Greetings!

Well, it's 2:32am and I'm ankle deep in the Star Control code.

Happy New Year!

Warning: Rambling incoming.

I took a few minutes off to celebrate with my wife and 3 kids.  We had a quiet, family night at home for New Year's eve.

Stardock is closed for the holidays so it gave me a chance to go whole hog on Star Control without worrying about breaking things for the team.

Like many of you, Star Control isn't just a game. It represents something extraordinary and personal.  At least, it does for me. 

Back when Atari was auctioning off Star Control, my first thought was "You know, we could get this and then make something wonderful and let others add their own stories."

People like the Ur-Quan Masters team and the others who have been trying to build up the Star Control universe were the primary reason I wanted us to acquire the rights to Star Control.

It isn't just that I loved Star Control 2. Which I did.  But that it was something we could all work together on to create something new and fresh.

The things I've been coding on are probably esoteric to may colleagues.  But I think you guys will understand why I've used my Christmas vacation to implement features that will ultimately make Star Control a more open universe.

Galaxies

When I started working on Star Control, it was very much geared around the Stardock game: Star Control: Origins.  Which makes sense, the game will succeed or fail based on what it comes with.  And we will make sure it is awesome before we ship no matter what.

However, that's not my motivation.  The story we have is pretty awesome and I'm excited about it.  But I am more interested in what you guys are going to make. Hence, my focus on coding systems that open it up to you.

For example, during this holiday I made galaxies OO (object oriented).  The INI file determines the default galaxy file (Origins) but I expect you will be able to add to: my documents\my games\starcontrol\mods\galaxies your own folder.

I want you to be able to simply be able to drop a folder with your own story and your own models (FBS files, DDS files, etc.) into a directory and have the game know it's there and select it.

Tonight I'm working on a new system called the "Librarian".  The idea behind is to move Nitrous (and thus Star Control) away from file paths and into a more OO approach.  You want a new alien? Drop it into the Aliens directory (or alternatively the mods/Alien directory).  You want new ships, drag and drop it into your mods/Alien/Ship directory.

Right now, or I should say, before I started going to town on this, our poor designers and artists had to type in paths to everything. Literally.  Want to use a .FBX file? You'd have to type into a file /models/ships/earthing/mainship.fbx (or whatever). A single type would ruin it.  That's crazy.

With what I've worked on, you would instead simply just drag and drop your new ship into the proper directory and the game will see it.

I hope to add this to Ashes of the Singularity too so modders can add their own units as easily.

I did the same thing with localization.  You want an Italian version? No problem, just drag and drop an Italian folder with the translated text into the Localization directory and change a single line in the IN ifile and voila, the game is in Italian.

Anyway, it may seem strange to see me up at nearly 3am working on such dull stuff.  But I love it.  The easier I make it for you guys to create your own galaxies, the better.

Cheers!