Welcome to the second SimplePlanes 2 dev blog! If you missed the first one, you can check it out here – in it we showed off the new SimplePlanes archipelago and the tools we used to bring it to life.
With the Archipelago out of the way for now, though, let’s talk about another big undertaking we’re doing for SimplePlanes 2: the UI.
Andrew has been working very hard on a new XML-based UI system for SP2, called JUICY (Jundroo UI Controls and a Y for fun). This new system replaces the ancient, nigh-unusable mishmash of UI systems we were using in SimplePlanes 1 and allows us to work on the UI at a far greater pace than before, laying the groundwork for a whole host of improvements to the presentation and user experience.
Andrew has a lot to say about this, so I’m gonna let him take the reins for a moment:
Our system is an XML based system that sits on top of Unity's UGUI, which is a pretty great system developed by Unity. Adding this XML layer gives us so much more flexibility and control over how things are styled. It's very heavily inspired by HTML and CSS if you're familiar with that.
Writing a new UI system from scratch took some time, but now that it's in place, it's making the development of new UIs so much faster. Need a new panel with some controls? BAM! Done before lunch. Need to tweak the style of all dialogs in the game? Already done before I could say (INSERT SOMETHING FUNNY).
One of my core objectives with SimplePlanes 2 is to make the game feel alive in every way. This includes the UI. Now nearly every interactable UI element on the screen responds to you. When you hover the mouse over a button, it swells up - YES CLICK ME! - when you click it, it smashes down before returning to its normal size. Panels, dialogs, lists, slide into place.
Something else this allows us to support is easy customization of the UI by the player through simple (or not so simple) XML edits, much like in Juno: New Origins. Some caution will need to be taken as the game’s code does reference certain bits by name, but overall it should be much easier for modders to change the UI, or for regular players to make small styling changes if they want to simply by going into their XML files.
Layout
Now that we’ve gone over the behind the scenes technical improvements for the UI, let’s talk about the actual layout.
One of our main goals with the designer in SP2 is to keep it familiar to old players while improving the user experience (UX) wherever possible. We’re taking a lot of learnings from Juno here – for that game’s designer we felt we had improved the UX a lot, but it had come at the cost of familiarity, and in many ways we also made it too complicated for new players to get a grasp on. In SP2 you should feel right at home as the layout is mostly the same as in SP1, with some options moved around into more intuitive places and many quality of life improvements, like the escape key no longer booting you to the title screen...
Next, the in-flight layout. This should feel very familiar as the fundamentals are unchanged, but open the menu and you’ll be met with a host of new options (same goes for the designer, actually, but moreso here) – most notably, you can now save and load crafts while in flight. Find a cool spot on the ground and want to switch to a car? Just load one from your saved crafts and it’s there, with no additional loading screen. I can’t tell you how much easier this makes exploration feel; moving somewhere to take a screenshot with a specific craft is a breeze now. We’ve also overhauled the Mouse As Joystick UI to be better looking and do a better job of indicating your inputs.
Aside from that, another big new thing here is the “BUILD” button. This sends you to the designer, but unlike SP1 or Juno it does not unload the flight scene, allowing you to quickly exit to the designer to make a quick change and then come back in exactly the same spot you were in before.
And finally, you can now access all of the game’s settings from anywhere – the title screen, the designer, or in-flight. I’ve always been perplexed about SP not allowing this, but you can do it now and it’s so much more convenient.
We want to make the UI in SP2 feel more alive than in our previous games. There’s a coherent design language throughout the entire game’s UI, full of little animations and sounds that give it some much-needed character. This results in a UI that I think feels much more polished than what we’ve done before and I’m excited for you all to get your hands on it.
Designer Environments
In our previous games, players often wanted more customization for the designer itself. In Juno we allowed you to set a custom solid colour for the background, which was a step in the right direction but there was a lot more that could be done.
For SP2, that same background colour functionality is still present, but it comes alongside a bunch of other neat little settings you can change to make the designer look the way you want it to. Don’t want a solid colour void? We’ve got a number of more scenic backgrounds for you to choose from on a whim, with the lighting on your craft being updated to reflect the conditions of your chosen background.
Oh yeah that’s right, the designer has actual lighting now. Finally, you can properly gauge the shininess of your Tasteful™ metallic paint without leaving the designer, viewing it in all its glory. You can also change the angle of the overhead light as well as its brightness (useful if you’re working on brightly coloured parts and need to dim the lights a bit), and you can tweak the intensity of reflections if your craft is too shiny to work with.
Additionally, you can change from a few different platforms, including a dark square with a customizable glowing ring in it, the ol’ reliable SimplePlanes grey circle, or nothing at all.
Paint Tool Improvements
The Paint Tool is one of the most important things at your disposal in the designer, and for SP2 we’ve made some major quality of life improvements that will make using it much faster and remove the guesswork.
To start, you’re no longer bound to either a basic set of colour options or hex codes – we’ve given you an actual colour wheel you can mess around with to your heart’s content. We added this later on in the development of Juno and it really made messing with your craft’s colours a lot more convenient and fun, so I’m excited to get it into your hands as well.
Next, there is now an auto-target option, which will automatically paint the correct trim on a part according to where your cursor is. This speeds things up a lot, eliminating the need to guess or memorize the correct trim when painting your craft.
And finally, hovering your mouse over a part with the paint tool open previews the paint before you apply it! So not only can you automatically select the right trim, you can actually see which one you’re about to paint!
All of these things combine to make for a much more polished-feeling paint tool that is easier to use than before, making painting your craft something to really look forward to.
Part Search Panel
If you make crafts with a lot of parts and/or mechanical complexity, chances are you’ve had to struggle with finding specific parts when you need them. For SP2, we’re adding a new Search Parts panel, which will open a list of all the parts in your craft for you to select and do various other things.
Once again, those of you who’ve played Juno will be familiar with this menu, but compared to Juno we’ve made a number of improvements to make it faster.
In the Search panel, you can search parts by their part ID or their name. To facilitate the latter, we’ve added the ability to rename parts to whatever you want. You can do this either in a given part’s properties menu, or by clicking the rename button in the search panel. Renaming parts helps you keep track of what you’re doing and it helps curious players understand what all the doodads in your craft are for, so we encourage you to do it as much as possible!
From here you can also hide individual parts by clicking the eye button, and you can simply click on them to select them in the same way clicking on them normally does, allowing you to quickly tweak any part in your craft without actually having to physically find it like you did before. On the bottom of the panel is all of the normal part hiding functionality you’re used to from SP1, but labeled using words instead of icons to be more intuitive than before.
With this new tool, managing all the little bits and pieces of your craft is so much easier than before and I hope you’ll find it to be a welcome addition to the designer.
That does it for this blog! If you like what you see, please consider wishlisting SimplePlanes 2 on Steam! It may not sound like much, but it helps us a lot.
And once again, if you'd like to see parts of these showcases several days early as they're written, you can do so in our official Discord server
@Aludra877 lol