v0.6.0 — a job, and something to lose

The release where it becomes a game. v0.5.0 was a world with a validated
helicopter in it and nothing to do; this one gives you a job, something to lose,
and a record of how well you did it — all of it read off the flight model that
was already there rather than bolted alongside it.

Added

• Transport contracts — a reason to fly somewhere. Set down on a friendly pad
  and it offers you a load for a named settlement; take it, fly it, and put it down
  in the landing zone beside the place. Contracts are a pure function of the pad and
  the world seed, so the same pad always offers the same job until you fly it, and
  what you have delivered is remembered per island.
• Cargo has weight, and the weight is real. A load is added to the airframe's
  mass and nothing else — there is no separate "carrying" code path — so the flight
  model charges for it the way it charges for any other weight: more collective to
  hover, more torque and therefore more pedal, more power, a worse hover ceiling and
  a faster autorotation. An empty aircraft hovers on 71% collective; at the 1400 kg
  ceiling it needs 89%, which is why a heavy contract wants a running takeoff — the
  same load only asks 77% at 60 kt.
• You can see the cargo. The load hangs under the aircraft on a four-point sling,
  sized to its weight, trailing behind you in forward flight and settling onto the
  ground when you land. The contract on offer sits on the pad as crates on a pallet,
  and the destination is marked with panels and an orange smoke column you can find
  from the air — which doubles as the wind indicator for the approach.
• The record is visible. Delivering shows a debrief with the run and the totals
  behind it, the island map carries a contract tally, and every settlement you have
  served wears a ring on the chart. The delivery log was already being written to
  disk; now something reads it.
• Fuel. The tank is not a timer: burn is specific fuel consumption against the
  power the engine is actually delivering, so a hover drinks about twice what a
  cruise does and a heavy load costs range because it always cost power. Fuel is
  mass, so the aircraft gets lighter as it burns and heavier as it fills. Run the
  tank dry and the engine simply stops — you are in an autorotation, which the
  model already does properly, and the landing is still yours to make. Any
  friendly pad refuels as well as repairs.
• Cargo can be broken. A set-down harder than about 1.6 m/s starts damaging the
  load, reaching total at the speed that would break the aircraft — so there is a
  real band of arrivals the airframe walks away from and the freight does not.
  Only what arrives intact counts towards your record.

Fixed

• Rain looked like lit sticks from the air. The streaks were drawn unshaded at
  a fixed near-white, so in the one condition rain exists in — a storm, which takes
  the sunlight down to a sixth and the shadows to nothing — everything else in
  frame went dark and the rain alone stayed bright. It is now lit like the rest of
  the world, and thins out with altitude, where the weather is carried by the far
  curtain and the wet ground rather than by drops a metre from the eye.
• The vertical-speed readout and the rotor-speed number were drawn on the same row
  of the instrument cluster and ran into each other.

Changed

• The pilot's guide is shot against this build. Its screenshots were from the
  first commit in June, and the HUD they showed — and the prose describing it —
  had drifted two months out of date.

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Downloads

Platform	File	Notes
macOS	Rotorwash-macOS.zip	Universal — Apple Silicon and Intel. macOS 11+.
Windows	Rotorwash-Windows.zip	64-bit.

Neither build is code-signed, so your OS will complain the first time. On macOS,
open System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway; on
Windows, choose More info → Run anyway.

Full changelog: CHANGELOG.md