Sporadic Naev Newsletter Vol. 4

This year we’re having another edition of our Sporadic Naev Newsletter. We’ll be covering some of the improvements that will appear in the 0.12.0 release, and more importantly, discuss a feature almost 15 years in the making: Naev going 3D! Now, this doesn’t mean gameplay is going 3D - gameplay is fundamentally unchanged - however, the ship models are now in 3D, allowing us to do new fancy effects and lower memory consumption while at it!

Less Pirates in the Early Game

One of the major complaints that Naev always gets is how ruthless pirates are, especially in the early game, when the player has no proper defenses. Although the past several releases have tried to mitigate the issue by establishing a safe starting area with no pirates, and adding more introductory missions to help the player get started, for those players that strayed too far from the starting area, it was often fatal. Now, Chapter 0 will feature significantly less pirates, that will ramp up to normal when the player reaches Chapter 1. This should give the player time to get better ships and survive the pirate menace.

In order to implement this feature, the in-game universe editor was significantly reworked (yet again!) to support universe diffs, that is, instead of saving the entire universe, only changes with the default are saved. While this has been used only for reducing pirates, for now, this is going to come very in hand when implementing the next stages of the major campaigns, where the universe will undergo many significant changes. It will definitely be a good investment for things to come.

Naev, now in 3D!

So, while this is something that was proposed around 15 years ago, this is something that has been quite active in the works for almost 5 years now. During that time, it has been rewritten twice: first using object files and more traditional rendering, and now using gltf files with physically-based rendering. As we’re not using any sort of game engine, it was all written from the ground up, and includes some fancy things like variance shadow maps, FidelityFX filtering, high dynamic tone mapping, and super sampling. There’s still many things to do, but this finally lets us start to do fancier things that were infeasible using spritesheets. That said, spritesheets are still supported, however, 3D models are the recommended way of adding new ships.

It has taken a lot of work, but all the ancient models have been updated to work with the newest blender, and many models have seen upgrades in different aspects like texturing, engine glows, broken geometry, and animations. Some ships have had to be nearly completely remade to work with current standards. There’s still a lot to do, but they look much better, and the same model can be used in the shipyard, communication window, and in-game.

With 3D, we finally can also have ships tilt slightly when turning. This makes flying feel much more natural, and the tilt shows off more highlights and details of the ships. While we were hoping to add blinking lights and more details, those have not yet been implemented, but there is a real possibility that they will come sooner and later, once some logistics are figured out.

For now, only ships have been reworked into 3D, but we hope to have planets, stations, and asteroids to join them in the near future. Some effects such as the backgrounds, wormholes, and the likes will still be kept in 2D, however,