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

[FleetingRain]

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.

He knows what you did.

 

[Wenla]

Aaaahh...

 

[Blackadder23]

Glad that silly discussion can be ended now

You must be new here if you really believe this will end the complaints. The next step is conspiracy theories about how Paradox is lying about their use of evil AI.

 

[Blackadder23]

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.

Called it in my previous post.

 

[FleetingRain]

The best justification for Cetana using an AI voice is that she's an AI tbh

 

[King Harkinian]

Definitely needs to be said that other companies have no problem bringing lots of voice actors back year after year to do additional lines, or recasting a soundalike if the original actor isn't available. Japanese games in particular *always* manage to get their actors to return even after decades and even if it's just a few new lines, and Stellaris is only one decade old. This isn't a case of the original actors being long dead or anything.

Personally I'm not against AI, but the justification is pretty weak. Stellaris is a very popular game that brings in loads of money, it's not "unviable" to get actors back, it might just cost a bit for what's perceived as not much gain.

 

[SofiaF]

Nice to read this kind of details and extra stuff about the art.

Been a real pleasure to play Machine Age DLC . <3

All the art it has been amazing, love the new adapting portraits (and the Cybernetics and Synthetics rework etc), shipsets and the new ascensions and all. Most likely my favorite update/DLC so far. Your art teams did very good work, and the music tracks are also SO good, really fits the theme well. The whole update is like actually really good content, the player crisis is so good and many changes also gives mods new stuff that can use. So all in all for me it's actually really one of best gaming related purchases of year 2024, been playing 10-12 hours gaming sessions without noticing time going by, except when gets hungry and somehow remembers to eat. ^^

I hope the rest of the "episodes" of Season 08 are as good also, since bought the Season 08 package. One does not simply resist -20% deal uwu

 

[Jekson20level]

Great. The game's visual enhancements are really good.
In fact, I would really like to see cybernetic and synthetic versions of portraits appear in the old portraits too. I even think that it would be better if you simply added cybernetic and synthetic variations of old portraits to the DLS (though not for all).
But thanks anyway for this beauty.

P.S. I don't understand the criticism about the use of AI in a space sci-fi game. Moreover, it was used only to create a voice, and not to provide semantic content. The main thing is to achieve the required quality.

 

[Shimohi]

1440p ui scaling when?

 

[DrFranknfurter]

I Just want to start by saying I love the Ships, stations, UI and so much of the art in this latest DLC.

But, personally I'm really, really not a fan of the newer portraits... I wish I could find the words to explain why but, whatever the reason I want to kill that cat creature with fire... so much fire.

Spoiler: Old Portraits I love

I still love the cute older portraits like below:


To me these are cute, easy to identify features from a distance and very clear.

I hope the next art pack has more 'cute' portraits, with easier to identify features at the zoom level seen in game... and I hope the old portraits I love never get "upgraded" to match the newer style that I do not like, I would be very annoyed if anything happened to my spider bot.

Something about these new portraits gives me nightmare fuel vibes. Squick, body horror, revulsion... even before seeing the complete cyborgification.

It feels like they were drawn at a ridiculously high resolution where the details can be quite subtle, then cropped and compressed down so details are lost, chopped apart, stuck back together and then the smaller pieces individually animated to grow and shrink rather than to move in natural ways... and for me the result of all that is unnatural, ugly, unsettlingly uncanny undulations.

Spoiler: New portraits

I think those cats want to take my soul, and I'm sure it has a knife hidden behind its back and possibly several other cats all trapped in the undulating costume, peeking out of the holes in the mutilated corpse of its last victim.

I would love some humanoid big cat portraits... I have the thundercats theme song in my head now...
...but this feels more like the bendy coffee drinking aliens from Men in Black. Maybe it feels worm-like due to the lack of skeletal structure? pale hairless skin? Although this pale Colour variant 1 is the lest disturbing by far so I'm not sure what it is that unsettles me.



This almost has the alien handbag from the film My Stepmother is an Alien vibes... but not quite. I love the bottom half of the portrait shown here.

But... why is the worm placed and cut-off in-game so that it looks like an undulating prehensile penis?
It's a choice... but not one I would have made.
I would have placed the pet worm as the focus of the portrait, perhaps on the robot's shoulder, as the robot head is rather uninteresting while the creature looks cool. That way it would be visible in the Leader portrait, the diplomacy screen and the pop portrait.



This portrait has shoulders that seem to expand and contract like a rotting corpse that's about to explode. All the undulations feel like I've found a strange humanoid alien worm monster... but not in a good way.

Also, for older cosmetic DLC criticisms... I'm not a fan of the tiny spindly T-Rex hands in half the lithoid portraits. Rock people should look sturdy and not like someone mutated a seahorse and crossed it with an Aye-aye. Obviously one or two is ok but why are half the lithoids deformed mutants? I'd like some hulking giants eventually.

So... I want cute, clear and easy to identify critters and less confusing decaying corpse body-horror.

So, I love the ships and obviously all the mechanical changes, but really not the portraits.
That isn't a problem. I can obviously just use the portraits I do like, those haven't gone anywhere.
But if this DLC's portraits were on sale on their own I would avoid almost all of them, sadly.

 

[Idle America]

I love, love, LOVE that cybernetics and synthetics will finally be shown on the species portraits! Hopefully this means we'll see more portrait variants in the future, for things like the brain slug trait.

 

[Scyobi_Empire]

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.

Its the main character

 

[Scyobi_Empire]

Definitely needs to be said that other companies have no problem bringing lots of voice actors back year after year to do additional lines, or recasting a soundalike if the original actor isn't available. Japanese games in particular *always* manage to get their actors to return even after decades and even if it's just a few new lines, and Stellaris is only one decade old. This isn't a case of the original actors being long dead or anything.

Personally I'm not against AI, but the justification is pretty weak. Stellaris is a very popular game that brings in loads of money, it's not "unviable" to get actors back, it might just cost a bit for what's perceived as not much gain.

Sometimes, people die or retire or even have their voices change with age

 

[TimeMask]

This is good post, though I don't like forum posters being snide at people who are cornerned as if it wasn't legit thing to be concerned about

But yeah, I just wish new species portraits felt like there wasn't disconnect between them and old ones

 

[Abdulijubjub]

The best justification for Cetana using an AI voice is that she's an AI tbh

The advisors are all also AIs, canonically.

 

[Acoasma]

@Eladrin

In the 3.6 “Orion” update we added support for text-to-speech in events as a major accessibility improvement, but currently it is limited to the use of operating system based voice packs. While these audio tools are not yet at a point where we can use this technology to improve that experience, I look forward to a day some years from now where AI-based advanced text-to-speech could replace these relatively crude voices with more thematically appropriate ones, and be able to better handle languages other than English.

I dream of this, too. I was extremly hyped when you announced the text-to-speech introduction. While it certainly was a great improvement for accessibility of the game, it doesn't really feel atmospheric and is immersion breaking to a point, where I never use it.

As a hobby music producer I absolutely understand that it would never be a feasibly option to voice the thousands of text messages without an automated solution. However, if you find a way to use AI supported text-to-speech solutions to actually generate atmospheric voicelines for all the events, it would be HUGE, not only for stellaris, but for every paradox game IMO.The texts are often carefully written and great to read, but after a long way of work, I usually cant be bothered to actually read them 90% of the time, which is a shame. Thematic voice lines for all the events at the click of a button would be a total game changer for immersion.

 

[FleetingRain]

The advisors are all also AIs, canonically.

Well, would you look at that.

 

[GnoSIS]

What 3D modeling software do you guys use to make the ships in Stellaris? I always wonder...

 

[Vitruvian Guar]

There are really awesome cybernetic versions of default partraits here, on the right. Are they available now? Or will they be available in the future?

 

[Sjru]

Okay all that talk about AI talk but Scott Austin "inspiring speech" text sounded suspicious on it's verbose of words and many tools online say it is AI generated...