Update v0.16.2 "The First Planet" Public Beta

This is the first update I decided to publish into the public beta branch first, because it has too many fixes and internal changes that could break something. It will stay there a week or two and will be released to the default branch once I will fix all issues found by players. You can find how to switch the game’s branch on Steam in the release notes section. Let’s get started.

Mercury

The closest planet to the Sun and the smallest planet in the Solar system now in the game!

Procedural texturing rework

As I explained in the previous dev update, I have significantly improved the procedural texturing system and Earth and the Moon have been reworked and now use this new system for rendering. The only downside, is that it requires more VRAM because of 4x improved level of detail. I am planning to add a quality setting for planet texturing in the near future. Martian system procedural rework will come in the August update.

Finally what you see on the map will match to what you get during the flight

Planet’s surface received much more details

Sometimes it produces slightly weird results, but this is a procedural approach, what can you do, eh

Moon was already good, but now it’s simply great

Rocket Staging improvements

You can expand and collapse stages now. Rocket parts will be grouped by type and resource group when the stage is collapsed.

For each stage that contains engines I’ve added a dV and max TWR calculation. You can set a reference body and altitude for it. It will also update the remaining deltaV and max TWR calculation for the active stage during the flight.

New payload fairings

Payload fairings are section-based now, so you can basically launch a payload with any length. I’ve added two radiuses of farirings and adapters between them. Also I’ve added fairings to the rocket staging as a separate action, so you don’t need an additional decoupler for it.

Contracts enhancement

“Land in distance” contracts will now add a surface object marker on the planet, if it was not added though the mods. You can also set a surface object as a target and get a marker (similar to nearby spacecraft markers), when you will be near your target.

“Reach an orbit” contracts will add a reference orbit you need to reach. Unfortunately you can’t set this orbit as a target for now, to get ascending/descending nodes. This change turned out to be huge, so I moved it to the next update.

New content and other improvements

Three more rocket parts have been added to the game, In addition to the fairings, and three more contacts. Also you can find a new exposure compensation control on the camera modes panel. This will allow you to make a scene brighter or darker in cases when automatic exposure couldn’t handle it properly. Lastly, I’ve fixed an enormous amount of critical bugs in this update. Some of them lasted for a year and more and I can’t understand how the game even functioned in some cases.

I know, you are waiting a new parachute too, but it is crazy complicated process to make it. But it is coming sooner or later

That’s all for now, please let me know if you have any issues or will encounter any bugs.

Beta

This build was deployed to beta-builds branch. To switch to this branch right click on the Rocket Science in your library, and click on Properties. Select the Betas tab, and then select the beta-builds branch. Once you see it, select it and click OK.

Note: if you want to switch back to default branch after this beta, you will need to manually clean %USERPROFILE%/AppData/LocalLow/Unity/unbeGames_HDYLIEM folder or the game will not start.