Hey everyone it’s that time again, time for your weekly update! I’m happy to report the final geometry pass for the destroyer has been finished. We still need to do textures/materials however we’ve decided we’ll likely defer that until we’ve had a chance to do one or two balancing passes on the weapon systems. The reason for this is that it will affect the distribution of hardpoints and their size which could have an impact on texturing. The art team is now working on a broad set of tasks including the cruiser, placeholder particle effects, placeholder weapon effects, and some website improvements.

WIP final cruiser geometry

On the engineering side work continued on weapons as well as some website and backend improvements. We’re working hard to get that elusive next patch out as soon as possible however our missile locking system has ended up taking considerably longer than anticipated and is the primary source of the delay.

All of the ships with completed geometry passes

We’ve had a number of discussions regarding capital ship weapons over the last few days. Our current plan is that capital ship weapon systems, which a pilot is able to organize into different groups, can be aimed at a specific target and fired all at once - similar to games like World of Warships. Turrets that are not facing the right direction can be optionally set to auto-fire on targets within visual range or stay dormant to conserve ammunition and/or energy. Missile turrets will have slightly different behavior than other turrets. Since missiles are intelligent they can fly around the host ship to get to their target regardless of which direction they’re facing as along as the target is far enough away. They can also be set to auto-fire like other turrets. Obviously, the implementation of capital ship weapon systems diverges heavily from that of the smaller ships and won’t be properly implemented until sometime after our next patch. That’s it for this week, until next time!