Greetings!  I will try to keep these really short (as short as I can anyway).  We'll be doing these every Friday until we ship.

Beta Week 1:

For Stardockians who have been with us for many years, you're in for a treat.  Never before, in our 25 years, have we ever had one game with both game teams and the software team on it simultaneously.  So you're about to see progress unlike anything you've seen from us before.  

To put it in perspective, there are 3X more engineers on Star Control: Origins than there ever were on Galactic Civilizations III.

House keeping

If you are not getting the performance you want, open your settings.ini file that is located in documents\my games\star control and make sure that:

terrainHmapQuality(0,1,2) = 0

The higher the number, the better the graphics but the perf takes a hit.  There are no computers...yet that can handle a setting of 2.  It's for future proofing your game so that it doesn't get "dated".  All our assets (I kid you not) are 2048x2048 or higher which, of course, is insane...today (as in, a single terrain tile is higher resolution than most people's displays in 2018).  But we have to think not of just today but 2028 as well when everyone will have 8K displays.   We don't load those assets into memory and they don't use much disk space (they're just a mip).  But they're ready for you.  

Bugs and other issues we are focusing on addressing before Week 2:

1. Solar system camera.  Finding the right balance between "ooooh that's cool" and "arrgh, that's frustrating".  
2. The weird scan line at the bottom of conversations.  
3. The weird problem with Lt. Kerry reporting for duty and just not going away.
4. Updated UI system.
5. Lots of polish to the planet UX

Modding and tweaking

There is a file called Gameparameters.xml in your assets directory.  You can play around with values in this file and change all kinds of things about the game including camera, ship speed, etc.  You guys are encouraged to play around with it.  Just remember that you do get lots of ship upgrades.

If you have any questions, let me know! Thanks!

Cheers!

UPDATE: