December Dev Blog: It's Cold In Space!
Hello all! As we get into a cold December (here in the US, anyway) we wanted to share some of the exciting things we’re working on!
First of all, we’ve made tremendous progress in updating the UI. Last month, I talked about the UX at length, so I won’t rehash the general concept, but let’s take a look at how the experience is being refined!
Previously, you had to explicitly click on a planet to be ‘sent’ there, and then you’d have a bit of an overflow of information – it could be a bit intimidating, especially for new players, with a lot of windows and tabs that weren’t always easy to understand at a glance.
We have decided to go with a more independent navigation flow within the stellar view, with basic information about a planet ‘fading in’ as you approach it with zoom. You can still click on it, but you can also zoom in on it and the selected information panel in the bottom-center of the screen will change to show that info, without having to ‘commit’ to the choice. In this way, you can zoom in to look at things like orbitals, orbiting fleets/ships, and trade without having to zoom all the way in.
We’re also planning to update the hover functionality and information for world-space objects, like planets, orbitals, etc. to allow for more intuitive interactions.
As for the planet view itself, it has been completely reworked. We’ve replaced our planets with much higher LOD models, which allows us more detailed views at close distances and offers an improved light/shadow scenario for all the different planet types
The new curved wing panels allow quick access to stationary buildings and your planet regions. It condenses the critical information about regions and buildings into a readable format, and we think it looks very elegant. We’ve also added a planet action window so that, like systems, you can click on it and see everything you can theoretically do with a planet (even things that aren’t available yet).
You will also be able to expand the lower center panel to show more information about the planet (or any object that’s selected, really), and select a specific info category (economic, military, demographic, or overview). This will open up a configurable window that will show information that you can hide,show, and customize as required. You can even have multiple windows open at once! For example, you can now see a planet’s economic info, demographic info, and the viceroy character screen all at once, closing and minimizing as required!
Minimize, you say? Sure! On the lower-left, you now have a window management center that allows you to minimize character windows, planet windows, and other object windows by category, and then hover over the category to see a list and preview of that window, in the same state it was in when you minimized it! So in the above example, you could minimize the viceroy window, the planet economic window, go to another planet, open its economic window, and open the previous planet’s window to directly compare planet performance. You could even add a third planet! The possibilities are endless!! You can store custom organizers in this way as well. You can now create and store organizers for Houses, planets, characters, systems, projects, and much more!
What this system does is essentially give you near-total access to nearly all information in the game, relative to what you need it for. This makes ‘pinning’ objects unnecessary since you can store them minimized as required, as many as you need, for as long as you need. We’re very excited to see what our beta testers think!
Regions and other changes
We’ve made several improvements to Regions and related features, which we hope will make this portion of the game more streamlined and easier to interact with. For example, we’ve cut the number of pops down to six (RIP, Engineers and Merchants), and our pops now all produce a specific good within their chosen region. Regions can have designations such as mining, farming, science, etc. that only produce that one good/resource. Instead of build points, pops themselves build new sectors in regions using their labor, a one-time resource cost from the planet stockpiles, influenced by the viceroy’s engineering skills! Planets will now have a set number of regions regardless of size, with planet size instead influencing the max number of sectors per region. There will also be region types that will impose further modifiers on this base planet > region > sector structure.
You can change region designations on any planet that you own, or for any House that is a vassal or subjugated. Regions have also changed so that all planets have 6 regions, regardless of planet size; size now just determines the number of potential maximum sectors in a region. The type of region also matters; a volcanic region will be able to support far fewer sectors than a plains or forest region, and the time to build a new sector will also be affected by the region type! These changes should make sector and region output more transparent, and easier for the player to manage and influence!
That’s all for now - have a great holiday season and we’ll see you next month!
First of all, we’ve made tremendous progress in updating the UI. Last month, I talked about the UX at length, so I won’t rehash the general concept, but let’s take a look at how the experience is being refined!
Previously, you had to explicitly click on a planet to be ‘sent’ there, and then you’d have a bit of an overflow of information – it could be a bit intimidating, especially for new players, with a lot of windows and tabs that weren’t always easy to understand at a glance.
We have decided to go with a more independent navigation flow within the stellar view, with basic information about a planet ‘fading in’ as you approach it with zoom. You can still click on it, but you can also zoom in on it and the selected information panel in the bottom-center of the screen will change to show that info, without having to ‘commit’ to the choice. In this way, you can zoom in to look at things like orbitals, orbiting fleets/ships, and trade without having to zoom all the way in.
We’re also planning to update the hover functionality and information for world-space objects, like planets, orbitals, etc. to allow for more intuitive interactions.
As for the planet view itself, it has been completely reworked. We’ve replaced our planets with much higher LOD models, which allows us more detailed views at close distances and offers an improved light/shadow scenario for all the different planet types
The new curved wing panels allow quick access to stationary buildings and your planet regions. It condenses the critical information about regions and buildings into a readable format, and we think it looks very elegant. We’ve also added a planet action window so that, like systems, you can click on it and see everything you can theoretically do with a planet (even things that aren’t available yet).
You will also be able to expand the lower center panel to show more information about the planet (or any object that’s selected, really), and select a specific info category (economic, military, demographic, or overview). This will open up a configurable window that will show information that you can hide,show, and customize as required. You can even have multiple windows open at once! For example, you can now see a planet’s economic info, demographic info, and the viceroy character screen all at once, closing and minimizing as required!
Minimize, you say? Sure! On the lower-left, you now have a window management center that allows you to minimize character windows, planet windows, and other object windows by category, and then hover over the category to see a list and preview of that window, in the same state it was in when you minimized it! So in the above example, you could minimize the viceroy window, the planet economic window, go to another planet, open its economic window, and open the previous planet’s window to directly compare planet performance. You could even add a third planet! The possibilities are endless!! You can store custom organizers in this way as well. You can now create and store organizers for Houses, planets, characters, systems, projects, and much more!
What this system does is essentially give you near-total access to nearly all information in the game, relative to what you need it for. This makes ‘pinning’ objects unnecessary since you can store them minimized as required, as many as you need, for as long as you need. We’re very excited to see what our beta testers think!
Regions and other changes
We’ve made several improvements to Regions and related features, which we hope will make this portion of the game more streamlined and easier to interact with. For example, we’ve cut the number of pops down to six (RIP, Engineers and Merchants), and our pops now all produce a specific good within their chosen region. Regions can have designations such as mining, farming, science, etc. that only produce that one good/resource. Instead of build points, pops themselves build new sectors in regions using their labor, a one-time resource cost from the planet stockpiles, influenced by the viceroy’s engineering skills! Planets will now have a set number of regions regardless of size, with planet size instead influencing the max number of sectors per region. There will also be region types that will impose further modifiers on this base planet > region > sector structure.
You can change region designations on any planet that you own, or for any House that is a vassal or subjugated. Regions have also changed so that all planets have 6 regions, regardless of planet size; size now just determines the number of potential maximum sectors in a region. The type of region also matters; a volcanic region will be able to support far fewer sectors than a plains or forest region, and the time to build a new sector will also be affected by the region type! These changes should make sector and region output more transparent, and easier for the player to manage and influence!
That’s all for now - have a great holiday season and we’ll see you next month!