Hello everyone!
Welcome back to another Stellaris: Console Edition development update. We’ll be running through some of the work that Tantalus has done since our last update.
We’re proud to announce that Tantalus has successfully delivered to Paradox early-testing builds for both Xbox and PlayStation! At the last update, PlayStation wasn’t running due to a shader error. This issue is now resolved, and the game boots on both Xbox and PlayStation. These builds are still incomplete, and have many missing features, interface elements (which cause the game to crash), artwork, and further sources of crashes, but this keeps us on target for our release window later on in 2024.
The Tantalus team has spent some further time on performance since the last update, and identified unused alpha channels on the in-game models, and removed them. Alpha channels in an image exist to help with transparency and opacity, since these channels are not used in the asset, they take up a small, but meaningful amount of graphics memory when a lot of them are shown at once. This could potentially improve performance when the game is drawing lots of models, and offer some improved visual fidelity.
Disclaimer: All of the screenshots in this Development Diary are work-in-progress screenshots submitted from Tantalus. Due to the uncertain nature of game development, just because a feature is shown here does not necessarily mean it will make it into the final, releasable version of Stellaris: Console Edition.
And now, the obligatory UI update image:
UI work is an ongoing process on Stellaris: Console Edition, but as you can see in the past few weeks the Tantalus devs have made great progress on getting these issues addressed. You might also notice that the total number of issues has increased, the team has found and addressed crashes on several UI elements in the game that were introduced by the update process.
Among general UI improvements, the team has been busy incorporating text-to-speech in more of the user interface. Stellaris has dozens of interface menus, and the TTS button will need to be added to each one individually. They’ve also gone ahead and added a TTS option that can be enabled/disabled in settings that will allow TTS to also read out the in-game tooltips.
Espionage screen with Text to Speech
The team has also been hard at work on implementing the empire council screen. Last update, we only had an early mockup of the empire screen, here is it running on one of the latest builds:
Left: Bio Council. Right: Gestalt Council
Cloaking is a feature being introduced with the First Contact Story Pack. Cloaking interacts with many aspects of the UI - and as such - the team has spent some time adding cloaking detecting and cloaking strength to the existing menus where it is appropriate.
As well as adding the Cloaking button to the Fleet UI.
New cloaking button in the Fleet UI. Just ignore the debug info.
Cloaking strength on the Fleet UI. And definitely no debug info.
As well as implementing an initial version of the shader for cloaked ships:
Also introduced in Stellaris 3.9, is the option to choose your leader’s traits and class from game start. The team at Tantalus has ported over these changes as well.
Updated empire screen
Another change in Stellaris 3.9 is the removal of three heads of research (Physics, Engineering, Society), and now all of their functions will be covered by the Head of Research assigned to your empire council.
Research UI updated to show Head of Research
Updated Leader UI
That’s it for this update! We’ll be back later in the summer with the next update from Tantalus on bringing Stellaris: Console Edition into the 3.9 “Caelum” era.
Have a great summer everyone!
Welcome back to another Stellaris: Console Edition development update. We’ll be running through some of the work that Tantalus has done since our last update.
We’re proud to announce that Tantalus has successfully delivered to Paradox early-testing builds for both Xbox and PlayStation! At the last update, PlayStation wasn’t running due to a shader error. This issue is now resolved, and the game boots on both Xbox and PlayStation. These builds are still incomplete, and have many missing features, interface elements (which cause the game to crash), artwork, and further sources of crashes, but this keeps us on target for our release window later on in 2024.
The Tantalus team has spent some further time on performance since the last update, and identified unused alpha channels on the in-game models, and removed them. Alpha channels in an image exist to help with transparency and opacity, since these channels are not used in the asset, they take up a small, but meaningful amount of graphics memory when a lot of them are shown at once. This could potentially improve performance when the game is drawing lots of models, and offer some improved visual fidelity.
Disclaimer: All of the screenshots in this Development Diary are work-in-progress screenshots submitted from Tantalus. Due to the uncertain nature of game development, just because a feature is shown here does not necessarily mean it will make it into the final, releasable version of Stellaris: Console Edition.
And now, the obligatory UI update image:
UI work is an ongoing process on Stellaris: Console Edition, but as you can see in the past few weeks the Tantalus devs have made great progress on getting these issues addressed. You might also notice that the total number of issues has increased, the team has found and addressed crashes on several UI elements in the game that were introduced by the update process.
Among general UI improvements, the team has been busy incorporating text-to-speech in more of the user interface. Stellaris has dozens of interface menus, and the TTS button will need to be added to each one individually. They’ve also gone ahead and added a TTS option that can be enabled/disabled in settings that will allow TTS to also read out the in-game tooltips.
Espionage screen with Text to Speech
The team has also been hard at work on implementing the empire council screen. Last update, we only had an early mockup of the empire screen, here is it running on one of the latest builds:
Left: Bio Council. Right: Gestalt Council
Cloaking is a feature being introduced with the First Contact Story Pack. Cloaking interacts with many aspects of the UI - and as such - the team has spent some time adding cloaking detecting and cloaking strength to the existing menus where it is appropriate.
As well as adding the Cloaking button to the Fleet UI.
New cloaking button in the Fleet UI. Just ignore the debug info.
Cloaking strength on the Fleet UI. And definitely no debug info.
As well as implementing an initial version of the shader for cloaked ships:
Also introduced in Stellaris 3.9, is the option to choose your leader’s traits and class from game start. The team at Tantalus has ported over these changes as well.
Updated empire screen
Another change in Stellaris 3.9 is the removal of three heads of research (Physics, Engineering, Society), and now all of their functions will be covered by the Head of Research assigned to your empire council.
Research UI updated to show Head of Research
Updated Leader UI
That’s it for this update! We’ll be back later in the summer with the next update from Tantalus on bringing Stellaris: Console Edition into the 3.9 “Caelum” era.
Have a great summer everyone!
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