As Christmas approaches the only people working as hard as Santa’s elves are the STNH Devs… well maybe not quite, but the team is still working hard to bring the “Next Generations” patch to your PCs as soon as we can. I wanted to take this dev log to explain a little bit about what we’ve been doing and why this update has been bigger and more complicated than most.
Getting from here to the 24th Century!
By far our biggest challenge has been working out how we advance the STNH game from the usual 2150s start to the 2300s. It’s something we’ve wanted to do for a long while now, certainly long before it was attempted elsewhere. Still, our big concern was that this could end up being a whole new mod in itself which we very quickly decided would be too much overhead on a small core team of people to maintain. We didn’t want to develop something that we couldn’t keep relevant or would impact the development of the main mode.
However, we are fortunate to have an impressive number of geeks on our team. Thanks to some Python skills (alas not the snake!), we were able to develop some impressive scripts that would effectively move our empires up to the 2300s. Now this sounds amazing, right? It certainly is, but anyone who has modded Stellaris knows adding techs is one of the most intensive actions that can be taken, as the game needs to work through all the pre-req techs and work out what is/isn’t allowed as well as handling all of the allowances that come with this new tech you now magically have. So, we had a great script that did the job and a puddle of melted computers trying to load the new mode. However, we are nothing if not stubborn and so we’ve painstakingly reviewed and optimised the new TNG era start-up scripts, including a few tactical decisions, but we now have a working script, which does a lot of work but doesn’t take all day!
Next, we have to hand over these new starts to our beta testing team to go through and make sure that with so many intricacies all of our empires behave as they should this takes time, but we’re getting there with our most stable and fastest TNG load-up being pushed into testing this week. So once we are happy that our empires research, build, and react to the formed relationships that we’ve modelled on the available lore from the Lost Era and a little from our imaginations. Hopefully, we’ve now got a build that would make even Captain Janeway happy!