This post is about development on Naev 0.9.0. Even though explosions in space games generally defy the laws of physics, they are some of the better and necessary eye-candy. However, explosions in Naev remained unchanged since about 13 years ago. While not necessarily awful, they have always left a bit more to be desired. One idea that has been around for ages has been to try to redo them in procedural shaders to look better and more variable. With the recent shader improvements, it has never been a better time to revamp the other special effects.
The explosions have been redone with ray marching and are completely procedural: each explosion should be completely unique. Furthermore, the explosion parameters can be tweaked to create plasma clouds or other special effects, replacing a large amount of image-based animations we were using. Images speak louder than words, so see for yourself the new explosions in action!