The ships: concept art to textured models

Three ships to fly

On October 4 we set the shape of the player’s ships. Flying through the city should feel nimble and light, with room to swim and shift between buildings. One ship should be slower and brutish, with more health, shield and power and less lock-on ability. A third is built for range. Each ship has a short brief of how it should feel, and research turned the briefs into first numbers. Those numbers are starting points, to be tuned by flying in the city.

The Skyhammer fills the nimble role. It is designed to be fast, lock on quickly, carry two missiles with a quick reload, and fire a cannon that is rapid and accurate with less punch per round. It is the primary ship, built on the gunship’s frame and mass.

The Brute is slower without being sluggish, and it can take a beating. It weighs 8.5 t. It is designed to carry four missiles with a moderate reload and a medium lock-on, and a cannon that fires like a scatter gun, three shots a second.

The Sniper is built for range. It has the longest reach of the three and hits hard, with a slower rate of fire and less toughness. It is very fast in a sprint but not agile, so it gets out of a fight by getting out of range. Its two missiles are designed to keep their lock when a target passes behind a building and to punch through several layers of a building before they stop. It already glances off walls it brushes, and a head-on hit bounces it back, because crashing through a building at sprint speed would wreck it.

The enemies

The enemy types come from the same three ships, with more variety than three. The Raven is the computer-flown ship the dogfight has used since the start, and a copper Raven now flies as a second look for it. The Wasp is the roster’s small ship. A Wasp drone is still at the concept stage.

From concept art to a ship

Each ship starts as a set of concept views we make with an AI image model. A 3D generator, Meshy, turns them into two models from the same source: one painted, and one split into parts. The asset studio carries the split over to the painted model, names the parts (body, wings, engines, canopy, cannons, missile racks), and gives each part one collision outline the game uses to tell which part a round hit and what shape it falls as. Each engine gets a glowing disc.

Each ship also gets a lighter version for distance and shadows. With the part outlines and texture seams held in place, none of them reached 30,000 triangles: the Skyhammer’s is 40,000, the Brute’s 55,000, the Wasp’s 36,000 and the copper Raven’s 55,000. A part shot off in play falls as that part of the same model, paint and all. Drawing each ship’s own textured model covers how the game draws these models and what they cost.

Where each one stands

As of October 10, in the development build:

• To fly: the game’s Settings let you pick the gunship, the Sniper, the Skyhammer or the Brute, from the next launch.
• To fight: a second Settings row picks the Raven or the copper Raven as the enemy.
• The Wasp flies in the development build, set from the command line.
• The Wasp drone is concept art only.