release v0.2.0
0.2.0 — Clouds you can fly through, and an ocean that has depth
Volumetric weather with real cloud tops, a rebuilt sea with sea state and flooding, and a launch pad that no longer shatters rockets on spawn.
By Royendgel Silberie
The sky was flat. That was the most common note after the last build, and it was fair — the clouds were a single painted layer that looked convincing from the pad and fell apart the moment you climbed through it.
Weather with a top and a bottom
Clouds are now a volume. Coverage is driven by baked 3D Perlin–Worley noise and each column of sky gets its own cloud top, so climbing out is a real transition rather than a texture swap. The renderer skips empty space using a conservative envelope, which is what keeps the whole thing affordable.
The clouds also stop at the horizon correctly now. That one took a while to understand: the depth surface is the sky dome’s mesh, not the cloud volume, so the fix was to write fragment depth from a proxy rather than to change the volume at all.
The sea
Water was a blue plane. It is now depth-coloured, has a sea state you can set, spreads directionally with the wind, breaks into foam, and attenuates light below the surface. Parts flood individually when they go under, which means a booster that splashes down intact behaves differently from one that comes in sideways.
The pad bug that was quietly ruining everything
Craft were shattering on spawn. The cause was a fallback pad collider using a hardcoded scale while the pad itself scales to the vehicle — a seven-metre error in where the deck was. Worth calling out because it did not only break spawning: it silently invalidated every scripted ascent measurement taken against it, so a number of performance conclusions had to be thrown out and taken again.
Also in this build
- Monopropellant is loaded per stage in the builder, from 0 to 300%, and is weighed everywhere it should be.
- The map opens on the flight you are in rather than resetting to the Sun.
- Audio has its own settings tab with real per-channel volumes.
- Six characters that rendered as empty boxes have been replaced with glyphs Inter actually has, and there is now a test that scans every string in the source against the font so it cannot happen again.