Stellaris Dev Diary #342 - The Art of the Machine Age (Part I)

[V-Metamorph]

Nice

 

[DeeMc]

Your work is beautiful Art Team, always impressive. Once again I am humbly requesting a planetary tile showing some alien wales, similar to the Rockworm Hive tile. Kind regards, DeeMc.

 

[Helicopter200]

I hope they will update all other species pack to be like that

 

[Ezumiyr]

I wish one day we will have all portraits updated to current standards - to handle cyber/synth and different outfits. Honestly Id pay for this gladly.

It won't happen and it's one of the reasons why we need Stellaris 2 at some point. Lots of stuff like that would just be much easier to do in a new game, rather than by trying to tweak a very old and janky one into doing what they want.

The post by the artist working on the portraits in this thread is quite telling imo. It's great that they (finally) managed to add reactive portraits, but even that was complicated by how portraits are "modelled".

 

[FFGaming333]

So not every species portrait will get this type of progression? Disappointing but understandable.

 

[PLSKICKME]

Maybe im blind, but where is MEATSHIP?

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Maybe im blind, but where is MEATSHIP?

The flesh is weak

 

[Perseus Veil]

Those new city appearance also look amazing <3.

Now im just hoping that devs soon decide that the 'skin' of a ecumenopolis is decided by city appearance instead of ship appearance

I need this so much.

 

[Anemetius]

Radiators!

View attachment 1124316

ugly

 

[Madwwwizard]

I don't want to diminish the great work here, but is there any reason we need a whole week for the art here? Couldn't you drop it a few days early or in a youtube short (as you have done with other art) and release the expansion closer to the final game play related diary?

 

[Vitruvian Guar]

It won't happen and it's one of the reasons why we need Stellaris 2 at some point. Lots of stuff like that would just be much easier to do in a new game, rather than by trying to tweak a very old and janky one into doing what they want.

The post by the artist working on the portraits in this thread is quite telling imo. It's great that they (finally) managed to add reactive portraits, but even that was complicated by how portraits are "modelled".

Back in 2-x versions of the game I made couple of mods with reactive portraits for several species. I managed to do while not even being an artist myself, simply through reusing existent assets.

The game engine had native support for it. The same mechanism that allows different portraits for different genders of the species could be used for cyborg versions as well.

I see absolutely no reason why a team of artists working full time couldn't do the same thing but better and in a larger scale. Mostly you just need to do some retexturing of the existing portraits. The amount of work they did to create a set of completely new portraits from scratch seems to be bigger.

 

[Madwwwizard]

Back in 2-x versions of the game I made couple of mods with reactive portraits for several species. I managed to do while not even being an artist myself, simply through reusing existent assets.

The game engine had native support for it. The same mechanism that allows different portraits for different genders of the species could be used for cyborg versions as well.

I see absolutely no reason why a team of artists working full time couldn't do the same thing but better and in a larger scale. Mostly you just need to do some retexturing of the existing portraits. The amount of work they did to create a set of completely new portraits from scratch seems to be bigger.

Yeah I would also push back on it being easier to do in a new game. It sounds like someone who doesn't spend a lot of time working in software production envs. There is enormous speed up to having existing templates and understanding of system vs needing to make a whole new one from scratch. The request amounts to no new content for several years while a whole new engine is set up.

 

[WingedMithril]

I find these changes really interesting, and I'm loving the art style and all the effort you've put in!
I think you could make it even better by considering my proposed concepts:

- Organic tissues should not be exclusive of cybernetics
- Synthetics should be able to keep their appearance if the player chooses, except for a signature thing like dunno, mechanical seams/red blue glowing eyes

My point mostly applies to humans and humanoid-similar species (possessing hairstyles and yadda yadda)

Let's look at it from a humanoid perspective, you wake up in a machine body look up in the mirror and see a robot staring back at you
Yes, it might be nice, but what if you simply want to maintain your appearance while maintaining all the benefits of a synthetic ascension? (Freedom from illness, death, organic defects)

My design point of view is supported by many science fiction examples which I cite as follows:
- In Terminator the Terminators have a layer of synthetic skin
- In Ghost in the Shell despite maintaining a 99% perfect human appearance (apart from small details) only a small fragment of the brain remains biological (and this is not true for Makoto either)
- In Alita normal people are cyborgs, while Typhareans have a synthetic brain but a biological body (how do you even classify that)
- In Fringe, shapeshifters keep their true memories and personalities inside a microchip
- In Blame! and other Nihei's works characters have visibly mechanical bodies but their faces are smooth (no metal plates) and clearly human (Still true even for silicon lifeforms)

I think some of these concepts could integrate well into stellaris both in terms of portraits and in terms of game mechanics (for example, a synthetic skin technology for synths might make possible infiltration of pre-FTL civilizations)

Finally, I think the main differences between cybernetics and synthesis could be boiled down to just the method of ascension (progressive replacement/mind upload) or even just simply the level of cyberization of the brain

 

[Fox McCloud]

Aww, no cybernetic or synthetic space foxes.

 

[ZomgK3tchup]

What does it mean for gameplay purposes if all three portraits count as human? A commonwealth of men purifier is fine with the humans looking slightly different?

The game has a script for this:

is_human_species = {
    OR = {
        species_portrait = human
        species_portrait = human_legacy
        species_portrait = pla17
    }
}

There aren't many places where it's used, but it does get used occasionally to check whether your species is human.

As for how this interacts with the CoM and UNE, they should always use the same portrait set. If you play as the CoM and make your portrait the legacy portrait set, the UNE should spawn with that portrait set and vice versa.

 

[WingedMithril]

That's interesting, sounds like there could be a mod for keeping human portraits after synth ascension without lots of code and without messing up with savefiles and achievements. I'd find it useful cause I have a game in progress saved just before synthetic ascension.
Do you have suggestions about that?

 

[theBigTurnip385]

Hey Imp0815 Beals here, I made an account so hot and fresh it hasn't even been verified yet but figured I'd answer this here so I could point to this later.

Warning I'm just an artist and not an animator or coder, who actually had to do the hard work.

I agree it does seem a bit silly that something like this required so much work but that's just the nature of the beast sometimes. A lot of the work wasn't so much that it was impossible (although the coders, who I am not, definitely worked very hard on it) but simply that none of this existed and had to be made from scratch. There was also just a long period of troubleshooting given the amount of permutations in a single species.

To explain further, the problem was spread out across a few areas:
1. We need a new asset layer for these parts, not hard at all to do, although we do have to decide at what layer this exists. I'll explain below but we can't for example, put some cybernetic parts on layer 2, and some others on layer 4. So there had to be a bit of proof testing to make sure this didn't come back around to be a problem.

We also internally tried out at least one other system briefly before coming to the conclusion it was too work intensive

2. The way portraits are animation rigged is pretty cantankerous, it's not a fan of big silhouette breaking changes and prior we didn't have really any way to put a single asset on top that didn't also need to be rigged up specifically. Hair on the humans are a good example, and are a reason we don't have that level of detail on every species.

We had to create a system where we could put the new parts on masks (the big blue silhouettes) as you can see above, and also then use a color for that mask we were 99% sure wasn't being used anywhere since we want this to be as backwards and forwards compatible as possible since the engine is looking at this color, not the asset layer, to figure out what not to render. This lets us re-use the existing rig with minimal effort and has a LOT of potential for other ideas we have cooking.

3. , Testing, we had to make sure that the parts weren't warping, overlapping outfits, blending poorly with color variants, etc. We tried our best to not just make every single cybernetic upgrade have the same joints, since that would look pretty boring. We also had several gnarly layering issues for several species that required some approach redesigns going forward.

And lastly to answer your question yes this new system allows us to re-use the existing rig, although the older portraits are much more basic in their construction in ways we had to work around for MA, so this probably is on a case by case basis.

A very long winded response to explain Now I Have Metal Arms Tech but I hope it helps a bit!

You still need to give us Zombie layers as well.

My Cybernetic Zombie should look like a cybernetic zombie.

 

[Ikael]

Great art, and very interesting DD! It seems that this paper doll model could also have other applications, so we can see psionically ascended species with glowing auras or brain slugs attached to character's heads. Would be neat!

Dang, no foxes :<

Amen to that.

 

[Shark7]

It won't happen and it's one of the reasons why we need Stellaris 2 at some point. Lots of stuff like that would just be much easier to do in a new game, rather than by trying to tweak a very old and janky one into doing what they want.

The post by the artist working on the portraits in this thread is quite telling imo. It's great that they (finally) managed to add reactive portraits, but even that was complicated by how portraits are "modelled".

Also it would probably break a lot of the mods out there if the older style portraits were no longer able to function in the game. If the game were relatively new, I'd say it wouldn't be an issue. But with a game as old as Stellaris is some folks would be very unhappy is my guess. I think the best solution is the one they are taking so far...update to newer portraits as DLCs but leave the ability to use the older style portraits as a possibility.

 

[LVTrish]

Loving this new art. Any chance of getting that Machine Age splash screen as 2/4k wallpaper?