Each of the three arenas gains an ELEVATED sibling scene that inherits the
base arena and overrides the boundary's goal_mode, the two goal transforms
and the ship spawns, so the goal sits at mid-wall height instead of flush
with the deck. Registered in ArenaRegistry alongside the floor-level arenas,
plus a training_elevated scene for self-play on them.
TrainingMode reads the arena's goal_mode once in _start() and widens the
ball-placement height range to match the goal's real position; on FLOOR
arenas the bound is a no-op, so floor-level training is unchanged. It is read
in _start() rather than _ready() because TrainingMode has no _ready()
override and GameMode._ready() is what discovers the arena first.
Policies trained against floor-level goals are not expected to score on an
elevated one, so the two are kept as separate arenas rather than a variant of
the same entry.
Replace NebulaDust's flat unshaded glow material with a custom
ShaderMaterial: a fake per-pixel puff normal on the billboarded quad
feeds a light() override so motes catch the directional light and a
nebula-core color bias, alpha gets a depth-texture soft-particle fade
so motes no longer hard-clip through boundary/decoration geometry,
and a per-particle hash adds subtle sparkle.
Adds sdfgi_enabled and a ReflectionProbe to all three arenas' Environment
setup so surfaces get real bounce lighting/reflections instead of flat
ambient. Converts arena_boundary.tscn's shared glass field material from
unshaded to a shaded, rim-lit material so it reads as glass (dim face-on,
highlighted at grazing angles) rather than a flat tinted overlay.
Enable glow/bloom, color adjustments, and MSAA+FXAA across all three
arenas so emissive ship/station accents actually bleed light and edges
read cleanly. Expose the player-facing knobs (anti-aliasing mode, glow
intensity, brightness) through a new Settings screen off the main menu,
persisted via a VideoSettings autoload that scales each arena's own
tuned Environment values on load rather than overwriting them.
Introduce arena_02 (Nebula) and arena_03 (Asteroid Field) alongside
arena_01, listed in a new ArenaRegistry (scripts/arena_registry.gd) as
the single source of truth for available arenas. Free Play lets the
player pick an arena from the main menu; Match/Spectate each pick one
at random per session; Training keeps its own fixed arena_01.
Nebula gets an RL-style visual treatment: a near-invisible glass
boundary material shared by all arenas, a baked equirect nebula sky
texture, a drifting-dust particle system, and a Blender-modeled
station/debris/planet decoration set. GameMode gains a
_get_arena_scene_path() hook so modes can instantiate their arena in
code instead of hardcoding it in the scene.
Replace the raw checkpoint dropdown with curated Easy/Medium/Hard presets
that drive GameSettings' bot model/reaction_ticks/action_noise overrides.
Move raw-checkpoint testing and Spectate mode into a dev-only section
hidden via OS.is_debug_build() so they disappear from release exports.
Josh Creek