The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

The new Star Control is still some months from release but we've released a trailer that shows its progress.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdCGLVnf904

A couple things that aren't obvious from the video is that the universe is a single view.  That is, from the surface of a planet all the way up to the entire known galaxy is a single view (not different screens).  If you look at around 1:25 you can see an example of other ships going about their business.

The Mu'kay at 1:42 is actually real-time lit and rendered with its voice acting synced in real time as well.  We're thinking about having an AMA at some point with one of the aliens talking in real time.

The main purpose is to help introduce those not familiar to Star Control the main premise: You aren't just exploring the galaxy for exploration's sake.  It's a busy universe and the stakes are high.   

Even since this video was taken, the visuals have gotten even better.

I really like the way you designed the Mu'kay's appearance. Beautiful, and very reminiscent of SC2.

The humans, on the other hand, look too cartoonish to me. Yes, I am aware that Star Control is supposed to look cartoonish, but humans were depicted much more realistically in SC2.

Looks awesome! I am looking forward to play it. :)

Is it going to work in Linux?

nice.

dangit..
I think my kids will love your game...

BTW, since it's the name of the race, shouldn't "Human" at 1:42 be spelled with a capital "H"?

Actually the humans in SC:O go by The Hegemonic Tauri Empire of Sol.

Or just, "Tauri" for short.

Heh.  Is that from Stargate or something else?

Stargate. You first hear it from Teal'c but apparently Tauri is what the rest of the galaxy refers to the humans that evolved on Earth.

I only watched about half-way through because I'm trying to keep myself as ignorant as possible so I can come into the game with completely fresh eyes, but the stuff I saw looked pretty sweet.

Quick update:

One big difference between Star Control II and Star Control: Origins is that different races will have whole ranges of ships.

So for instance, the Scryve have probes, scouts, cruisers, battleships, Dreadnoughts, etc. Rather than a single ship.

Here's a screenshot of a Scryve Cruiser. Slightly different weapon loadout.

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/380722421390639107/431922956655001611/unknown.png

Here is an acid planet from orbit:
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/380722421390639107/431914810305675266/unknown.png?width=2402&height=1352

Acid planets are deceptively safe (other than, you know, the name of the planet class). You have to watch out for bursts of acid that will do not so good things to your lander.

This desert world has some radioactives on it that I need (the yellow triangle is your HUD showing that there's a radioactive mineral ahead).

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/380722421390639107/431910101071429632/unknown.png

One of our challenges in development to decide how high resolution to make our visuals. Right now, we store every material as a 4096x4096 texture but we're only using the 512x512 mip and lower of them. This way, as your hardware gets better, the game will just automagically look better.

Obviously, on a 1920x1080 monitor there's no value in having a 4K texture on screen (especially even on a 4K monitor you would only see part of it). But someday, people will have 8K or higher displays.

The nice thing about the engine is that we don't keep the 4K texture in memory. We simply skip out on the first 2 mips.

For you any modders here who are curious, we use BC7 encoding which does require a DirectX 11 or better video card but vastly decreases the memory use allowing the game to run even on my Surface Pro 4.

So how are you texturing that there spherical planetary environment in so much detail when the lander is that close to the surface?

Is it a spherified / normalized cube with a 4096x4096 texture for each of the six sides? Or do you use seamlessly repeating detail textures to create all that grit and small craters?

New planetary hazards. Awesome.

About mineral values, though - would it now be viable to harvest minerals that were considered low-value in SC2/UQM (common, corrosive, base metal)? Is SC2's classification still going to apply?

It is actually many many different textures.  So think of a planet having hundreds of tiles where each tile is a texture.  The textures can overlap each other and blend into each other.

Thus, I could have a mountain tile with a snow texture that goes over it.

That's how you end up with really interesting planets like this:

(https://content.screencast.com/users/draginol/folders/Snagit/media/3f4a805a-dd72-4f03-8be2-12b1917b2f8c/04.07.2018-16.56.png)

So lots and lots of 4k tiles (downsampled to their 512 mip) placed around the planet to overlap with various algorithms on placement to create these neat planets.

We also regularly have screenshots Fridays (or Saturdays) that get posted on our Discord server and subreddit.

You can check out some of the public screenshots from the last one on this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/StarControlOfficial/comments/8aisla/star_control_screenshot_saturday_472018/ (https://www.reddit.com/r/StarControlOfficial/comments/8aisla/star_control_screenshot_saturday_472018/)

Personally, I love the shot of the mockup for version 2 of the UI for the planet editor Scott shared on twitter.

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DaMdqWpX4AAEHGB.jpg:large)