Alpha build 39 is live. Restart Steam if the update does not appear.
Ships you can actually look at
Seven of the thirteen factions now have real ship models instead of placeholders - 490 hulls, from Fighter all the way up to Dreadnought. Crimson Fleet and Deep Space Explorers joined Alien Hive, Celestial Order, Miner Rebellion, Solar Empire and Void Syndicate in this build.
Every one of those hulls also has a new icon rendered from the model itself. The old icons were concept art drawn before the models existed, so the ship in the list was often not the ship you got. That is fixed - what you see in the shipyard is what you build.
Hull previews in the shipyard show the real model now too, rather than an empty frame.
Fixes that came out of looking closely
- A Deep Space Explorers carrier had a gun pod floating off the side of the hull, not attached to anything. It is part of the ship now.
- The Deep Space Explorers siege ships were built around a long spear running well past the nose. Ships are sized by their total length, so the spear was eating the hull's size budget and those ships read a whole class too small next to their siblings. They have been rebuilt without it.
- Ship icons are lit neutrally. The icon renderer was using a warm environment that laid a faint bronze tint over every hull. You could not see it on the orange and red factions, but the pale ones looked brown instead of white.
Still to come
The remaining six factions - Freelancer, Iron Vanguard, Nomad Clans, Shadow Brokerage, Technocrat Union and Unaligned - are still on placeholder ships. They are being worked through one faction at a time.
The download is bigger than usual this time. Ship models and their textures are most of the game's size and this build adds two full factions.
Full details are on the changelog.