Fire, smoke and ships you can watch die. Until now, explosions were a drawn jagged star, and smoke was a tinted dot. Now both are rendered in 3D.
- Fireball and smoke as pre-rendered frame sequences: a fireball with real volume that blooms white-hot, cools through orange and red, and dies out, plus a smoke cloud with lighting and self-shadowing. The fire is drawn additively and picks up a third of the enemy’s color.
- Explosions: a white flash, embers that cool as they fly off, debris, and large hull chunks that tumble away burning and trail fire. Big enemies burst into secondary explosions.
- Damage now shows: a ship starts smoking once it’s lost a third of its hull, the hull chars at 40 %, and at 60 % it burns at one to three fixed spots that rotate with the hull.
- Burning: anything on fire now licks with real flames and trails fire behind it.
- No more constant white flashing: burning and decay no longer trigger a hit flash — a burning enemy used to just be a white silhouette. The hit flash itself is now capped at once every 0.2 s; otherwise an enemy under sustained fire was white most of the time.
- A hit flash now appears right at the point of impact, so you can see exactly where you’re hitting.
- Softer projectiles: glowing bolts, plasma balls, the guardian’s energy orb and engine flames are now real gradients instead of stacked circles — no more banding or rings showing through the glow.
- New “Effects” setting in the start menu next to “Bloom”: full, normal (the particle count from 0.118.0 plus the new effects), and light (half as many particles, none of the new extras). Defaults to full on desktop and normal on touch devices. Telemetry now records both the effects level and the bloom setting.
- Measured under load (40 enemies, 15 kills per second, half of them heavily damaged): the settings differ by roughly 1 to 3 ms per frame; not slower than 0.118.0 in the same test, because burn ticks no longer throw off sparks and flashes of their own. The measurements vary a lot, though.