Stellaris Dev Diary #344 - The Art of The Machine Age (Part II - Art Blast Edition) - Warning: Many Images

[rodgerdavies]

Whoah. I think my computer is going to need the same sort of heat exchangers as those ships to load all this in!

 

[Ajacoba]

Hey, people can stop being paranoid about AI

The voice actors got officially paid, lol

Glad that silly discussion can be ended now

 

[Calvax]

The art team deserves so much praise for machine age. Two species sets, three ship sets, a bunch of new buildings and megastructures. It's a great achievement and very much appreciated

 

[SS Boss]

Hey, people can stop being paranoid about AI

The voice actors got officially paid, lol

Glad that silly discussion can be ended now

Some people always need something to be outraged and to fuel a review bombing.

 

[Silens]

You guys really outdid yourself with this expansion. I remember the ups and downs since before MegaCorp, the many bugs, performance issues, and the big turn-around with the Custodians.

It's impressive what you have achieved here, and I hope you riding the high tide will never end.

 

[V-Metamorph]

Magnificent...

Now, I am a bit surprised there are no "eldritch" early art of Cetana, like the beast behind the mask.

The work on this DLC was stellar ! I mean it ! Pun intended but I mean it !!!

 

[AlexanderBoesen]

The art of Machine Age is really stunning and it's nice to see this all in high res concepts, really loving that!

However, they underline a growing problem that at least bothers me to no end: the portraits atm have crazy variance in quality and style. The original portraits up to planetoids felt really uniform, but all that has gone out the window (What happened to all portraits having similar light/shadow balance?). I think most of us agree that the latest humanoid additions last year were really sub-par and not in line with any of the other artwork.

I would really, really appreciate if you would consider going trough all the portraits to retouch, remaster and unify them in style. Also (if not already done) building the framework for modders to add cyber/synth variants to existing portraits. Everything in Stellaris is spectacular and up to date except portraits so please look at this before churning out new ones. Plus while the new portraits are masterful in their own right I think it was beneficial that originally most clothed portraits could just use the same textures for clothing. People have made amazing clothing mods, which are difficult with portraits with many layers (looking at you, handsome yet impossible human cyborg).

During the future development of my all-time favourite strategy game I would really love to see zoomed-out and remastered versions of the old portraits. If it's a problem to overwrite old portraits (since people are always gonna complain) then maybe versions of a species (like the three versions of humans, or cyb8 who seems to be an upgraded version of humanoid_03?) could see till be accessible trough a dropdown menu or something like that. However, I really feel like this issue is something that's just gonna get worse by every update if it's not addressed eventually.

Edit: just wanted to emphasize that the art is really really good in Machine Age, since I made such a critical statement here. I love Cetana, I love the building icons, 3D is stunning and the list goes on. This DLC was totally totally worth it and it and more!

 

[rubert]

Holy bananas, so many pictures.

 

[Algae328]

Were/are the voice actors used for the AI paid the same amount they would be paid for an actual performance?

And if they are then why not just have them do the performance themselves instead of an AI?

 

[Ajacoba]

Were/are the voice actors used for the AI paid the same amount they would be paid for an actual performance?

And if they are then why not just have them do the performance themselves instead of an AI?

Because the entire point of using an AI was to have the performance be intentionally bad and unnatural

 

[Algae328]

Because the entire point of using an AI was to have the performance be intentionally bad and unnatural

I don't really think that Cetana's performance is something that a voice actor couldn't do, and I don't even think she sounds that unnatural. Voice actors can do an "unnatural" voice it's literally a part of their job. GLaDOS in portal sounds unnatural and inhuman and is still done by an actual voice actor.

And that also doesn't explain why the Cyberpunk advisor also uses AI like this.

Like I'm not even strictly against AI being used in stuff like this but all the justification here is very thin and unconvincing to me.

 

[rubert]

This will prevent the voice from needing to fall back to the default VIR voice, as many of our other advisors did when Galactic Paragon added Council Agendas.

How VIR voice is done? Somebody in-house or some voice synthesizer?

Also, any plans to record new lines for the "old" advisors? Would be cool, but I guess it might not be financially "smart":

 

[Calvax]

And if they are then why not just have them do the performance themselves instead of an AI?

Because if you have a voice model you can change or add to your scripts easily. If you have to have a voice artist record it every time you need to get in touch with them, arrange a time to record, perform the recording, all of which will take time.

 

[Eladrin]

It's not really possible for us to record new lines for the old advisors. (Actually impossible in some cases, not merely unviable.)

The use of this tool lets us add lines in the future, change them all the way up to freeze, and honestly, lets us experiment more than we would have otherwise. Cetana very likely wouldn't have been voiced at all if we hadn't had access to this tool. (And in the best case, she'd have had a handful of lines, not over a hundred.)

Cetana's voice sounding kind of off wasn't really the intent of using the tool, but she was a good test-bed for it because it'd still be okay if it was weird.

 

[Dr_Gentech]

This is... a LOT of art. Awesome, I will be stealing some of this for wallpapers if it looks as good on my laptop as it does on my phone.

I loved the art of The Machine Age so much in game as well, I'm really excited for the future of Stellaris' art with this direction. All of this is fantastic, and I'm super happy to have more things voiced in the game, both in general and as part of improving accessibility. Thank you art team, and whichever leadership supported them to do work this good.

 

[Algae328]

Because if you have a voice model you can change or add to your scripts easily. If you have to have a voice artist record it every time you need to get in touch with them, arrange a time to record, perform the recording, all of which will take time.

I don't really buy this as a good justification. Like ya it's faster for development, but at the expense of an actual performance instead of a lackluster AI generated one. Like I think it would've just been better to not do a fully voice acted character in this case, especially in a game that otherwise has only limited voice acting anyway.

 

[Farbros]

There are a lot of talks about Art, but I wonder way more about music. Why have you decided to make such huge change in the style for that expansion?

 

[FleetingRain]

Guys. Just use spoiler tags lmao. I almost skipped the AI disclaimer because of the massive influx of still-loading pictures.

With that said: glad to have cleared it up, I really thought you guys had used generative AI for Cetana and it left a sour taste in my mouth.

 

[LayZboy]

For cyber portrait 06, why was he designed to look directly at the camera when every other speicies looks off into the distance. It's very strange to look at it when designing a new empire.