by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
We’re still hard at work getting the features we’ve been describing into the game, but this week we’re giving you a bit of a progress update, and I’ll be giving my thoughts on what shape they’ll be in when we begin the Open Beta. As with everything over the past couple of months, all of this is still subject to change.
We’ve successfully gotten past the critical milestone of “the game is no longer completely broken”, and things are starting to come together very nicely.
DD #367: Precursor Selection, Databank, Species Modification, and Ship Designer
The first three are fully functional and will be in the Open Beta.
The Databank still has some placeholder graphics on some buttons, and we’re planning on adding more entries, but it’s good enough for the Open Beta.
The work for the Ship Designer changes was done in the Q2 DLC branch to support that release, and while it is functional it will not be in the Open Beta (but will be in the final release).
DD #368: Pacing Adjustments, Galaxy Generation, Leader Traits, Events/Messages/Notifications, Empire Focuses and the Timeline, Hard Reset, and Achievements
Wow, we covered a lot in that dev diary.
All of these are functional, but like the Ship Designer, Hard Reset is in a different branch and will not be present in the Open Beta (but will be in the final release).
The Timeline shows a number of important milestones, and is generally functional. There’s still some polish to be done here, but I feel like it’s in a good enough state for the Open Beta.
Many of the basic Focus Tasks are in too, along with some of the progression rewards for completing them. We’ve added a couple of new Technologies to use as awards, such as Existential Campaigns, a tier 5 Society Tech.
Still to-do are Tasks for nonstandard gamestyles, and we haven’t moved things like Form Federation out of the Diplomatic Traditions yet.
Currently almost all of the Focuses relate to the base game only, but it’s good enough for now. We will have more in the actual 4.0 release.
Achievements no longer require Ironman, but the use of any debug commands disables them for that run. We haven’t updated them to the new systems yet though, so getting things like 100 pops on a planet is trivially easy.
Well that was easy.
DD #369: Trade and Logistics, Mammalian Portraits
Most, but not all, of the features described in dev diary #369 are in a functional state. Trade is a normal resource that is shown in the top bar. There’s Logistical upkeep on ships and for local planetary deficits, and it has replaced energy as the market resource.
We have not yet completed the entire trade economy for Gestalts, but they will have some baseline generation to handle this from their Maintenance Drones for the Open Beta.
Our mammalian friends are done, but like Hard Reset, are in their own development branch and will not be present in the Open Beta.
DD #370: Pop Groups and Workforce, Colonization, and Civilians
This is the core of what we’re interested in testing during the Open Beta.
Pops have been converted to using the new Pop Group system, and most aspects of Workforce are functional. We’re still going through the various jobs and updating them, and some of the weirder stuff in Stellaris (like, for example, Permanent Unemployment) hasn’t been worked on yet. Broken Shackles is hilariously broken right now. (It’s in the name, after all.)
Multispecies pop growth is working, but we haven’t made Xenocompatibility pool different species together yet.
Simultaneous pop growth!
Your homeworld starts with an extra 2000 pops, most of whom start as Civilians. This number is subject to change based on our internal playtesting and the Open Beta.
DD #371: Planet UI & Zones, Surface UI, Ecumenopoli, and Habitats
This is the other big part we’re still working on. The backend for the new mechanics is mostly complete, but we’re still doing the design side implementation of the new jobs, zones, and buildings.
The actual surface UI is still very much a work in progress - it’s getting to a functional state, but isn’t near the polish level of the designs you saw in the dev diary. It’s likely to be part of the way there (but not complete) at the start of the Open Beta.
Special planet types like Habitats and Ecumenopoli are unlikely to be fully implemented for at least the first part of the Open Beta. We have completed tying Habitat maximum development directly to the sizes of the deposits in the system, but haven’t had a chance to recreate their districts or zones using the new systems yet.
Performance
In a couple of threads, I mentioned that we’re not yet taking full advantage of some of the new model's performance benefits. Many things are still being calculated daily rather than monthly and are still largely single-threaded. We plan to keep it that way for the first couple of patches of the Open Beta because it will make it significantly easier for us to spot and fix any major issues that crop up.
As a reminder, the 3.11 Technology Open Beta found an issue like that with the Breakthrough Technologies, and finding these sorts of fundamental problems is my primary desire for the Open Beta. The Stellaris community is pretty exceptional at providing general feedback with the information provided by dev diaries, but a week of Open Beta testing will hammer the systems harder than we could do with months of internal testing.
So WHEN is it? What’s Next?
I can’t quite tell you that right now. This Friday, we’ll be evaluating the status of our current build, and I’ll try to provide a possible timeline for sometime next week.
Until then, it’s back to the code mines for us! See you next week!