Naev News

This post is about development on Naev 0.9.0.

Even though explosions in space games generally defy the laws of physics, they are some of the better and necessary eye-candy. However, explosions in Naev remained unchanged since about 13 years ago. While not necessarily awful, they have always left a bit more to be desired. One idea that has been around for ages has been to try to redo them in procedural shaders to look better and more variable. With the recent shader improvements, it has never been a better time to revamp the other special effects.



The explosions have been redone with ray marching and are completely procedural: each explosion should be completely unique. Furthermore, the explosion parameters can be tweaked to create plasma clouds or other special effects, replacing a large amount of image-based animations we were using. Images speak louder than words, so see for yourself the new explosions in action!

This post is about development on Naev 0.9.0.

So fact is, beams are cool. They can hit multiple targets and do a lot of damage while being accurate. Sure they have short range and bad tracking, but they more than make up for that in coolness factor. We thought about it and decided the only way to make beams cooler is to sprinkle some shader goodness on top. Not only will this make beams look great at any resolution, but it will also allow creating new beams easily, as there is no longer a need to muck around with graphic images.

In the previous blarg post about Lua outfits, some of the new beams were already shown:



There are also a lot of new beam graphics, some of which are not used yet, but open up a lot of exciting new possibilities. Look forward to more and fancier beams in the future.

This post is about development on Naev 0.9.0.

Most non-weapon outfits in Naev have consisted of simple modifications, with some notable exceptions like afterburners. This has always meant that most of the game is built around setting up outfits, without non-weapon outfits playing an active role in combat. In order to allow much more flexible outfit design, we have incorporated Lua, the widely used scripting language in Naev and other projects, into the outfits.

The result? Now outfits can react to environmental conditions or trigger in certain instances. Furthermore, the behaviours don't have to be fixed, but can be dynamically set during runtime. This allows doing simple things like having outfits give you bonuses above certain shield levels, or depending on nearby ships. Below are some examples of what can be done with this.

The Emergency Stasis Inducer will automatically trigger when your ship takes armour damage. Not only will it slow down time around you, it will also speed up your ship for a great bullet time effect!



Do you like holograms? Would you like to project a fully equipped model of your ship into space to distract your enemies while you blast them into smithereens? The revolutionary Combat Hologram Projector does just that!



Have you ever felt so angry that you wanted to slow down time and get a large bonus to damage while you damage yourself? Think no further, the Berserk Chip does just that, without making you turn green and rip out of your shirt!



Of course, it would only be right to pay homage to the original Cloaking Device by implementing it in Naev. While active, nobody will see you, and you will be able to do what you please freely.



Other than these showcased outfits, there are many more to explore, however, we leave that up to you to look forward to in-game!

This post is about development on Naev 0.9.0.

Given that the old jump animation was a bit bland, fading in and out from white, we decided to give it a new spin with GLSL shaders. Furthermore, it is now possible to use multiple different jump animations. Currently only two are used in-game, but this might be extended in the future.

This post is about development on Naev 0.9.0.

By moving to newer versions of OpenGL in version 0.8, we have modernized the rendering pipeline of Naev, however, we have not been making full use of that power. Well, at least not up until now. We are proud to present trails for ships and missiles! These are generated procedurally using GLSL shaders, and are capable of having complex animations. There are currently a total of 7 different trails depending on the ship and missile, ranging from cool to very cool.