Stars Reach News

By Dave Georgeson

We recently ran a wild-and-wooly external test where we gave our players a whole host of voxel manipulation tools and absolutely no guardrails. The ensuing chaos was both a) enormously entertaining, and b) extremely valuable feedback on both performance and giving us indications of what the players would do with that level of power.

We gave our players six different tools they hadn’t used previously:

• Extractor: A mining cannon that’s used to dig through soil and stone, extracting minerals and making tunnels.
• Agitator: A device that can apply enormous heat or cold to different areas so that players can melt stone, freeze water, and everything in between.
• Terraformer: This tool lets you place any material you’ve gathered (usually with the Extractor) back into the world. You can select from the materials in your inventory and sculpt away to your heart’s content. (Especially in conjunction with careful application of the extractor.)

• Chronophaser: This beam weapon allows you to increase, or even reverse, entropy so that materials either break down into their components (as they would with erosion) or merge back together into fewer elements (like lithification).

• Paver: Use materials you’ve gathered to pave areas and make parking lots or roads.

• Block Tool: We let testers experiment with a very rough, brand-new feature, allowing them to build with materials similar to what’s available in the world. This was still VERY early in development, but the players were able to do a lot with it anyway.

Then we turned 100 players loose on a 1k x 1k test map for two hours…and watched. No rules. Just mayhem.

It was spectacular.

As expected, the Agitator was enormously popular right away. It was no surprise that melting and freezing things is fun stuff. But the other tools were all attractive in their own ways and a bunch of stuff happened all at once.

• Players created enormous lava flows, melting entire sides of mountains to create immense “dragon spines” of melted and re-solidified rock.
• They froze huge sections of lake, making impromptu ice skating parks and playing on them extensively.
• A small group immediately began working to undermine an entire hill, just to see it eventually cave in on itself…which ended up killing everyone in the immediate area.
• One group went underwater and dug a vertical shaft down into the bedrock, eventually draining part of the lake into the lava mantle far below, which flashed the water into steam, creating a geyser that rushed back up the tunnel and so high into the sky that the cold there started freezing it and dropping ice chunks back down to the ground, killing anyone that was under them.
• Another player dug a shaft down below the lake, creating a drain for lake water. They then froze the resulting whirlpool that occurred, creating an ice funnel they could slide down and up, flinging them into the sky.

People didn’t spend a bunch of time making roads (that’ll probably be more popular as we start allowing persistent building efforts), but they did take the really rough Block Tool and start experimenting with it, making crude log cabins and many signs (including our own game logos).

They built bridges across the sky, set each other on fire, froze one another in place, and generally had a great time. In the process, they absolutely wrecked a world in short order.

The Ancient Gaming Noob wrote up more detailed reports of how the test went! Links to his articles are posted below:

Scenes from a Stars Reach New Tools Playtest

Stars Reach and the Terrain Modification Playtest

And here’s some pics from the test, below:
A ravaged map after a two-hour test

Players building structures and then melting them with judicious application of heat beams

Building Stars Reach logos with the prototype block tool

Some quick log cabins made in a few minutes during the test

Are players going to be able to do all this in the launched game? The answer is “yes and no”. All the features we let the players experiment with will definitely be in the game, but all of them are gated by skill trees and may not be quite as powerful as what was seen in this test. The tools we gave them are not the final form of those tools and not every player will be able to do all of these things at once.

Additionally, block building will be heavily improved soon and they’ll also have the ability to utilize building tiles and props, but that sort of building will be relegated to homesteads and colony plots, not just everywhere in the world.

But will players be able to do all of this in the launch game? You bet they will…and a lot more.

Stay tuned for details of our next test, which will unleash players into a world with a completely different set of abilities. There’s so much to come, and all of it is near term!

PLAYER FEEDBACK:

[h3]Want to Join the Next Playtest?[/h3]
Don’t miss out on the next round of chaos and creativity! Make sure to [register for the playtest here] and be part of the action. Your feedback and creations will help shape the future of the game!

Stars Reach by Playable Worlds is about fulfilling the promise of what online worlds can be. In this video, you’ll learn about upcoming innovations for both MMOG and virtual worlds and Unity’s advantages. This thought-provoking experience draws you into a single shardless galaxy with thousands of living planets and space zones that you can explore, settle, and rule with your friends.

Via Unity

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]Register to participate in the Pre-Alpha Playtest HERE[/h3]

By Dave Georgeson

We strongly believe there are three core elements at the heart of a great, massively social MMORPG. Fun and compelling moment-to-moment gameplay, a thriving global economy you’re excited to participate in, and satisfying character advancement. These are all married together and intertwined like ivy branches. Each inseparable from the others, and all operating in mutual support. This is an incredibly hard feat to accomplish, and it’s worth every ounce of the herculean effort required to make it happen.

Together, they’re too big of a subject to tackle in one article, so today we’re going to separate out character advancement and talk about how that works in Stars Reach.

[h2]GAIN EXPERIENCE BY BEING USEFUL[/h2]
One of Stars Reach’s core principles is that you learn by doing…but not by just blindly repeating an action over and over again. Instead, you need to do something that’s useful to yourself or others, or incurs risk.

How does that translate into gameplay? Here are a few examples:

• Let’s say you’re learning to be a Ranger, and you learn the skill to set up temporary camps in the wilderness. Do you get XP for setting up a camp that just sits there idle? No, you don’t. But you do earn XP when that camp is used by you or other players to rest or re-equip.
  
• Or maybe you’re becoming a Weaponsmith and you start making weapons. Do you get XP from making weapons? No, but you do get XP when those weapons are actually used by you or other players. The more the weapon is used, the more XP you earn.
  

The same is true for entertainment (you get XP when your dancing benefits others), leadership (you get XP while actively providing benefits to squad members), xenobiology (you get XP when people use the libraries of information you create) and you gain XP with medical skills when you heal or restore other players.

Of course, some trees are more straightforward. When you train with a weapon, you get XP when you cause damage with it (which incurs risk for your character). If you learn Combat Engineering skills, you get XP when your traps or turrets are effective.

You can see the pattern here. This is about your relationship to a universe where danger exists, and how your actions impact others both directly and indirectly, all of which are critical elements in our living, thriving sandbox of a game.

[h2]SKILL TREES AND TOOLS[/h2]
We have a lot of skill trees in Stars Reach and every skill tree has a tool associated with it. To gain XP in a specific skill tree, you need to use the tool associated with it.

Want to be a better miner? Use the extractor. A better leader? Use the rally banner. Get better with the assault rifle? Then use the rifle in combat.

It’s a simple concept. Of course, you can’t equip everything at once, so you’ll have to pick which trees you’re advancing at the moment by choosing the appropriate tools. And various tools have different quality levels which affect their various abilities, which again plays into economy and crafting, but the basic idea of “use tool, get XP with that tool” is an easy one to understand.

Nearly everything you can do in the game is associated with skill trees (you can do fundamental things like run and jump without unlocking skill nodes, of course), so your loadout choices will influence what your character becomes capable of doing as you play.

[h2]CAN I LEARN EVERYTHING?[/h2]
Yes, and no.

Yes, you can learn every skill in the game, but no, they cannot be active all at once. There is a maximum number of skills you can keep “in practice” for your character at one time. If you want to continue to learn more skills thereafter, you’ll need to first let some of your previously-learned skills atrophy and fall “out of practice.”

Atrophying a skill doesn’t mean you lose it. You’re just out of practice and can’t use the capabilities at the moment. You do retain benefits from having worked so hard the first time: If you want to dust the atrophied skills off and relearn them, it’s much easier and is really just a matter of time. You don’t need to learn the skill again from scratch.

WHAT DO I LEARN IN A SKILL TREE?
As you unlock nodes in a skill tree, you’ll gain bonuses to your existing abilities and unlock root nodes to other trees that branch off from the one you’re climbing. And you’ll also unlock Specials.

Specials are new abilities that you use with the tool for that skill tree. Some examples:

• If you’re pursuing the Forestry skill tree, you might learn to force trees to grow so you can replant and replenish more quickly, or automatically de-limb a tree when you cut it, or learn to cure diseases in the trees while they’re growing.
  
• If you’re learning Leadership, you can inspire your team by boosting various character stats, create formations for them to use for bonuses, or activate crowd control abilities against foes.
  
• If you’re learning to use the Laserwhip (a weapon), you might learn to Lasso an opponent, or Laserstrike at range, or lash out and entangle a foe like a Bola.
  

And so on! However, there are two caveats with this:

• You can unlock many Specials on a skill tree, but you can only enable two of them at a time, and;
  
• The Specials you have enabled are crafted into the tool that you’re using. So when you want to use different Specials, you’ll need to buy or craft a different version of your tool and use that one instead.
  

As you can see all of this obviously intertwines with moment-to-moment gameplay as well as the economy. Every item you use in the game was made by a player, so you’ll either need to learn crafting skills of your own, or you’ll need to make friends with someone that has those skills. How that all works together is a much larger discussion for another day.

[h2]SO WHERE ARE WE NOW?[/h2]
As with most (if not all!) fundamental gameplay systems in an MMO, we first have to build the supporting infrastructure, which is part of what we were up to when we were running quietly before announcing the game publicly.

Then we build the systems and interfaces that the gameplay teams will use to fill out the code and data that becomes the trees and abilities. Finally, the player-facing trees and abilities themselves get created and you’re able to see and test them.

We’re on that last step right now, and you’ll be able to see the first couple skill trees very soon. Our next set of external tests will let players explore the first couple of simple skill trees, and then we’ll continuously roll out new ones thereafter until we get all the intended functionality for launch into the game.

We’re still pre-Alpha, so we have a good chunk of development still to do, and we’d love to hear your feedback on these core concepts! Join us in our Discord channel so we can discuss!

If you have a friend or guildmate who would enjoy this testing, please give them this link to sign up: https://signup.starsreach.com/email-cohort.

This past week I was at the annual Unity developers conference called Unite 2024, where we were presenting a couple of times on our game and technology. This year it was held in Barcelona, Spain. I had never been, and it was on my bucket list of places to visit.

We work very closely with Unity. Some of our technology is right at the bleeding edge of what the engine can do, and several aspects of it, such as our simulation, are outside the game engine entirely.

Among other things we make use of their DOTS framework, and we have been able to contribute back by identifying ways in which the physics system and networking system could reach even higher performance – several of these changes are actually in the engine for everyone to use now. It feels good to be able to give back that way.

I filmed a segment for their YouTube channel, which had me in full TV make-up… no photos of that, but you’ll get to see it soon I suppose! I also did a segment for their livestream which you can see right here starting at the 1h 33m mark:

[previewyoutube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1N7c0PD5FY&t=5s[/previewyoutube]
There were two main presentations.. One of them was actually a joint talk with Amazon Web Services. They are another key partner of ours. We run our game servers on AWS, and work closely with them as well in order to build our unique backend.

The talk was all about how we use AWS services for our back end. Many of the lessons we wanted to share were about how we try not to reinvent the wheel, but also are very willing to dive in at the deep end of inventing new technology if it serves the game and the vision for what we are making. The talk was filmed, so I am pretty sure it will pop up publicly at some point here.

As part of this talk we showed examples of how our terrain generation system works, and described a bit of how the living world simulation works as well. We shared images like these, which show how we have built custom tools for generating the initial state of our planets before the simulation starts to run. It is all too easy for procedural stuff to generate “endless bowls of oatmeal,” stuff that is technically different but starts feeling very samey.


Our designers use a node graph tool to build algorithms. These algorithms describe landscapes – not just one specific landscape, but rather the rules for building a particular sort of landscape. We can randomize parameters within those rules in order to make endless variations of that landscape type.

This keeps important stuff under designer control: canyons need to be this wide in order to keep combat fun, slopes this steep for navigability, and so on. We can put all those rules into the algorithms, and know that no matter how much we randomize in the procedural process, the rules will still be obeyed so that player fun is preserved.


The tools let us preview the way the world is going to look and tweak the rules in advance. You can see that this isn’t just like regular terrain tools with heightfield generation – we have a full 3d world and simulation, and we need to know that there’s a quartz deposit there under the soil, and so on. So the tools actually annotate the rules so that every cubic meter knows what materials the world is made of at that location.

When we go to generate an actual planet, we grab rulesets out of that designer-created library, and change the seed values so that we ourselves don’t know what the geography we get will be – but we know that it will still fit our design criteria.


And then, there’s all the wizardry to make it actually render in a gamelike way. We talked about that more in the second talk, which was on the main stage. A bit intimidating! Here’s a shot of the room before it had filled up, from the stage.


This talk was meant more as an overview of everything we are doing, a chance to introduce our tech to a crowd of folks who had never heard of us before. Among other things, we shared stats about the way the world is rendered, how the simulation works, and of course, an overview of the gameplay. We talked about how we use a custom scripting solution based on Javascript for our game logic, in order to achieve MMO scalability and high levels of service reliability.

by Raph Koster

When we announced Stars Reach, the art style and visuals were not yet as far along as the gameplay, the cloud technology, and the simulation. Visual improvements were planned for later in the schedule, starting with this month’s pre-alpha testing.

This gave us a challenge: Our development plan calls for early input from player-testers. Waiting for near-final visuals would have meant player input coming too late in the process to help us scale the servers and improve the game. So we cut a trailer with the imagery we had available, giving players a general sense of what the game was. We did receive some criticism on the visuals of the trailer.

Well, we have made great progress and some of that is visible now. We’ve improved the lighting, increased detail levels, added functionality to and enhanced the simulation, and much more. We still have more work to do, especially on characters; in the meantime, we’re sharing some video and screenshots that show how the game looks today. As you can see, we incorporated some of your criticism into the new appearance.

Expect more visual updates before this game reaches beta phase, but even now we can begin to show you a combination of art and technology that approaches our intended finished look.

[previewyoutube]https://www.youtube.com/embed/B08Ld2sLa00?si=0f8xs7WWdLyc3Xxv[/previewyoutube]

A lot of work went into adjusting the lighting in the game. In modern videogames, light interacts with the shaders that are on all the objects. Texture detail might be present but basically invisible unless the lighting is set up correctly.

We did a general pass on tons of objects throughout the game to make sure that shaders were set up correctly, and then built a new day/night cycle for it all. Contrast and saturation were adjusted and balanced out to be closer to the look we are aiming for.

We also finished off some capabilities of those shaders that you haven’t seen before. You may already know that our simulated world has temperature and humidity for every cubic meter, and that the grass reacts. Well, now the grass actually stays burned and trees blacken, when set on fire. They also ice over. So do the rocks, the bushes… everything.

Simulation detail also increased, and that brings with it visual detail. In those older videos, we only had about a dozen sorts of materials in the world – one or two sorts of rock, one kind of dirt, and so on. We now have ten times as many as we used to – and they all behave differently! They melt and freeze at different points, they have different densities, and they slump and fall differently because they have different adhesion characteristics.

This turned out to be a huge difference in the look of the world. Minor details like sand always sliding down, or bare dirt being more susceptible to giving way than dirt held together with grass roots, add visual touches that powerfully echo what we see in reality.

[h3]Before...[/h3]
[h3]Along the way...[/h3]
[h3]Where we are now...[/h3]

We also implemented all the chemical reactions between different materials. Suddenly the simulation was doing worldbuilding for us! The bottom of stone riverbeds eroded away into sand and clay. Dirt embankments turned muddy and were swept away. Dirt on slopes too steep to hold it slid off, and the sides of mountains that used to be bare gained pockets of greenery all over anywhere that plants could cling to life.

The best part of all this was how it showed up when players were modifying the world. Dig a tunnel, let water in, and you can just watch as unexpected color and detail shows up – whether it’s algae or moss on a rock face, or soil rounding off the landscape, stuff just looks more like you expect it to, but still in that painterly, welcoming style we were aiming for.

We still have plenty more work to do – character customization is well along but not yet visible, and work continues on that. And of course, upgrading the terrain rendering means that soon we will need to revisit the grasses, and so on. It’s a never ending quest to make it all look better and cohere. We are solving rendering issues that other games simply don’t face, and we will probably be working on the look and the art right up to the very last minute. Thanks for coming along on the ride!

(Oh, who am I kidding? It’s an MMO. We’re definitely going to keep going after the last minute! Haha.)