The best laid plans...

Let's talk about the environments of Star Control...

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Sorry this is a bit late! Here we go!

The importance of knowing what type of a planet is without landing on it has made us emphasize more time on improving the visuals on the different planet classes.

Why are resources presented as objects on the screen? What is the science behind that? The Codex explains all.

Your sector map lets you apply markers and name them.  This way you can keep track of things you may want to return to (or not).

If you're landing on every planet, you should ask yourself...why.  It would be like breaking into every house in Skyrim. 

Most planets in the universe are either rocks, gas giants or ice balls.  In time, you'll know what the good planets are just by looking at them and they are understandably uncommon.  You can then see which resources are worth your time or not.

Want to collect resources faster and easier? Thanks to alien tech, we can extend our gravity channeling to grab concentrated resources from further away.

There are, literally, hundreds of ship types we know of so far.  Each civilization has its own set of ship classes and then there are the one-off ships you will find with their own unique weapons and designs to deal with (or capture).

A view of Saturn.

You can use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out on the solar system or the surface of planets. Or use 1,2,3,4 to switch cameras (or whatever your game controllers equivalent is).

Back in part 9, I touched briefly on the art style with the debate we had on having a "mobile" style UI vs. an immersive style UI. Today, I want to walk you through how the art style itself evolved during the five year development of Star Control: Origins.

Let's jump right in..

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Don't worry, this isn't a spoiler.  The Star Control map is based on a 2D projection of the real universe going out around 130 light years.  

You might enjoy this as it took some effort to try to create a reasonably accurate depiction of where we are compared to other stars.  One major change from real stars is that we took the liberty of naming some of the stars ourselves because a lot of the ones that have been discovered in recent years have alpha numerical names.

So for example, one group of stars is known as the Trombley constellation in honor of our friend and colleague Sarah Trombley who was the lead developer on Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation.

Enjoy!

With labor day nearly here in the United States, we are putting the finishing touches on what will be the version that goes out for review.  

Here are some highlights from this week:

Better late than never.  Your ship's fuel range is now showed on the map.  Very convenient if you want to avoid Tywom fan fiction (yes, that's a thing).

The in-game codex continues to be enriched with documentation, lore, and other goodies.

Visual effects have been iterated on once again. It's come a long way.

The Terran Cruiser replaces the "Earthling Cruiser" both in name and design to better match the idea that the Vindicator class is a prototype thus new ships should have some resemblance to it.

Lots of new cut-scenes went in this week.  

You can change the game's difficulty at any time from the options menu.  However, you can set the game's default during the game setup.

Not easily visible in a screenshot but thanks to AMD sending us lots of hardware, we have been able to make the game run well on ridiculously low end hardware.  Like, think 10 year old hardware.  How? As long as the system has 4 logical cores (example, the Surface Pro is 2 cores but has 4 logical processors) we can effectively have 4 "graphics threads" going at once. giving >30fps on hardware that people will be shocked even loads t he game.   The magic of the Nitrous job scheduler in action.

One of the most difficult challenges we've had in developing a new Star Control game has been the delicate balance between the need to start fresh and the desire to satisfy hard-core fans of the classic DOS games.

Today we will look at our solution to that conundrum.

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Let me get this right out of the way: Star Control: Origins has no planets in it with free-standing water.  We've taken the very convenient (for us) position that free standing water is extremely rare and that instead,, water tends to be trapped under layers of ice.

But according to a ScienceDaily article I read last week, water worlds might actually be pretty common.  

Now for you gamers out there, how would you like to see water worlds handled in Star Control in the future? For example, would you fly over them? Would your lander act as a submarine? Or something else entirely?

Great article on Astronomy.com today.  The question is, would aliens even understand us if we communicated with them?

We take so many things for granted when it comes to communication.  For example, in Star Control: Origins, there tended to be an assumption that aliens would have a mouth.  Why would they have a mouth for communication? That seems to be a pretty big assumption.

It seems fair to ask whether anything that would encounter what we send out would be able to make sense of what we send out.

This might mean nothing. And the sounds the record produce might not even be in a frequency that something could hear.  The range of frequencies we can detect are pretty limited.

We are less than a month away!

Here are some new screenshots to show some of the progress as we near "gold".

Update to the old-style computer monitor.

New introduction after you enter in your data as you arrive at Star Control!

The Codex is just about done. This is the in-game manual.

Lots of subtle changes based on beta feedback on how to make it clear how much damage you're going to get.

Terran Cruiser updated in style to match the flag ship style.

Lots of little tweaks to the visuals on planets.  Not easy to see but significant performance boosts combined with being prettier. The optimizations let us have much more detailed textures.

A new Menkmack character arrives.

Stay tuned to this thread for more!

This morning I awoke to see one of the most flagrant examples of doxing ever.

Now, to be fair, this person did apologize:

This event started because the social media person at a game company made a joke that this person didn't like.  To make that person pay "in real life", they took it upon themselves to find out who the person was and make their information public.  This is an ugly trend that seems to be gaining momentum.  Someone offends you with words, you try to ruin their reputation or career in real life. How do we stop this?

Well, let's look at this case. What caused this person to suddenly apologize and protect their account? We can only speculate.  But I suspect you, the reader, have some pretty good guesses of what happened.  I suspect that people found out who this person is in real life and found out they too have a career that they don't want to have affected.  I suspect, like many people, they instinctively believed in anonymity for me but not for thee was in play.  That said, good for them for apologizing. 

As someone who has been doxed hundreds (literally as in >99) of times over the years including having my home address posted with a picture of my house posted with a note that someone "should do something" about me as well as someone using that information to call our house and threaten to murder my wife and (disgusting act) my son, I am very well in tune to what doxing is (and isn't). 

You do not have an absolute right to anonymity

What happens online should stay online.  We should respect people's privacy and we should respect their desire to be anonymous.  But that is not the same as having an absolute right.  As soon as someone's online actions start to have real world consequences for their target, all bets are off.

I've been online since the Commodore 64 BBS days. There has been a gradual, but unmistakable, trend towards believing that no matter what someone does, it is out of bounds to reveal who that person is in real life.  That's insane.  If someone is trying to get someone else fired from their real life job then they should have no illusions that the target or friends of their target might return the favor.

To give you an idea of how out of touch some people are, I've actually had people quote me saying what I essentially wrote above as evidence that I support doxing.  This is akin to saying I support violence if I believe in the right of self-defense. 

Would those critics suggest that if someone was calling for violence against someone and posting their address that it would be immoral to find out who that person is? Of course not. They've already agreed that anonymity isn't absolute, we are only discussing when it should be pierced.

If we want people to stop trying to destroy other people's real-life careers, we need to find a way to discourage that kind of behavior.  To do that, we need to reverse the trend that allows people to think that they can hide behind their Internet anonymity while they try to destroy someone's livelihood and that is to recognize that anonymity isn't a right, it's a privilege that shouldn't be abused.

Rule of thumb

If you are trying to harm an individual in the real world, such as trying to get them fired or do not be surprised if they or their friends return the favor. I suspect that is what Matt there discovered when he decided to try to damage the employee at CDPR in real life.