The Gladius and the Redeemer engines are lit as AF. You can see them well before the ships are entering radar range. Is this intended, or will it be addressed and toned down?
TL;DRThe bright, far-visible Gladius engines come from a still-in-testing minimum-pixel-size setting meant to aid readability; it isn't applied to all ships and may change depending on how design feels about it.
This is an interesting one. So the Gladius, I did some tests for... design were asking to be able to see them further away in the distance. As with anything in the game, we have to have LODs with our particle effects. And I think what was happening was the actual thruster items themselves were getting LODed out and the particles were getting LODed out. But from a point of view of readability for the player, that was problematic. So I did a test on the Gladius using min pixel distance. So I can force a particle to be a minimum amount of pixels on the screen, and that can force it to draw further away than it otherwise would do. It would otherwise be culled. So it's still in testing phase, I guess. It's not been propagated across all ships. It might need to be changed depending on how design feel about it longer term. So that's one of those examples where some of the ships have got this test applied to them, but not all the ships, because that wouldn't be practical to do. So hopefully that answers the question.
It's one of those things where, because we are operating a live environment in the middle of our development, we have the opportunity to do that kind of A/B testing and see how it works in a practical environment and see what the majority of folks say.