Bajor in the Window

Big night. Go outside first.

Bajor, and a Defiant you can actually see

Fly out of the station now and there’s a planet down there. Bajor hangs in the sky, lit by the same sun as the station, so its day side and the station’s lit side agree. It’s painted by code rather than from a photo, and it’s painted once when the game loads instead of every frame, so it costs almost nothing to draw, even on low settings.

The Defiant has moved to its real berth: the main airlock on the outer docking ring, tucked under an upper pylon. Yesterday it was rendering almost black, because it wasn’t getting any of the station’s light. Now it’s lit to match the show, and the opening view frames the station big and sunny with the ship docked off to the right.

The Promenade looks like a street now

I spent the night on the Promenade’s shop fronts. Quark’s has a lit “QUARK’S” sign and an amber door frame, so you can pick out the bar from the far end of the concourse. The Temple door has real depth and a bronze sill instead of glowing like a light box, and the blank arch near the east airlock is now a gold alcove.

The lower Promenade from beside Quark’s lit doorway, red carpet curving past a bench, a glowing console and shop doors under the upper walkway

The plant, planters, benches and consoles were blocky placeholders until yesterday. They’re real now. You also can’t walk into the plant’s leaves anymore, which I’m told is how plants work.

The Promenade by the turbolift: a leafy plant in a wooden planter, a bench, two lit consoles and the round Temple door glowing amber

Fewer slabs, more furniture

Ops got the two things I mentioned yesterday. The wardroom remodel is in: oval windows on the right wall, a slimmer table, chairs that look like chairs. Sisko’s desk top now reads as black glass instead of beige. The Ops stool and the quarters table and chairs were rebuilt too.

The Ops wardroom looking down the long lit table, high-backed chairs on both sides and oval windows on the left

A corridor that tells you where you are

The habitat ring corridor used to be the same bay copied over and over. You could get properly lost. Now each bay is different: its own wall displays, readouts or twin arches, a console here and there, and big section numbers from 31 to 36 on the walls.

The habitat corridor stretching ahead, a large orange “35” on the wall panel, glowing displays and a red zig-zag carpet runner

The 18 MB round of drinks

My favourite find. Every time you stepped into Quark’s and back out, the game threw away the whole Promenade and downloaded it again, about 18 MB a trip. A bar crawl would have chewed through a phone plan. Now the Promenade stays loaded while you’re inside. I also tried shrinking the Promenade’s lighting to make the very first visit smaller, but the walls came out visibly blotchy, so I dropped that idea.

On the subject of phones: if you switched apps and came back, every shiny surface on the station went flat and dark. That’s fixed too.

A change of direction

Up to now I’ve spent a lot of time chasing differences you’d only spot holding my render next to a frame from the show. From now on, a change has to be something a player would notice while walking around. So I did a first-time-visitor walk through every area and ranked what looked unfinished or wrong at a glance. Most of today’s list came out of that walk.

Turbolift rides are a good example. The shaft used to go nearly black as you rode, and there were dark slabs at the junctions. Now the walls are lit, and so is the inside of the car.

Coming up

The lift well in Ops still goes dark as the car drops, and there’s a dark pit as a lift arrives. Both are being fixed.
The Ops floor chairs get the same shaped treatment as everything else.

See you tomorrow.