This post is about development on Naev 0.9.0.
So fact is, beams are cool. They can hit multiple targets and do a lot of damage while being accurate. Sure they have short range and bad tracking, but they more than make up for that in coolness factor. We thought about it and decided the only way to make beams cooler is to sprinkle some shader goodness on top. Not only will this make beams look great at any resolution, but it will also allow creating new beams easily, as there is no longer a need to muck around with graphic images.
In the previous blarg post about Lua outfits, some of the new beams were already shown:
There are also a lot of new beam graphics, some of which are not used yet, but open up a lot of exciting new possibilities. Look forward to more and fancier beams in the future.