by Eladrin Hello everyone! Were still hard at work getting the features weve been describing into the game, but this week were giving you a bit of a progress update, and Ill be giving my thoughts on what shape theyll be in when we begin the Open Beta. As with everything over the past couple of months, all of this is still subject to change. Weve successfully gotten past the critical milestone of the game is no longer completely broken, and things are starting to come together very nicely.

DD #367: Precursor Selection, Databank, Species Modification, and Ship Designer

The first three are fully functional and will be in the Open Beta. The Databank still has some placeholder graphics on some buttons, and were planning on adding more entries, but its good enough for the Open Beta.
The work for the Ship Designer changes was done in the Q2 DLC branch to support that release, and while it is functional it will not be in the Open Beta (but will be in the final release).

DD #368: Pacing Adjustments, Galaxy Generation, Leader Traits, Events/Messages/Notifications, Empire Focuses and the Timeline, Hard Reset, and Achievements

Wow, we covered a lot in that dev diary. All of these are functional, but like the Ship Designer, Hard Reset is in a different branch and will not be present in the Open Beta (but will be in the final release). The Timeline shows a number of important milestones, and is generally functional. Theres still some polish to be done here, but I feel like its in a good enough state for the Open Beta.
Many of the basic Focus Tasks are in too, along with some of the progression rewards for completing them. Weve added a couple of new Technologies to use as awards, such as Existential Campaigns, a tier 5 Society Tech. Still to-do are Tasks for nonstandard gamestyles, and we havent moved things like Form Federation out of the Diplomatic Traditions yet. Currently almost all of the Focuses relate to the base game only, but its good enough for now. We will have more in the actual 4.0 release. Achievements no longer require Ironman, but the use of any debug commands disables them for that run. We havent updated them to the new systems yet though, so getting things like 100 pops on a planet is trivially easy.

Well that was easy.

DD #369: Trade and Logistics, Mammalian Portraits

Most, but not all, of the features described in dev diary #369 are in a functional state. Trade is a normal resource that is shown in the top bar. Theres Logistical upkeep on ships and for local planetary deficits, and it has replaced energy as the market resource.
We have not yet completed the entire trade economy for Gestalts, but they will have some baseline generation to handle this from their Maintenance Drones for the Open Beta. Our mammalian friends are done, but like Hard Reset, are in their own development branch and will not be present in the Open Beta.

DD #370: Pop Groups and Workforce, Colonization, and Civilians

This is the core of what were interested in testing during the Open Beta. Pops have been converted to using the new Pop Group system, and most aspects of Workforce are functional. Were still going through the various jobs and updating them, and some of the weirder stuff in Stellaris (like, for example, Permanent Unemployment) hasnt been worked on yet. Broken Shackles is hilariously broken right now. (Its in the name, after all.) Multispecies pop growth is working, but we havent made Xenocompatibility pool different species together yet.
Simultaneous pop growth! Your homeworld starts with an extra 2000 pops, most of whom start as Civilians. This number is subject to change based on our internal playtesting and the Open Beta.

DD #371: Planet UI & Zones, Surface UI, Ecumenopoli, and Habitats

This is the other big part were still working on. The backend for the new mechanics is mostly complete, but were still doing the design side implementation of the new jobs, zones, and buildings. The actual surface UI is still very much a work in progress - its getting to a functional state, but isnt near the polish level of the designs you saw in the dev diary. Its likely to be part of the way there (but not complete) at the start of the Open Beta. Special planet types like Habitats and Ecumenopoli are unlikely to be fully implemented for at least the first part of the Open Beta. We have completed tying Habitat maximum development directly to the sizes of the deposits in the system, but havent had a chance to recreate their districts or zones using the new systems yet.

Performance

In a couple of threads, I mentioned that were not yet taking full advantage of some of the new model's performance benefits. Many things are still being calculated daily rather than monthly and are still largely single-threaded. We plan to keep it that way for the first couple of patches of the Open Beta because it will make it significantly easier for us to spot and fix any major issues that crop up. As a reminder, the 3.11 Technology Open Beta found an issue like that with the Breakthrough Technologies, and finding these sorts of fundamental problems is my primary desire for the Open Beta. The Stellaris community is pretty exceptional at providing general feedback with the information provided by dev diaries, but a week of Open Beta testing will hammer the systems harder than we could do with months of internal testing.

So WHEN is it? Whats Next?

I cant quite tell you that right now. This Friday, well be evaluating the status of our current build, and Ill try to provide a possible timeline for sometime next week. Until then, its back to the code mines for us! See you next week!

[ 2025-03-06 12:00:21 CET ] [ Original post ]