Hello everyone!

We are rapidly approaching the release of Necroids, the next species pack coming for Stellaris. Yesterday we announced that Necroids will be released next week on Thursday the 29th of October.

Necroids will be released together with the 2.8 ‘Butler’ Update. As we promised next week, here's the full list of the patch notes.


* Added a new Necroid pre-scripted Empire.
* Added a new Phenotype with 16 new portraits (15 normal + 1 robot) of spooky scary Jeffoids Necroids.
* Added a new City Set and room backdrop for Necroids.
* Added a new dark and eerie Ship set.
* Added a new Advisor Voice.
* Added three new Civics: Death Cult, Reanimated Armies and Memorialist.
* Added Necrophage, a new Origin.

* Added new Gestalt Governor Leader Traits: Amplifier and Mindfulness - both increase Administrative Capacity in relevant Pop Jobs.
* Systems spawned during the game (e.g. precursor ones) will now usually have two hyperlanes instead of one.
* Added a new experimental DirectX11 support launch command (“-dx11”).

* Gestalt empires can no longer build the Hyperlane Registrar starbase building as they have no use for it.
* The Oracle's admin bonus now grants +10% more admin cap instead of just +20.
* Observation Post Indoctrination events now have a 540 day cooldown before they can fire again.
* Terraforming Candidate is now a bit more common in the early game.
* Terminal Orbit anomaly's reward has been buffed slightly.


* Greatly improved startup and load times.
* Optimised the refugees system to perform fewer duplicate checks.
* Fixed an OOS related to armies created from Pops.
* Fixed an OOS happening if someone is hotjoining while a country is marked for destruction.
* Fixed an OOS with planet modifiers related to species crossbreeding.
* Fixed an OOS with Federation Fleet Capacity.
* Fixed a source of false positive OOS.
* Fixed a CTD when transferring a save file during hotjoin.
* Fixed a CTD that might happen when the outliner is updating certain elements when borders are updating.
* Fixed a CTD when planets are removed and have active construction.
* Fix CTD in Colonize window after dismantling shipyard.
* Disabled AlienFX/LightFX since it has been reported to have issues and might cause a CTD/freeze when starting the game (at 30% loading).
* Added a "hardoos" option that adds extra checksums to make it easier to catch causes for OOS.
* Fixed an OOS when you find a precursor civ. event and an observer is present at game start
* Tick time optimization (more efficient parallelisation (game go vroom vroom)).

* Fixed some Settings UIs having overrunning text in some non-english languages.
* Fixed overlapping text in Empire Modifiers tab in some non-english languages.
* The Curators' "goodbye" option is now always placed at the bottom of the option list.
* Envoys can't be reassigned to the same location.
* You can now only resettle your primary species away from planets with culture shock.


* The AI is more willing to lower federation centralization if they are the federation president. They now care if Cohesion and Monthly Cohesion are negative.
* Crisis AI will now be more likely to seek honorable alternatives to doomstacks (i.e. it will split its fleet up a bit more).
* AI will now refill starbase modules and buildings if they are destroyed.
* AI now handles FTL inhibitors better, new fleets will now try to assign each fleet to the closest most valuable objective.
* AI should now handle Colossi correctly again. Fear will keep the local systems in line.
* AI empires with the Void Dwellers origin are now more likely to choose the Voidborne ascension perk.
* AI in Mercantile stance is now less likely to close borders.
* AI now builds branch offices where it can rather than trying again and again to go on a world where there's already a branch office.
* Fleet AI should not abort orders for defensive fleets like merging.
* Fixed Fleet AI getting stuck in a regroup loop if some fleets cannot reach the system for regrouping.
* Make sure AI fleets stop when issued orders to merge.


* You can now use [ ] localisation commands in building descriptions.
* Added trigger num_assigned_jobs = { job = <key>/unemployed value > 2 }.
* Added is_ambient_object_type trigger.
* It is now possible to use scope variables in the create_message effect.
* ideal_planet_class trigger now works in pop and species scope, and also accepts a planet scope as the right hand side argument.
* Added remove_starbase_building and remove_starbase_module effects.
* Added change_colony_foundation_date = <number of days> effect.
* Trigger has_available_jobs now works.
* Added set_ship_prefix effect for country scope.
* Added set_adjective effect for country scope.
* change_government now has a cooldown = yes/no toggle (default is yes).
* Added effect set_government_cooldown = integer/default/no.
* added the missing settings to the get_galaxy_setup_value effect.
** Here's the new, up to date, list:
*** num_empires, num_advanced_empires, num_fallen_empires, num_marauder_empires, mid_game_year, end_game_year, victory_year, num_guaranteed_colonies, num_gateways, num_wormhole_pairs, num_hyperlanes, habitable_worlds_scale, primitive_worlds_scale, crisis_strength_scale, tech_costs_scale.
* Added set_origin effect, but note, it'll usually not be useful to use this as effects executed during galaxy generation will not be rerun.
* last_created_system now works.
* Added defines SPAWN_SYSTEM_BUFFER_DISTANCE and SPAWN_SYSTEM_ATTEMPTS, in case you want to try funky things with the spawn_system effect.
* set_location now works on juggernauts.
* Added on_colony_10_year_pulse on_action
* any_ambient_object and any_system_ambient_object scopes now no longer cause false positives in the error log.
* on_colony_5_year_pulse now works on the capital too.
* abort_trigger, on_fail and on_cancel in special projects now all use the same scopes.


* Fixed so that Zroni Precursor Arc Sites cannot be "hijacked" by another Empire.
* Multiple Curator Scientist cannot be purchased any longer.
* Added checks to see if the host has the appropriate DLCs for the slave market-oriented Resolutions.
* Added missing Loc when proposal for forming Federations failed.
* Fixed leviathans.1018 tooltip not showing actual results of the event.
* The UNE now spawns as intended when playing as the Commonwealth of Man.
* Fixed missing localisation in event “The Oracle”.
* Slave Market Resolutions are now properly locked without Megacorp DLC.
* Restoring megastructures will now only cause the rubble from their ruined variants to be cleared, rather than all ambient objects in the system (including system effects e.g. nebulas...)
* Droids can now take Colonist jobs.
* Subjects can no longer create vassals.
* Pox Bombardment no longer kills machine units.
* Fixed a case where the Slave Riots event could happen twice on the same day.
* Fixed being able to build from (mega) shipyards that are not owned.
* Added missing localisation keys for resolution_passed_diplomatic_weight and resolution_failed_diplomatic_weight empire modifiers.
* Hid Zroni and Shoulders of Giants arc sites from countries ineligible for completing them (thus hiding unlocalised anti-stealing flags).
* Added missing descriptions to Evermore planetary modifiers.
* The AI attitude of country A to B now depends on A's opinion of B rather than B's of A. This fixes Fallen Empires never declaring war.
* Surveyor relic can no longer find new resource deposits on Ring Worlds or Habitats.
* The Floating Value event text no longer mixes up the planet and ship names.
* Corrected Russian translation of Galactic Contender ascension perk.
* Fixed minor localization issue in the Senate Floor tutorial window.
* Changes to a progress-tracking variable in Joint Operation: Genius Caeli are now hidden from the arc site panel.
* Fixed various typos and duplications in the species name files.
* A Quiet Stroll event now has different text for Synthetic empires.
* Tree of Life deposits are now properly cleared when the planet changes owner.
* Shielded Planet special projects now use the correct planet name.
* Removed duplications in Tiyanki ship names.
* System graphical effects are now removed when the final Contingency planet is destroyed.
* VLUUR's space storm will no longer manifest in nebula systems.
* Fixed minor tooltip issue in Atomic Countdown event.
* Shortened and rewrote overlapping Vault of Acquisitions technology description.
* Fixed completed construction items for reinforcements not being removed properly from the fleet manager.
* Fixed research costs for Special Projects "Investigate the Loop Temple" and "Study the Messenger connection".
* The correct event description should now always be shown in “Finding the Truth”.
* Adjusted the tooltips for the Improve and Harm Relations diplomatic actions.
* Observation Posts are now cleared if all primitives have been killed by orbital bombardment.
* Removed duplicate entry in Alpha Hub technology.
* Mining Drones no longer display the Rare Crystal icon in the Jobs interface.
* Changed Miner and Technician building icons to be more consistent with other jobs.
* Fixed issue where some Spiritualist responses weren't always displayed in first contact situations.
* Removed duplicate cohesion effect from tooltip in federation fleet contribution laws.
* Fixed transparency on room backgrounds from Federations.
* Gestalts can no longer get the debris_gasgiant_category_temp anomaly at all - which is as it should be.
* Unity should now always spawn as a continental planet when playing the UNE.
* Fixed a bug where Star-Crossed Lovers could take refuge in the Mutaagan Trading Guild.
* Gestalts that conquer a regular empire's starbase will no longer have Trading Hubs and Offworld Trading Companies there.
* Fixed some cases of species growing on planets disappearing and reappearing every other month.
* Fixed Species rights showing as in breach of galactic law when they’re not.
* You can no longer get random tomb world events on tomb worlds created through armageddon bombardment and other similar causes. Also, you can now only get each of them once.
* Event Primordial Soup no longer wrongly assumes that Terminator machines think organic life worthy of interest.
* Space fauna resolutions can no longer be proposed if they're already active.
* Made sure clearing the blocker creates the correct species.
* Added in breach icons and warnings in confirm dialog for policies that would cause breach of galactic law.
* Fixed a case where the sector AI would spam luxury residences to deal with low amenities if there aren't workers available to work as Entertainers.
* Fixed a bug where special projects to investigate space fauna would sometimes lose the targets they were meant to investigate, become "Investigate <blank>", and do nothing on completion.
* Fixed a bug where the project to investigate Enclaves would talk about the system rather than the country.
* Having comms established with you by enclaves no longer gives you influence.
* The wrecked caravan ship ambient object is now removed by completing the project to research it.
* Enslaving the species in the Underground Vault now shows the correct species will be enslaved.
* Fixed some issues with special resources in the Hive Confluence building.
* Added missing Army Names if the name list is picked for a Machine Intelligence empire.
* Scions can now control their border access.
* Fixed cases where sometimes the Galactic Market would take a while to allow buying and selling of special resources.
* Gaia Worlds may no longer spawn with the 'poor quality minerals' planet modifier.
* If you manage to create a species that is both psionic or cybernetic and erudite, the resulting leaders will now get both the cybernetic/psionic and the erudite traits.
* Using modify_species to change the species of a country will now also target pops on colony ships. This fixes various gene modifications through events excluding colony ships.
* Pops are now more likely to be maintenance drones if the planet lacks amenities.
* Fixed some spaghetti script in the First Contact for Fallen Empires event, closing several loopholes where you could see Fallen Empires without them establishing contact with you.
* Fixed a case where the event for Fallen Empires requesting the long-dead species you kept in stasis would fire twice.
* Rewards for completing the Technosphere chain now take into account Gestalts (who cannot get Sapient AI tech).
* Nu-Baol Life-Seeding now no longer removes Baol Homeworld planetary features.
* Upgraded versions of planet-unique buildings now correctly specify that their number is capped per planet and keep their special background frame.
* Fixed flags not being set correctly on building upgrades (which led to AI spamming upgrades it shouldn't have).
* Fixed number of pacts not being visible in diplomacy windows at game start, as well as a potential OOS.
* Fixed a case where Awakened Marauders would conquer a planet with less than 5 pops, kill all those pops and then spawn 12 pops on the planet (which, having been rendered uninhabited, no longer counts as a colony).
* Fixed the tooltip for utterly failing the Enigmatic Cache uplift chain.
* It is now possible for your ruler to be randomly given the trait Charismatic during their rule.
* Events leading up to the spawning of a Relic Rails dig site may no longer fire multiple times.
* Made sure that the relevant Fallen Empires actually exist in order for the Resolutions to be available.
* Various fixes to the Golden Rule challenge for federation leadership, particularly addressing scenarios in which the event may not fire at the end of a presidential term.
* Do not ping pong fleet groups that are on mission but the leader has jumped to the next system.
* The tooltip for purchasing L-Gate insights from Curator Orders is now slightly more precise about the time it'll take them to identify each new clue.
* Resolved late-game pirate fleets losing their scripted event targets.
* The Yuhtaan system's star and planets are now correctly called "Yuhtaan" rather than "Yuthaan".
* Fixed a stray "?" in the Blue Lotus Project event
* The governor offered by the Nuumistic Order is now of the correct species
* Opening the Alien Box will now change your dominant species rather than just modifying your pops and leaders. It will also now modify subspecies of the main species.
* Forced a trait upon the event-created species that stops them from counting as Bio-Trophies.
* Tooltips in the diplomacy screen regarding the other empire's federation is now more consistent.
* Machine empires with the Resource Consolidation origin can now correctly adopt the Rogue Servitor civic when GC Resolution "A Defined Purpose" is passed (though they will be reset to the default origin in the process)
* Fixed some cases where empires would be created during the game with random and inappropriate origins e.g. Doomsday. create_country now creates countries with Prosperous Unification by default.
* Implemented an option trigger to stop an unnecessary/irrational option in an event.
* Players will no longer receive alerts about war goals they cannot set anymore.
* Fixed a case where marauder diadochi could spawn without any planets, breaking various things.
* Fixed issues with space monsters sometimes being uncontactable.
* Event experience reward is now assigned to the correct leader (scientist).
* Systems spawned during the game e.g. precursor systems will now no longer spawn on top of other systems unless there really is no space for them elsewhere.
* Fixed cases where you'd get refugees from a country you had no communications with.
* Stopped certain arc sites from disappearing from the situation log after completion.
* Fixed possible error with event-spawned Wormhole.
* In the subterranean nation chain, if you get an invasion by them after attempting a preemptive strike, the invasion will now work.
* Event "God of Death" no longer has an eyeball-popping tooltip.
* Fixed confusing tooltip mentioning rivaling members when inviting to federation.
* The conclusion to the Rage Virus event chain will no longer give invalid technologies for Gestalts
* Fixed a case where multiple arc sites would spawn on one colony; also, the Sentinels will no longer spawn as soon as you fulfill the conditions, but are now a bit more random.
* New auto-generated ship designs now have auto-upgrade checked by default
* Fortress proclamation actually increases defense build speed now.
* Fixed misspelled VO ID.

In addition to what you have seen in the patch notes, we have also been working on some stuff that was deemed too risky, or didn’t finish in time, for it to be released together with 2.8. We intend to deploy some of these changes together with a beta patch sometime in the near future.

We also have some other larger changes that will not be released until the next big update, but we will start talking about some of those changes very soon.

Hello everyone!

My name is Fredrik Toll, and I am the Art Director for Stellaris. For this week's dev diary, we will have a look at how we develop our characters included in the Necroids Species Pack.

Much like when we design the ships, we start out with reference gathering, finding anything that inspires us visually. We gather everything we can find that fits roughly within the theme. In this case it was everything from Venetian masks, Egyptian mummies, Mexican makeup from Día de Muertos, wraiths, ascended energy beings, vampires, dark elves, and of course skulls. We are looking to find as many different ideas as possible.
Once we feel we have enough, we look at what we have, discuss them and put them in clusters, things that relate to each other and might be an idea for a species. We want each species to be as different from each other as possible, as well as trying to fulfill as many different player fantasies as possible.

On of the things we do to add depth to the ideas is we try to come up with a backstory for each of the, to explain a bit more what they are. Does not have to be that detailed, just something to give some context, and adds details, and helps the artist when they paint them, drawing on their history.

A backstory might be something like:
“A species which inhabits a completely sealed suit which they can never leave. You can see through the transparent helmet that whatever they once were, they are a hollow scare version of that.”
“An alien that has kept itself alive through genetic manipulation, the cells no longer die, they just keep dividing. The body has grown uncontrolled and looks weird / mutated.”
So once we have settled on the 15 or so idea’s we need, we start sketching out various ideas. For the initial ones we usually just do line art, sometimes rough shading, it depends on the artist. We always develop at least 3-4 different versions of each character idea before going ahead and developing it further.
Here are some of the early look dev for some species.







After the sketching phase, we use much the same process for developing aliens as we do for ship designs. We start out with rough sketches for the ideas, to see which path we want to go on. Then we choose the one we think has the best potential, develop it a bit further, trying different sub variants / poses. Once we are happy with the idea and its structure, we usually do a color test, look at different ways we can shade them.

Here is an example of what all this looked like for the aforementioned alien which extended life through genetic manipulation.













Even though the characters are done in 2D, and look like it in game. The way they are made is technically in a 3D software. To do this, the character needs to be split into layers. So before rendering all the details, we split them up into the components they need. Tentacles might be several layers, eye lids, arms etc, anything that moves needs to be on a separate layer. By splitting them up early, the animator can start setting them up with the rough version. While the 2D Artist continues his work on the details. This also enables us to catch any issues with the character earlier.






Example of what the character looks like in Maya, all set up and rigged.

So once the color test, and layer split is done, we can finally move on to the final render. This is where most of the work comes in, making it feel more 3 dimensional, making sure the materials look realistic.



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That is all for this week. Next week we'll be posting the patch notes!

Zaztl’s time had come. The Ritual of Elevation was soon to begin, and as she was inching ever closer to her own final destiny, she wondered “Is this perhaps the start of a new life?”. She couldn’t help but to latch on to hope in her moment of dread, but she also knew the futility of the question.

No Jeferian would ever know the answer to that question.

Shumon ins-Beth was born, the newest individual to join the Pasharti species.

---------------



The result of dark experimentation by the Jeferians - the former owners of the planet Taralon - the Pashartians are the ultimate parasites. Originally a semi-sapient creature dwelling in the depths of Taralon's mountains, the Jeferians uplifted and augmented them to act as a subservient slave race. However, their uplifting was rather too effective, and they unleashed a monster. Horrified at the capabilities of their creation - which included the ability to absorb other sentient species and turn them into Pashartians - the Jeferians tried to shut down the experiment. However, a small group of uplifted Pashartians escaped.

Over the years, they bided their time, managing not only to evade capture, but also gradually increase their numbers and develop a technological base to rival the Jeferians. Eventually, the Jeferians noticed that something was amiss, but by then they were powerless to resist.

Soon the Pashartians had seized control of the planet, unleashing violent pogroms on their erstwhile oppressors - all the while further increasing their numbers. Now poised to take to the stars, the Pashartians stand ready to pursue what they see as their solemn duty - the conversion of all lesser life forms to their likeness.

---------------

Hello everyone!

Two weeks ago we announced the Necroids Species Pack, and today we’ll be giving you more information about the gameplay aspects. But first, I’ll take the opportunity to link the trailer once again, in case you missed it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0WbgYFvb5I&feature=emb_title

For Necroids we wanted to add some new gameplay that would be available to many more different types of empires and species. Unlike Lithoids, these Civics and Origins will not require you to use a Necroid portrait. For Lithoids we felt like it made sense, but in this case we didn’t want to impose any limitations on your imagination and creativity.

Necroids gameplay includes:

• Necrophage (Origin)
  
• Memorialist (Civic)
  
• Death Cult (Civic)
  
• Reanimated Armies (Civic)

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Necrophage is a new Origin that means that your primary species has a very hard time to procreate by themselves, but is instead dependent on transforming other Pops into themselves.



Necrophage Trait - live long and consume



Chamber of Elevation - when regular Uplifting isn’t enough



Necrophytes - Hey, what does the necro part of my job title stand for anyway?

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In addition, there is also the Reanimated Armies civic that we showed in DD #185. This civic replaces the Military Academy with a Dread Encampment, and can recruit Undead Armies that are unaffected by morale.


Reanimated Armies - the ultimate in recycling.


Dread Encampment Building - wouldn’t want to get caught dead here


Undead Army - it’s not wight how they work them to the bone, but they don’t complain




Necromancer job - some say it’s a dead end job, but they’ve made a grave mistake
(Note: Above image includes the bonus from Ground Defense Planning)

This civic has a few restrictions - no pacifists, and it conflicts with Citizen Service since it replaces the Military Academy. Some subtle differences exist between Soldiers granted by Military Academies and the Necromancers from Dread Encampments - they’re Specialist tier and provide more defense armies, provide some research benefits, and will summon additional defense armies under Martial Law instead of increasing Stability.

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That is all for this week! Next week we’ll take a look at the art process and all the effort that goes into creating the Necroid portraits!

We’ll be eagerly reading your responses, and remember that...


Jeff sees all

My name is Fredrik Toll, and I am the Art Director for Stellaris. For this week's dev diary, we wanted to give you an insight into the development process of creating the ships for the Necroids Species Pack.

Let’s dig right into it!

After settling on the theme, the first thing we do when embarking on designing a new ship-set for a species pack, is going through the core ideas of the species pack with our internal team of concept artists. In this case it was centered around the theme of death, and the various species who have cheated it. After the brief, we had everyone write down their association and ideas for this theme to know what everyone is thinking. This allows us to align more what it’s all about, share ideas, and inspire each other. By doing that we are able to highlight what is more important and what does not fit with the theme.

After this we do a search for visual reference to use in the concept process. These can be anything from patterns, statues, tiny objects, to buildings, whatever inspires us visually in connection to the theme. We look mostly for shapes, but also materials. Architecture is usually a great source of inspiration, they have great shapes, and a scale suitable for ship details. We try to avoid using other existing ships as reference since we want to develop something original, not just a variant of others, though they can still be a reference, if only to show what we don't want.
For Necroids we looked a lot at Art Deco and brutalist architecture, tombs, pyramids, as well as skulls, fossils and many other things. After reviewing and discussing the references we start sketching, going wide, anything goes. Sometimes they align a lot with our references, other times ideas come from nowhere, it’s all part of the process. This leads to a whole lot of Ship designs ideas. Here are a handful of those.



Ultimately we settled on these two references as our direction. They felt like something far away from existing ships, as well as fitting well with the theme.




These ships are only the start though. Once we have chosen one of the styles we did in our initial look development. We have to flesh out what those mean. These are just side-views, they do not tell you everything you know, in fact, opinions of how to interpret it can differ significantly. So we need to figure that out, as well as adapting it for the demands of the game, such as having sections, having turrets etc.

Usually we start with the Cruiser, since it’s a good mid-size ship close enough to all ships sizes that it’s relevant for all designs. You also have a fallback option, if it turns out that it looks too big, you can just use it for the battleship. If it turns out too small it will be the destroyer or corvette. Here you can see a few of the concepts from the process. It looks pretty straightforward, but it takes a lot of back and forward before we nail it down.



Once you have the style narrowed down, it’s time to make all the actual concepts for each and every ship. Even though the style is figured out, each ship is a bit unique and each of them present new challenges, and new parts of the style to figure out. The civilian ships are different from the military ships. Each of the military types ships has a different size, and the style differs significantly from the corvette to the juggernaut. Each of the civilian ships has a very unique design and they have more in common with some stations than they do with each other. The construction ship and the mining station often share traits, as do the science ship and the research station.

The science ship for instance, has a much more high tech appearance than the other ships. The process is made easier though from the work we have done on previous shipsets. Some standards have been set, the science ship for instance usually has a more “cool” appearance with a more streamline almost racing type ship. This helps us know where to aim, and apply the style on that.
Sometimes it's pretty straightforward – Let’s take the example of the Science Ship. First we start by making a couple of rough versions, then choose one of those versions, then make some more versions based on that one. We then continue the process by once again choosing one of them, refining the details to finish the design, and in the end we create an asset sheet. The asset sheet is for the 3D artist to model, and know where to apply which material. It speeds up their work a lot and makes sure everything is consistent.





If you wish to see more art examples of the Necroid shipsets and read more about the art process, check out the forum post here!

Hello everyone!

Today we bring you some exciting news about our upcoming Species Pack! We’re happy to announce that our next species pack will be themed around death and should allow you to live death to the fullest! Check out the trailer below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0WbgYFvb5I&feature=emb_title

• 15+1 new portraits (the +1 being machine)
  
• 1 new Ship Set
  
• 1 new City Set
  
• 1 new Room background
  
• 1 new Origin
  
• 3 new Civics
  
• 1 new pre-scripted Empire
  
• 1 new Advisor Voice

We wanted to add ships that had a more sinister or evil appearance, and I’m very happy to say we’ve made something really great. We’ll go into more detail about the ships, and give you a peek into the art process, in a future dev diary.

True to the theme, we wanted the portraits to revolve around death, but not look outright undead or decaying. We never intended the Necroids to be specifically undead, but rather themed around death. Similar to the ships, we will be doing a dev diary in the future to give you a peek into the art process, and also reveal all the new portraits. Stay tuned!

Regarding the other features, we have already shown you some of them, such as the Death Cult Civic and the Memorialist Civic. The remaining features will be revealed over the next couple of weeks, and maybe you'll even get to learn about Jeff. But for now, let’s pass the Mishar Cabal into our memories.

---

General Donnten threw her bloodied axe next to Ostiir’s severed head. The others in the Leadership Council would remember this the next time they considered interrupting her in the Mishar Althing.

She pushed past the acolytes that were coming to deal with the corpse. They were annoyed - the rites were always harder if the head was removed - but they would just have to stitch it back together.

Smiling to herself, she left the arena. At least Ostiir would be an obedient little soldier now.

Congratulations, [Employee.GetFirstName]!

Due to consistently meeting or exceeding performance goals and receiving high marks from both your manager and colleagues, you have been selected for termination at the end of this quarter! Your sacrifice is greatly appreciated by all of us here at Dodacorp™, and we’re lucky to see you go!

Your manager will be in touch with you to provide instructions related to termination benefits, reallocating your Dodacorp™ retirement credits to your next of kin, and the necessary paperwork for your desired post-termination arrangements. As a valued member of Dodacorp™, remember that you have an employee discount on cremation services from our partners at Burnatech™ and don’t forget that you can claim your complementary Eternal Interment™ urn from our Repositrexx™ subsidiary.

Ask your manager about securing a spot for your urn on the Wall of Honor™, the most desirable places are going fast!

Please make sure to complete all of the requisite forms by the first of [Employee.TerminationDate.PreviousMonth] so you don’t miss this exciting opportunity.

We’d like to thank you again for your service here at Dodacorp™, and appreciate that your sacrifice today will lead to record profits tomorrow!

Sincerely,
[Employee.Division.Supervisor.GetFullName]
[Employee.Division.Supervisor.GetFullJobTitle]



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Inspired by the extreme popularity of CK2’s Sunset Invasion, we continue our exploration of mortality with two more civics that we’re planning for an upcoming release, the Death Cult and Corporate Death Cult.



Death Cult civic - sadly the Curators aren’t allowed to secretly be a death cult


Corporate Death Cult civic - ritual murder for funds and prophet

Available to Spiritualist empires, empires with either of these civics replace the Temples that Spiritualists can normally build with Sacrificial Temples that provide both Death Priest and Mortal Initiate jobs.


Sacrificial Temple building - funny how there always seems to be a Help Wanted sign in the window


Death Priest job - dedicated to improving game performance



Mortal Initiate job - the benefits are to die for

Death Cults that have Mortal Initiate positions filled gain access to three new Sacrifice Edicts that let them perform the ritual slaughter to the gods (or whatever force your empire’s pops believe in). They’re a bit fickle though, and the magnitude of the benefits varies, but the more blood that is shed, the more likely you are to get the better blessings.

To read the full forum post, follow the link here.

Chronicle Drone Unit-W3 swept the plaza, as it did once every ten days since its creation. Before that, Unit-V3 had performed this duty until a piece of crumbling masonry crushed it beneath tons of rubble. Unit-W3’s first assignment was to remove that debris.

The Mollarnock Commonwealth was once a mighty empire of a dozen planets, ruled from the glistening spires of their ecumenopolis capital, Azure Chalice. The Chardin Process created Director, a gestalt consciousness that could coordinate the many machine servants of the Mollarnock. They toiled so their Mollarnock masters could spend their time on arts, sciences, and philosophy.



But all things fall.

The colonies had been destroyed during the Discovery War, reduced to radioactive rubble by an unforgiving foe. To deny their enemy the victory they craved and to prevent them from seizing the jewel of the empire, Chancellor Rhosen chose to end things on their own terms and released a terrible bioweapon, rendering Azure Chalice uninhabitable for centuries.

Those centuries passed.

The Chardin Mechanicals collected the dead and interred them with the Sanctuaries of Repose. Their struggle to maintain the planet was admirable but doomed - scavenging, repurposing, and reallocating materials could only do so much. Without a stream of resources coming from the colonies, they were losing the battle to keep it from decaying.

A program to return to the stars once controlled by their creators was begun.



The Mollarnock may have destroyed themselves four hundred and eighty seven years ago, but they would never be forgotten.

---

Stellaris is full of stories - some that we tell you, but so many more that you tell us that emerge from the gameplay.

This is the story of the Mollarnock, destroyed by a terrible enemy and those that were left behind.

Memorialist is a new civic we have planned to bring you in a future release. Unlike many current civics, it will be available to regular, machine, and hive empires. (They say that Megacorps try to resist remembering anything unless it directly impacts the next Quarterly Report.)


Machine Empire Memorialist Civic

To read the full post, you can read it here:

"Hi everyone! I am Caligula, one of Stellaris’ Content Designers, which means that I do a variety of tasks based around narrative writing and scripting - “scripting” being our term for doing things that is somewhat similar to programming, but without changing the source code. In other words, I do what modders do (though I have the significant advantage of also being able to peek into the source code and change it around when needed). Every Content Designer has their niche, and mine is that when a particularly complicated system needs to be scripted in (or, more frequently, is giving some sort of trouble - the War in Heaven still gives me nightmares...), I step into the breach.

Now, we have a lot of exciting stuff to show off in the weeks and months to come, but for today, inspired by some questions that were asked after the last dev diary, I’m going to be writing about the technical side of scripting for modders and aspiring modders, specifically with an eye on what can cause performance problems and how to avoid making bad scripts.

The Stellaris scripting language is a very powerful tool, and a lot can be done with it, but first of all, a note of caution: just because something is possible, does not mean it should be done. I can’t really stress this enough, because (and I speak from experience here) this attitude will almost certainly end up causing both performance issues and unreadable scripts that you will not be able to disentangle six months later when you realise some part of it is broken. Though it should be borne in mind that doing something in code is, by definition, faster: in code, you can check a single function and be done with it, but if you want it to be accessible through script, there’s a fair few necessary functions it has to go through before you get to checking your function (turning the line of script into a code command, checking whether it’s used in the right scope, etc etc) - hence why some things are hardcoded, and also why hacky solutions to problems can end up being quite bad. So, the first question to consider is, should I really be doing this?

But who am I kidding, I’m speaking to modders here, so of course you will do it :D So without further ado...


Every time you run a check or execute an effect, this will take a very tiny amount of your computer’s processing power. With a few exceptions that should be used sparingly (I’ll get to those later), this is totally fine and is needed to do anything at all. It is when the check is repeated often, over lots of objects, that problems happen. In practice, this usually means pops are the cause, though running something across all planets in the galaxy is also a pretty bad idea.

As a first step, when possible, it is a good idea to control when your script is run. The best way to do this is by setting where events are fired and using on_actions (or firing events from decisions and the like) wherever possible, instead of mean time to happen or, even worse, just setting an event to try and fire every day. If a degree of randomness is needed, one could also fire a hidden event via, say, a yearly pulse and then firing the actual event you want with a random delay (for an example, check out event action.220). "

If you wanna read the full post, have a read here!

Today's Dev Diary is a greeting from one of our Stellaris Programmers, Mathieu aka The French Paradox!

"Hello everyone, this is The French Paradox (Stellaris Programmer) speaking!

On behalf of the whole Stellaris team, we hope you've had a good summer vacation, with current circumstances and all!

We're all back to work, although not at the office yet. It is going to be a very exciting autumn and winter with a lot of interesting news! We are incredibly excited to be able to share the news with you over the coming weeks and months!

Today I open the first look at the upcoming 2.8 release with some of the technical stuff that we programmers have been working on over summer. The rest of the team will reveal more about the upcoming content and features in the following diaries.

Without further ado, let's talk about threads!



There is a running joke that says fans are always wondering which one will come first: Victoria III or a PDS game using more than one thread.


Don't lie, I know that's how some of you think our big decision meetings go

I’m afraid I’ll have to dispel the myth (again): all PDS games in production today use threads, from EU4 to CK3. Even Stellaris! To better explain the meme and where it comes from, we have to go through a little history. I’m told you guys like history.

For a long time, the software industry relied on “Moore’s Law”, which states that a CPU built in two years will be roughly twice as efficient as one today.
This was especially true in the 90s, when CPUs went from 50 MHz to 1GHz in the span of a decade. The trend continued until 2005 when we reached up to 3.8GHz. And then the clock speed stopped growing. In the 15 years since, the frequency of CPUs has stayed roughly the same.
As it turns out, the laws of physics make it quite inefficient to increase speeds beyond 3-4 GHz. So instead manufacturers went in another direction and started “splitting” their CPUs into several cores and hardware threads. This is why today you’ll look at how many cores your CPU has and won’t spend much time checking the frequency. Moore’s Law is still valid, but, to put it in strategy terms, the CPU industry reached a soft cap while trying to play tall so they changed the meta and started playing wide.

This shift profoundly changed the software industry, as writing code that will run faster on a CPU with a higher speed is trivial: most code will naturally do just that. But making usage of threads and cores is another story. Programs do not magically “split” their work in 2, 4 or 8 to be able to run on several cores simultaneously, it’s up to us programmers to design around that.

Which brings us back to our games and a concern we keep reading on the forums: “is the game using threads?”. The answer is yes, of course! In fact, we use them so much that we had a critical issue a few releases back where the game would not start on machines with 2 cores or less.

But I suspect the real question is : “are you making efficient usage of threads?”. Then the answer is “it depends”. As I mentioned previously, making efficient use of more cores is a much more complex issue than making use of more clock cycles. In our case, there are two main challenges to overcome when distributing work among threads: sequencing and ordering.

Sequencing issues occur when 2 computations running simultaneously need to access the same data. For example let’s say we are computing the production of 2 pops: a Prikki-Ti and a Blorg. They both access the current energy stockpile, add their energy production to it and write the value back. Depending on the sequence, they could both read the initial value (say 100), add their production (say 12 and 3, the Blorg was having a bad day) and write back. Ideally we want to end up with 115 (100 + 12 + 3). But potentially both would read 100, then compute and overwrite each other ending up with 112 or 103.
The simple way around it is to introduce locks: the Prikki-Ti would “lock” the energy value until it’s done with its computation and has written the new value back, then the Blog would take its turn and add his own. While this solves the problem, it introduces a greater one: the actions are now sequential again, and the benefit of doing them on concurrent threads has been lost. Worse, due to the cost of locking, unlocking and synchronizing, the whole thing will likely take longer than if we simply computed both on the same thread in the first place.

The second issue is ordering, or “order dependency”. Meaning in some cases changing the order of operations changes the outcome. For example let’s say our previous Prikki-Ti and Blog decide to resolve a dispute in a friendly manner. We know the combat system will process both combatants, but since there are potentially hundreds of combat actions happening, we don’t know which one will happen first. And potentially on 2 different machines the order will differ. For example on the server the Prikki-Ti action will happen first, while on the client the Blorg will act first.


#BlorgShotFirst
On the server the Prikki-Ti action is resolved first, killing the Blorg. The Blorg action that comes after (possibly on another thread) is discarded as dead Blorgs can’t shoot (it’s a scientific fact). The client however distributed the computation in another way (maybe it has more cores than the server) and in his world the Blorg dispatched the Prikki-Ti first, which in turn couldn’t fight back. Then both players get the dreaded “Player is Out of Sync” popup as their realities have diverged.

There are, of course, ways to solve the problem, but they usually require redoing the design in a way that satisfies both constraints. For example in our first case each thread could store the production output of each pop to add to each empire, and then those could be consolidated at the end. In the same fashion our 2 duelists problem could be solved by recording damage immediately, but applying the effects in another phase to eliminate the need for a deterministic order.

As you can imagine, it is much easier to design something with threading in mind rather than retrofitting an existing system for it. If you don’t believe me just look at how much time is spent retrofitting your fleets, I’ll wait.


This is all nice and good, but what’s in it for you in the next patch, concretely? Well you will be happy to hear that I used some time to apply this to one of the oldest bits of our engine: the files and assets loading system.

For the longest time we have used a 3rd party software to handle this. While it saved us a lot of trouble, it has also turned out to be quite bad at threading. Up to the point that it was sometimes slower with more cores than less, most notably to the locking issues I mentioned before.
In conjunction with a few other optimizations, it has enabled us to drastically reduce the startup time of the game.
I could spend another thousand word explaining why, but I think this video will speak better:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6MWyc0wIo8&feature=emb_title

This comparison was done on my home PC, which uses a venerable i7 2600K and an SSD drive. Both were “hot” startups (the game had been launched recently), but in my experiments I found that even on a “cold” start it makes a serious difference.

To achieve the best speedup, you will need to use the new beta DirectX11 rendering engine. Yes, you read correctly: the next patch will also offer an open beta which replaces the old DX9 renderer by a more recent DX11 version that was initially made by our friends at Tantalus for the console edition of Stellaris. While visually identical, using DX11 to render graphics enables a whole range of multi-threading optimizations that are hard or impossible to achieve with DX9. Playing with the old renderer will still net you some nice speedup on startup, the splash screen step should still be much faster, but you’re unlikely to see the progress bar “jump” as it does with DX11 when the game loads the models and textures.

Some of those optimizations have also been applied to newer versions of Clausewitz, and will be part of CK3 on release. Imperator should also benefit from it. It might be possible to also apply it to EU4 and HoI4, but so far my experiments with EU4 haven’t shown a huge speedup like it did for Stellaris and CK3.

If you want to read more technical details about the optimizations that were applied to speedup Stellaris, you can check out the article I recently published on my blog.

And with that I will leave you for now. This will likely be my last dev diary on Stellaris, as next month I will be moving teams to lead the HoI4 programmers. You can consider those optimizations my farewell gift. This may have been a short time for me on Stellaris but don’t worry: even if I go, Jeff will still be there for you!

Mathieu, aka The French Paradox"