G’day, Adam from Tantalus here to talk more about the process of porting Stellaris from PC to Console.
First up, we need to consider how we have mapped the interface from the PC version of Stellaris to the controller used for Console Edition.
A PC with mouse and keyboard allows a user to click on anything anywhere, and at any time. This supports stacking overlays, mouse bound tooltip windows, arbitrary close buttons ([x] in the top right corner of a view), along with all the shortcut keys available through the keyboard.
In the console edition, we have adjusted navigation to behave as a graph (a tree specifically) meaning every gameplay view is accessed through a deliberately chosen list of inputs. Typically, ‘select’ confirms or opens the next child screen, and ‘cancel’ returns to the previous screen or view.
Of course there are exceptions to this through popups and diplomatic events, these stack on the current view and simply close when done.
When we work on a new release, we receive a target version that we then assess for how many new screens, how many screens have been changed or updated, along with any new art asset updates.
New screens take up much of the initial work as we must design a console friendly navigation pathway, decide where it fits in the hierarchy of existing views, and what legacy views now might have to access it; which then also require further updating. All this GUI work sits over a C++ support layer which contains PC interaction code that we then have to update or refactor for console.
The work so far results in the view now being ‘functionally in-build' but far from finished.
Through experimentation and testing we now check if the flow of a screen feels right, does what is expected and can navigate between old and new views and tabs correctly. For example, when a view is opened, care is taken to choose the correct tab and navigation target as a starting point for the player. Eg: Unity edicts from the tradition view jumps to the bottom of the list, then to the topmost unity edict ready for selection whereas a PC player would just click Edicts and scroll down.
All of this takes time, and this was the biggest Stellaris update I have seen since starting with Tantalus on version 2.6. A double DLC and free feature update in one release, using the largest team we have had since the initial launch.
Again, this takes time. Here is a cut down work list of what it took to complete 3.9
UI design and navigation:
• Paragon portrait view
o Each variation required adjustment for their console use cases.
o Created more for console custom extra UI views.
o Removal of all previous leader portraits
• Council View
o New screen, information rich, lots of functionality
o Art upscaling
o Button functions needed to link to pre-existing screens, some found in other areas or have since moved on PC
• Leader View (Recruitment)
o New screen
o New GUI object type – Collapsible container – needed new console controller support, navigation highlighting and context hooks.
• Traits
o Multilayered trait icon support added across the project
o Resulted in removal of trait graphics from tooltip till some other time. o Needed upscaling
o Anywhere traits changed to leader traits, needed the gui’s entry updated with layered trait locator / builder eg: Empire view -> Details tab.
• Paragon Events
o New view – based on existing event view that was different in console compared to PC
o Scrollable flavor text
o Huge art
• Technology
o Three leaders down to one.
o Assigning leader now opened the council screen and selected the science leader
o New art borders for new technology rarity types
Some miscellaneous PC UI updates:
• Extra buttons in ship designer
• Extra icons across many views for cloaking
Text to speech
• Many views had a TTS button added on PC.
• We added TTS to the base UI view and a shortcut that then needed to be directed in code to what text to read on a per screen basis – Matching PC
• This allowed us to add TTS to other screens and console specific screens without having to add buttons to every view.
More game, same hardware
Most likely, PC players have been able to keep up with this forever growing game by no longer playing on the computer they first played on in 2016.
Each new version of Stellaris contains more art, more audio, and more modifiers to calculate. (Modifiers are the game, under the hood) Each new addition uses up system memory, and each new calculation slows the game down a tiny bit. We have always limited Console Edition to 600 stars and we added a performance warning in 3.2 for the largest galaxies as the game grew with each update. The number of players we know that are playing past the year 2500 is wild.
3.9 introduces a new set of optimizations. We trimmed out unused alpha channels from 250+ files, and converted all audio on PS4 to AT9 saving more memory and storage. A lot of time was spent refining the threading and task systems to make the most of what we had, reducing context switches and physical core hopping resulting in measurable late game performance from 3.6.
We also have a preliminary list of patch notes for the first 3.9 hotfix! We have finished our work on the hotfix patch, and waiting on platform certification before we can officially say it will be released this year. However, here is a sneak peek at the patch notes:
Please note this list is very preliminary, and may be subject to change.
- IMPORTANT: Unfortunately the PS4 TTS library also requires an NA region console to function.
- Fixed ship designer prefilling new ship from current designs instead of creating a fresh pattern.
- Fixed ship designer crash attempting to select invalid component entry.
- Fixed fleet manager template deletion (and icon).
- Fixed soft lock from auto-pausing toast notifications.
- Fixed leader recruitment event crashing due to no multiple choice options.
- Fixed situation log 'track all' crash on Situations.
- Fixed rare GPU crash when reloading a game from within a game.
- Fixed occasional, accumulating looping game sounds.
- Fixed formatting typo in credits.
Hope you're all enjoying Stellaris Console Edition 3.9!
Cheers - Adam
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