Devlog · August 7, 2026

v0.3.2: The Kill Skull Returns, and the Guns Move

v0.3.2 is out. Two visible changes and one you will only notice on the bill.

The kill skull

Scoring a kill is supposed to take over the centre panel with a flashing skull for about three seconds. It has never once done that in a shipped build.

The artwork was always there. So were the frames, the timing, and the code that plays them. What went missing, quietly, in a routine content refresh, was the one stanza that told the game the sheet existed. The renderer looked for it, did not find it, and returned without drawing — but the panel had already been handed over to the takeover. So instead of a skull you got three seconds of nothing, at the exact moment you most wanted to look at it.

It is registered again, and this time there is a test that fails if it ever goes missing.

The guns moved

The muzzle flash you see when you fire now comes from the painted gun tips ahead of you, alternating between barrels, with the nearer gun passing in front of its own flash so it sits in the aeroplane rather than on top of the picture.

Getting that to look right meant measuring where the guns actually are against the cockpit art — and discovering they were not where the simulation thought. So the simulation moved: further forward, a little lower, and noticeably further apart.

That is not a cosmetic change. Convergence and the spread between the two barrels both changed with it. Your shots leave from somewhere new, and they cross somewhere new. Gunnery feels different, and you will want to re-learn your range before you trust a long deflection shot.

Quieter bots

The bot pilots were narrating themselves once a second, every second, forever. They now speak up when something actually happens and otherwise check in once a minute. Nothing changes in the air. It is the difference between an arena that is cheap to leave running around the clock and one that is not.

Getting it

macOS and Windows builds are on the front page. The Windows installer is still unsigned and will warn on first launch. Existing v0.2.3 and later clients keep working — nothing is force-upgraded — but the new gun geometry is server-side, so it applies to everyone regardless of which build you fly.