yes, you can outfit an Exo with 4x pneumatic hammers, this is a valid loadout.
it's as chaotic as you'd expectContinuing with the theme of building out the games graphics, this week has been tying up the final bits and bobs for the intro industrial campaign. That includes building models for weapons and utilities, and building the hangar environment for both the menu and the drop sequence.
I've taken the approach of using a little bit of stuff rom interloper, but for the most part making new elements that look and feel appropriate in atmosphere, and that suit a more modular use case.
yes, you can outfit an Exo with 4x pneumatic hammers, this is a valid loadout.
it's as chaotic as you'd expect
I've also spent a bunch of time working on the hangar environment. Coming into making this I was mostly unsure what I wanted, with only two things I knew for sure: That the planet should be in view, and that it should feel pretty tight.
I started out working with some shapes, I knew I didn't want a cuboid environment, and it had to be some kind of specific housing for units within a KRS Carrier. What I ended up with was a kind of reverse egg shape, after that it was just details, packing the environment with as much crap as I could feasibly fit without impeding the turntable camera in the loadout view. 
Playing around with forms and shapes I found a narrative building. The key thing was when I grabbed the warp lance from Interloper's Pariah B-skin. Those red glowy bits and elongated forms made a nice frame against the window, but also suggested a way for the unit to warp down to the surface. Everything extended from this logic, the parts for these units would be carted in, piece by piece into this room, they'd be assembled in the space, with no way to navigate beyond this room, and then warped to the planet surface when required.
One other thing I've done here is use a single texture sheet for all the weapons, and the hangar environment. This cuts down on draw calls significantly, but also unifies the look and keeps the hangar dim, so that the player's unit can stand out. Being able to check off so many things with one relatively simple choice is how I generally prefer to optimise my games.
Finally this week I also spent a bunch of time working on the planetary background for the menu / hangar. It's a relatively small task, but it's arguably going to be one of the more common things you see in the game so it deserves a little bit of time.
The textures I had in place beforehand were all just assets I'd found online, temporary stuff to fill the void for the time being, so I kicked off by building out the planet's texture. As with the temp files, even building out a 4k texture wasn't quite enough for the proximity to the planet, so I've simply tiled it a bunch to increase its texel density. It looks ugly if you see the full planet, but you'll never see it.
In the skybox art in Interloper Rayleigh Prime has a Commonwealth constructed orbital ring, and attached space elevators. These play a function in the game, but I wanted to represent them here in the menu too as these structures are both colossal and also very sci-fi.
I also took the opportunity to beef out the planet's detail a little, adding a cloud layer, adding texture to the asteroids and splitting out the lighting to get the impossible situation of both a rim-lit planet and rim lit asteroids. Could I have done this with a shader? Yes. Is it easier to just use two directional lights, set to different layers? Hell yes.
This leaves a single task to do before the first campaign is asset-and-gameplay ready, the pilot arms and body. Exoloper won't have the same kind of pilot system that Interloper did, so no need for a lot of customisation here, but it'll still be a ton of work comparative to everything else I've done so far.
Once that's in, I'll build out the remaining assets for the second campaign, clean up the remaining bits and bobs, make some music and then the game will be ready for a full open beta. I'm terrified.