Reworked Interface: Live Main Menu and Settings

Since 0.9.14 we have reworked what you see in the first seconds after launch. This is the first of three posts catching the story up to 0.11.5.

The menu used to be a static image. Now it is a real scene: an eclipse slowly burns behind the wordmark, stars flicker around it, a nebula in the project's colors breathes in the background, and ships drift past the camera from time to time. On launch the scene assembles itself with a smooth intro animation, and the wordmark carries a soft glow that responds to the composition of the frame.

The menu is not a splash screen. A real game world runs behind it — the ships on screen fly on the same physics they use in combat, not on a pre-recorded animation. We wanted the first screen to look built rather than temporary. The menu also shares its styling with the website and the launcher, so moving between them feels like one product.

To make the difference clearer, here is how the main screen looked before and how it looks now:

We rebuilt the settings screen from scratch. Categories sit on the left — Gameplay, Graphics, Audio — and the right side holds tidy rows of "setting name / control". No more hunting for an option in one long pile: sections are grouped by meaning, and every row is labeled and carries a short hint.

Small things that make the screen nicer to live with:

• Yes/no toggles now plainly read ON / OFF instead of abstract values.
• There is a reset-to-defaults button, with a confirmation so nothing is wiped by accident.
• Changes apply immediately and are saved when you leave — nothing gets lost.
• Window and frame rate settings behave properly: window size and mode are remembered, and switching the display mode applies live. The frame rate limit can now genuinely be removed, or raised far above the old ceiling.
• All settings text is localized.

Some of this work is invisible, but you feel it under your hands. We rewrote the internals of the interface, and screens now behave predictably: scrolling no longer lags behind its content, dropdowns open where they should and follow the scroll, and modal dialogs capture input properly — a click on a dialog no longer falls through to whatever sits beneath it, turns your ship, or fires your guns.

We also cleaned up text rendering: in some widgets letters used to sit noticeably too high — now they line up the same way everywhere.

And for when things go wrong: if the client hits a fatal error, you now get a readable dialog instead of a silent crash.

This is only the first part. The next posts in the 0.11.5 series cover the reworked foundation of combat — physics, damage and wrecks — and then how flight control and network behavior became smoother.