Category Archives: Volo

Goodbye, Volo

Hello Pilots,

For the past six years, Volo Airsport has been our lives. We’ve thought about it long into the night when we should’ve been sleeping, worked on it weekends and holidays… We love this game, and still find ourselves amazed by the number of players who have come to love it as well.

When we released Volo Airsport on Steam Early Access in late 2014, we intended for its development to be a journey – and it certainly has been. We added features that allowed you to choose the way you fly, whether in our signature wingsuit, or the new, customizable parachute. We improved the game’s graphics and upgraded the engine several times over, adding day/night cycles, a weather system, and more. We started a semi-weekly show to catalogue improvements made, future plans, and discuss our approach to game development. And all the while, we were able to rely on you – our community – to guide and support us. Whether you ‘liked’ one of our videos, covered the game, or simply took the time to play it, we can’t thank you enough for your support of Volo Airsport, and our team.

As we’ve continued to try bringing Volo Airsport to a point of completion, we’ve begun to hit one roadblock after another. Right now, we’re a team of three, and we simply can’t continue to work on this project we love so much with the revenue it currently generates. We’ve run out of money, and with it, the time we hoped we might have to bring this project to a fitting conclusion.

As of today, development of Volo Airsport is on a permanent hiatus. Today’s new branch containing the seeds of the next steps we hoped to take with the game is the last addition Volo Airsport will see.




We thank you wholeheartedly for your support, encouragement, and feedback over the course of Volo’s development. We’ve built a game that we’re still quite proud of, and we couldn’t have done any of it without you. We also hope to see you again in our next journey – whatever that might be.

Goodbye, Pilots.

Sincerely,
Ramjet Anvil

Ramjet Anvil Show 15: Parachuting in VR

— With the latest 3.7 beta we’re bringing VR flying back to Volo! —

00:00 Oh my god it’s VR
04:12 About motion controls
05:54 The subtlety of brake lines and gamepad triggers
10:18 Parachute selection with gamepad
12:31 Performance improvements
14:52 Pilot now relaxes under canopy
16:02 Fixed tendency for all canopies to bank left without input

Ramjet Anvil Show Ep. 14: v3.7 Beta 4 Release

— This week we look at the new beta, featuring pretty parametric 3d models for all your parachutes, new editor improvements, and we go over the polishing work still to be done for the proper v3.7 release. —

00:00 Look at them!
02:41 Iterating on editor UI
06:06 New parachute visuals
08:01 What’s on the todo list?
09:13 The state of VR support
12:57 Small additions
14:33 State of parachute physics consistency

Ramjet Anvil Show Ep. 12: v3.7 Beta 3

This episode we show off Pilot’s new canopy controlling skills introduced in beta 3, and we tackle comments on last week’s episode!

00:59 DaGhost141: Will tracking jumps be a feature?
03:23 DaGhost141: Can we control speedscaling?
04:56 Parachute-powered backflip fun
08:39 Skyfread: Can we get that slowmotion?
11:58 Beta 3 Discussion Starts
17:53 Dealing with surging wings
21:19 A list of squashed issues
24:13 Beta installation instructions

Ramjet Anvil Show Ep. 11: Can we remove the leg?

While we’re polish up v3.7 we thought we’d mess around with the game while it runs in the editor, leading to very important questions like: What happens if you remove the left leg?

00:52 Jet Fighters and automatic control systems
02:23 Flying without wings, tracking jumps
06:56 What happens if you turn off assists?
09:26 What happens if you turn off ALL stabilization?
11:30 Toribash
12:23 What happens if we remove… the left leg?
14:39 What happens if we remove its butt
15:30 Windtunnel testing
19:07 Tree collision

Enjoy!

Ramjet Anvil Show Ep. 10: To Flail or to Fly

In this episode we take a question from the comments about Volo’s current and future art direction, looking at the space between the concepts of pure realism and pure fantasy, where the two are much alike, and where we think they can really help each other.

00:35 MarkusA380’s feedback on the beta’s capsule-pilot
07:20 Plans for the ragdoll animation system
10:24 The complexities of teaching a ragdoll how to move
14:45 Tulipothar’s feedback on the parachute flight model
20:58 Please help test our beta releases!

Enjoy!

Ramjet Anvil Show Ep. 9: Parachute Integration Beta

In this episode we discuss the first v3.7 beta release, which brings the parachute system into the full game, detail how we’ll polish this release up over the next weeks, and ask you to help us make it better!

Enjoy!

v3.7 Beta Forum Thread

00:00 Steam beta instructions
00:53 What in this beta?
07:15 Making things seamless
09:14 Help us test!
10:23 Replacing the capsule with the full ragdoll
10:56 State of VR support
14:16 Summary of planned 3.7 work

v3.7 Parachute Test Release – Out on Steam

Hello Pilots!

We just released a new test version of the upcoming parachutes update for Volo Airsport.

This update is packed with awesome features:

  • Parachute flight simulation with all the depth of the wingsuit flight model you know and love
  • A rich editor for designing your very own parachutes
  • In-flight deployment of your parachute, with the ability to switch back to wingsuiting at any moment
  • Use ‘T’ or ‘Right Shoulder button’ to toggle
  • Numerous performance tweaks and improvements

Go to game in your Steam library -> select Betas tab -> select ‘test’ to download the new update.

If you haven’t done so already check out our development diary on YouTube. In it you can see how the parachute release came to be, what considerations we made while building this update, and many more things.

Please let us know what you think about this release on the forums. Also, if you find bugs, please report them on the forums.

Happy new year!

The Volo Airsport team