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Stellaris Dev Diary #165 - Ready for 2020!

Hello everyone!

We’re finally back at the office and we’re very excited to be back working on Federations! We will be continuing to focus on AI and stability/performance, while also polishing our features. As a couple of examples of something we are working on right now; we are looking at the economic AI as well as making more unique behaviors for the end game crisis AI. As we continue polishing we’ll also be making improvements here and there.

To share some polish progress, as one example, we’ve added a new slavery type called Indentured Servitude, which will be a part of the Utopia (as its a part of the expanded species rights). We wanted to have a slavery type that works better for your more dystopian and evolved empires, which has a greater need for many specialists.

upload_2020-1-16_10-26-41.png

While slaves only have 25% political power of free pops, indentured assets will retain 75%.​

As promised before vacations, we will be doing a number of Q&A sessions related to different topics. The first Q&A will be about the Federation rework and you can already post your questions. We will be answering some of your questions next week, on Jan 23rd.

Future topics:
Jan 23rd: Federation rework Q&A
Jan 30th: Galactic Community Q&A
TBA: Diplomacy Q&A
TBA: Origins Q&A
TBA: Mega shipyard & juggernaut Q&A

The reason why we cannot release an exact schedule right now is because there might be dev diaries related to other topics between the Q&A ones. The thread for collecting your questions will always be posted one week in advance.

We are looking forward to answering your questions and showing off more of Federations during the coming weeks!
 
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What does "In breach of galactic law" mean?
 
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MatRopert said:
If you're interested in that stuff sure we could see if there's a slot for a DD on tech debt and other fun.

The free update that comes with Federation will include all those performance enhancements and other tweaks the team has made.
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I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think a DD dedicated to performance, tech debt, and just wonky stuff is probably a good idea. The patch will already have 4 months between patches, replacing one of the Q+A DDs with a "look at how we fixed all of the bugs and made the game run better" would be a worthwhile use of a week. Honestly it would be a better use than even a "features of federations" DD because if it gets even 1/3 of the people to shut up and keep their panties on about performance until the patch releases it will be SO DARN WORTH IT.
 
BlackUmbrellas said:
That you're not adhering to something mandated by a galactic community law that was passed. Does nothing on its own, but other laws open up possible sanctions to be levied, etc.
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Ah, I figured the first part, but had no idea about the second part. Where did you find it?
 
MatRopert said:
If you're interested in that stuff sure we could see if there's a slot for a DD on tech debt and other fun.
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Yes please! I think the above line is such a fantastic idea that I've logged in just to give it the thumbs up.

As an aside, can I please have more DD that focus on technical debt? If there's only going to be one slot available... that's a bit naff. I can only speak for myself, but I'm here to see what the developers can do to make a product that works well. I'm not here to see some some shiny bauble, that's just a marketing teaser.
 
PERFECT!

I was getting annoyed that I would have to integrate xenos into my empire because my proper species was not populating quickly enough.

Barbaric despoilers just got better.
 
MatRopert said:
If you're interested in that stuff sure we could see if there's a slot for a DD on tech debt and other fun.
Click to expand...
Also don't think that people aren't interested in explaining programming issues in depth. Take Factorio. They've done some super technical blog posts. For example:

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-323 (animated textures)
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-324 (using shaders to animate trees & optimization through event driven programming)
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-317 (pathfinding algorithms)
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-281 (texture compression and other GPU optimizations)
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-271 (optimizing data structures for memory access)
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-264 (rendering textures)

I guess not every company wants to open up so much about what's under the hood, but it's really interesting. In part because it's already an extremely optimized game. And a lot of the readers have the technical knowledge to understand the issues
 
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Serenity84 said:
Also don't think that people aren't interested in explaining programming issues in depth. Take Factorio. They've done some super technical blog posts. For example:

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-323 (animated textures)
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-324 (using shaders to animate trees & optimization through event drive programming)
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-317 (pathfinding algorithms)
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-281 (texture compression and other GPU optimizations)
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-271 (optimizing data structures for memory access)
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-264 (rendering textures)

I guess not every company wants to open up so much about what's under the hood, but it's really interesting. In part because it's already an extremely optimized game. And a lot of the readers have the technical knowledge to understand the issues
Click to expand...

Yeah It would be cool to see an explanation. That would even allow programming savvy users to to give their own advice, on how to make the performance better.
 
BlackUmbrellas said:
That you're not adhering to something mandated by a galactic community law that was passed. Does nothing on its own, but other laws open up possible sanctions to be levied, etc.
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It will be interesting to balance your playstyle with this in mind.
Yes eating Xenos is bad according to the GC but they taste so good, so what do I care about the 10% marketfee increase.
My assumption, the longer the game goes the penalties for breaches get higher and higher so you have to make the decision of either stop eating humans or leaving the GC.
I am looking very much forward to it.
 
GnoSIS said:
The slavery change affects RPing as a megacorp more. The other AIs will still use the "normal slavery" types most of the time I wager. Also don't underestimate the political unrest here. That change would cause rebellions, and if the AI can't manage the workforce which is simple, god forbid them being able to manage the rebellion. Just my 3 cents.
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I'm hoping there's more smarts going into the AI's decision when to change slavery type dependent on the demand for specialists, weighed against the risk of political unrest. Honestly, I'd wager the AI will default slaves to the new type, and screw the risk of political unrest. Not like the AI has ever really cared about their empires shattering into a bunch of mini-mes, anyway.
 
I am pretty curious about what 'unique behavior' wrt crisis AI will entail. Economic improvements are probably more critical, in the observe games I've been running I sometimes switch into one of the empires and their economies always crash once the boost they receive from being AI is switched off which makes me wonder whether the AI can build a functional economy without those boosts.
 
I know alot of people would love to hear about multiplayer desync fixes as it is currently impossible for all of my stellaris friends to play either as a group or have 2 player games due to constant desync.

Is there any work being done to "correct" the desync event that stops the game so people dont have to leave and rejoin constantly?
 
MatRopert said:
If you're interested in that stuff sure we could see if there's a slot for a DD on tech debt and other fun.
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I think this would go a long way to helping people appreciate your work so far.

As for SQL (or another format) vs text, the biggest reason we go for text is that it's fairly easy for our content designers and modders to edit compared to an actual relational DB.
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How about a compromise, here? Query builders are not new, and I think this could be done. You've got a scope system that fairly specifically seems to just select an item in a table, and allow designers/modders to modify those variables.

A lot of data just isn't accessible to us to modify in-game, like max trait picks.

Or it's difficult to modify or override. It's been over three years since launch and namelists still don't merge. Nor is it possible to make a clean fix of the duplicates you put in, for example - we have to overwrite the entire file.

We have to resort to cheap hacks to get 'patch' code working, and these hacks are different for different Clausewitz games. And sometimes it just doesn't work.

I would love to see something closer to proper code, that us programming+database types can dig into. More control over the guts of the system.

Right now... modding Clausewitz games is far more painful than it needs to be, in my opinion.
 
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