As most of you already know we have been really busy working on SimplePlanes 2 but we managed to find some time to bring you a small update to fix some concerning bugs we had been seeing affecting career, and while we were at it, spice things up a bit with a visual refresh and a whole new moon.
If you want to keep up with SP2 remember you can wishlist it on Steam, it actually helps us a lot. And now, back to Juno.
It's no secret some of the contracts added in 1.3 have been technically challenging, we released multiple patches to try to address various issues making it hard to complete the Space Station and Rover contracts.
Even with all those efforts there were still various game breaking bugs we struggled to reproduce, but thanks to all your bug reports we think we have finally fixed them for good 🤞.
Sadly if you got a contract really stuck it may need to be canceled and restarted, if you find yourself in a hard to solve situation let us know.
On the topic of Career Mode, if you like to play in the Solar System there's been a lot of progress by @SatelliteTorifune on a mod free Custom Career for RSS. If you are interested you can check out a preview and share your feedback here.
We didn't want to leave you with just a couple bug fixes, so to spice things up we have done a pass through the whole Image Effects to enhance the visuals of the game. You can expect a brighter and more colorful experience now, especially in Map View, as well as better looking lens flares when looking at the sun.
Disclaimer: Droods can sungaze safely thanks to their helmets, staring at the Sun can cause irreversible damage.
The keen eyes may have noticed something odd in that Map View screenshot... you are right! We have made from scratch our Skybox, in an effort kickstarted by @Brixxter with a Blender project set up to render cubemaps.
From that point I got a bit carried and overhauled the whole project, leading to what now is not just a new, better looking and more realistic skybox for the game, but also a setting to bump up its resolution to 2x and 4x on PC, for all the low FoV enjoyers.
We have decided to share this project with everyone so you can make your own skyboxes, as far as I know it's the most advanced skybox generator available for free, you need some knowledge of blender to use it (both shaders and geometry nodes) but it is surprisingly easy to get into it. The skybox in the game has a secret that has been removed from the blender project, can you find it?
As the Droods cleared their telescope lenses to capture the skybox in such high resolutions they noticed a strange object near Sergeaa. Upon further inspection it seems to be a Proto-Earth which they have decided to call Oord.
Strangely it has water in its equator, the best theory so far is that its strange orbit, causing it to have a permanent partial eclipse by Sergeaa, has lowered its temperatures enough to sustain liquid water, probably brought by recent comet impacts.
Huge thanks to @HyperPatch for letting us use his Young Earth Exoplanet as a template, when I saw it I fell in love with it and knew it was the perfect fit for the style of Oord.
As per usual there's more to this update, you can find all the changes in the Release Notes, like the new Vizzy blocks for the Texture Widget in the MFDs.
We plan to be in beta a couple weeks to ensure the fixes to the contracts are fully working and attack some more bugs that may show up. The moderators have had access for a day and they have already found a couple, so there's certainly more to be found.
Once we know for sure things are stable, we will work on the mobile beta. Expect it to take at least a couple weeks.
Join the Steam beta by right-clicking Juno: New Origins in the Steam client -> Properties -> Betas -> and then select "beta_1.3" from the dropdown.
MOBILE PLAYER!
I see what you are about to comment, hold on: We don't have a date yet for the mobile beta, but we expect it to be out for Complete Edition in a couple weeks. This is an expectation, not a confirmation.