[mod] Stable Elves

[Armchair]

1 hour ago, Særtr said:

Got it, turns out it was another mod, not a conflict but a feature of the mod that was poorly communicated.

@Særtr

Can you share which mod incase someone in the future runs into the same problem.

[Særtr]

Sure, its Mango's Lewd Diplomacy and specific to the Cloned Sex Slaves Origin and in case someone wants that origin but doesn't want the same portrait you can comment out or delete the line   portrait = prev.ruler   in mod/lupanarius_project/events/clone_slaves_event.txt

Edited April 3, 2023 by Særtr

[Armchair]

Thank you!  I was just having flashbacks to those sorts of moments where you're trying to debug some obscure IT problem, find a message board where someone has the exact same problem, and then the thread simply concludes with the guy either simply stating that it's fixed or sharing the fix via an ancient and long dead photobucket link.

[Sscel]

Gotta say, Armchair, I started playing Stellaris a couple of weeks ago and this is easily my favorite portrait mod so far. Looked up and down, left and right on other portrait mods but this one looks so great and somehow the art blends so much better with the game's own graphics. Big kudos on that one.

[Neri]

This is an amazing mod, hope you can continue doing some other races or expanding this one.

I haven't been playing modded Stellaris for so long but this actually made me install first lewd mode since 2022.

Anyway, I am amazed that you can now set portraits for different jobs, I was making Steallris mods years ago - is this a new feature?

Also what do you use the

stableelves_l_english.yml

for? Is this also a new feature when you can set adjectives based on a specie? That would be awesome, makes me want to create mods again.

[Armchair]

That's the localization file, and to be truthful I don't fully understand all of the interactions.  I just kind of haphazardly copied one from a similar mod.  From what I can tell, certain events in game can reference your species and its characteristics.  As an example, maybe there is a event popup saying that the species is reaching for the stars with their ____________.  Hands?  Claws?  Talons?  Tentacles?  The localization file lets you define those attributes for usage within those events, and the potential exists to localize it for different languages too.

 

 

However the flaw here is that I am not well versed enough in the actual events that call upon those descriptors, so some of the choices in that file might look Dumb with a capital 'D' in practice because I'm not versed in the context where the descriptors are actually used. 

 

Another thought that I had the other day is that some species mods define the greeting-noise that the pops make when you select them.  I didn't define one here.  I might need to listen to them all and define one later.

 

 

I think that portrait mods being able to distinguish between jobs has been something from the earliest days of stellaris so that you could slap a spiffy star trek uniform on your admirals.  I remember reading some old forum posts suggesting that there were some old problems regarding confusion on how to define heirs, and problems with portraits bugging out after elections where an admiral/scientist might go on to server as a ruler.  To be honest, I normally play monarchies so for all I know there might still be bugs with elections. 

 

Most portrait mods, at least the lewd ones, often simply have different design goals and don't intend to try to differentiate between pop roles.  They still define entries for admirals/scientists/etc, but they re-use the same portrait definitions in each category.   It's simply more efficient in terms of man hours to define a dozen or so portraits for usage for entire species than to create five dozen for that species.  Hell, one thing that many of the other portrait mods do that I didn't is that many of them also define portraits for the male pops.  Adding males doubles the workload.  Triples if you add hermaphrodites like a few of the lewd ones do.  When your goal is to create dozens of different species to populate the galaxy, it simply makes more sense to create a singular pool of portraits that get spread across all of the jobs.

 

 

I also think that it's possible to define sets of portraits that are used by enslaved pops, but I haven't explored that yet.

[Neri]

Lovely thank you for all the information and once more: an amazing portrait mod.

I was looking for some lewd ones that actually blend into Stellaris aesthetic. Usually they are just cartoon anime ones.

[porora]

I don't know what's wrong, but it doesn't work in vanilla either....

[BB520]

Just on your end Porora, I've been using this and my loadlist is pretty hefty at this point with no issues.

[Armchair]

I've uploaded a new version that corrects an invalid portrait definition that would cause some civilian pops to not have a portrait.  Thanks to @Blackfist for bringing the issue to my attention.

 

Porora, I'm not sure what's causing the problem that you're experiencing.  I defined them as their own species archetype to try to minimize the risk of conflicts with other mods.  When I have mysterious problems with mods, I usually create a fresh mod list and start adding my mods that I want to use with them one at a time.  I also like using the Irony mod manager and its conflict solver to help identify precisely what files in mods are conflicting with each other.  It's a bit of a pain to re-assemble a mod list from scratch like that, but I'm unaware of any useful logs that could otherwise help debug a problem.

[porora]

I solved it. It seems there was a problem with the mod installation path. It worked because the path was completely in English.

[dogco]

@Armchair Are you willing to share the pictures from this mod but with higher resolutions? Like the original png or jpgs? These elves are beautiful. Wish i knew who to install and run stable diffusion. I thought they blocked nsfw on that program.

[Armchair]

I zipped up the PNGs from the source directory, but the zip was ~1 GB and I got an upload warning when I tried to upload it.   If I have time tomorrow, I'll see if I can work around that. There's probably a way to batch convert them all into jpgs.   There will be a slight loss in quality swapping to the lossy format, but it should still be good enough and might be small enough for me to upload.

 

Some of the source images aren't quite as beautiful as you think that they are.  Many have flaws that aren't noticeable at the thumbnail sizes in game but stand out when viewed at full resolution.   It's possible to touch-up the mangled parts, but for the most part I didn't since I knew that I was going to be using the thumbnail sized version.  Some still look great at full resolution, but others you'll recoil a bit at how mangled that their hands look.  Or maybe their eyes are a bit messed up or their groin isn't right.  It's pretty consistently good at drawing boobs though.

 

 

As for NSFW on stable diffusion:  stable diffusion is the program but the types of images that you can generate depend on what kind of model is loaded.  The model is the product of training the AI on a dataset of source images.  IIRC the current official model by the makers of stable diffusion has transitioned to one trained on SFW images, but others have trained models with NSFW image sets.

[Armchair]

@dogco

I've added a separate file that contains the full resolutions of the images in the *jpg format.  There's actually more pictures here than are in the mod, but rather than sort through the files I just stuffed them all into the zip.   Some of the pictures that aren't in the mod are ones that I rejected for one reason or another when I was making my final decisions on which ones to trim out of their backgrounds and resize into the .DDS files.  There's also a few where I tried to touch them up, so there's a few duplicates of the image in various states of me touching the image with inpainting.  In other cases there are some variants of some images where I experimented with regenerating the same image with assorted permutations of settings such as step count, denoise strength, cfg scale, etc.

[dogco]

@Armchair Highly appreciate that. Loving the images.

[Armchair]

I just saw the announcement for the new "Paragon" DLC and I'm crossing my fingers that the new additions such as the council system don't somehow break something with portrait mods.

[jkl7590554]

If the read-only check is not applied to the .mod file, there is a problem where the path item is constantly modified and cannot be applied when the launcher is executed. If mode recognition is applied but still not working, check the read-only item in the properties of the .mod.

[Dirheim]

Almost perfect, they would be perfect if they were futa. Neverless, I plan to run an empire with them

[Armchair]

My knee-jerk response to this new DLC is that the leadercap was a terrible terrible terrible (terrible) idea.  Especially with the nerf to sector governors and the fact that science ships need to be crewed to do anything noteworthy.   They've dramatically decreased quality of life for early game exploration for me, and have made the pain of losing a scientist to pure RNG because they jumped onto a space monster even worse than normal.  One of said scientists that might bump into a space monster is my empire's crown princess!!!

[Woitek]

On 5/10/2023 at 10:32 AM, Armchair said:

My knee-jerk response to this new DLC is that the leadercap was a terrible terrible terrible (terrible) idea.  Especially with the nerf to sector governors and the fact that science ships need to be crewed to do anything noteworthy.   They've dramatically decreased quality of life for early game exploration for me, and have made the pain of losing a scientist to pure RNG because they jumped onto a space monster even worse than normal.  One of said scientists that might bump into a space monster is my empire's crown princess!!!

Same design problem that 'First contact' had - they centered DLC around primitives, but decided not to fix glaring and ancient bugs with them - like bugged chances to nuke themselves or Player's empire so stupid, that allows multiple scientists with god complex to "defect".

All fixed by mods (especially new ruler cap), but it definitely needs to be dealt with in base game w/o mods tho

[Armchair]

22 hours ago, Woitek said:

Same design problem that 'First contact' had - they centered DLC around primitives, but decided not to fix glaring and ancient bugs with them - like bugged chances to nuke themselves or Player's empire so stupid, that allows multiple scientists with god complex to "defect".

All fixed by mods (especially new ruler cap), but it definitely needs to be dealt with in base game w/o mods tho

I've seen some discussion about it on the paradox forums.  I can see what the devs were going for with a desire to make our leaders more unique, but I think that the plain leader cap was a hamfisted way to accomplish that goal and that simply removing the cap isn't an ideal fix either.  The following points had been suggested as a more in-depth solution.

 

• segregate the leaders with distinct leader caps for each leader type so that we have something like a 3/3/3/3 split of leaders at the start of the game.  3 scientists, 3 governors, 3 admirals, 3 generals
• decouple scientists from science ships so that unmanned science ships can perform basic exploration and surveys.  Scientist leaders would only be necessary for anomalies, research projects, and archaeological dig sites.   Although there would still be some incentive to utilize a leader for survey work since they can often survey faster, have better odds of finding anomalies, and honestly it's a good way to farm scientist XP.
• The nerf to sector governors and introduction of planetary governors just doesn't mesh well with a push to make out leaders rarer
• Introduce more ways to scale leader capacity beyond the relatively limited options available from the existing techs/traditions/ascension perks.  Generals/Admirals could scale alongside our growing naval capacity, governors can scale alongside the number of colonies that we control, and scientists might scale alongside our research income or research lab count.

 

I think that mostly covers the problems, since the problems were a mix of exploration being excessively constrained by the low leader cap, weaker leaders like generals being unable to compete against more valuable leaders for leader capacity slots, not having enough leaders to get value out of governors, and an inability to scale leaders to big galaxies.

 

[Woitek]

2 hours ago, Armchair said:

I think that mostly covers the problems, since the problems were a mix of exploration being excessively constrained by the low leader cap, weaker leaders like generals being unable to compete against more valuable leaders for leader capacity slots, not having enough leaders to get value out of governors, and an inability to scale leaders to big galaxies.

 

This.
With a curently placed leader cap the only general that will ever enter my service is a renowned kidnapper one, cause kidnapper trait is "perfectly balanced"
All other generals can't compete with every other leader types (I mean, tbh I rarely even used them prior that update)

Tho not sure if paradox will even deal with leader cap situation - seeing how they addressed problems with First contact...

[Woitek]

Another "fun" part of dlc/update - leader retirement.
Just when you finally leveled that dude he just like - Sike! Gonna retire now, kthxbye

[Armchair]

5 hours ago, Woitek said:

Another "fun" part of dlc/update - leader retirement.
Just when you finally leveled that dude he just like - Sike! Gonna retire now, kthxbye

There might be bugs regarding retirement.  I saw a post from someone at paradox claiming that "retirement" was only ever supposed to happen as a part of a normal "death by old age" event and that it was just a random chance for them to retire instead of die of old age.   However I've seen people reporting that their leaders were just retiring despite heavy investment into life extension.

 

I haven't looked at the code, and my leaders haven't retired yet in my game.   However my current game is still in the early phases and I'm playing as necrophages, so leader life expectancy is above average.  I guess that I'll see what happens.

[lancarta]

Hi! You did a really great job at this, and I am having a new motivation towards playing stellaris!

 

Im trying to make myself something like this, but with human ears and a bit more diversity... but my only computer is an average laptop, so I started paying for NovelAI generation. However, I was not able to achieve the same results you have given... may I ask a few questions and maybe a plea for help?

 

1. The keyword setup.

I was able to get see-through, or other 'simple' forms of clothing, but I was not able to get the intricate and beautiful dresses your characters wear, nor the various poses or facial expressions. I'm very new to this, and I would appreciate it if you could share your secrets on the keyword setting.

 

2. The possibility of acheiving decent quality under 50 steps.

I paid for the highest tier on NovelAI, so I get unlimited generation for images  512x768 and 28 steps or below. I read somewhere that StableDiffusion had options for way more steps and other settings, and I was wondering if something even close to your work is possible with the limitations imposed by NovelAI.

 

3. Background transparency.

How did you make your .dds files? Im quite new to image processing yet as well, and Id like any tips or suggestions you would give to a beginner for making the backgrounds transparent.

 

In short, I was wondering if I could achieve something even remotely close to your work with a paid NovelAI subscription... My idea is to create something similar with more images and more human-looking. I really would love to get your help on my new project!

 

Thanks a lot for reading such a long request!