Nobody rides it in: bailouts and parachutes

July 4, 2026 · game feel

Last update, killed planes stopped blinking out and started falling. This one gets the pilot out of them. When a burst is fatal but the cockpit itself survived, the airman pops out under a canopy and drifts downwind — and every kill grows an epilogue you can watch, protect, or shamefully interrupt.

A blocky pilot in a crimson flight suit hanging in the harness of a team-red voxel parachute, four shroud lines rising to the canopy, drifting against a blue sky — Team-silk canopy, four shroud lines, a chunky little pilot in the harness — drifting home.

Who gets out

The bail rides on the damage model we already had. Every hit is routed to a component, and one of those components is the pilot. So the rule is simply: if the airframe dies but the pilot subsystem is still alive — and there's at least 60 m of air under him to jump — he bails. Take the cockpit hit instead and he rides it in with the wreck (which, thanks to last update, now actually falls). Flew it into a hill? That crash is the death; there's nothing to jump from. The same test runs for bots, and since bots are most of who you shoot down, most of the canopies you'll see over the line are theirs.

The chute is its own little entity

The parachute is not the dead player — that pilot is already on the respawn timer, untouched. It's a detached thing the server drifts on its own: a fixed sink rate down, and a horizontal velocity that relaxes toward the round's wind, so it streams downwind exactly the way the bombs do (it literally shares their slot on the wire — one spare flag bit, zero new bytes). The client draws it as a team-tinted voxel canopy with a pilot slung underneath, so you can read friend from foe at a glance.

An objective in every descent

Where the canopy comes down is the whole point. Drift it onto your own half of the map and the pilot is returned — a feed line and a few team points, smaller than a kill so it never overshadows one. Come down in contested or enemy ground and he's captured, no reward. And the ugly option: a chute is defenceless, so you can gun a pilot out of the sky — but the kill feed brands it DISHONORABLE in red for everyone to see. Suddenly every kill has a few seconds of afterlife with real stakes: escort your man home, or hunt theirs down before he makes it.

There's one outcome we left hanging on purpose: a chute that splashes into the sea. Right now he's just “adrift.” Next update he becomes a bobbing survivor with a marker both teams can see — and a low, slow pass to scoop him out of the drink. No one fights alone.