Art & graphics

The Aurora Mark II offers a big visual upgrade in the new RSI style while the Mark I stays for owners, and both can coexist, as with the Hornets.

Ben Curtis says the Polaris was deliberately left sparsely signed to feel cold and brutalist, that this was probably wrong, and that changes will come, with some quality-of-life fixes sooner but no schedule and no promise it will match the Perseus's brightness.

Players will be able to tint buildings with palettes suited to each biome, add logos, and connect many generic buildings via corridors or hangars, so bases can be adapted to different purposes.

Initially the focus is on one high-tech style, with more functionality to follow; whether to expand it or add a new aesthetic will depend on how players react.

Bases can blend in through biome tint palettes, careful placement around trees and signature-reducing buildings, while terrain editing is limited so scouting stays valuable, with foundation tiles used to level building areas.

Quantum boosting shake is likely too strong and will probably be dialed down, but whether players can turn it off is undecided and a director-level decision, though Squadron 42 allows it.

Customization will likely start with accessibility options like colour blindness and text size, then item-tied UI styles, with broader player customization coming later and not yet designed.

Rainer is working on derelict habs, such as habitation pods, garages or workshops built from ship pieces, to dress up crash sites in following releases as part of an asset library.

Letting players paint their ships in game is still wanted, but the internal tools, inconsistent ship setup, scaling across ship sizes and interior customization problems must be sorted first, and no player-facing system or details are settled yet.

Mark Gibson loves the Sabre Raven's look and says it isn't forgotten; it missed the base Sabre's rework only because it's a separate model that would have doubled the time.

The Constellation got a handling rebalance in 3.12 and shield-hole mitigation, with minor interior changes coming, but no full visual refit is scheduled and new ships are preferred over reworking it.

The team says older ships will get equal gameplay functionality and aren't ignored or underplayed, and that visual updates will come when the time is right, since reworking too early means redoing the work.

The team definitely plans more customization like the 300 series, including cockpit decorations, but weighs it against the schedule delay it adds to a ship's release.

Repeated textures are acknowledged as an issue, arguably better in V3, caused by precision limits and manual texturing; improvements are planned but won't come in 3.8, only hopefully soon after.

V4 doesn't fundamentally change tree popping or loading, but objects spawn on more stable data, so assets should fade more smoothly than before while the underlying loading process stays the same.

Nothing theoretically stops peaks above the clouds, but clouds aren't volumetric enough yet, and terrain stretching limits steepness to a maximum of two kilometers of height difference per four-by-four patch.

The Hull C's art is mostly but not fully final, and it is still waiting on several technical dependencies (vehicle states, bulk cargo, moving grids and portals, docking) that haven't been scheduled together, though it is still on its way.

No one is actively working on the Polaris and no one is scheduled to start in the near term, though work on the Constellation and Bengal designs is helping prepare for it.

The VFX team says it covers particle effects like sparks, fire, smoke, explosions and dynamic thruster trails, plus gameplay-readable effects, but not geometry or main level lighting, sitting between art and design.

Female characters are still in progress: assets are being made one-to-one with male ones on a separate, differently proportioned skeleton, and release is expected in a bigger character release after the male work is finished, with no date.

Faceware tracking works with glasses, beards and small children, though imperfectly, for example with thick dark glasses or hidden lips; it can't work with sunglasses, and facial hair is slowing the gene-splicing customization.

Much of the fauna will be handcrafted, with procedural elements mainly making variants of handcrafted creatures, to avoid homogenous or ugly results, and tools will help scale up content.

The face capture mirrors whatever your face does, though tracking can drop when a hand covers it, so the team plans player-facing options like pausing capture and separate send and receive toggles.

Brewer says ship animations are the most complex because ships keep changing and break character animation, and sitting-console animations use a shared timing metric to reuse chair animations.

Throttle and joystick movement already exists as programmatic inverse kinematics, where the character's hands follow the controls, though poorly fitted proportions can cause arm stretching.

Brewer says nested animations within a usable, like sitting on the toilet or working at a work zone, are being worked on, with an AI code hitch still being solved.

Ship entry and exit comes in roughly three speeds, like walk, jog and run, with emergency exits not yet shown, so large numbers of variations aren't promised.

Only interior Freelancer artwork has been shown so far, with no exterior images yet, and the interior draws on the Starfarer's design language as MISC ships are becoming a unified family.

The plan is to buy a preconfigured ship from the dealer and then modify parts afterward, with basic paint schemes coming in the first release of the game mode and custom skins and decals possibly later.

The developers give no workaround for the editor animation errors: the team is busy with other work and a move, helping fans is not yet a priority, and releasing tools or an editor is a long way off.

Chris Roberts thinks the Dogfighting Module will be a great benchmarking tool, though the game is currently less optimized than the final one; if it runs well now, the final game should run well.