Technology

Real-time rendering

Fully procedural worlds

Every surface here is generated at runtime. The terrain, the cloud deck, the storms and the atmosphere are all evaluated per pixel from a planet's ID, so a world costs a few numbers to store and arrives identical for every player who visits it.

Weather follows chemistry. Ocean worlds brew hurricanes. Volcanic worlds run ash decks over glowing lava seas. Airless rocks get no sky at all. The ground samples the same cloud field the sky draws, so clouds cast moving shadows on the surface below them instead of floating free of it.

Two styles, one world. The classic and comic renderers share the world-building layer and differ only in how they shade it. Flip the style switch above: the continents do not move, because they are the same continents.

Rarity is real. A small fraction of worlds draw a named catastrophe: a hypercane belt, a snowball glaciation, an ashfall winter. Rarer still is the Hive Sprawl, a planet paved pole to pole, its night side solid city light, wearing a halo of orbital junk. Keep reseeding and you will eventually meet one, which is exactly the experience a player has.

Procedural asset generation

An asset pipeline that runs on seeds

Our in-house generator builds assets from procedural node graphs. You give it a family, an archetype and a number. It hands back a finished game asset: geometry, LOD ladder, baked textures, collision proxy and metadata. The art direction is authored by hand and lives in the recipes, and the generator is how we apply it at scale.

The same seed always produces the same asset, on any machine, on any run. That turns art into something we can version, diff and regenerate at will. When a material's look changes, we update the recipe and rebuild the library from it.

Archetypes are readable, on purpose. A player should be able to price a rock from its silhouette and colour before spending a scan on it. Bright, smooth and blue-white is ice. Dark, dusty and softened by age is barely worth the fuel to reach it. Pale and angular is a fragment of something bigger, and something bigger is where crystal comes from. Each archetype is a set of ranges rather than fixed numbers, so two rocks of a kind differ in proportion while staying recognisable as that kind.

Ships and stations

Generated hulls that arrive pre-rigged

Ships and stations come off the same seed-driven idea as the rocks, with a different job. A ship is built from a kit of hull, cockpit, engine and wing parts assembled to a class such as scout, hauler or corvette, then finished with a paint style and baked down to a single mesh with 2K maps. A station is built from the same kind of kit against four archetypes: trade hub, habitat ring, modular stack and industrial platform.

What ships is a rig, not just a model. Alongside every mesh the generator writes a small sidecar describing what the engine needs to know about it: which node spins, at what rpm and about which axis; where the beacons sit and on what period and phase they blink; where the docking bays face; where a ship's engines and weapon hardpoints mount. Nothing about any particular hull is written into the game code. The engine reads the contract and does as it is told, so a new hull works the day it is generated.

The hulls above are the comic set. They are built from rounded blocks and finished with an inked outline rather than panel lines and baked grime, and they run light enough to suit a phone. The contract underneath is the part that matters: it does not change with the look. A station declares the same rotors, beacons and bays whichever way it is drawn, so the engine reads one contract and an art style never needs code of its own.