Hey everyone! We hope you’ve been enjoying the demo, it’s been awesome seeing you playing (and breaking) it this past week. We’ve got a bit of an impromptu SimplePlanes 2 blog post here for you today. Normally we post dev blogs dedicated to multiple related topics at a time, but this time it’s just focused on one topic, and it’s one we think a lot of you are going to be very excited about.

Recently, we did a livestream on our YouTube channel where we messed around in the demo, doing races and stuff – if you missed that, click here for the VOD. The topic of this blog post was announced and shown off during that stream, so if you watched that you already know what’s coming.

One of the most part-intensive aspects of many SimplePlanes builds is stuff like custom landing gear bays, internal weapon bays for things like stealth jets, windows for airliners, and many more things of a similar nature. They take up so many parts because you need to manually make the hole you want using multiple fuselages which could quickly get out of hand depending on what you were going for. Modern fuselage features like fuselage slicing[www.simpleplanes.com], introduced in SP1 version 1.11, plus the community’s ever-growing skill, help to minimize the part requirements for these things, but they still require more parts and effort than they ought to.

So… what’s the solution? Well, this question was actually kind of answered in the fuselage slicing post I just linked to if you read closely, but that answer was dismissed at the time because it just wasn’t feasible to implement. However, SP2’s fuselages are rebuilt from scratch, so the impossible now seems not only possible but very feasible. So without further ado, here’s a window into what Nicky has been working on:

As it turns out, the solution to holes in fuselages taking a lot of parts is to just… let you cut a hole into a fuselage. Through what I can only imagine to be the same kind of dark wizardry we’ve all come to expect from him, Nicky has added “boolean cutting” to the fuselages in SP2. This means that, with just one invisible little box, you can carve chunks out of a fuselage’s geometry. This doesn’t use any “negative space” rendering fakery like the procedural landing gear from Juno: New Origins; this creates an actual hole in the fuselages with an option to automatically turn the piece you just cut out into a door or even a window. In other words, those landing gear bays, weapon bays, and windows I mentioned? You’ll be able to do those without any extra fuselages, opening the door (heh) for new players to much more easily create crafts with complicated geometry, but also for more skill expression for experienced players. It’s an incredibly powerful feature that the team is super excited about, and we can’t wait to see what you all do with it. Note though that as of writing this, the fuselage’s hitbox isn’t changed when you cut holes into it, however this may change by the time the game is out.

That’s all for today, consider this an early Christmas present! We’re going on our holiday break now, and we’ll get back to work on the game in January. Happy Holidays and have fun with the demo!

Surprise!! With the holiday season now upon us and the ten year anniversary of SimplePlanes 1’s release on Steam coming up on December 17th, we’ve released another SimplePlanes 2 demo (or playtest, whichever you’d rather call it) for you to try that you can play RIGHT NOW, featuring an all-new area, new stock crafts, and more! This second demo will be available all month long, ending on January 5th, 2026, giving you a whole three weeks to play a limited version of SimplePlanes 2 by yourself, with friends, or with random people.

The very keen-eyed among you may have noticed a peculiar image in our most recent dev blog[www.simpleplanes.com] on our website, with hidden text saying “I AM CHAD”. Clicking that image took you to a secret teaser video (sorry, the hidden link didn't work on Steam), and the file name of that image, [c]12.15.png[/c], actually revealed the release date of this demo. If you noticed that, congratulations! I have no specific prize for you, just know that your observational skills make me happy.

To join the demo, go to the SimplePlanes 2 Steam page and click the “Join the Playtest” button in the playtest box. The game will automatically be added to your Steam library so you can just download it and start playing!

The demo is a limited slice of the SimplePlanes 2 experience, limiting you to a specific portion of the map, and a read-only designer where you can only load crafts, paint them, and edit their decals (if applicable). In other words, you cannot build crafts yet, but you can edit their paint scheme to use all of the new textures and stuff in SP2. Multiplayer is here and fully functional, as are a host of activities to play, so go wild!

If (and let’s be honest, when) you encounter a bug, please use the in-game bug report button to tell us what happened. It’s the little bug icon in the pause menu. Bug reports submitted this way give us various files such as your log file that help us a lot with deducing what went wrong.

Compared to Demo 1[www.simpleplanes.com], a number of things are different and we’re gonna lay out some of the more important changes here.

• An all-new playable area

  • Rather than Driftwood Island, Demo 2 places you on the south of New Yoke island, allowing you to play in the location we showed off in our latest blog post[www.simpleplanes.com], including a power plant, port, a military base, a train, and more. This location has more playable airspace, in particular there is significantly more playable area out towards the sea, hopefully giving you more room to breathe with faster and less maneuverable crafts like the Stormvark.

• The USS Beast II has come to visit

  • The USS Beast II, our state-of-the-art aircraft carrier, is now inside the playable area and can be landed on, sunken, or whatever else you feel like.

  • A quick note: there was supposed to be a spawn location so you can easily spawn on one of its catapults, but we accidentally broke that so it’s not there. For now, if you want to spawn on the Beast, you’ll have to land on it and create a custom spawn location.

• Many new stock crafts

  • Loads of new stock crafts have been added by our internal playtesters, ranging from supermaneuverable thrust vectoring fighter jets to civilian propeller planes to racecars. The name of each craft’s creator is included in the craft instructions.

• New propeller engines

  • The propeller-powered stock crafts from Demo 1 have been updated to utilize our new procedural propeller engines[www.simpleplanes.com], featuring better sounds and more realistic flight performance, among other things. All of the new propeller crafts use these as well, with the exception of the Vogel and Peanut.

• Performance has been greatly improved

  • Performance (framerate), especially in multiplayer, was a major complaint in Demo 1 and we’ve spent a lot of the time between then and now working on making it better. Although there is still a lot of work to be done on that front, we’ve made a lot of progress that we hope you’ll notice.

  • On top of framerate we’ve spent a lot of time optimizing the networking, to hopefully offer you a smoother experience in multiplayer. That being said, we haven't managed to fully contain the chaos of random trolls, so we’ve decided to limit public lobbies to 10 people in order to reduce the chances of people unexpectedly running into a slideshow, while still allowing for private lobbies to have 16 players.

We really hope you all have fun with this demo! When you’ve played for a while, you’ll be asked to fill out a survey providing your thoughts. If you have the time, please consider filling this out, it’d help us a lot <3

If you’d like to discuss the demo with other players, or find people to play with, please consider joining our Discord Server[discord.gg]! There are a lot of friendly people there who’d love to play.

The team will be entering a holiday break pretty soon, but before then we're planning to do a livestream on our YouTube channel where some of the team will be playing the game, and perhaps doing some other things. The scheduling isn't fully locked in right now, but it'll probably be on December 19th, starting sometime between 2-4 PM Central Time. We hope to see you then!