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We're back with another Dev Blog to give you an update on how we're tracking. There's been some great releases thus far, and I for one can say I've very much been enjoying all the new Display Module updates.
However as much as logic updates are great, one of the most exciting additions recently is Fog of War. Not necessarily because of that feature alone, but because of what that feature is leading us into.
Now let's say this up front, the main reason for this Dev Blog is to inform you that our release cycle is changing for a bit. Up until now it has been a steady two week release cycle, and has worked great overall. Moving into larger development projects for the game though has seen these two week turnarounds become more difficult, and resulted in slower progress on these larger projects. To rectify this we are now going to be operating with a four week release cycle, at least for the time being. With more similar scale projects ahead in the development timeline you will find us choosing to swap to four week release cycles a bit more frequently.
Let’s talk about the development project that has spurred on this change.
NPC Faction Generation
At the moment StarMade’s default faction stations would randomly spawn on the start of a new universe and populate the galaxies. Additionally you would occasionally encounter pirate ships and a battle would wage. This has been the most basic NPC faction generation, but we have much larger plans for NPC Factions, so in revisiting the system everything has been built from the ground up.
There’s a number of aspects to NPC faction generation. Thinking about the playtime of games gives a rough look at how complex their NPCs need to be. A simple game like Counter-Strike, in terms of round time, means that any NPC bots just need a rudimentary understanding of how to play, rather than complex strategic calculations. Progressing to most real-time strategy (RTS) games and the logic and calculations and strategies that NPCs employ during gameplay is far more complex, as those games are often a lot more drawn out.
Now think about StarMade and consider a server that you could return to play on over days, weeks, months. All that time there’s additional NPC factions that will exist in the universe, doing their thing with their goals that they wish to work towards. It’s just scratching the surface to the breadth we wish to give NPC factions, resulting in a constantly evolving landscape of gameplay as time progresses. This is especially significant for singleplayer gameplay, and something that StarMade has been lacking thus far.
This is just the starting phase of all we wish to do with engaging content that evolves over time through gameplay. Setting a solid foundation for NPC faction generation is paramount to the stability of everything else planned. Hence the move to extend the release cycle periods.
If we picture NPC factions like a jigsaw puzzle, there's a lot of elements coming together...
- Newly designed ships and stations for our Default factions (Trading Guild, Scavengers, Outcasts)
- Numerous ship fleets from our fleet competition that will be for procedurally generated factions
- Fog of War to encourage exploration, but also to hide what the other factions are doing, making it more engaging in the process depending on whether they're friend or foe.
- Many new features for factions or that factions will be engaging with (e.g. the Trade Network)
- A robust faction generation system to handle generation, exploration, expansion, gathering resources, diplomacy, etc.
There’s still pieces of the puzzle that will come later but for what is planned for our initial release of this new NPC faction generation system it’s still a very exciting release that lies ahead. Here's a sneak peek of what the process of development has been like, and remember that this are only screenshots from a basic simplified system for testing and isn’t necessarily a reflection of what you will actually see in-game...
Firstly, NPC factions generate in the galaxies. They randomly distribute and take a star system, where their homebase would be located once that feature is eventually added in. Looks something like this...
Then like actual players, they start to explore, expanding and gathering resources and claiming more for themselves...
In reality though, resources are a lot more random and so there's more value claiming certain areas rather than just the ones surrounding your homebase. So instead, the factions need to weigh up what is worth claiming over other star systems...
One of the benefits is that while players haven't explored areas occupied by NPC factions, and because of Fog of War, it enables all these calculations to happen very quickly through algorithms etc rather than physically loading every ship, every station. This means that there isn’t a performance hit compared to if every star system had to be loaded for processing to happen. The NPC factions exist virtually, as numbers and computations, for the most part. It's not until players approach where a NPC faction exists that all the number crunching becomes reality. Do the numbers say that that faction has consumed 50% of the resources in a star system, expect 50% less resources to spawn when you first visit there.
One thing to note as we look forward to the release of the new NPC faction generation system is that this won’t require a universe reset for your servers. In fact, existing worlds will help us in the initial implementation by being able to provide us more in-depth details about the generation process.
Thus far it's been a project happening behind the scenes as other releases have been coming out, but the switch to the 4 week release cycle will allow us more time to focus on building a robust NPC faction generation system that is something we can expand upon as we progress. It will see both singleplayer and multiplayer injected with a vast more content and that's not even going into the other stuff we have planned for StarMade.
It's a very exciting time and we can't wait for you to experience it.
- The Schine Team
