MACH-X
Most of the time you spend in Mach-X is not in the air. It is in the hangar and on the base map, choosing a plane, spending stars, reading a weapon. For three weeks these screens looked like an app. On 28 October I rebuilt them as a place.
The brief I gave myself was a night raid seen from the ground. The hangar header now has a live night-raid sky behind it. All counters sit in one stencil band, like markings painted on a crate. The tab band is lit. Buttons are blacked-out steel with an edge light.
Details I liked making:
- Tapping an armament row opens a weapon briefing. I drew 13 new gun icons for them.
- The barracks became a painted Nissen hut with a war table. Pilots are dossier folders on the map.
- The run-end ledger and the pause screen got the same stencil look.
- Release 1.9.0 (31 October) added a jet flyby behind the hangar now and then, and a tenser war theme for the hub.
- Release 1.9.1 (1 November) added the round COMBAT READY or CLASSIFIED stamp on the plane sheet. The stamp has a fixed height, so the sheet no longer jumps 35 pixels while you browse planes, and plane names stay on one line.
The painful part was performance. A pretty menu that redraws at full rate all day empties a battery. I made the hangar sky and the base map stop redrawing every screen refresh. Main-thread time in the hangar fell by about a third, and an idle hangar or base costs roughly 70 to 80 percent less. The menus also drop to a low-power mode when you leave them alone.
I shipped a bug in this stretch that is worth owning. The tab band on the hangar came up empty after one change. A return followed by a line break made the function return nothing. JavaScript inserts a semicolon there and does not warn you. I fixed it and added a test that scans every script for the same mistake.
Then came the settings screen in release 1.9.0: tabs for Sound, Visual, Input, Profile and About, with live previews, hints and a restore-defaults button. Action buttons now sit in a fixed bar at the bottom of every screen so nothing hides beneath them.
The hangar is not finished, but it finally looks like it belongs to the same war as the sky. Next I turned to the multiplayer side.