Founders Talk: June 2017

Hello Frogboy,

thanks for the update!

The living galaxy sounds great, would love to see how it works out.

really like the new hyperspace idea where it's just a fluid transition of the same navigation style from small to large. Does that mean we'll see alien ships on the map and that encounters will be "real time" (as opposed to a chance calculation) ?

Indeed,  thank you for the link over in Discord. I have got my voice set up and look forward to seeing how things evolve and having the privilege and opportunity in participating in the process. 

I like the idea of ship construction. The engine and parts from Gal Civ III are perhaps the best ship designer on the market and I am eager to see what the modding community comes up with. 

" If you click on a star system you can auto pilot to it (if you know of it) and set the pacing in which time passes." So does this mean that if you haven't discovered a star, you have to manually navigate to it? If so, that's awesome, and exactly what I wanted.

I will chime in here for Hyperspace. I agree with Volusianus on interpretation. I would like to see a red haze that you 'uncover' as you pilot your ship thru hyperspace, very similar to how FOW is removed in Gal Civ III. Initially you do not know where any stars are and will have to head off into a general direction blindly. Once you 'discover' a star, from that point you can 'click on it' and have the option to auto travel to it. 

I am positive this is NOT how Frogboy wants to implement this, however I think it will give the players the most fun and frustration trying to find points in the galaxy. I can completely envision the nerd rage on steam now by folks running off willy nilly into the unknown in a random direction and getting devoured/capture/destroyed, after an hour in game. 

I have not even played much of SC2 and the idea of blind dangerous exploration with the possibility of losing the game early on due to exploration (running into powerful enemies) is one feature which no other game since SC2 has had ( I may be wrong). The hand holding needs to come off and let the players learn however painfully that they need to think and not try to 'game the game'. 

Just my thoughts. 

I like the proposed hyperspace.  It sounds suspiciously like what I posted previously.  Hopefully it will blend out to a red hue.  I can live with it if it doesn't though.   Looking forward to the new build.  And another round of @frogboy posts.   Maybe I'll get through all the ships this time.

Hyperspace is back!! Woot! Woot! Zoomed out too!!

Now back to lobbying for random mini-events, micro-quests and Hyperspace news radio.

One issue with having a large disparity in ship size is that it runs counter to each other.  It doesn't mean it can't be made to work, but it is an issue many don't think of until they see it happening.  You say "This ship will be bigger and badder than all the others", so you make your huge massive battleship.  But this game uses "dumb fire" weapons, in other words they are not targeted and rely entirely on the player's aim.  So you can't build in accuracy into the weapons, because that is entirely up to the player.  This, in turn, means that your "bigger and badder" ship is, in reality... the easiest target to hit in the entire game.  

This can be compensated for, having to blow components off a larger ship before being able to destroy it works, for example, but something needs to be done to compensate for the fact that your "big and bad" ship is such an easy target that you almost can't miss when you shoot at it.  With nothing compensating for it, "bigger" doesn't mean "badder"... it means "easy target".

Thanks for the update Brad.

Exiting stuff! I'm stoked that the number of people working on SCO has shot up so drastically - time for some real action! I can't wait to be involved and hopefully add my tiny part into making this the best game possible.

Hey @Frogboy - thanks for the update! 

I'm hesitant to immediately jump-for-joy about the Hyperspace update, though I will say it sounds incredibly promising!! My God, just so exciting to leave a system and zoom way out.

But I don't know exactly what you mean!!! What do you mean? Does this mean you'll get to fly your ship around in zoomed-out Hyperspace? You certainly alluded to that:

"Hyperspace being like traveling in a solar system" - YES!

"If you click on a star system you can auto pilot to it (if you know of it)" - YES!

But you stop short of saying the words we all want to hear: You can direct-control your ship to the next star system, piloting your ship the SAME way as inside a solar system. That's what we're all waiting for. That's what I THINK you're saying, but it's still too vague to make any assumptions. 

As for the ship-builder? It looks great! But I wonder about two things specifically:

1) All the ship components, and the player-made ships I browsed on Steam, seem very, very busy. Like each component of each ship has a ton of detail. While I like that on some ships, I'd rather many be very smooth sheets of metal (or other material), with bright colors. Violet. Lime Green. Fuchsia. Less generic. More striking. Hopefully that gets included.

2) How versatile will it be, when trying to design non-standard-ship-looking ships? Like the bulbous, seething, gas cloud spewing ship? Can some be covered in fur? Organic? Little eyeballs poking out? Light-based? Tentacles? I mean, the GalCiv ships look great! Very cool. But at the end of the day, they are 99% triangle-ships, with wings. Can I make a perfect sphere, with no seams?

Lastly, the living galaxy - DO IT. Go for it. That'll be awesome. But, please play SPAZ 2, to see how to NOT make a "living galaxy". 

***On a Side Note***

You know what I read about, that would STRONGLY apply to the new Star Control, if possible to include it?

Starfield.

Hear me out. If you haven't heard, it's the strongly rumored next game from Bethesda, hopefully debuting at E3 this year. And its main point of existence (besides bringing Fallout and Elder Scrolls to Outer Space) is one of the most interesting ideas I've heard in a long time, and very pertinent to the development of Star Control. 

It features a procedurally generated galaxy, supposedly filled with planets. This is a sin that hisses from my mouth since No Man's Sky. The problem with procedurally generated content, as we've spoken of many times before on here, is its utter lack of finding anything really interesting. Games rely on The Human Touch, lovingly hand-crafted scenes for us to explore, and be entertained by. When a computer generates EVERYTHING, you end up with a whole lot of nothing. Endless planets full of nothing interesting to explore. No Man's Sky, Minecraft, Ark, Rust, I think the planetary exploring in Mass Effect 1, anything auto-generated like that loses a lot of character, and just ends up being bleak and uncultured.

Starfield supposedly goes in a different direction - most of the galaxy IS still procedurally generated. But they ALSO include hand-crafted locations, deposited randomly on each of those computer-generated landscapes, made interesting by the designers who created them! This would be incredible news, if it can be done! I think Skyrim did a bit of this with the ruins and tombs you entered. Those were hand-crafted, at least. And then stuck into otherwise ambiguous terrain. 

I know Stardock isn't going to hand-craft each of the thousands of planets you can explore in Star Control: Origins! But what if you guys DID create a large amount of specialty landscapes, awe-inspiring monoliths or giant pink waterfalls or a crater with a huge worm, giant bridges or tombs or whatever... and then deposit them like puzzle pieces, throughout the galaxy, so at least we can have some really interesting terrain to uncover???

That would be awesome. Just something to split up the monotony of a computer-generated landscape.

I just have one question/concern about this:  will we be able to see this living galaxy (ships patrolling, borders being guarded, etc.) when we enter the zoomed out hyperspace/space map?

If so, I feel this is an egregious error.  Essentially, it means that our primitive Earthling sensors are among the best in the galaxy, easily able to detect the movement of ships in other star systems.  This problem becomes all the more egregious when you consider the idea that the hyper-advanced Skryve apparently know nothing about us.  If we can detect a party of Skryve ships moving in their system from several light years away, then they should have NO PROBLEM detecting our movements as well.

^ Are you concerned about realism in this game or something else?

If yes, why won't you start asking how are we able to talk to Tywom right after we build our first spaceship? How did completion of our first spaceship coincide with Mars annihilation and Tywom Triton crash? And how did they even survive that insane Tom & Jerry style crash?

I don't think realism is something you should be concerned with in SCO.

So the trick will be to find the precursor sensor module which can scan across half the galaxy in one go?

Quoting bleybourne, reply 13

So the trick will be to find the precursor sensor module which can scan across half the galaxy in one go?

Could perhaps be able to build sensor stations that you could drop into orbit around other star systems, or a precursor module that gives you a link up to the precursor starbase sensor feeds.

Hey Frogboy - on the future voice chats, I hope the timing of these might be able to vary to allow those in significantly different timezones to participate on occasion.

A note about navigation/galaxy map:

There's a problem with having to discover the galaxy as Origins happens in our own galaxy, and we already know where all the stars are. We might have missed some brown dwarfs, black holes etc but generally the map is known (SC2 was the same).

so just putting the question out here..
What would be those things that would need to be discovered by free form navigation?

I would wager this has something to do with Hyperspace not being true 3D. It's 3 dimensional, but in a different orientation than truespace, slightly. Kind of. It would be like trying to navigate city subway tunnels on foot based purely on your knowledge of their surface-level entrances.

i guess that makes sense, so basically when out of hyperspace you'd know where everything is, but hyperspace sort of changes the way you get from place to place...

We'll have to see it built as it's a bit in the air as it is. I'm also keen to see how the hyperspace manual navigation pans out.

I missed the whole Hyperspace discussion while it flared up so forgive my ignorance on some matters.

Regardless of how the controls or view is implemented I would like to retain manual control. Auto-pilot should be an option yes for convenience but not the main focus. I would not enjoy all exploration and encounters being limited to solar systems. It would be a real waste of space so to speak.

From SC2 we know there were rogue planets outside of real space so there's plenty of things we could find there

• Drifting ships
• Lifeforms
• Rare Asteroids
• Warp storms
• Worm holes
• Starbases
• Science stations
• Hidden planets
• Holes to other forms of space
• Prisons
• Lost travelers
• Cargo pods
• Pirates
• Temporal distortions
• Failed experiments that resulted in whole systems being transported there

And so on. Plenty of things that would be food for quest lines. It would also allow the game to have more places to visit than the stars we already know in this area of space.

Hi Inibriatus, welcome! No need to apologise, the amount of content that has poured through on hyperspace here and in Discord has been significant. In discord last week Brad confirmed that there will be manual hyperspace control. There was much rejoicing!

There was also a big discussion on the exact ideas you listed. Discussion ended up that most don't mind if that content isn't in the main game arc, but it would be great for the modding framework to allow it in the future.

Thanks to IBN I finally got to see this update, lots of great information.  I just couldn't resist pointing out the genius of the brevity of it... no matter how hard you try, you'll never rival Douglas Adam's explanation of how big space is.  But Don't Panic!  He really hit the nail right on the head with that one, haha...

I also agree with Brad's idea of what Star Control is and isn't.  I thought I'd add what I think SC is and isn't from a different perspective.  "Game design as art" is not a $10 million fully random endlessly massive game universe that is a realistic map of the galaxy, game design as art is Chess and Acquire.  In game design less is more.

Game design as art was SVC's original "Pocket Games" that originally jump started TFG.  "Robots" was a classic.  SFB started as a "Pocket Game"... 6 pieces of paper, not bound, and a single 6-sided die in a small plastic bag for about $4... providing thousands of people with many hours of gaming fun with just a Federation Heavy Cruiser and a Klingon D7.  That is "game design as art".  Making a game where you can pile an infinite amount of "paint" on top of it to try and make something of it is easy, making a game that fascinates at it's core is hard.  If you think you have severe production constraints in making computer games, just try making a board game some time... you'll learn a whole new definition of "production constraints".  Or, how I like to say this succinctly... "1 + 1 = Chess".

This is what Star Control was.  Star Control is brilliant at the core of its function, and doesn't need any "paint" at all to shine.  Certainly, put that good modern "paint" on it anyway... after the fact.  After it is already good at it's core, without all that "paint".  "Scientific research" is the crutch of the modern game designer and unavoidably defines their games, when it should be "paint" at best.

Don't try and gloss over the core of the game not being fun and engaging by itself, without all that paint.  This is, exactly, the "indecipherable" quality that Star Control had in the minds of gamers.  It isn't "indecipherable"... it is fun and interesting at it's core, with no "paint" at all.

One last thing I noticed in this last update is that Brad seems to be saying that building the mothership is going to be like a Rogue-like game.  You won't be picking and choosing what mothership to build as much as you are having to work with what you happen to find along the way like in Nethack or Faster Than Light.  That is a perfect solution to the remaining problems, and adds an awesome quality to the game that SC2 didn't have.  In addition to that, it will almost inevitably be difficult to wind up building an uber powerful "battleship" version of the mothership if it truly has a Rogue-like balance too it, the only big drawback being that many modern gamers consider that balance to be "punishing" and without it... somewhere about half-way through the game the "BB Build" will become that uber "Trump Ship" that has an easy time with just about anything.  But this does solve most of the remaining "problems" if you are willing to truly give it that Rogue-like balance and feeling of never finding enough of what you feel you need.

I surely hope more people see this, and hop right in DISCORD 

i just read through all the vault updates and now i´m really hyped!

thanks frogboy for this update, since i totally love your ideas. sc2 still is one of my all time favorite games, and i was really sad about losing the original aliens and the loose ends of the story that i would have loved to see in a new sc game.

but after reading up on all the updates i am not worried any more.

the design and art style of the aliens looks awesome and true to the original style, which was nother major worry for me. great work so far! the kind of comic style from sc2 in combination with the lovely silly humour made the original aliens so amazing and memorable. i am positive that the new aliens will replace them just fine.

still hoping for an orz easteregg somewhere though

getting an original componist from sc2 was also a big deal that already payed off greatly, as the alien themes were another part of star control 2 that never left my brain in all those years.

so far all decisions i have read up made sense to me, except the total scrapping of hyperspace, which now has been reversed, so i am all happy again.

especially if we understood it right and we get the best of both worlds like manual hyperspace travel with some kind of fog of war machanic and convenient click to navigate autotravel for known systems to avoid repetitive boredom. totally sounds to me like the frustrating part of sc2 hyperspace will be removed without scrapping the fun part.

i am also very excited about the ship customisation! will this system be wide enough to totally custom rebuild the original sc1-2 fleets with the exact mechanics? and will we be able to make up and insert new mechanics or will we just choose from a list of preset weapons/special abilities?

so if you started out with a plan of 3v3 melee, is it safe to say the weapons and abilities can handle multiple targets? if so, maybe a multiplayer battle royale/last man standing melee mode would be fun to try!

so much for my first post. thanks  for working on one of my 3 biggest videogame dreams (1. a modern sc game-check, 2. star citizen-check,3. a true remake of planetside 1-no hope)and keep up the good work!

may the orz be with you!

Oppps... tried to leave a reply but it looks like it went to the wrong place. Disregard....