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Stellaris Dev Diary #28 - The Project Lead speaks

Good news everyone!

Today’s Dev Diary will be about whatever I want it to be about! When I thought about what I would write in this dev diary I had a really hard time deciding what I should write. Most people told me that I should write about who I am and what I do, but I thought that felt a little self-absorbed. But anyway, let’s begin with being self-absorbed...

My name is Rikard Åslund and I have worked at PDS since 2011. Initially I worked as a programmer and then senior programmer, but these days my main focus is being the project lead for Stellaris. I have worked on a bunch of different projects during my years here but I spent most of them working on EU4. After EU4 I moved to Stellaris to work as a senior programmer, but I took over as project lead after some time.

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As a project lead my main responsibility is to handle the execution of the project and making sure that we do that within set budget and time frames. Since I’m also the most senior programmer on the team I have also worked as a programmer lead (tech lead). These days I’m trying to step back from programming because I simply don’t have the time. This is something I feel confident doing since my team is so highly skilled, but it’s also hurtful since I love programming so much. Because of that I still try to write a couple of lines of code everyday, to keep my mind sane between all the different budget and time follow-up meetings.

When I think about Stellaris I feel three different strong loves; the team, the game and the players. I have the privilege to spend each day surrounded by highly skilled and passionate people, they are the makers of the game and the ones that should receive all credit. I feel so extremely proud of what the team has achieved, we have managed to create a such a good game in a setting we have never worked in before.

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This game is in my personal opinion the best game PDS has ever created. First of all let me say that I love our other historical grand strategy games, no other games let you relive and feel history at such a grand scale. With that said I however have to say that sci-fi games have always had a certain attraction to me that few other games ever had. I love the feeling of dreaming myself away to an alien world and the feeling of exploring something new. Stellaris gives me exactly that possibility, I get to dream myself away.

Now when the release is incoming you always feel as a developer that you would like to have some more time. This feeling is completely normal and if someone ever tells you that they are completely done and have nothing more to add, you should probably not buy that game because it will suck. With Stellaris I know in my heart that we have a really good product in our hands, I think the game would be really well received even if we released it tomorrow (no we won’t), but we are in no way done with this game. We have plans for working with this game for a really long time and I’m really looking forward to see how this game gets shaped by our players. I usually say that we probably don’t know exactly what Stellaris is until a year after release, I’m really looking forward to be along for that ride with you guys.

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Next week we will talk about Pop Factions and Elections, don't miss it!

Fun fact: Stellaris was originally planned to have a locked camera like our other games, so that it felt more like a 2D map. The rotatable camera was implemented as a test because we had a hunch it might work better and it turned out so good that we kept it. Meaning that in Stellaris, in comparison to our other games, you can always rotate the camera by holding the right mouse button.
 
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HeartsofMetal said:
Disgusting. Why aren't you playing with GLORIOUS Humanity?
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Humans you say? Were they the hairless monkeys that I uplifted a couple of centuries ago? They didn't know their place so they had to be purged sadly...
 
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Zoft said:
Humans you say? Were they the hairless monkeys that I uplifted a couple of centuries ago? They didn't know their place so they had to be purged sadly...
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Exactly as things should be. :)
 
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TheBeautifulVoid said:
There is indeed a down in space. It's every direction. If you're an astronaut and you lose hold of your ship, you will fall until you starve.

Have fun thinking of that image while trying to sleep.
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Which is why a ship would not sink down on a 2D map into a black hole, what is being depicted in the current Stellaris black hole art.
 
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[QUOTE="Zoft, post: 20910865, I think the game would be really well received even if we released it tomorrow [/QUOTE]

Wait..what!? Really u will tomorrow!!?? (Celebrates with the celebrate good times song playing)

[QUOTE="Zoft, post: 20910865, (no we won’t)[/QUOTE]

( the music suddenly shuts off with that scratching sound) WHAT!!??! so NOT funny!
 
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TheBeautifulVoid said:
There is indeed a down in space. It's every direction. If you're an astronaut and you lose hold of your ship, you will fall until you starve.

Have fun thinking of that image while trying to sleep.
Click to expand...
On the plus side, you'll probably suffocate before starving.

Being an astronaut is really cool, in the abstract, until you actually think about the logistics of space travel. It's a horrifying death trap.
 
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hewhoispale said:
On the plus side, you'll probably suffocate before starving.

Being an astronaut is really cool, in the abstract, until you actually think about the logistics of space travel. It's a horrifying death trap.
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Previously in this thread I said that space is dangerous because there's very few things that you can fall into that aren't deadly. On reflection, it turns out that even falling into nothing at all is deadly in space.

Space is like Australia.
 
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Zoft said:
even if we released it tomorrow (no we won’t)
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Oh Paradox why do you tease me this way....

but looking forward to it...
 
Cheers for the DD Zoft :). It sounds like a Project Lead at PDS is a fair bit like being a Producer on a film? Not that I've either project lead a game or produced a film, so could be a ways off. Whatever it is, you're clearly doing something right - I've enjoyed space strategy games for around a couple of decades now, and Stellaris is looking mint :).
 
TheBeautifulVoid said:
There is indeed a down in space. It's every direction. If you're an astronaut and you lose hold of your ship, you will fall until you starve.
Click to expand...

It's worse than that. Look up on a day there's no clouds and realize that the only thing stopping you from falling into endless sky and eventually space is gravity; that force that's so weak it gets neglected everywhere any other force occurs, until you have something the mass of a planet to consider. It makes trampolines terrifying :p
 
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Zoft said:
View attachment 167936
This is my current saved favorite species, they focus heavily on research and just want to be left alone and grow. Never works like I want it when I play the office multiplayer, people keep trying to interact with me... usually in a hostile manner...
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Looks like cross between large cat and a bat... Batcat! :D

So hostile manner... what was your best warship? How did it look like, what was its weaponry? :)

TheBeautifulVoid said:
Briefly:

Density doesn't matter when it comes to gravity. All that matters is total mass. This is because, most of the time, gravity acts as if all the mass is concentrated at a single point called the "centre of gravity" (uncreatively.) This is especially true the mass in question is spherical, which a lot of things are.

In other words, if a giant star collapses to form a black hole, that black hole will have the same mass as the giant star and the same centre of gravity. This means that it will continue to have the same gravity field as it had before, and anything that was orbiting it (and wasn't destroyed or block away by the star's death) could continue orbiting it just like before.

The only time this stops being true is if you get within a certain distance of the centre of gravity, called the "Schwarzchild radius." The Schwarzchild radius is larger for heavier things, but because heavier things are usually larger then most of their matter will still be outside its own Schwarzchild radius. When the entirety of an object's mass fits inside its own Schwarzchild radius, then it becomes a black hole and the Schwarzchild radius is referred to as an "event horizon." *

EDIT: Schwarzchild radius are small. The Schwarzchild radius of Earth is around 9 millimetres.

Regarding the "big orange over a clothing" diagram, yes, this is a common way of depicting black holes. It's generally referred to as a "rubber sheet" diagram. However, it's not actually what spacetime looks like, it's just a convenient diagrammatical way of representing it. This is fine if the other things in the picture are also represented by symbols, but mixing symbols and naturalistic images together looks a bit weird. It's as if you went to a military parade and instead of soldiers, you saw NATO symbols moving down the street. On the one hand yes, a square with a diagonal cross through it is sort of what infantry "look like", but on the other hand it isn't actually what they look like at all.

A black hole looks like an absence of stars behind it, and will often have an accretion disk of hot gas around it or a noticeable "lensing" effect on light passing by, like the beautiful image I posted earlier. I assume that the devs tried this approach, found that it didn't look good, and went with the rubber sheet version instead.

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* Unless the black hole rotates, in which case I hate it.
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So cool!


I wonder if in game black hole just was there, slowly eating a planet or did the biggest disaster ever happened to someone. :eek:
 
Stellaris is coming out as my Sci-fi strategy dream becoming a reality. Seriously.
I know that it'll have shortcomings, bugs and we'll whine endlessly that something could have been done differently (and better of course).
But I'm pretty sure that every successive iteration, patch and expansion will make it better, grander and funnier.
You broke your final frontier with this new IP and you deserve your 'bonne chance'.
;)
 
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The
REDDQ said:
Looks like cross between large cat and a bat... Batcat! :D

So hostile manner... what was your best warship? How did it look like, what was its weaponry? :)



So cool!


I wonder if in game black hole just was there, slowly eating a planet or did the biggest disaster ever happened to someone. :eek:
Click to expand...

I would image a black hole forming could be part of the game mechanics.......tech gone wrong and naturally forming.

Maybe aliens built a large space collider and created a black hole around their star. Or tried to harness energy from a created black hole around their planet like Hawking has suggested.

Anyway it looks better than most space games have created.
 
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