A full day in the workshop. Almost none of this changes a rule of the game; it changes what you see while playing, which is sometimes the same thing.
The three launchers, 13 to 22 times lighter
These are the most-instanced models in the whole game: one per weapon slot on every ship, and a cruiser has eight.
| Before | Now | |
|---|---|---|
| Cannon | 8,224 triangles | 614 |
| Missile launcher | 11,283 | 620 |
| Scatter gun | 13,674 | 614 |
The drop in vertices is even bigger — up to 43× — because the old ones came unwelded: exactly three vertices per triangle, each face carrying its own. A cruiser with eight missile launchers goes from 90,264 triangles of turrets to 4,960.
The motherships and the station
Both motherships are new, and so is the docking station. The station is also upside down: what was the roof is now the floor. That is not a rotation applied in code, it is baked into the model — so if the base is ever swapped, there is nothing hidden waiting to cause trouble.
On the Universe page each faction’s dossier used to show a fighter. Now it shows that side’s mothership beside its station, which says far more about what a fleet is like.
The mining drone, and the fix of the day
The drone’s hull is new: 10,724 triangles against 171,525. Sixteen times lighter, with one texture instead of eleven.
But the important part is something else. Going in to look at it turned up a bug that had been there for weeks, reported like this: “the mining ship never gets to where the asteroid is, it just sits there sucking thin air.”
And it was literal. The extraction funnel ended in empty space, every single time.
The reason: both the hover height and the funnel length were computed from the sphere that encloses the asteroid, not from its surface. And these planetoids are not spheres: they are squashed axis by axis, on meshes that were already flattened. On one of the small rocks that leaves 38 units of air between the effect and the stone; on the big ones, over 130.
The best part is that someone had already tried to fix it: there is a July patch that lengthened the funnel by 6 % “so the plasma dies inside the rock”. Three units against a thirty-eight unit gap.
Now the funnel stretches to the real surface. The function that solves it already existed and was being used for something else: it is the same one that lets you fly right up against an asteroid’s hull instead of hitting an invisible sphere. The vortex was the only thing still asking for the sphere.
And the tool that exists to review that effect never caught it: it built a perfect sphere, the one case where the major semi-axis and the surface coincide. A test that builds a case which cannot happen in the game proves nothing. It now uses a real rock, and picks the most squashed one out of two hundred.
The missile, and why you can now see where it came from
The three faction missiles are replaced by a single one for all three sides. Losing the distinct silhouette costs nothing: a missile is 1.4 units long and you see it from 100 to 1,400 away, which is between one and ten pixels. There is no silhouette at that size. What you read is the colour, and that was already tinted with the firing side’s.
What is new: a smoke trail. The puffs hang in place and draw the path the missile has travelled, so you can finally see where one coming at you from a distance started. The flame and the light told you a missile existed; not which way it had come in.
The smoke also outlives the missile: before, the trail would have vanished all at once at the moment of impact, which is exactly when you are looking at it.
