NullG had a busy week, and the best way to catch up is to see it moving. Five rebuilt XL ships, a fresh batch of learned pilots, shields rippling around the hulls, and a playable slice of WipEout Pulse: there's a lot to get into.
The new Shields Up video pulls the XL work together over the full Warehouse Rage track. Every ship gets screen time, every weapon gets a turn, and the camera gets close enough to enjoy the details. Turn the sound up for this one.
Watch Shields Up on YouTube. It's 3 minutes and 19 seconds of this week's work, with a separate 90-second portrait edit for a quicker look.
The fleet is coming together
FEISAR, AG Systems, Auricom, Qirex and Piranha all feature in the updated XL fleet. The familiar shapes are there, now with rebuilt geometry, physically based materials, and more attention to the cockpits, engines and moving control surfaces.
FEISAR and AG Systems in the native Model Viewer.
There's a lovely amount of character in these ships. Qirex's broad shape and Piranha's narrow profile ask very different things of the model work. Even the ailerons need care: their position, thickness and range of movement all affect how convincing the ship looks when it banks into a corner.
This week brought more of those details together, including clearance checks on Qirex and refinements to the thin control surfaces on AG Systems and Piranha. Lighting and materials carry the work from the menus onto the track, through bright open sections, tunnels and city lights.
Auricom, Qirex and Piranha, with control surfaces posed in the engine viewer.
The Blender fleet article gets into the reconstruction process. The video is the payoff: all five ships, moving through the world they were built for.
Fresh pilots, straight from training
The pilots in the racing footage come from the newest completed reinforcement-learning checkpoint available when capture preparation began on October 25. It's an experimental snapshot from the current pace-training work, using simulation revision 48, selected to show where training had reached that day. Its promotion status wasn't a condition for appearing in the video.
All eight racers in each recorded field use that same saved policy. Training can keep moving while the recording holds onto a particular version of the driving behavior.
That's part of what makes these clips interesting to watch. The ships are working their way through traffic using learned controls, while the replay camera follows the action from rear-quarter, chase and cockpit views.
Behind the footage, this week's RL changes touched difficulty objectives, rewards, checkpoint retention and continuing from earlier training runs. Keeping those snapshots around makes it easier to compare how a change actually affects the driving. The RL project page explains how the policy turns its view of a race into steering, throttle, airbrake, pitch and weapon inputs.
Shields deserve a close-up
The shield is one of the highlights of this week's XL effects work. Its animated surface wraps around the hull, with the ship and engine flare still visible through it. It's especially satisfying in a held shot, where there's time to see the surface move.
Qirex's shield on Sagarmatha, stepped through the native weapon harness.
The rest of the arsenal gets plenty of attention too. Rockets, missile and electrobolt show their launches, flight and impacts. Mines, quake, plasma and energy bomb bring the larger effects into the track view. Turbo, autopilot and the energy pack round out the eleven types, alongside the shield, with their activation and status feedback.
Rockets leaving Qirex on Sagarmatha, captured from the paused production race harness.
These are staged demonstrations using granted inventory, so each weapon gets a clear moment on screen. The mine sequence also places a live mine to show the impact. That keeps the edit moving and makes it possible to spend some time with effects that would otherwise flash past during a race.
The smaller presentation changes matter here too: targeting trails, status placement and the order effects are drawn all help the action read when several things happen at once.
A little more room for the camera
Getting this much work into a video also gave the replay tools a workout. Authored camera sequences bring the chase, cockpit and wider angles together, while XL camera handoffs and the results view received stabilization fixes.
Underneath it all, asset preparation and texture-residency improvements support the richer models. Shared lighting and effects keep the ships looking consistent between menus, inspection views and races. For the engine details, the architecture page connects those systems to the simulation and asset loading.
Split-screen gets some breathing room
Split-screen had a good week too. Each player's HUD now fits the shape of their own viewport, with the top readouts at the top, speed and thrust anchored toward the bottom, and status information kept around the edges. That gives the road ahead more room in both horizontal and vertical layouts.
Two-player capture from the native HUD review harness. Weapon, shield and lap states are staged to check how the readouts fit; this is a presentation test.
The typography has had attention as well. HD2097 gives the racing labels and large figures their industrial character, while colored status labels and brighter numbers make shield countdowns, health, boost and thrust easier to pick out. Compact text keeps driver names and results readable in the smaller views. Targeting trails and weapon feedback remain tied to the relevant player's camera.
Three-player races make particularly good use of the screen. The fourth quadrant now carries a live race overview: a circuit map with numbered ship markers beside the standings, lap and speed information. Local players keep the same colors across the map, legend and standings, so it's easy to follow who's where.
Three race views and a live overview, captured in the native split-screen harness.
It's a nice addition for everyone watching as well as everyone driving. Finished and retired racers get their own result states, and each driver's results stay inside their view. The multiplayer project page covers the wider local and network racing setup.
Pulse is on the grid
Away from the XL footage, WipEout Pulse reached a particularly exciting point: a playable preview through NullG's normal import and menu flow.
The current slice is Talon's Junction White, FEISAR and Venom, with a one-lap Time Trial or a Single Race against seven native opponents. Difficulty selection is available in Race Setup.
Pulse in NullG's race scene, with FEISAR's Shield and its HUD countdown visible.
There's a lot wrapped up in getting that first race to feel right: grid placement, the countdown, launch behavior, steering, airbrakes and the sideshift gesture. Banking and barrel-roll visuals, a chase camera that follows the track horizon, and feedback for landings, wall contact and recovery bring more of the experience together.
Time Trial now hands out a Turbo at the start/lap line. It uses the normal weapon controls, including the option to absorb it for energy, and appears in the common HUD. Ship and track contact also feed into the shared damage handling.
Pulse's Shield and three-shot Rocket bursts have reached the controlled integration stage too, connecting native weapon state to the model, rendering and HUD systems. The recorded checks exercised shielded and unshielded encounters, and all eight racers completed a lap in the full validation run. These weapon shots use explicit inspection grants to show the new behavior clearly.
Three Rocket darts heading down Talon's Junction White ahead of FEISAR.
Pure is moving along with it
Pure's progress this week is in the import pipeline: getting its tracks, ships and resources decoded and checked. The shared PSP work covers geometry, materials, textures, collision and animation data, while keeping each game's content distinct.
The CPU loader checks now cover 16 Pure track layouts and 24 Pulse layouts. Ship metadata accounts for eleven Pure ships and eight Pulse ships, including the resources they depend on. Sound-bank voices and soundtrack resources have also been decoded and checked.
Those numbers describe the content-processing work; Pulse is the current playable preview. Together, they give a good sense of how much of the PSP library is moving through the engine's import tools.
That work feeds into the existing model cache, staged GPU uploads and track streaming. Pulse's supported disc import validates a private installation before making it active in the asset library, connecting the source data to the same scene and inspection tools used elsewhere in NullG.
The tools are part of the story
A lot of this week's progress happened with the engine paused and a model, track section or weapon effect under inspection. NullG's MCP harnesses let an agent or script operate the real native tools: load an asset, move the camera, pose the control surfaces, inspect the state and capture the result.
That makes for a very hands-on development loop. With the XL fleet, the work moves from Blender into the engine's model viewer, through material and motion checks, then into the menu and a race. A beautiful model still needs to look right under the engine's lighting and move cleanly when the airbrakes come out.
Qirex in an MCP-driven Model Viewer session. The hierarchy, texture panel and bounds put the rendered ship beside the data being reviewed.
The weapon harness is especially handy. It opens a paused production race, grants a selected weapon and lets the simulation advance a few frames at a time. A snapshot can preserve the setup before a launch, so the same moment can be restored and tried again. Ship state, weapon timers and events sit alongside the rendered frames. That's how an effect can get a proper close-up while still going through the game's firing and rendering paths.
This week also added more targeted Pulse feedback checks. One probe starts a ship above the track with downward velocity, letting the normal hover and collision systems produce the landing. Another moves it beyond the track so the recovery controller has to respond. The reports retain when the feedback happened, which racer produced it and its magnitude. It's a useful way to connect something felt during play to a repeatable case.
The Track Validator: track context, geometry selection and texture inspection in one working view.
The capture workflow has grown along with the inspection tools. This week's authored replay cameras and music-video tooling turn saved races into planned shots, then into landscape and portrait edits. The racing stays in the replay; the camera and edit can be worked on separately. For Shields Up, that meant retaining the checkpoint, recording each ship's race and staging the weapon demonstrations before assembling the full-song film and short.
The practical change is how closely those steps now connect. A model review, a controlled weapon test and a finished video can all come out of the same engine tools, with the inputs and reports kept alongside the images. The MCP tooling page has a deeper look at the harnesses and how they fit together.
Warehouse Rage ties the video together, while playlist playback, track announcements, Zero G Chokehold and On Fire were also part of this week's music work. The original NullG soundtrack is generated with Suno.
A rebuilt fleet, learned pilots on track, a proper look at the XL arsenal, and Pulse lining up on the grid: it's been a good week to point a camera at NullG. Watch the showcase, or spend a little longer with the project pages for the work behind the footage.
WipEout names, designs and imported game content belong to their respective owners. The images show that content and its reconstructed presentation inside NullG.