Hey everyone,

It’s getting late in 2025, and we’ve been hearing a familiar question more and more: "When is the game actually coming out?" So, let’s talk about it. I’ve got good news and bad news.

The good news: We finally have a release month
The bad news: It's not until next year

We are going to release SimplePlanes 2 on Steam as Early Access in March of 2026. We're still considering what the initial price will be, most likely it will be $20 or $25 with a 10% launch discount and that price will go up when we exit Early Access. At this point we don't expect to delay the mobile release, but it's certainly possible it will slip to 2027.

Why Early Access? Because we wouldn't dream of trying to finish this game without the community's input. We’ve built something here that we’re truly proud of and it's shaping up to be our most exciting, feature-packed launch ever. But there's still work to do: localization, VR support, more parts, more environments, and most importantly, time to listen and respond to the community before calling it final.

Early Access is the only sensible way to release a game like this, for a community like this.

Now, for the really exciting part. This October, we're releasing a free, limited-time demo on Steam for everyone. This demo, which we're internally calling the Flight Demo, is focused on letting you experience multiplayer and a taste of the new environments. Here's what to expect:

• The designer will be "read-only": You can load up and look at any craft, including your SP1 crafts, but you can't modify them. You won't be able to add, remove, or modify any parts. However, the designer will let you paint your craft so you can check out the new texture system which is pretty sweet.

• New stock crafts: We have a new set of stock crafts built with love by our playtesters. They are awesome. We'll have a showcase post for them in the future.

• Driftwood Island: You will be restricted to a small island just east of the main SP2 Isles. It has plenty of great stuff to check out, so don't try to leave because Nathan has installed a very accurate missile system that will shoot you down.

Aside from those limitations, the demo will let you do quite a lot. You'll be able to start activities such as air & car races, a bomber defense mission, play multiplayer with your friends, or just explore the island! We're really excited to get the game in your hands soon, and we hope this demo will help alleviate some of the sting of having the game delayed. You might even come across a developer in a multiplayer lobby on occasion :)

One last thing. When you check out the Steam page, you might notice some new art. We got new key art for the game from the very skilled Daniel Liske[www.daniellieske.com]! It turned out really nice, and you'll be seeing it all over the game on Steam now; in the thumbnail, your library, and so on.

If you haven't already, please consider wishlisting SimplePlanes 2 on Steam and joining our Discord Server[discord.gg]! We hope to see you in October when we release the demo!

Thanks for your patience and thanks for playing!

-Andrew

Welcome to the first of many SimplePlanes 2 dev blogs! We're going to be doing one of these about every couple weeks or so, sometimes more. Each one will showcase a multitude of features focused around a central theme. For this first post, the central theme will be on the map. We've got quite a lot to cover here!

Real quickly though, if you want to see individual segments of these dev blogs several days early as they're written, check out the #showcases channel in our official Discord server. We'd love to see you there :)

SP2 Discord[discord.gg]

With the preamble over with, let's get into the exciting bits :D

Something players love to do in SimplePlanes is zoom by at insane speeds, but our islands have always gone by in a blink. For SP2 we want to address many of the most common criticisms we’ve received and push things further than ever before. The new archipelago spans almost 800 km2 of highly detailed terrain both above and below the water, so even if you get the zoomies you’ll be flying over cool terrain for a little while before you find yourself lost over endless open ocean.

The archipelago consists of three main islands: on the Northern end there’s Vetusta Island, on the South there’s New Yoke Island, and separating them you’ll find Middleton. Each one is trapped in its own metaphorical time bubble, leading to very different vibes from one border to the next as you’ll get to see in future showcases.

For these new islands we tried to find a good balance between realism and terrain features that are impressive to look at while being fun to explore. In order to achieve this we have used a set of advanced tools to generate the terrain that combine the power of procedural noise, realistic erosion simulation, and high artistic freedom over the main landmass.

In this image you can see the full archipelago in its various stages as we first lay down the noise, then remap it and paint some canyons, ravines, and islets around, applying multiple erosion and weathering simulations on top of it and finishing it off by adding snow, rivers, and a few final touches before painting the different terrain textures using information from all the previous steps, such as the soil deposition and amount of erosion.

Now let’s talk about some of the tools we’re using that allow us to make our terrain look way better than before.

One of these tools is a terrain shader called MicroSplat, by Jason Booth. Without boring you too much with babble, what MicroSplat allows us to do is give our terrain more and better PBR textures along with advanced rendering techniques, all while being super performant.

For SimplePlanes 2 this means you’ll see better looking and more varied terrain than in our previous games, with more detail and without hurting performance too much.

Another big step up in visual quality that we can now take advantage of is heightmap-based texture blending. In our previous games when two textures interacted with each other they had a smooth blend of color and texture, but now the details of the rougher textures can sneak through the cracks as the blend happens, independent of the terrain resolution.

A big element that didn’t age well in SimplePlanes was how stretched some of the textures would get whenever we had a tall cliff or canyon. In SP2 we can now take advantage of a technique called Triplanar Mapping, which samples the texture from up to 3 different angles depending on its slope.

Probably one of the biggest limitations when it comes to large organic features is that the textures used result in very obvious tiling patterns as they get repeated over and over across the surface. To combat this we now have Stochastic sampling in our arsenal. At the cost of a few extra texture samples what this does is it rotates each tile at random and height blends them, entirely removing the visual tiling.

As you’ve definitely seen by now, the map is covered in trees. Not only does this help make the game prettier, it also provides a really nice (and necessary) sense of scale. Another benefit is it helps make low altitude flight feel more dangerous as the trees have colliders, which will ruin your whole day if you clip your wing while trying to be a showoff.

The main limiting factor for having a lot of vegetation is that models that look good for trees require a lot of geometry, and with how large our map is we need a LOT of them. Games usually get around this by having what’s called Levels of Detail (LODs), so as things become smaller on your screen, they switch to simplified models and sometimes even to a flat image. But simplified geometry is still too much geometry for us (despite the name of the game), and flat images look really bad as you fly by. So, what now?

Once again, the huge ecosystem of tried and true assets Unity provides is of great help, with two really good tools in particular being very handy: GPUI and Amplify Impostors.

The first asset improves how the data for the trees flows between the CPU and GPU in a similar fashion to what the Parallax mod does in Juno, but without the extra complexity of having a spherical planet with procedural terrain.

The second creates a texture that morphs depending on the view angle, faking the illusion of depth in what can only be described as magic. We collaborated with the Amplify team to test their 1.0 release for the Impostors shader to help us have zero compromises when it comes to foliage. Believe it or not, the trees in this gif are a flat image with some shader trickery!

Another huge challenge to overcome for a map the size of ours is figuring out how to place down the trees. Planting one by one may be meditative, but ain’t nobody got time for that. For this task Jason Booth comes back to the rescue with another great tool of his, MicroVerse.

This swiss army knife covers most of the flaws from the insanely underwhelming terrain tools Unity provides, and works hand in hand with MicroSplat to let us do non-destructive tweaks to the islands’ geometry, textures and vegetation interactively. For example, we can just ask it to place trees anywhere with grass, limit it to a certain altitude and slope, adjust the density and call it a day. Or even add patches of trees on demand in certain areas, in the screenshots you can see how inside of the yellow lines there have been trees added, and the blue lines are painting the terrain in dirt, and even carving it.

When you think of a large sprawling landmass many things come to mind, but I bet none of you thought of caves. Yup, that’s right, we’ve done it! Now you can go hide in a hole underground just like IRL and never see the light of day. And maybe, just maybe, leading into that hole underground is a waterfall. Believe it or not, we have one of those too!

Caves and rivers have both been highly requested features in our previous titles, but they’ve been practically impossible for us to actually implement, the caves because we couldn’t do actual holes in the terrain, and the rivers because the water could only be at sea level.

For SimplePlanes 2, though, we’ve actually been able to do it. We’ve got rivers that aren’t just flat streams of water; they flow above the sea level, and we have a giant cave you can not just explore but even fly through, if your skills allow for it.

If we’re going to have such a large map, we need a way to get you to move from one end of an island to the next, besides just flying around or having to go offroad.

To achieve this, we’ve made a huge network of highways, roads, and trails, spanning over 300 km in length across the map. If you want to get in a car and drive from one end of the Archipelago to another on a road, that’s totally doable. If you want to get lost in the mountains following a winding trail, we also have you covered – no driver’s license required, but you better get insurance.

With the help of Microverse all these roads merge with the terrain, change their textures, and clear the trees, allowing us to go crazy without having to worry about laying down asphalt by hand, even for racetracks that seamlessly blend with the environment.

• Added SimplePlanes 2 button to the SANDBOX section in the main menu
  
• Added special error dialog when attempting to load a craft made in SimplePlanes 2
  
• Updated Unity to 2022.3.41f1
  
• Fixed parachute activation expression not recognizing aircraft variables

• In the "VR headset not found..." error message, we now show the current OpenXR runtime (for debugging purposes), and a link to the related topic on the Steam forums.

• SimplePlanes VR will have a launch discount for a limited time.
  
• Once logged in, you have access to fly the same craft in both games.
  
• SimplePlanes includes an aircraft builder, SimplePlanes VR does not.
  
• Except for those which require building; all challenges, islands, locations, aircraft, etc. are available in both games.
  
• Buying them both on Steam will automatically enable VR in SimplePlanes. After VR is enabled in SimplePlanes you can do everything there, without switching games.

• Fully immersive cockpits and virtual controls that you can reach out and grab with your hands
  
• Download and fly any number of crafts from SimplePlanes.com for free
  
• Escort a bomber, torpedo a WW2 destroyer, dogfight enemy aircraft, obliterate a convoy, and several more combat challenges are included
  
• Fly around in sandbox mode and engage neutral aircraft and ships or spawn enemy aircraft to dogfight whenever it suits your fancy
  
• Explore islands and airports to unlock secret locations
  
• Includes several air and car racecourses to compete against A.I. opponents
  
• One of the very few flight sims available for Oculus Quest, and the only one that includes helicopters and such a wide variety of aircraft!