Star Control®

Origins

By

Brad Wardell
Executive Producer

December 2016

[NON-DISCLOSURE IN EFFECT]

HO HO HO
Greetings!

The team has reached close to its maximize size. This is good in terms of progress but it also means that
coordinating resources is more of a challenge.

For those of you interested in how game development works, broadly speaking development goes
through a number of phases (depending on the studio).

 Phase 1: Design
 Phase 2: Pre-production
 Phase 3: Protyping
 Phase 4: Production
 Phase 5: Full Production
 Phase 6: Iteration
 Phase 7: Code Locking
 Phase 8: Testing

Now that we’ve reached Phase 5, there is a lot less to show you in terms of pretty pictures and such
because it’s about implementation.

The phase we look forward to working with the Founders is in the ITERATION phase.

Phase 5 also means that we discover mistakes that were made during early production. In the case of
this project, it’s tools.

Let’s get right into that.

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 Status Report
Stardock was closed a decent chunk of December so there’s not a huge amount of progress from last
month. But there has been a lot of progress from November which I wasn’t able to get into due to being
just too busy to write up a decent journal entry.

Planet Design work

The planet exploration is a feature I talk a lot about because it is, by far, the biggest new feature in the
game.

The story, the characters, the exploration, Super Melee are all more important than planet exploration.
But Planet exploration is the most expensive feature and the feature that we hope people will agree
helps demonstrate that we didn’t just take Star Control 2 and reskin it either.

However…

There’s no world editor tool. If you think the map design tools in various games you’ve played are
rough, we have zilch, nada, nothing for creating worlds. They’re procedurally generated right now
which might sound good to some but as everyone this year came to understand, procedurally generated
worlds can be pretty bland. You really need a game designer in there to help make these worlds fun
and interesting to explore.

…and there’s no tool to do that.

So that is a major focus of our work right now, designing and creating a tool to allow the game designer
to create custom worlds.

Hyperspace
Because it’s critical that Star Control: Origins be released in a state far beyond anything we’ve released
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before, the iteration phase is critical.

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 Normally, we leave about 60 days of iteration. That’s when the game is basically done besides bug fixes
and balance and we just play it. In the case of Star Control, it’s going to be more like 120 days.

First, it’s because the story is got to resonate. Second, because the original cast of aliens isn’t in this
game, there will be no quarter given to us if the game is flawed. There will be no benefit of the doubt.

This is the essence of the Founders program. We need you to pound on us privately so that we can fix
things before they are public.

The hyperspace feature is the missing ingredient right now between getting to some early early
iteration.

Pacing, intuitiveness, frustration potential vs. open universe these are all things we have to balance

Memory Consumption
Right now, the game is using a lot more memory than we want. This is mostly because the art is coming
in so fast that we haven’t had a chance to optimize it. Star Control, however, has a lot of art.
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 Figure 1: Textures and compression

Performance
I have found that it is always better to continuously optimize than to wait until later. Doing so makes a
lot of tradeoffs visible much earlier on.

Figure 2: Star Control uses the Nitrous engine which means it can be very multithreaded. But if you look, some CPU cores are
over-used.

If you look at the figure above, you can see that one of our most costly calls is just loading up all those
assets.

One of the tougher challenges will be: How much stuff? Too much stuff means it’ll take forever to load
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the game and use a ton of memory. Not enough stuff means we either have lower graphics quality or
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less variety.
 Ship Design
One area of the game revolves around ship design.

Figure 3: Concept of the ship design screen

The ship design is one of those areas we had to make a lot of challenging design choices.

On the one hand, it would have been totally cool if the ship design was completely free-form ala GalCiv
III. On the other hand, it could be a severe headache balancing and debugging all the weird designs
people might come up with.

Thus, we settled on an Earthling design that can have multiple customization wheels on it.

Early on, you will need to make use of your allies to help you fight enemies off because, frankly,
Earthling tech starts off as pretty terrible.

But over time, you will find Precursor relics as well as meet various alien traders who will happily trade
you a new ship component for the right price.

When you get (or buy) a new component, you can add it to your ship. This would include new weapons,
defenses, special abilities, crew pods, sensors, engines, fuel tanks, etc.

FOUNDER TOPIC:

Feel free to come up with and name some suggested components that you’d like to see on your shop.

How many world environments are needed?

As I write this, we have three environments more or less in:

1. Desert. You’ve seen this in the video. Obviously the furthest along.
2. Moon. I’m not sure if we’ve shown this but it’s pretty much what you’d expect.
3. Crystaline. This is still pretty early on.

In addition to this we have:

4. Volcanic
5. Acid
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6. Rainbow
 However, here is the trick:

These environments use a ton of memory. A TON. The obvious answer is to load and unload them.
Then you are choosing how much detail you want to have because if you have a lot of detail, the load
times become problematic.

The team would really like there to be 9. I am thinking we’ll only get to 6.
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 Figure 4: This concept art shows how far we coudl go with our planets but we are constantly battling memory and performance
limitations (and budget).

Figure 5: Sorry water world. You'll have to wait until an expansion

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 Figure 6: Sorry forest world.

So we have ideas for lots more. But there’s only time for 6 and we have to pick them based on
gameplay.

Thus:

Easy worlds:

1. Desert
2. Barren (Earth’s moon style)

Medium:

1. Crystaline

Hard:

1. Acid
2. Volcanic

Rainbow:

1. (Well, Rainbow)
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 Figure 7: Volcanic concept
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 Figure 8: The planets started out a lot bigger in thought. But the amount of video memory they'd require (if we wanted to have
multiple planets) were too big.

Figure 9: Rainbow world

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 Super Melee
We’ve been playing Super-Melee for awhile and as you know, there’s been some debate on how much
we should change from the classic series.

As recently as this October a player would control 1 ship and the AI control two other ships for battles
on 3. The problem was that this wasn’t fun because if the AI was poor, it was super frustrating and if the
AI was good the player was largely a non-entity in the battle.

Figure 10: Super Melee when it was you with an AI partner. Not as fun as it might sound.
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 Figure 11: The ships in game. We await your feedback

So at this point, we’re back to 1 on 1 battles with the ships wrapping when they hit the end of the star
system. Unfortunately, this has cost us quite a bit of time.

It’s good to take some design chances as long as there is time to go back and undo them. I’m glad the
team decided to try and see what Super Melee would play like if it were a kind of a MOBA. But
ultimately, there are too many points of failure. I wouldn’t mind – after release – us adding a MOBA
style mode but Super Melee should stay Super Melee.

Getting Super Melee to you

In December we started trying to package Super Melee up so that we could get it to a group of 500
Founders to start playing. It didn’t go well.

Here were the things we quickly ran into as it started to go to QA:

1. Asset conflagration. The ships in Super Melee are tied to their stories. Deeply tied. It’s not a
huge issue but it will require some time to decouple this.
2. It’s not fun enough. What made Super Melee so good historically is that it really did nicely on
the physics. The problem we ran into is that too many of the ships lack…heft. We’re using
Bullet (a physics library) but the ships need to have more differentiated mass. There’s no point
in sending Super Melee out to the founders while we still find it needing more baking time.

I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to get something more polished by GDC. That’s the team’s deadline to
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have something that can be shown to partners.

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 Cidermill
The first game that we shipped using Oxide’s Nitrous engine was Ashes of the Singularity.

After Ashes shipped, Stardock took over development so that Oxide could work on a secret VR project
(you’ll see it soon). The result became Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation.

But as good as Nitrous is, it’s a very new engine. There’s a lot of boring functionality that isn’t in there
and that really becomes clear when you try to do mods to Ashes. It’s very labor intensive to do
anything.

By contrast, Sorcerer King: Rivals, uses Kumquat and has a host of tools for modding (not that anyone is
modding it..cough cough). But we have a pretty solid vision of what we want modding in Star Control to
look like.

Figure 12: Star Control main menu with Cider Mill options on the right

Thus, we have begun to port the best pieces of our Kumquat engine over to Nitrous. They’re not
exciting bits but they are powerful. File Management, Modding management, UI features, tools and
more tools. This new set of APIs are called Cider and the tools we’re making are called Cidermill.

Specifically:

1. Model Viewer - Load FBX models and save them as OX Models

2. Animation tools – Preview animations and timelines
3. Audio tools – add and manipulate timelines
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4. Particle editor and viewer – Manage and create new particles for weapons, etc.
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5. UI Designer – Modify or create new screens

 6. Asset Manager – Manage all the assets in a Cider game
7. DDS viewer – Load up and view the new DDS formats that aren’t supported by any Photoshop
plugins (grr!)

Struggles
I’m going to p resume that part of the reason you joined the Founder’s program is because you wanted
to see how game development works on the inside. No marketing people. No spin.

The challenge with Star Control is the content.

Right now, there’s 15GB of content. These aren’t videos. They’re not maps. Other than the TIF files
temporarily being used for the planet surface textures, they’re models, effects, animations, etc.

If this were a traditional game, you’d load all this stuff up at the start. But obviously, you can’t do that
here.

First, it would take too long for the game to start up (remember, it’s not just loading the stuff, you have
to parse the data structures to get to it) if we loaded everything. Secondly, it would consume far too
much memory.

So as unexciting at it is, someone has to build systems that properly handle all these assets in a way that
doesn’t slow down the game and doesn’t kill our hardware requirements.

If we do everything just right, nobody will notice we did anything at all. That’s the goal. But if you’re
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wondering why no one has tried to make a modern Star Control style game, this is why. There’s a lot of
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 stuff in a modern PC game and because the game has so many different experiences within it, your
underlying architecture has to be just right.
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 Founder Feedback

Star Control 2 had around 500 star systems. We are looking at around 700. But our tools let us create
sectors as big as we want in any style:
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 3D sector. We can do these but have decided not to. They don’t’ make good posters. 

But modders can do whatever they want.

Lots of stars (10,000 stars). Not fun to play but pretty crazy.
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 Leaving your star system and going into Hyperspace

We’ve argued a lot on the camera angle. It’s free-form but the battle is over the default. This angle lost.
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Testing out the AI trying to go after the player

 Figure 13: The Earthling Commander continue3s to be a challenge. We want her to be authoritive but attractive. It's still in flux.
She needs to be distinctive enough also that people might want to cos-play her.

Conclusions
Well that’s all for this month. Things are moving along, albeit, slower than I’d like them to. We look
forward to your feedback and thoughts.

-brad
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