Five textured ships in the game

Five ships

The Sniper was the first ship the game drew from its own textured model. Four more now fly the same way: the Skyhammer, the Brute, the Wasp and a copper Raven. Each went through the asset studio’s pipeline. The textured model is split into named parts, each part gets one collision hull of at most 64 points, and each engine gets a glowing disc.

• The Skyhammer is the primary ship, built on the gunship’s frame and mass: a body, two nacelles on pylons, wing tips hanging from the nacelles, two rocket pods and a tail.
• The Brute weighs 8.5 t: a body, wings and twin rear engines.
• The Wasp is the roster’s small ship, with a canopy in five pieces.
• The copper Raven fits inside the Raven’s frame, with four nose cannons, missile racks under its wings and two lift fans.

Each model also has a lighter version for distance and shadows. With part outlines and texture seams kept intact, those land between about 36,000 and 56,000 triangles.

LOOP 0:05

The game’s Settings now pick the ship you fly at the next launch, from the gunship, the Sniper, the Skyhammer and the Brute. A second row picks the enemy: the Raven or the copper Raven. The game bundles the textured models its ship files name, so they fly from the shipped app as well as the development build.

Exhaust cones

Next to the detailed models, the old straight exhaust streak looked out of place. Each nozzle now draws a cone instead. It is as wide as the nozzle at the root and tapers to 15% at the tip, white-hot near the nozzle. It is 2 m long at cruise and 3.6 m on boost. Twelve cones at boost length on six Skyhammers at 3840 × 2160 cost about 0.04 ms.

The copper Raven

The copper Raven has four guns, and its rounds now leave from the four barrels in turn. Shooting off one side silences that side’s two barrels, the same way its rate of fire already halved. Its lift fans point down, so its jetwash now blows down from under each fan, as a smaller cone, and the glowing discs on its back are gone.

The Sniper’s hull

The Sniper is built for range. It is fast in a straight line, cruising at 33 m/s and boosting to 77, and it is slow to turn. A ship that fast would wreck itself crashing through a building, so the Sniper has a glancing hull. Brushing a wall costs it little or nothing, and a head-on hit throws it back instead of stopping it dead: at 24.5 m/s when boosting and 10.2 m/s at cruise. Its ram breaks glass, roof tile, plaster and timber, and never brick, steel or concrete. At the test range, the Skyhammer boosts through a brick wall and the Sniper does not.

A shield you can see

A ship’s shield is now drawn as a shell around the hull that flares where it takes a blow. The flare is 25° across for a round and 60° for a missile, and a big blow sends a ring around the shell. The shell is blue-white while the shield holds, amber at a quarter left and red-orange under a tenth. The whole shell flashes when a blow breaks the shield. Enemy ships show it too. On the player’s own ship, a hit also puts blue arcs and a glow on the edge of the screen toward the blow, and the shield bar flashes.

Damage on the model

A part shot off a textured ship disappears from the model, and the piece that falls is drawn as that part of the same model, paint and all. A burning ship now blackens in patches. Soot spreads in blotches, from a few to most of the ship as the fire grows, and a piece that breaks away keeps its own soot.

The Brute and the Wasp aren’t in these recordings yet. The Wasp is set from the command line in the development build for now.