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Distant Worlds 2
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Distant Worlds 2 Sneak Peek #1 – Ship Design
20 Dec 2019
A Teekan Spaceport in orbit around a planet
We’ve been working on Distant Worlds 2 for more than four years now and we thought it was time to start giving you a few peeks behind the curtain. There is much more we’ll be showing over the coming months, but we’ll give you a first look today.
Please note that the screenshots included here are not from a final, polished release build so will in places include some unfinished areas and missing or placeholder art. There is much that is still subject to change between our current development build and the release.
In general, our goal for Distant Worlds 2 was to make a better Distant Worlds 1, with a new and modern engine. That is a pretty tall order given that by the time we got to the final Distant Worlds: Universe release, about nine years of development and design had gone into Distant Worlds 1.
Distant Worlds 2 is based on an entirely new 64-bit, multi-core capable 3D engine which provides us better performance and the ability to create even larger galaxies with more to explore, more stories to tell and even larger battles. In addition, it allows us to support a fully scalable interface.
A Mortalen Spaceport with component slot markers turned on
For this first peek, we’d like to speak briefly about Ship Design. In this screenshot, you can see the ship design interface and a view of a Mortalen Spaceport.
In Distant Worlds 1, ships were two dimensional units basically defined by their size. Size determined how much could fit in a ship. Each component that could fit in a ship had a size and while you needed some minimum components to get a ship to work, beyond that you could put in whatever you wanted, as long as you stayed within the maximum size. Your size was also essentially your bag of hit points and any damage that wasn’t soaked up by your shields or your armor started destroying components.
In Distant Worlds 2, ships are a bit more interesting.
A Mortalen Spaceport with component slot markers turned off
For one thing, they are now three dimensional models. For another, ships now have a hull, which has its own armor rating and ability to take damage, as well as additional space that can fit components.
That additional space is divided into slots, which are organized by the broad component category they are intended to fit. When a ship takes a hit, assuming it gets past the shields (which now can allow some damage to “leak” through, but also can have some base resistance against small shots, similar to the reactive rating for armor) and the armor, it may hit the hull or it may hit a component.
If your hull is too badly damaged, your ship will be destroyed. If you lose the wrong components, you could also be effectively dead in space, but not necessarily destroyed.
When you are deciding how to build a ship now, you first research a hull, which defines the hull armor, hull size and the size and number of components it can fit.
This is a shot of an Ackdarian Construction Ship
Some of these component slots are external (for example, all the weapons and engine, the hangar, some of the defenses). In the case of an external slot, adding a component there is actually reflected on the 3D model of the ship. A ship with four weapons will have four visible weapons, whereas a ship with one will only have one. A ship that has filled out all its possible engine slots to be as fast as possible will visible have more engines, and so on.
In many cases, this means that you can see significant differences in the ship model based on the design style chosen for a particular ship. It’s worth noting that you almost never have enough available space in the hull to fill every possible slot. As with Distant Worlds 1, you can choose to specialize a ship in one or a few areas, or to try to balance its capabilities across all areas.
Within the ship design interface, you can easily view the different categories of components, review the component slots in your selected hull and also see the visualization of the ship and the component slot locations in the center. The right side allows you to see a summary of your ship’s capabilities in a variety of areas.
There’s more to say about ship design, but that’s all we will cover for now. We’ll leave you with a few screenshots that show a bit more of the game.
This is an Ackdarian Spaceport in orbit around an Ocean Planet
This is view of the planet Sreloor 5 and its moons
This is view of a red gas giant with a mining station in orbit
This is a peek at the main interface, still work in progress, but showing a system view in the center, various main interface dialogs in the top left, including the Military one which is open, the selection dialog in the bottom left with some information regarding the selected Mortalen Destroyer, a summary of the planets, ships and stations in the system being viewed in the bottom center, map overlay toggles in the bottom right and victory, settings, message and speed controls in the top right.
We appreciate your interest in Distant Worlds 2 and we hope you enjoyed this preview of Ship Design!
Stay tuned for further information
Asid:
Distant Worlds 2 - Showcase
21 Jan 2021
Live stream on Tuesday, January 26th on Slitherine new Twitch.Player("twitch-embed1", { channel: "slitherinegroup", autoplay: false, height: "378", width: "620", parent: "dogsofwarvu.com" }); for a showcase entirely dedicated to Distant Worlds 2.
We will be sharing with you the latest news and showing you the first gameplay videos of the game.
So don't make plans for that day, Distant Worlds 2 isn't that "distant" anymore.
See the reveal teaser
Asid:
Distant Worlds 2 || Ackdarians Trailer
Jan 26, 2021
Asid:
Distant Worlds 2 Gameplay Reveal
26 jan 2021
Asid:
Distant Worlds 2 - Dev Diary #1
Tue, 6 July 2021
Welcome dear reader and thank you for your interest in Distant Worlds 2. This is the first of several Developer Diaries that we’ll be releasing roughly every two weeks from now until release to cover different parts of Distant Worlds 2 in some additional detail.
First, let me introduce who we are. As you may be aware, Distant Worlds 2 has a fairly small development team, though it has grown since Distant Worlds: Universe. The two core team members are Elliot Gibbs who is the one and only programmer and designer and Erik Rutins (that’s me) who is the producer and co-designer. There are many additional and crucial team members who we work with every week: a “Supertester” and expert XML data wrangler and tools developer, several incredibly creative and dedicated 3D, 2D and UI artists who provide us with our models, characters, animations, effects, illustrations, interface elements and concept art, and a very talented music composer. We have also been blessed to have the assistance of many dedicated and remarkably talented Distant Worlds volunteer testers and fans who have helped us in very important ways throughout Alpha and Beta testing with their feedback and suggestions. Any acclaim should deservedly go to the whole team as Distant Worlds 2 has been a real team effort.
This initial diary will discuss a few of our key goals when we finished support on Distant Worlds: Universe and decided that making a new Distant Worlds game was what we wanted to do.
The pre-cursor to Distant Worlds 2, Distant Worlds: Universe is a very successful Sci-Fi 4x game, which while strongly influenced by many 4x and strategy games that came before it, also added some new innovations to the genre. Some of the main innovations were the seamless “living galaxy” feel of the game, the very flexible automation and advisor settings that allowed you to tailor the game to your preferred playstyle, and the remarkable depth which allowed you to dive into your preferred gameplay areas with significantly less abstraction that many games allow. The end result was a great deal of positive acclaim from players that focused on these innovations and the overall gameplay, while most of the negative feedback was related to the limitations of the underlying engine, including memory usage, performance, graphical quality and interface scaling.
Distant Worlds: Universe was unfortunately built on a 32-bit Windows engine with some very real limitations in what could be done in many of these problem areas while maintaining adequate performance within the scope of an always active “living galaxy”. We were bumping up against these limits ourselves from the initial release and they became increasingly more difficult to deal with over time.
By the time we released Distant Worlds: Universe, we knew that any future game would need a new engine that would not only allow us to make Distant Worlds look better, but would also allow it to perform better and expand what we could do in terms of gameplay choices. Elliot spent a good deal of time researching this and in fact one year into the project we even went through the pain of switching engines, just to make sure we would be able to achieve all of our engine-related goals. Distant Worlds 2 is now based on the Stride engine, is fully 64-bit and 3D and with a full dynamic scaling for all elements, including the interface. I can’t overstate how much work and time it required of the entire team to make this leap, but we strongly feel the end result will be worthwhile and will allow us to continue to develop for Distant Worlds 2 for many years to come.
The second main goal relates to the interface. In making the big jump to a new and modern engine, we knew we could address dynamic scalability, but there were also many comments from Distant Worlds: Universe players about the original interface being difficult to learn. While it was quite functional once you learned it, the initial learning curve was harder than it should have been and partly because it evolved over multiple releases, the organization of information in some cases made things quite difficult for players to find.
A significant effort was put into a re-design of the interface, focused on providing players with easy top-level access to the most significant information both for better awareness and quicker decision-making. The bottom-left area remains focused on information about whatever the player has selected, but the selection menus and buttons themselves have been reorganized as well as additional information added where it previously required diving into other menus or dialogs. The bottom-middle now has a dynamic summary when in the system level of all significant “objects’ within the player’s current location or view.
The top-left now has a series of major “headings” (in order from left to right, Empire Summary, Diplomacy, Colonies, Exploration, Resources, Construction, Research, Military and Civilian). When the player hovers the mouse over any of these, a summary of key metric in that area is shown. Moving the mouse down to the summary expands the menu further, allowing any of a series of sub-menus to be chosen that provide more information or detail. Moving the mouse off this area, collapses them back to the top, but clicking anywhere in these menus “locks” them open for ongoing interaction. Another click on the top “unlocks” them.
The top-right has a few basic piece of summary information – your current research projects, number of colonies and population, surplus income and cashflow and game date and speed. Clicking any of these also jumps to the relevant dialog to manage them in more detail. Below the speed controls are the victory conditions, game options and the message log.
The Message Log has had fillters added and can be opened at any time to review old messages. Current messages appear on the right hand side below the log. When they first appear, they are briefly expanded at first to allow the player at a glance to get a sense of what they are about, then they collapse back to a smaller color-coded message category icon. Depending on the player’s chosen options, these many include advisor messages as well as other notifications or warnings. If ignored, the vast majority “auto-expire” after a delay (a small line under the message icon shrinks as the message expires) and go to the message log. Hovering the mouse over a message allows a quick glance at its expanded form. A single left-click on the message will open and lock it so that any actions related to it may be decided on. A double left-click will go to the message location. A single right-click will immediately dismiss the message.
A third goal was to make it easier for the player to gain information at a glance from the map. Part of this involved connecting up the User Interface to the map more directly. For example, when you have a dialog open on the top left and are reviewing your colonies, or exploration ships, or fleets, or even a filtered list of freighters currently transporting Hexodorium, the relevant items will also be highlighted on the map and will “ping” as you mouse over them so that you can more quickly and easily see where everything is. It also means that we added planetary and system “badges” which provide a summary of key assets, resources and capabilities at a given location. These have a planetary system version and a galacitc version depending on how zoomed in you are. There’s also additional information available when you mouse-over locations or objects.
In the view above, you can see that for the planet and moon on the right side of the system, I have found two ruins that are not yet fully explored. I also know of two available resources that could be mined and the exploration indicator in yellow is tellng me the current exploration level and that exploration there is not yet completed. The middle planetary group just has four resources. The middle left has a star showing that it’s our capitol planet, what its population is, what its happiness is, that it has the capability for construction (both due to the planet and the spaceport) and that it is a location that can refuel ships. Under that, it shows an explored ruin, the various explored resources and that we have 120 Troop Strength there.
Finally, in order to allow you to play the game your way, we’ve added a lot of policy, automation and advisor settings and grouped them all together in one convenient location to allow you to automate the parts you don’t want to deal with, turn on two different levels of advisors for areas you’d like to supervise, or set areas to full manual control when you really want to dive in. This level of automation extends down from this top level to being able to automate or manually control planets, fleets and even individual state ships.
I hope this review of our goals in improving the engine and the user interface helped you see how far we’ve come from Distant Worlds: Universe. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks with a new Developer Diary for you all!
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