Shield impacts like the mood board, a sharper picture, no more twitching at rest.
- New shield impact: The bubble is now just a hint, a faint sphere with a soft edge. The real event is the impact:
- A dense field of small hexagon cells lies on the sphere’s skin, foreshortened towards the edge. It’s blinding with a white core at the centre and glows out and flickers towards the edges.
- A wave runs outward from the impact through the grid.
- Short lightning arcs flicker across the skin and sparks fly off.
- It all glows additively. On your ship it shows for every shield hit, and on enemies for every hit, in their colour and smaller.
- Sharper picture: The game now renders at the resolution it’s displayed at. Before, the canvas was 960 game pixels tall (up to double on Retina), and on large monitors the browser stretched the picture and made it soft. On a 1440p monitor it now renders 1.5 times as many pixels. New Resolution option under Graphics: Sharp, Balanced (75 %) or Economy (50 %).
- No more twitching at rest:
- With the mouse, the pointer works like a joystick in Orbit because the camera follows the ship. Until now the ship stood still up to 26 px and flew at full speed from 31 px, so a few pixels of hand tremor made it start and stop. There’s now a smooth ramp: a 30 px dead zone, then speed rises smoothly to full at 150 px.
- At rest, the attitude thrusters now fully cancel the Core’s pull, with mouse and keys alike. While flying, the pull takes at most 15 % of the speed you’re currently trying to fly. Before, that was measured against full speed, which almost cancelled out slow movement.
- More hexagons instead of circles:
- the rescue radius and its timers in co-op, and the player ring in co-op
- auras, the decoy, the swarm’s command target and the drones’ readiness dots
- the skill point marker and the Heavy Gun’s charge
- the empty shield with its recharge timer, plus the Aegis, Overdrive and Time buffs
- The shield bubble now shimmers only as hexagon cells.