Signing in now says what you were about to keep
You don't need an account to fly Skydex. Press Take off and you're in the air over a real city, with real aircraft and ships around you. That stays exactly as it is.
An account comes in at one point: when you try to keep something. Catching a ship or an aircraft, scanning the sky with the radar, saving a photo or a 360° shot all need somewhere to put the result, and that somewhere is your account.
What the sign-in box used to say
Until today, every one of those moments opened the same box, and it was a leftover from the voxel world. You'd hold a container ship in the crosshair for three seconds, press the shutter, and read "Sign in to build. To place and break blocks, sign in with Google." Nothing about the ship, nothing about why an account would help.
What it says now
The box names what you were doing. Catch a vessel as a guest and it reads Keep this catch, with the ship's name if the crosshair has already revealed it: sign in and it goes into your collection, on every device, and counts toward your rank. The radar, photos and 360° shots each get their own short line. Nothing about blocks.
The first time you sign in
A brand-new account used to land in the old profile editor, with tabs for a walker skin and voxel blueprints. Neither exists in flight. Now a first sign-in opens a small welcome card with three things: your photo, your display name, and your page address (skydex.online/yourname). Change what you want and press Continue to go back to the sky, or skip it. You can change all three later on your own page.
Why we're doing this
Most people who try Skydex never sign in, and until now we couldn't even tell how many of them reached one of these moments. The new box counts each step anonymously: how many browsers saw it, how many clicked the Google button, how many came back signed in. No account, address or name is stored with those counts.
Your catch waits for you
Signing in from that box takes you to Google and back, which reloads the page. Until now the ship you had locked was simply gone by then. Now the catch is held for five minutes: after you sign in, the welcome card says it's waiting, and it goes into your collection the moment you take off again. The server checks it exactly like any other catch, so if the ship sailed out of range or the aircraft left our coverage in the meantime, you'll be told so instead of getting a card for something you can't see anymore.
A gentle reminder, off for now
We also built a small, non-blocking line that can appear after some minutes of flying as a guest: sign in to keep your catches and rank. It never covers the controls, it never appears if you've already seen the sign-in box, and closing it hides it for a week. It starts switched off; we'll turn it on only if the numbers say it helps.