Skywatch #9 - Ship Parts: Winging it at the Helm (and BFG...)

Welcome to this weeks Skywatch development diary!

A few weeks ago, we gave you a deep dive into some of the progress made on our skyship engines. In today's post, we're following up with a glimpse at some of the other ship parts we've been working on - namely wings, helms and some cannons! This post is shorter than the engines post from a few weeks ago, but this is because these ship parts haven't received as much development time at the time of writing. We'll share more progress on these parts as it happens.

Wings

First up, let's take a look at some wings! Below, you can see one of the early concept pieces for our lower tier wings - the thought process behind the early game wings that you'll have access to, is that they would mostly be made from wood, maybe with some scrap metal attachments (e.g. improvised ailerons, wing mounting plates etc.)

And below is a textured model of one of the lower tier wings. Unlike the low tier wooden wings in Worlds Adrift, which were simple planks of wood strapped together as pictured, we wanted our wooden wings to look like they've been carved and shaped this time around, to better reflect the more advanced level of technology in Lost Skies.

Below is a look at a slighter higher tier wing. Unlike the wing above, which is a brand new model, this wing is a legacy Worlds Adrift wing model that's receiving the upgrade treatment to bring the level of detail in line with Lost Skies. As you can see, this wing is mostly made of metal, but is still somewhat 'scrappy' looking.

Helms

Below is a look at some of the concepts for one of our ship helms. We used the Worlds Adrift helm as a baseline, but altered certain aspects of it to account for the higher level of technology in Lost Skies.

Below you can see some of the earlier renders of our current helm model. This particular helm is a Saborian design.

And below is a more up to date render of our current helm design, with a slightly different material shader pass applied - the drones that you can see in the image will serve as visual representations of other players when in the shipbuilder.

In the image and video clip below, you can get a closer look at the model for the Atlas crystal that's used in the helms built-in elevation gauge. The video clip shows how we could apply different colours to the Atlas crystals if we wanted to.

Cannons

Finally this week, here's a look at some of the progress on a couple of our cannons! First up, here's a look at some of our earlier cannon concepts from a while back. These concepts are for one of our low-tier Saborian cannons.

Moving on, the images below show some of the early reworks for some of our legacy Worlds Adrift cannon assets. The two images directly below show a side-by-side comparison of the old modular cannon assets (barrel, cannon body, mounting platform etc.) from Worlds Adrift, and the updated models for Lost Skies with a higher level of detail (LoD).

Below is a greybox blockout of a fully reworked Worlds Adrift cannon model, and the last pic shows some early shader work and VFX applied.

And finally this week, the images below show a more recent reworked cannon model, with more detailed shaders and textures applied.

That's all for this weeks Skywatch! As we mentioned at the start of this post, most of our ship parts still have quite a lot of development ahead, with engines being the furthest along right now, so we'll have more updates to share for our wings, helms and cannons with you all in the future.

Until next time!