Demo Patch 2.1: The BIG GRAPHICS Update

GRAPHICS

- A ship coming close for the first time no longer stalls the frame while its detailed model is built: until then it shows its plainer distant model, and the detailed one is built the next time the game stands still (a refit card, the pause menu). Every ship's distant model is ready a few seconds after the game starts.

- Hull metal is lit properly now. Reflections of the sky blur smoothly with how rough a surface is instead of smearing, bright reflections are no longer clipped flat, and every sector's sky lights a hull to the same strength, so ships read the same in the dim Crown and the bright Veil.

- Hulls carry fine real-metal detail under their panels: scratches, specks and wear on the paint, brushed grain on bare metal (High and Ultra).

- Hull paint has more life: neighbouring plates differ in tone and sheen, plate edges are chipped back to bare metal, the clear coat puts a crisp highlight on every edge, broad patches of the hull are glossier or duller than the rest, and creases and joints sit in deeper shadow. Bare metal armour (the Anvil's black belts) gets the same treatment, so dark hulls no longer read as one flat sheet.

- Some plates carry painted yard stencils (service lettering over a rule) and hazard chevron strips.

- Planets have more depth on High and Ultra: ridges and crater walls on solid worlds catch the sun near the terminator, the edge of the disc darkens, worlds with an atmosphere glow faintly along the line between day and night, and gas giants carry finer turbulence and a second storm.

- Painted plating has a clear coat that catches the sky, and creases keep their depth without the open plating going muddy.

- Each sector's colour grade is a lookup table now, and bright highlights roll off toward white instead of going flat.

- The chase camera eases out a little over the run, so the larger late fights fit the frame.

- A badly hurt flagship or boss shows it: vapour vents from the hull past half its hull lost, fire breaks out past 70%, and past 85% it burns in three places. Tactical keeps its own fires and breaches.

- Radio portraits come through a comm channel: tinted to the speaker, with scanlines, and the picture breaks up as your hull takes damage.

- Refit cards: the stats beside the mount map no longer break one word per line, and the Tractor's and other glowing modules' pictures are no longer washed out. The Tractor's rim coil is a lit ring now, not a glowing disc over the dish.

- Chromatic fringing is off by default (it painted pink edges on gantries). Options, Graphics turns it back on.

- A sortie opens with your flagship and her wing dropping out of jump, in place of the hangar launch.

- Ultra goes further: the sky is baked at twice the resolution (sharp planets and nebulae at 1440p and 4K), sun shadows are twice as fine, detailed ship and asteroid models hold to twice the distance, and surface textures are filtered at 16x.

- Distant galaxies in every sector's sky.

- The dead world at Crown's Wake is a cracked magma planet: glowing seams between crust plates, some crusted over. Cratered moons have real relief: bowls, raised rims and ejecta lit by the sun, instead of drawn rings.

- The Registry orbits a living world: oceans, continents, deserts and ice caps under a turning cloud deck, with city lights on the night side and a sun glint on the sea (High and Ultra add cloud shadows and ground relief).

- Glass Ring ice is split by crevasses that show its blue depth; Goblite fortresses there no longer read as one pale slab.

- Veil Storm asteroids crack along branching fractures, and only some of them carry the storm's charge.

- High and Ultra are sharper: temporal anti-aliasing keeps fine detail instead of softening it frame by frame, and a light sharpen brings plating and lettering back.

- The dark jagged rim round ships in the dust of the Belt of Ashes and the Drowned Yard is gone.

- The target camera no longer washes out white when the target's drives, lamps or hard light fill it.

- Hull lettering is a proper stencil font: one size on every plate, never mirrored, clear of the hazard stripes.

- Chipped paint along plate seams no longer breaks into square specks up close.

- Goblite fortresses are smoother up close.

- The bridge view's console carries instruments: rows of keys and readouts, screen housings, armrest consoles and a lit lip along the window.

- Enemy hulls are finer at Ultra: Hollow vessels are grown, not built, with bell-shaped profiles, ivory bone, gilded horn tips, backlit membranes and round skin pits; the Custodians' hard light is cooler face-on and deepens to gold at the edges; Goblite fortresses are dressed stone with chisel marks; Alve hulls carry a pearl sheen.

- The sky has a broad dust rift, faint galactic cirrus in the empty quarters, backlit ice and livelier nebula banks. Planets sit properly on the sky sphere, a ringed world's rings cast their shadow onto the globe, the corona of a near sun streams, and obsidian spires look glassy.

- Field rocks: rounder ice boulders and calmer basalt; planet relief without speckle.

- On Ultra the jump-in is a cinematic: the exit point gathers light, your hull streaks in smeared along its length and drops out in a burst.

- HUD text is drawn pixel for pixel at 1440p and 4K, and the boss card and toasts scale up with the screen. The HUD hides under the run-end letterbox.

- Photo mode takes clean frames: the HUD hides and the control bar fades when you stop moving the mouse.

- The Custodian Usher's door is laid in raised ceramic plaques on gold piping, with silicon dies set into its bevel.

- Hollow Carapace ribs grow out of the shell and taper to points, instead of lying on it like straws.

- A distant sun no longer has a lumpy, cotton-wool rim: its corona is smooth with thin streamers running off it.

- The bridge console's keys are finer and grouped in banks under thin readouts, in place of a few big glowing blocks.

- Alve rings are rounder up close, and the crescents' canopies are glass bubbles standing proud of the hull.

- Steam Deck: the right stick scrolls the Service Record's rank list (it moved the page around it by a few pixels instead).

- Explosions no longer blow out into white blobs when several go off close to the camera: stacked light rolls off gently while a single blast keeps its white-hot heart.

- Fireballs billow and leave soot as they cool, and a capital ship or boss dying bursts out through the wreck instead of burning inside the hull.

- Beams are a thin white thread in a coloured sheath with streaming filaments, in place of a fat white bar.

- Missiles and torpedoes burn with flame tongues; the railgun throws a shock disc at the muzzle and leaves an ionised line down the slug's path.

- Shield hits bend the light behind the membrane with a faint colour fringe. Blasts leave heat shimmer, and smoke churns.

- The flat shock rings are gone: refit bursts, the flak barrage and the jump-in drop-out throw continuous rings of glowing vapour.

- Effects run lighter: far less memory churn per frame in big fights.

- Hull plate seams are clean grooves at every distance (they showed a stepped, speckled line up close), and worn edges are a ragged band of bare metal rather than square specks.

- Soft shadows and ambient occlusion are smooth instead of grainy.

- Pale hulls (the Halcyon, Seraph and Corsair) read in tones: plates in cool greys, steel flanks below the waterline, darker panel lines and grey primer under the chips.

- Guns have real bores; the Mk V battery wears a round compensator, lance emitters are dark glass with a hot core, and torpedo tubes stand open with the next torpedo's lit seeker inside.

- Barrels, turret drums, shield domes, coils and other round module parts are smoother.

- Viewports are rounded panes in dark gaskets; unlit ones are dark reflecting glass. Drive nozzles burn white-hot at the centre.

- The reactor dreadnought is a dead hulk now: lights and drives out, scorched plating and a torn-open reactor housing on its deck whose core burns orange, then white-hot as the fuse runs down.

- The turncoat frigate wears Hollow growth across its plating; knocked down, its lights stutter and a green boarding beacon blinks.

- The Hollow nest heart has roots boring into its rock and egg sacs on them. The notary's jump point is a Custodian gate of ceramic ring segments and gold inlay. The rift is a true-black core with a thin, tilted accretion disc that bends the light around it.

- Supply drops are real canisters whose strobes turn from green to red as the claim builds. The relay beacon is a buoy whose lamps brighten as you hold it. Old minefield mines near you are built contact mines with a blinking lamp and a soft amber haze over their reach.

- The loot barge carries strapped crates, and derelict hulks show torn plating round their breaches. A freighter or stranded capital with a failed drive sparks and sputters until it is repaired.

- The campaign chart has a painted sky per act, glowing routes, lit nodes that grow under the cursor, a gold glow on your fleet's node and a badge for the next sector's hazard. Icons stay crisp at 4K.

- Ultra runs much smoother: GPU time per frame is down 10 to 34% at 1440p and the long stutter frames in big fights are cut by more than half.

- Sun shafts are smooth (the sun no longer shows a ring of dots from the strategic view or a hard-edged halo), and rocks cut shafts of light through the volumetric gas.

- Soft shadows: thin parts close to a surface (trusses, gantries) cast crisp contact shadows that soften with distance, rounded flanks no longer show shadow stripes, and rocks no longer shadow themselves in black blotches.

- Ambient occlusion no longer leaves a dark halo past a ship's silhouette, and temporal anti-aliasing drops a moving ship's old image at once instead of ghosting it; sparks and embers no longer trail.

- Glass reflections are cleaner and steadier, and lens ghosts from the sun and explosions are soft, rounded and about half as bright.

BRIDGE CREW (CO-OP)

- A new co-op choice on the dock: BRIDGE CREW. Player two crews your flagship instead of flying their own. You have the helm: flying, turning, locking targets and the refit cards. Player two has tactical: the spinal gun and missiles, flares, power, fleet orders and the gun groups. A crewed tactical station reloads faster and recharges the shields sooner.

- Bridge Crew works online too: with a partner connected, the host turns BRIDGE CREW on in the online row of the dock, and the partner joins as the tactical station.

BOSSES AND WEAK POINTS

- Bosses can be staggered. A gold line under a boss's health fills as your spinal gun hits it. Full, the boss reels for 4 seconds: its guns go quiet, it stops moving, and every hit lands half again as hard. The line drains if you let up.

- A lockable battery on an enemy ship flares white while its guns fire, and takes more wear in that moment: hit it when it shoots.

THE FIRST MINUTES

- The first refit card comes about twice as fast: the opening swarm arrives a few seconds after your sailing orders and the first level costs less.

- Your first evolution comes sooner. From the second refit, every hand offers the other half of an evolution for a module you carry until you have a pair, and until your first evolution the modules that build toward one turn up far more often.

- Mega evolution recipes show on refit cards for your first ten runs (Options turns them on or off for good).

- Flight School is shorter: five stations (flying, the spinal gun, turrets, a refit and a live skirmish). The other seven are optional drills, offered when you finish.

- The debrief lists the next three things to unlock and how to earn each.

FIXES AND CHANGES

- The Subversion node shows its work. It has its own row in the damage list (everything a ship it took deals, and what that ship still had when its net burned out), the feed names the ship it took and for how long, and if that ship is shot down early the node gets back the time it lost toward its next take.

- Mastery stars sit properly on every flagship: they no longer cross a hull step (Bulwark, Vigil), sink into the Wraith's edge, hide behind the Anvil's ladder or the Harrow's struts, or sit at the Command's ring.

- Belt of Ashes: the solar flare warning turns green and says IN COVER while a rock shelters your flagship, so you know when to hold.

- On smaller screens the boss bar narrows to stay clear of the target camera, and the refit hand's slot line no longer runs under the fleet list.

- The dock's online co-op buttons are styled like the rest of the dock (they showed as plain grey buttons), and the end of Flight School no longer shows a 16666 minute relief clock.

- The target camera no longer floods with glare from close lamps and emitters.

- The Command's flag mast now stands on top of the hub tower. At the tip of the forward arm it stood in the swing of both forward heavy guns, which had to lift over it.

- The Service Record keeps one size on every tab, so switching tabs no longer resizes the window or moves the tab bar, and DONE stays at the bottom.

- Flagship Mastery shows each ship whole beside its name (the Command's picture was cut to a band), all ten perks fit on screen, and the progress line reads "0 OF 400 XP" instead of "0 / 400".

- When a sortie unlocks two mastery perks at once, the debrief lists them on separate lines instead of running them together.

- The codex overview writes every group name the same way.

- The CLICK TO LOCK THE MOUSE box shrinks to a small line at the bottom edge after a few seconds instead of sitting over your flagship for the whole sortie, and it does not show at all while you fly with a controller.

- In the wing list a veteran's rank pips no longer run into their kill count.

- Off-screen markers keep their label clear of the arrow when it points to the side.

- A new captain's first sortie is gentler: the controls card shows the dozen keys you need in the first minute (H opens every control), and the directive hand waits until your second sortie instead of opening two seconds in, over the controls. The refit screen keeps the auto-pick settings and the bow conversion for later sorties too, so the first cards have more room.

- The first-command sheet describes the flight school course as it is now (the drills are their own course).

- A brand-new captain who picks TACTICAL first is offered flight school too (only ARCADE offered it).

- A new codex entry's notice says what the ship is ("Hollow swarmer") instead of repeating its name.

- The Ship Manual no longer has a tab for the secret flagship before you have earned her.

- Shield domes, hangar bays, drive pods and cloak vanes now take one slot at every level. Their second mount never added anything a level gives, it only took a slot another module could use (a hangar next to your domes, mines or a cloak beside your drive pods). The second dome, bay and pod now appear on the same slot, and drive pods carry a flame on each nozzle.