Nessa Posted January 18, 2017 Author Posted January 18, 2017 Yeah and then he got it from the other side as well and pretty much said the same thing. These days you're damned if you do... or don't.
Nessa Posted January 18, 2017 Author Posted January 18, 2017 OOOK, looks like they made good on that multi-color ship idea. The next question is going to be.... how to implement it for custom ships!
Princessity Posted January 18, 2017 Posted January 18, 2017 Ooooh! I wonder if the colour schemes are whole textures or just tints
Nessa Posted January 18, 2017 Author Posted January 18, 2017 The screenshot just shows the lights changing. So it's possible they just tint the glow map (which we already have... sort of... it's wonky.... ) Anyway, it shouldn't be too hard to do depending on how they set it up. If they had some real fun with it we could conceivably change the color tint on the hull itself. I guess we'll find out. On the plus side, I could finally have pink elves hell bent on eradication of all non-elf life without making a mod specifically for it.
Princessity Posted January 19, 2017 Posted January 19, 2017 OMGZ yes! Pink elves of doom need to be a thing! Also OMGZ have you seen the new dev diary yet? They elaborated on all the stuff Wiz was teasing and it looks like it's everything we expected and more! https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-57-species-rights.995302/ Also Right, that's all for today! Next week we'll be talking about something I know a lot of people have been wanting for some time: Orbital Habitats. Don't miss it. Squeeeeee!
Nessa Posted January 19, 2017 Author Posted January 19, 2017 Definitely liking everything!! (Though Alphamod is going to need some work. Glad that one isn't mine!!! ) Space habitats sound fun. Though right now I'm mainly interested in...... SHIP COLORS!! OK, so it's mainly because I'll be back doing some ships tonight.
Nessa Posted January 19, 2017 Author Posted January 19, 2017 Erm... some good and bad news. Good news is, play the Imperial March because.... Darth Vader's ship erm.. I mean elfy supercapital1 is about done. (What? It was the first shape I did for the elves and I'm just now finishing it off since the elfy style is well defined. ) Since I probably can't make up my mind, I may have a vote (of the 3 people that even follow my rantings haha) to decide which ship gets which slot. The other two supercapitals should hopefully be interesting as well. But the bad new.. some last minute work stuff just landed on my desk (figuratively) so I can't finish the textures tonight. Plus with the extra stuff I may be a tad busy for a couple days. So might be several days before screenies can show up. Oh yeah, and I got most of the Asari transport shaped. I think it might work out.
Nessa Posted January 19, 2017 Author Posted January 19, 2017 Oh and another thing that I keep forgetting to post about. Since I've finally managed to play a game again, I got the ... fanatic religion event again. And yes, the Crystallis compatibility does in fact change the existing vanilla "abandoned ship" mesh like I thought it might. Which means two things: Crystallis doesn't need to do this. The Advanced Science ship should be it's own asset that points to the vanilla GFX entry. Instead it points to the vanilla asset that is used in all kinds of events. Just make a new GFX asset specific to Crystallis and it would fix it totally. (You know, like NSC, Realistic Ships, and even AlphaMod do. ) I'll be removing Crystallis support from Elves/Asari in the future until such a point as this is either fixed, or Crystallis isn't in my usual mod list which means: I won't care. It could just be an oversight. The auxiliary sections all work just fine. (And are quite useful!) But then, if I switch over to NSC full time, I may not care about those anymore.
Princessity Posted January 19, 2017 Posted January 19, 2017 Awww! Last minute work stuff is a thing of evil, I hate when it sneaks up on me! But wheee! It sounds exciting, I wonder how big you can make elven ships before they start bumping into each other. The asari ones are really wide so I can't go too crazy but with elven ships being more on the long side I can already imagine how impressive you can make the flagship look!
Nessa Posted January 19, 2017 Author Posted January 19, 2017 Yeah long ships are a little easier with Stellaris' funky flying. So far I've been keeping the scale... roughly vanilla. My battleships are a tad bigger but: ELF. However, if I stick to what I've got so far for the Drow, they'll have the same problem the Asari do. Oh! And another thing! Depending on how good the ship tint thing is, I may have a lot less work for the Drow. Switching to purple tint isn't such a big deal if the game can do it on it's own. Which leads me to another thought...... What if, they set up ship tints like they did for races? Meaning, a whole new set of textures, and you pick that right at the ship style selection screen? Could have a -lot- of fun with a setup like that. Even if it's a bit more work than the game changing the color on it's own. Heh, OK I'm really hoping they took the easy way out with just new textures. If that's the case I can have: Gold Elven Ships Shiny Obisidian Elven Ships... with red OR purple glow.... And then imagine running into a Drow Bird of Prey that's... shiny GOLD! Hey, I can dream. They may just change the light tint. Which would mean a lot less texture work for me I guess.
Princessity Posted January 19, 2017 Posted January 19, 2017 I thought of that possibility buuuut I'm inclined to dismiss it. Strategy games, especially on a super-large scale like Stellaris generally try to minimise the amount of unique assets used on units. Usually customisation and visual distinction are implemented by using tint overlays and modular models. And that's because all unit assets have to be loaded in graphical memory at all times so the more unique texture sets or fancy models with dozens of unique animations each you have, the more memory you have to reserve. And Stellaris already has performance issues (mostly related to CPU but I bet they don't want to have memory problems on top of that) so it's a lot more efficient for them to use lightweight tint overlays rather than multiple versions of diffuse textures. I could still be wrong, they may actually go with texture sets for vanilla shipsets (they already do that for Fallen ships) but from my experience with Stellaris so far, following the Dev Diaries and occasionally asking Wiz stuff on Twitter, I feel they do actually care about efficiency, so it would be more valuable for them to do tints, which they can make an infinite number of for both existing and future ships and shipsets, rather than only have a couple of pre-set textures for each which would then make the process of creating new art assets for DLC take longer.
Nessa Posted January 19, 2017 Author Posted January 19, 2017 Stellaris has performance issues? You know, just thinking about this has made me realise something. I think one of things I like most about Stellaris (or CK2) is simply: little to no crashing. I guess when you've been overly focused on Bethsoft stuff it's easy to forget some games exist with almost no crashing. Well, if they do go with textures, all I'd have to change are the diffuse textures. The normals and specular all stay the same. But... while it's easier from a ... developing standpoint to just take the texture method... a tint is more versatile. Especially if the player can choose the tint. I mean, black Drow ships with pink lights that want to eat everyone else? No problem! I'm loving the eating idea by the way. HAHAHA! I can see it now, ooo talking mushroom refugees! FREE FOOD! Now if I could only get some talking lettuce, ah there's one!!
Princessity Posted January 19, 2017 Posted January 19, 2017 On its own, it's very hard to trigger Stellaris' performance issues. A combination of Huge galaxy, 30+ empires and superlategame will do it, but otherwise it runs quite well. You can get the CPU lag as early as midgame if you run a lot of mods, especially ones that have constantly running events in the background. There's a youtuber doing a playthrough with the Asari Civ and he has like 10 trillion mods installed on a map with 3000 systems or something ridiculous like that. By the current episode, he is experiencing it all the time XD But as I said, the only performance issues I've seen Stellaris run into so far have been down to CPU - game occasionally pauses on its own so throttled calculations can catch up, and then it resumes and everything's back to normal. It's never crashed or even frozen on me, which yah, as someone who plays Bethesda games is impressive to me XD Actually most of the issues with Bethesda games are caused by their terrible memory management that must have been coded by someone who didn't know they were making an open world game. Stellaris probably isn't going to have that for several expansions yet, and unlike Skyrim, it's a PC game optimised for 64 bit from the get go.
Nessa Posted January 20, 2017 Author Posted January 20, 2017 Oh that's right, I do remember one time where it got really laggy. It was with the old Drow fallens. They had something like 600 of their smaller ships. So if I was in a system with those it got a little skippy. I have had Stellaris crash but it's been very rare and the autosaves meant I didn't lose much at all. And actually, the crashes I think were way back in one of the earliest versions. These days, nothing. Erm... yeah. Bethsoft doesn't really know what it's doing. ... Ever. But their stuff is modable like crazy which is probably what normally attracts me to it. (Though.. not FO4 for some reason. Played it for like 3 minutes and ... it's not even installed now. Meanwhile I'll definitely be doing more FONV work. ) You know, I thought I read somewhere that civs weren't going to be stupid about purging if it happens to be a civ that has killed ... like... everyone? In my current game, some psycho talking shrooms somehow got tough and have been purging (probably eating ) everybody anytime they conquer someone. They get to my borders, wipe out a neighbor of mine (cute happy starfish... ) and I decided enough is enough. I wipe out half their empire and now everybody hates me!? Pathetic. I guess I'll just have to conquer all the various stupid Elf civs directly. Clearly they're run by idiots.
Princessity Posted January 20, 2017 Posted January 20, 2017 I'm pretty sure the patch that added that was referring to threat generated by war declarations against meanies, not purging them XD Like it makes sense. Destroying their military and ousting their goverment so they can't hurt anyone is a good thing for everyone. But I think other empires are still perfectly justified objecting to you slaughtering the civilian population on the planets you conquered. I mean at that point you're no better than the fanatical purifiers you blew up XD
Nessa Posted January 20, 2017 Author Posted January 20, 2017 Except I just saved everybody plus... why in the world are the other purgers upset at me? I thought they -like- purging? Haha! Turns out it was a good thing after all. The talking shrooms were so nasty they got into another war with -everyone- else later... and won. Then I just cleaned up the ungrateful idiots and made a United Elfy Empire. Now there's nobody left to whine about zonking talking shrooms. Mwahahahaha! Oh, about ships. OK... I know I'll probably move over to NSC once everybody is all done but....... getting annoyed at only one battleship. Gets boring. Sooo... I'm going to use the supercarrier (I think) design for NSC and place that in the carrier section for vanilla. I believe that is the section they get rid of for battleships in NSC, so I can still have compatibility with that and not have carriers show up twice.
Nessa Posted January 20, 2017 Author Posted January 20, 2017 Oh yeah... another funny thing. The fallens. TOTALLY fine with me taking out talking shrooms!!
Nessa Posted January 20, 2017 Author Posted January 20, 2017 Hahaha! I know right? That's why I love playing the Drow sometimes. Brings out my inner *****. I can be a good girl when I play elves. Mostly. Oh funny thing in my latest game too, I get to the other side of the galaxy (or rather tiny cluster because only 1000 stars is no galaxy.... ) and what do I find but... Asari and Other Elves in some kind of federation with freaking 50k fleets flying around. What. The.... Oh well, at least they didn't know about me wiping out the talking shrooms. And then! For the first time ever, the AI rebellion happened! Except AI wasn't so intelligent. Because it happened to the Ascari... and... they wiped them out before I even got there. Guess I'll have to wait for -another- game for that one.
Princessity Posted January 20, 2017 Posted January 20, 2017 I have NEVER seen the AI rebellion! In like 75% of my games I get Unbidden ._.
Nessa Posted January 20, 2017 Author Posted January 20, 2017 All I know is you get a cute little toaster popping up telling you that they're coming after you once they kill off their creators. Only... their creators were Ascari, who are nasty. So the toasters all got toasted. Also... are the Drow fallens a bit on the weak side now? I may have went too far in nerfing them. I'm using this new galaxy mod (Galaxies Unlimited) that lets you have more than 4 fallens. I've only played 2 games but the Drow in both were the weakest among the fallens. May need to do some tweaking.
Princessity Posted January 20, 2017 Posted January 20, 2017 Can't you just set them up like the other FEs? I didn't run into them in my current game but the regular Fallen Xenophobes that popped up next to me have been a handful. Apparently there used to be another empire on the other side of them because some of the habitable planets have buildings on them so I assume someone settled too close XD I just hope they don't Awaken in this game, if they do I'll probably have to become their vassal which would put a bit of a hamper on my (mostly peaceful) expansion plans.
Nessa Posted January 20, 2017 Author Posted January 20, 2017 Well I did, but I may have accidentally nerfed the percentages a bit. Normal fallens have a percentage chance of having more fleets. Maybe I screwed up on that part. Also I could swear I had it set that they'd -always- have a titan. But no titan in both games. Oh yeah, another wonky thing. I've got Drow on a planet with no special features.... shedding clothes. Might be an Alphamod thing though. Anybody else ever run into that?
Princessity Posted January 20, 2017 Posted January 20, 2017 Nopes, not using any Alpha mods, but I also haven't played Drow in a loooong while, the elves and their shippies are too fun! Maybe it's one of the dreaded curly brackets in your development version? ^^
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