From Gravhoek on Discord:

Here are all the camera modes that are currently in the game. Each of them has their use, some more niche than others!

For those of you on mobile, the camera mode names can be a bit hard to see, but they are as follows, in order of appearance:

• Parent
• Stars
• Chase
• Surface
• Orbit
• (switched to map view, which seems to be a

Source: gitbot

gravhoek-rw

+ Added the ability for vehicles to collide with and rest on planetary surfaces. This is a very simple version to start which treats the vehicle as an analytic sphere and only collides directly in the radial direction. It also does not take the surface normal into account at the moment.
+ Added a symplectic Euler integrator which we use to resolve collision along with a scheme of sequential impulses.
* Major rework to vehicle state and update logic. We can now choose multiple different update methods within a single frame - for example, taking a Kepler step to the edge of the atmosphere, integrating with velocity Verlet to the surface, and resolving and impact with symplectic Euler.
* Added a minimum target framerate to prevent the FPS "death spiral" when there is too much work to get done in a single frame, so the target frame time increases exponentially each time. We will now scale back the time compression rate to try and fit within a reasonable frame rate.
+ Added a new Simulation tab to the game settings for various physics parameters.
* Adjusted celestial creation to be a full preorder traversal, meaning each celestial is fully baked before its children are instantiated.
* Lowered the minimum camera altitude to 0.5 meters.
+ Added some float3 extension methods and renamed DoubleVectorEx to Double3Ex.
+ Added a physics debug window.
* Changed the patched conics parent impact detector to use a direct calculation rather than a bisect search.
* Fixed attitude snapping using the wrong coordinate frame rates.
+ Fixed debug thruster arrows being drawn in the wrong location.
+ Added LC-39A to Earth landmarks.

From Dean Hall on Discord:

You can see the SDF font gauge is working great and there is almost no aliasing whether the gauge is large or small. Might be hard to wrap your head around, but in drawing these gauges no mesh or texture* is involved at all. (technically, a texture is used for the SDF font but not in a traditional texture sense). This has a lot of benefits I covered earlier. You can see animated mechanical rollers for representing numbers in this demonstration as well. These gauges are generated entirely from runtime "mod data" meaning the way we make them is the same way modders do. The shader itself is able to access a global shader binding that is very efficient when it comes to transfering data. Individual shaders/gauges don't need special bindings for data, they have access to all the data. Allowing gauges of incredible complexity, for only the per-pixel cost of the shader itself.

From Dean Hall on Discord:

This shows the early progress on multiwindow rendering, showing me "undock" the settings menu seamlessly. When the settings window is dragged outside of the main viewport, a new application window gets created. This has tremendous use for many situations, especially so when rendering different cameras such as when doing interplanetary transfers. Hopefully this video gives a good indication to people the power of this functionality.

From Dean Hall on discord:

A lot of progress has been made improving a lot of our rendering process for many things, and terrain is one of them. This video shows off progress that has been made, with a great demostration of the seamlessness we now have with spherical billboarding. It is important to remember this video is taken live, realtime, from within the simulation at realistic scales (although the height of lunar features is exagerated for testing).

This video on discord is at 30FPS and and HD only, for a 60FPS and full HD download at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bb6F98k1nTESsR0I3YJJDuRwZWC-q9E8/view?usp=drive_link

(content creators welcome to use as always. attribution is not required)

HD version mirrored here

Requirements:

• Domain registration (duh)
• Privacy.
• DNS included.
• Preferably based in the EU, but it's not a hard requirement

And are there any you would support if you had just that little bit of extra disposable income?

From Dean Hall, playing around with navball config:

This new system allows you to write fragment shaders to "draw" widgets on the screen. All you need to do is write it in XML:

        <Gauge>
            <Component Id="Navball">
                <AnchorUv X="0" Y="1" />
                <PivotUv X="0.5" Y="0.5" />
                <SizePixels X="256" Y="256" />
                <OffsetPixels X="240" Y="-200" />
                <Rotation Degrees="0" />
            </Component>
            <Component Id="TBar">
                <AnchorUv X="0" Y="1" />
                <PivotUv X="0.5" Y="0.5" />
                <SizePixels X="48" Y="48" />
                <OffsetPixels X="240" Y="-200" />
                <!--<Rotation Degrees="45" />--> <!-- would need to use GaugeRotVert to use this -->
            </Component>
        </Gauge>

and these reference defined "GaugeComponents" can get reused:

<Assets>
    <GaugeComponent Id="Navball">
        <Vertex Id="GaugeVert"/>
        <Fragment Path="Shaders/Navball.frag"/>
        <Gauge Id="Fragment"/>
    </GaugeComponent>
    <GaugeComponent Id="TBar">
        <Vertex Id="GaugeVert"/>
        <Fragment Path="Shaders/GaugeTBar.frag"/>
    </GaugeComponent>
</Assets>

which this means is you can write fragment shaders (as an option) to make UI elements. THis is good, but also a little dangerous. If they are small - they are really chheap. but the bigger they get, the more expensive they are
In thiis screenshot i've "unlocked" them so you can see the borders

with this unlocked, I can customize it live, which helps me choose the values to put in the XML

you can resize manually, but in that slider is useful for more precise changes around the pixel etc...

Adjustments seem really fast and simple, both sensible tweaks, and not so sensible ones: