Distant Worlds 2 News

Welcome to our sixth Developer Diary.

This diary is a big one as it discusses the economy in more detail. You’ll learn what makes the Distant Worlds economy unique and how you can make sure that your worlds are prosperous and your empire is strong.



In Distant Worlds, your economy is divided into two parts. The first is the state-controlled economy, over which you have full control. The second is the private or civilian economy, which is everything else. As the state, while you have a great deal of influence over how your private economy is structured, you do not control it and you also have the responsibility to protect it from disruption by pirates and other threats.

As with all areas in Distant Worlds 2, if you prefer to allow your advisors to fully run the state economy for you and focus on other areas of the game, that is possible through the automation settings. For those who enjoy some economic planning and optimization, you can choose how much you wish to intervene, right down to manually controlling all state economic decisions.

The state controls space exploration and construction, colony ships, military ships, stations and troops, spaceports, research stations and monitoring stations. The state is also in charge of setting tax rates, building economic facilitie and adjusting bonus funding.

The private economy controls mining ships, mining stations, freighters, passenger ships and resort bases. It pays for its own construction, maintenance and fuel costs, but also earns revenue from its activities, which it keeps (except for the portion paid to the state in construction or fuel fees or taxes).



This process starts with your state-controlled exploration ships discovering new systems and worlds. Some of these worlds will contain valuable resources. Those resource fit into three general categories:

• Fuel, which is needed for all your space reactors and hyperdrives to function at peak efficiency (in other words, fuel is essential to just about everything in your space-faring economy)
  
• Construction Resources, which are required for your worlds to grow (they consume a variety of these on a regular basis), as well as to build or upgrade new ships, facilities and stations. Without these, nothing new really gets build and colony growth can be significantly slowed.
  
• Luxury Resources, which are required for your worlds to develop, though they also can offer other significant bonuses depending on the specific resource. Some of these are quite rare, or even unique and they come with much higher bonuses. Development is the difference between a relatively primitive frontier world eking out an existence with just enough technology to survive and a thriving core world which represents the pinnacle of your space civilization. Your population alone will increase development, but luxury resources help a great deal more.
  

Once you’ve found these resources, private Mining Ships (unless you’re playing as a Mercantile Guild, in which case you can also build and control these) can extract these resources for you. You may also effectively grant a license to the private economy to build a mining station at a particular location, using one of your state-controlled construction ships. These large mining stations are constructed by the state, but paid for and maintained by the private economy and are much faster at extracting resources, though they require private freighters to also pick up those resources and transport them to where they are needed.



This combination of state exploration and granting of mining rights combined with private resource extraction and transport is the most basic level of your economy. Keeping the flow of resources moving efficiently from your mining stations to where they are needed is up to the civilian stations and ships and you can watch them go about this business, while knowing that you don’t need to spend much time worrying about it once you’ve made sure the mining stations are where you want them.



The next most important pieces are your worlds and your spaceports. Your worlds have your population and your people will produce a certain level of productive output on their own, but without adequate Construction and Luxury resources, their potential will be greatly limited. If you supply them with abundant resources, you will find your worlds increasing much more quickly in population, development and happiness. That combination will also allow for higher tax rates and much more income from each world to flow into your state treasury. You can adjust the resource demands and the tax rate on each world if you so wish, or allow your advisors to automatically adjust these.

Spaceports are the largest state-controlled space stations and they are typically built at your populated worlds. From an economy standpoint, they act as hubs for your economy. The freighters and mining ships will transport resources first to your spaceports and from there they will be distributed further to the worlds or stations that need them.



Spaceports are also the locations where most space construction happens, both for your state ships and the private economy’s ships. The private economy pays the state when it needs the use of these shipyards, which can result in additional bonus income for the state.

Once you have a good network of mining stations, worlds and spaceports setup, the economy will generally run itself quite well barring external disruptions, either due to general threats or due to war. In those cases, your state fleets and troops may be needed to restore peace and orderly economic activity.



You can also gain access to resources and resource trading income through diplomacy. In Distant Worlds 2, by default you do not begin with the ability to trade with another Empire, but you can sign one of three trade treaties to allow trade. Each treaty has varying degrees of resource availability balanced against tariffs charged. Restricted Trade charges the highest tariffs and makes available only the most abundant resources. Limited Trade is a balance. Free Trade allows full access to all resources without any tariffs. Commerce Centers on your Spaceports as well as trading bonuses from other sources can also increase the value of trade with other empires.



Once you discover some particularly scenic locations in the galaxy that are near your populated worlds, the civilian economy will also be looking to build some resort bases. When built at good scenic locations with easy access to large populations, these can earn some nice additional tourism income for your economy.



Corruption is also something that will become a larger issue as your new worlds are farther away from your capitol world and as your worlds grow ever larger in population. This acts to reduce your taxable revenue from that world, but construction of planetary administration facilities can reduce the effects of corruption and ensure that the long arm of the law reaches across your empire.

In Distant Worlds 2, when you have a good positive cashflow as a result of a well functioning economy, you can invest those additional funds into the usual things like building new ships and stations, or new planetary facilities, or trying to “crash research” a particularly important research project. You can also invest it into bonus funding for research and colony growth. By default, this bonus funding is automatically funded once you’ve met your empire’s needs for maintenance and other expenses.



Without this funding, your research stations will roughly halve their output and your colony population will grow significantly more slowly. Under normal circumstances, this is not an issue, but when events occur that disrupt your economy, losing this bonus funding can result in significant penalties to your empire’s performance. If you build a robust economy and protect it well, hopefully you’ll never have to find out about that the hard way!

If you read through all of this, let us know if you have any questions regarding the economy in Distant Worlds 2.

We heard you loud and clear asking for updates on the DW2 release, and we assure you that DW2 is almost ready.

At the moment we don’t have a release date, but we can tell you that it will be in Q1 2022. The official date will be revealed in the upcoming months so stay tuned to find out more.

In the meantime, we invite you to join the new wave of beta testing that will open in the next few days

To sign up, head to Matrix's beta signup page and submit your application!

Welcome to our fifth Distant Worlds 2 Developer Diary.
This diary will discuss exploration in more detail, including how it has changed since Distant Worlds: Universe.



Exploration and discovery have always been something Distant Worlds does well. The procedurally generated “living galaxy” means that no two galaxies are the same and outside of any story events, there are plenty of unique locations and surprises awaiting you, which can make each game feel different from the last. Some discoveries are relatively mundane, others are quite exciting while still others can be downright galaxy-changing and the same holds true in Distant Worlds 2.



In Distant Worlds: Universe, we had a wide variety of different ruins and ancient ships, ancient battlefields and such scattered around the galaxy from ages past. That’s all still there in Distant Worlds 2, but we’ve added more and made finding everything a bit more interesting. First, just because you’re in a system doesn’t mean you automatically see everything. What you see, even within a system, now depends on the sensors on the ships and stations you have in that system, so even within the same system you won’t know everything just by jumping in and taking a quick look. In addition, everything now has more layers of information than the binary system we had in Distant Worlds: Universe, where you either knew it was there or you didn’t.

We now provide the player with exploration cues on both the system badges and a separate exploration map overlay to let you easily see which systems have been fully explored and which still require further exploration.



Wiith regards to planets, asteroids and such, which are what you are mostly exploring, they now come with a range of exploration levels which look like this:

1. You know some kind of planet is there at a particular distance from the star (it’s within your sensor range)
   
2. You know what general type of planet it is (Exploration Level 1, normally achievable by having a ship with sensors enter the system for the first time)
   
3. You know its quality, basic resources, basic ruins and bonuses (Exploration Level 10+)
   
4. You start finding the better hidden bonuses, ruins and resource (Exploration Level 20+)
   

Exploration levels in the initial release go up to about 100. There’s clearly a lot of room for things to hide between 20 and 100 and as a result, some exploration will continue, even in already known areas, well into the game.

How do you raise the exploration level? Well, in Distant Worlds 2 there are a few ways to do this:

1. An exploration ship with a planetary scanner (the most advanced types go up to around Exploration Level 50). Planetary scanners are the quickest way to explore a planet.
   
2. An exploration ship with a planetary survey module (these can go up to the maximum exploration level). Surveys take longer to explore a planet, but can explore it more thoroughly.
   
3. A mining station at the planet. Over time, a mining station can raise the exploration level up to around 30.
   
4. A colony at the planet. Depending on population, a colony will increase the exploration level over time, eventually up to the maximum possible level.
   

Note that better scanners and survey modules become available through research (and sometimes discovery).



In terms of exploration, not including special story locations and events, what else can you discover? Everything that you could in Distant Worlds: Universe, and more.

First, we’ve added new descriptive planetary bonuses which distinguish even planets of the same type from each other and can make a given location unique. Some planets are independent worlds, which even have their own populations and can engage in trade and diplomacy.



Ruins from ancient times can include a variety of discoveries and can also have multiple bonuses which could apply just to that location or even to your entire empire, if you control them. Ruins can also contain many surprises, some not very positive.



Rare construction and luxury resources can provide access to advanced technologies and ship hulls or boost the development and happiness of your worlds.



Ancient ships and stations can be repaired and put back into service for your fleets, salvaged for unique technologies, or left alone (some are more dangerous than you may think).



Finally there are also artifacts, which represent special relics from past ages which when moved to one of your worlds can provide a variety of benefits.

All exploration also comes with some risk though and space creatures, such as the dreaded stealthy Vordikar, are among the dangers any intrepid explorer must face. Pirates also know many secrets, if you can convince them to talk.



The new nebulas are also often worth exploring, though traveling through their ion, gravitic and radiation storms without sufficient shielding and repair can lead to the complete loss of your exploration ship.

We hope these additional layers of exploration and rewarding discoveries, along with the procedurally generated galaxies, will give you plenty to discover (or conquer)!

[h2]Galactic Terrain in Distant Worlds 2[/h2]

Welcome to a new Distant Worlds 2 Dev Diary.
Before we start, check out PCGamesN's interview with the developers.

This article focuses on a problem common to all space strategy games: how do you get terrain or ‘geography’ into a galactic map?

We explore how other games have approached this problem, how Distant Worlds 1 handled things, and how Distant Worlds 2 has a ‘best of both worlds’ solution to allow free movement while having natural barriers to movement.



[h3]Terrain in Strategy games[/h3]

Most strategy games have a map. Many strategy games have a historical setting and thus their map has natural terrain like hills, mountains and oceans. These natural geographic features form barriers that define the shape of the map and how a player can travel across the map. So mountains and oceans can block travel or at least slow it down.

Space strategy games do not have such obvious natural terrain. Usually all of the game action occurs inside star systems, where planets are found. Space ships must travel between star systems, usually via some kind of hyperdrive or jumpdrive.



To provide natural terrain in a space game, developers often employ arbitrary restrictions on travel. The classic example of this is the idea of ‘star-lanes’ where each star system has a limited number of paths to other nearby star systems. To reach a distant system the player usually has to traverse multiple intermediate systems. These ‘star-lanes’ thus form the geography of the map or galaxy, often entirely preventing any other route to a destination.

Star-lanes definitely add shape and terrain to the map. But many players dislike them because they are very artificial and contrived.

[h3]Inter-system travel in Distant Worlds 1[/h3]

Distant Worlds 1 took a different approach to inter-system travel. In DW1 you could jump to any point on the map that was within fuel range of your ship. You could even travel into deep space, far outside any star system. Many players liked this flexible approach. However there were some problems with this.



This free-movement approach, without star-lanes, meant that there wasn’t as much ‘geography’ to the galaxy. Star systems were less likely to appear in nebula clouds, so nebulae formed natural gaps between star systems. But really the only geographical constraint for movement was the varying distances between each star system.

[h3]Distant Worlds 2: Galactic Terrain without star-lanes[/h3]

In Distant Worlds 2 we wanted to preserve the open travel mode of DW1. But we also wanted to add better galactic terrain: natural barriers that added interest and function to different parts of the galaxy.

The answer to this was to use nebula clouds as the natural barriers to travel. In DW2 nebula clouds dramatically slow hyperspace travel. The impact on travel time is so significant that it is usually faster to travel around the nebulae rather than through it. Thus nebulae effectively become the ‘mountain range’ analog of a terrestrial map.

In addition hyperdrive components work slightly differently in DW2. All hyperdrives have a defined jump range. This jump range limits how far a ship can travel in a single jump. Ships can still travel as far as their fuel allows them, but usually their fuel range exceeds their jump range.

The effect of these 2 new features (nebulae that slow hyperspace travel, limited jump ranges) is that ships often have to plot a path of multiple jumps between star systems to reach a destination. The precise path they choose is not fixed. It depends on their current location, their chosen destination, and their jump range.



Some star systems may thus be in naturally strategic locations, e.g. in a gap between nebulae that many ships will pass through. These locations may be good choke-points, or at least good monitoring points to keep an eye on traffic passing through the area.

[h3]Nebulae Effects[/h3]
Nebula clouds can also have other effects on ships and bases. As in DW1, some nebula clouds are the locations of galactic storms that can cause damage to ships with inadequate defenses. However we have broadened the range of effects to include different types of damage to various ship components. Galactic storms can also have other effects like interfering with sensors or draining shield strength.



Some star systems can be found inside nebula clouds. You can still travel to these systems. But due to the impermeable nature of nebulae, these star systems can be some of the most remote parts of the galaxy.

Nebulae also affect long range scanners. Ships and bases are very difficult to detect when they are inside nebulae. In addition scanners cannot ‘see’ through nebulae. So you cannot scan objects on the other side of a nebula cloud. This can lead to ‘blind spots’ in scanner coverage.

[h3]Summary[/h3]

Distant Worlds 2 preserves the free movement of Distant Worlds 1. You can travel to any part of the galaxy, even locations in deep space.

However you must now navigate around nebula clouds and perilous galactic storms, often jumping through multiple systems to reach your destination.

This new approach to galactic terrain and travel provides even more options for fun and strategy.



We hope you enjoyed this look at the galactic terrain of Distant Worlds.
We’ll be back later with more information about other features in Distant Worlds 2.

[h2]Procedural Rendering in Distant Worlds 2 [/h2]

Hello to all. My name is Elliot Gibbs, and I am the developer for Distant Worlds 2. This article has a slightly different focus. It will give you a behind-the-scenes look at a small slice of the game with an important on-screen role: the natural environment of the Distant Worlds galaxy.

While this article is more technical, it will help you see “under-the-hood.” It will give you insight into how we solved some of the unique problems faced in a game as vast as Distant Worlds 2.



[h3]Procedural Rendering versus Hand-made Art [/h3]

What is procedural rendering? This refers to drawing various parts of the game without using hand-made art assets. In other words, an item is rendered on the screen without using any artist-created models or images. Instead the item is drawn using only software instructions – the item is rendered in code.

That might not sound very useful. Why would you bother writing a lot of software to draw something in code instead of just having an artist make a 3D model, or draw a 2D image?

That depends on what you are drawing and the number of different items that need to be drawn.



[h3]The old way: the Galactic Environment in DW1 [/h3]

As you probably appreciate, in Distant Worlds there is a vast galactic environment, filled with many items to explore and discover: stars, planets, moons, black holes, nebula clouds, and many others.

In Distant Worlds 1 (Universe and earlier) these items were mostly hand-drawn 2D images: there were a set of images for desert planets, another set of images for ocean planets, a set of images for nebula clouds, etc. In total there were about 250 images for planets alone. So there was a lot of hand-drawn art!



The advantage with static, hand-drawn art is that you can have very specific details in the art. For example you could have an image of the planet Earth in the game, complete with the continents, islands and oceans we know so well.

However there are some big drawbacks with static art:

• 2D images and textured models have a resolution limit that is constrained by memory, thus when zoomed in their appearance can become blurry or pixelated
  
• you typically need to draw each image or texture by hand, limiting how many variations you can realistically have. Although tools can help automate the generation of some images, you still have to store them and load them in game, which can take a lot of memory and storage
  

Procedural rendering is an alternative to making a lot of hand-drawn art. It means writing software that knows how to draw a particular item. We can then draw as many variations of this item as needed, tweaking parameters to make changes to its appearance.



[h3]The new, better way in DW2 [/h3]

In Distant Worlds 2 nearly all of the galactic environment is procedurally rendered. That means that we use minimal hand-made art to draw the stars, planets, moons, black holes or nebula clouds in the game.

Instead there are a set of custom shader programs that know how to draw each of these items:

• a star shader that can draw brightly glowing coronas of semi-transparent gas and plasma
  
• several shaders that draw planets with solid surfaces: some with a lot of mountains, others with deep oceans, others with glowing lava lakes
  
• a shader that draws planets with gaseous surfaces with colored bands and swirling storms
  
• another shader draws black holes
  
• other shaders draw nebula clouds
  

[h3]How does it work? [/h3]

At the core of these shaders is a concept called fractal noise. Fractal noise refers to a set of special random values that are tuned for drawing a natural environment in a realistic manner.

Fractal noise is a huge subject, which I won’t go into detail about here. But if you want to learn more you should look it up. You’ll see terms like Perlin noise and Simplex noise, which are good starting points.

But how do these procedural shaders work? What process do they follow, and what do they allow us to do?

• Firstly they use fractal noise to make a unique height map for each planet, allowing us to generate mountains, valleys, plains, coastlines and sub-oceanic terrain
  
• applies shadowing from sun light on the mountains and hills to provide subtle realism to the terrain
  
• if the planet is populated , adds city night lights that follow the natural geography of the planet, preferring low-lying and coastal areas (including underwater cities in shallow coastal regions)
  
• provides light-emitting features like lava lakes and oceans
  
• adds cloud layers with animated storm systems and shadows on the planet below
  
• allows latitude-specific features: polar ice caps, equatorial jungle belts, deserts
  
• allows altitude-specific terrain: snowy mountain tops, forested valleys, grassy plains and coastal areas, shallow underwater continental shelves, deep ocean basins
  

Thus procedural shaders provide a vast improvement when rendering the natural environment in Distant Worlds, giving us an incredible level of detail and variety. The advantages of procedural rendering directly address the weaknesses of static art that we had in DW1:

• because the shader programs operate on each pixel on the screen, there is no resolution limit. You can keep zooming in closely to an item without blurriness or loss of quality
  
• by varying the input parameters for each shader you can obtain nearly infinite variety for an item, thus every planet in DW2 is unique
  
• because no static images or textures are needed, there is a dramatic reduction in memory and storage requirements
  

[h3]A Living, Animated Galaxy [/h3]

Procedural rendering also enables another feature: animation. The fractal noise used in the shaders can be multi-dimensional, so you can use one of the dimensions to represent change over time. This allows you to smoothly animate things that you draw. For example, we have the following in Distant Worlds 2:

• cloud layers on planets that move and change
  
• star coronas with prominences that rise and fall
  
• gas giant planets with animated cloud surfaces
  
• nebula clouds that smoothly change over time
  
• black holes with swirling vortexes of light and energy
  

Thus procedural rendering helps to bring the galaxy of Distant Worlds to life, with motion and activity even in the natural environment. It gives infinite variety and depth of appearance to all of the planets and stars.



[h3]Modding [/h3]

You might be thinking: how does this affect modding? Can you easily mod new planet and star types into DW2? Or does this require special coding or shader skills?

The good news is that modders also have access to these same shaders to make their own unique planets and stars – no special skills are required. By simply adding a few values to a file you can have a completely new type of planet available in the game. Your planet will have all the same features as the built-in planet types: hyper-detailed height maps with shadowing, animated cloud layers, city night lights when populated, planetary rings, etc.



[h3]Summary [/h3]

So how does procedural rendering improve the galactic environment in Distant Worlds?

• provides infinite variety – no two planets in the galaxy are the same. They all have their own unique geographical features and coastlines
  
• eliminates blurriness or pixelation. Everything remains sharp and clear even when zoomed in close
  
• allows animation of features like star coronas, planetary clouds and nebula clouds
  
• uses a lot less memory, thus freeing up resources for other rendering
  

I hope you enjoyed this look at the galactic environment of Distant Worlds. I’ll be back later with more behind-the-scenes information about other features in Distant Worlds 2.