Wow, that black-red color scheme looks ace! Could match to an evil pirate. On the new fighter, I even like the nozzle placement! 
About the shield effect: I think it would look better if the explosions have another color than the texture of the craft. e.g. red instead of blue in this example. How did you achieve this effect? Just a bend area with animated, transparent texture?
Thanks - I agree with you on the color differential thing on the shield hits... hopefully that's something we can dynamically adjust in code to make the shields and engines be complementary colors. The effect was placed on a curved surface and animated - it's pretty simple, and I can provide the MAX file for it if anyone's interested.
About the textures. I guess it is mainly personal taste, but they are a bit nondescript in places. Also I would probably make the colourramps less straight, as in introduce a bit of colourshifting as the green on the ship goes darker for example. Another thing I find a bit boring is that the engine glow matches the colour of the ship. I would go for something complimentary, like red/orange glow on green ship, orange/yellow on blue/grey ship and so on.
I really like that pirate ship tho, looks like a proper popcorn enemy 
Looking forward to more. 
I'm glad you like the pirate fighter...sooo many more of these to do, good to get it started off right.
Ah, right. Yeah, I see what you mean about the color ramps and engine glows. The only thing I can say is that the colors of your ship, and the ships you come across will most likely be controlled by code - and i don't see why we could set it up so that the hue of the colors chosen changes incrementally as the brightness fades off. At least I hope we can.
Anyhow, here's a couple of drive flare tests...the first is with simple 1-bit cutoff alpha and the second is with additive transparency blending... I'd like to ask if anyone has an opinion as to which one we should use? I like them both, but I think the additive blending might be getting away from the overall style. Thoughts?
