Ships Go Boom

BY BOBBENS, ON JULY 18TH, 2023

This post is about development on Naev 0.11.0.

At the 2nd anniversary of posting about implementing raymarched fancy explosions, it’s time to talk about trying to use the system to its full potential. And by full potential, I mean custom ship explosions!

All of the factional ships have been given custom explosions, some slightly different from the “standard” explosions, while others have much more radical changes, including different explosion types, secondary effects, and radically different colours. Time to explode and damage have also been changed, while some explosions now do different damage types and/or apply disabling effects. This should help have the different factions and ships feel more different.

From the technical side of things, custom ship explosions are done by using Lua scripting for ships, similar as what was done for outfits. This opens up a whole new possibility of what can be done with ships, I won’t cover other things being done with this yet, but it has to do with the Great House Sirius rework which brings about psychic powers. All these changes will be included in version 0.11.0 which should be released around December this year. Lots of exciting development to look for for the rest of 2023!