For a long, long, time Soldat has been ugly – certainly since its creation, but as games have become more and more beautiful, we've stayed behind the times and the disparity has grown larger. When a new player opens up Soldat, not only is he met with a convoluted and confusing menu, but also graphics straight from 2000, which even for the time weren't good.With 1.8 we are going to rectify that. Hand-painted sceneries and textures were the way to go, since limitations poised by the old engine rendered many conventional methods useless, and the art team (which consists of Monsteri) doesn't have enough time for 3D pre-renders. The goals of the new art direction are a cohesive style, much improved visuals, and improved readability of the game elements.The style will be a mix of cartoony and painterly visuals with a bucketload of grit, but decently realistic shapes and objects. All colliding things – that is to say, polygons and colliders, will have thick outlines. Polygons will also be shaded invertly with light sources on the map in mind. A mix of cold and warm colors will be used for the foreground and background – where the foreground is warm, the background will be cold, and vice versa. The further background sceneries go, the colder they will be, which creates a nice sense of depth and increases readability. Colliding objects on the foreground will thus have more contrast and stand out from the rest.During the downtime in communication we've been steadily growing our library of textures and sceneries, which is now starting to be big enough to be put into use. A lot is still work in progress and preliminary, and for the final results to match our vision, some additions to the game engine and PolyWorks will be necessary, but so far we've achieved some nice results with the tools already available. Check it out: ctf_dropdown!Do post your thoughts and possible requests down below, we'd be happy to hear opinions, since this is a very big change coming up. We'll be making more updates in the coming weeks, and hopefully in a more regular manner than before.