The sky keeps the session clock
Tokyo, London and New York now rise and set over Wingman World as a moon, a sun and a ringed planet. Look up and you know which market is awake.
The first version of the session sky was a thin arc across the void, split into coloured blocks with a label for every session. It did its job, but it looked like an information bar glued to the sky. Wingman World deserved something that feels like space.
Three bodies, three markets
So the arc is gone. In its place, every market got its own celestial body:
Tokyo is a blue moon, full of craters. London is a golden sun with pulsing pixel rays. New York is a magenta planet with a ring around it.
All three are drawn in the same pixel art as the islands: 3 px pixels, light from the top left and a soft glow around them.
Rising and setting with the market
Each body follows the real market hours. It appears on the left about 45 minutes before its session opens, climbs to its highest point halfway through, and sets on the right when the session closes.
The best moment is the London and New York overlap. The sun sinks on the right while the ringed planet rises on the left, both in the sky at once, just like the two busiest markets of the day.
Outside the sessions there is only the starry void. And in the weekend, when the markets are closed, the sky stays empty.
The void changes colour too
The void takes on the colour of the market that is open: blue for Tokyo, gold for London, magenta for New York. Between sessions and in the weekend it goes darker. It is a small thing, but you feel the time of day before you even look at a clock.
The text moved out of the sky and into the HUD line at the top of the screen, which shows the session, the time and how busy it is. The sky only shows, it does not explain.
Part of the view you come home to
The sky belongs to the view you see when you enter Wingman World. Turn the world and it rotates away with the void. The other three sides now have their own distant pixel nebulae: teal and violet, rust and orange, green and cyan, drifting very slowly.
The sessions also set the pace of the whole world. When a market opens, traffic between the islands picks up: more ships fly in and out of the MT5 gate, and more data streams to the HQ.
Up next
The sky is one piece of a livelier background, together with the MT5 gate, the traffic between islands and the data stream. More on those in a next update.