Stellaris Mods - Drow Shipset Nearing Completion, Federations On The Horizon, Project Chocolate Almond (Patreon)

Why does Patreon feel the need change the layout every couple of months? >.<

But thankfully there is one thing that will always stay the same, and that's yours truly's capacity for derpy monologues in these lovely Monthly Mod Reports that are officially back!

Since we were a bit disorganised over the holidays and post Nyaa Yarn, we decided to skip January and simply post updates on Twitter whenever something interesting happened. Not much did, but we shared some screenshots of the final iteration of Drow Titan as well as the new tentacle-patterned Drow texture variant. As of today, work on the shipset is, at long last, entering the final phases where all that remains are the stations and civilian/utility ships! And with this, our resources will soon be free to be fully committed towards Omega, which we're hoping will be the main feature of Monthly Mod Reports throughout 2020!

But that's not the end of our ambitions this year! With the completion of one project, another is set to fill up the slot - Project Chocolate Almond!

Which... I once intended to be announced as an Unannounced Project first but ultimately decided against it as I'm thinking of reorganising the Patreon (this time for real!) but more on that in the next monthly report. Today's post is going to be encompassing a lot of stuff as is sooooo... you know how I feel about further ado, right?

Elves of Stellaris

With the Drow Titan complete and the rest of the military vessels having received new textures across the board, the Drow shipset is almost complete! We have started on the civillian/utility ships already and will be tackling the final batch of assets - stations and habitats - last. Megastructures are not currently our priority given how much time goes into each one, but we do hope to address them over time, whenever the inspiration strikes us.

The Colossus is another one we consider a wildcard because it's not part of the core tech tree and extremely situational. However, it is thematically very fitting for at least the Tulshar Drow so there is a high chance that we'll get to the Colossus sooner rather than later.

And of course, both Elves and Drow will get their own Juggernauts at some point after Federations come out. We've looked at the vanilla previews and are very happy with the sheer variety and flexibility of designs across shipsets. Shapes, hangar placement, turret layouts, none seem to be standardised so that leaves us a lot of room to be creative while still coming up with something recognisably Juggernaut-like! Even if the actual models are still some time away from entering production, I'd love to share our design ideas as soon as we commit them to canvas!

As for the ships currently in progress, Nessa is working on the Science Ship and Colony Ship. I don't have any pictures of the SCIENCE! vessel yet, but here's the original concept art!

It was drawn countless aaaaaages ago and you can probably see how much our Drow design has evolved since then, but we are still in love with many elements of its design, such as the wing-panel... thingies! Yes, that's the proper scientific term for them and we are thinking of animating them while the ship is scanning! The core of the vessel is probably going to look a little closer in line with our newer ships but it's also a pretty silhouette we would like to preserve in the finished product. It's going to be an interesting ship and definitely one of the most unique ones we've done so far!

The Colony Ship is much farther along in development and we expect it to be wrapped up very soon, pending only the final decision on what to put inside the dome and how to texture the dome itself. We are sorta toying with the idea of "stained glass" or otherwise fancy and eye-catching.

It's not QUITE how we originally envisioned it...

...but for a good reason. In the original concept, there wasn't much room for the glowy decals that have since come to be the hallmark of Drow ships. We decided to come up with a similar but less dome-dominated design. The new dome, while not yet complete, is going to consist of this segmented series of pyramids similar to the structures on top of most of our military designs. It's nowhere near finished but the final version will look a lot more intricate and interesting.

Project Chocolate Almond

Ooooooh mysteeeeerious! What could it beeeee?

We also refer to it internally as Portraits 2.0!

Those of you who have been following us for some time may remember that we originally planned Omega to ship with Collectors depicted by custom portraits. While the most recent reorganisation of Omega resulted in the Collector content being relegated to post-release development, the portrait setup for them has laid a foundation for a larger project!

What is it about? In the simplest of terms, the main objective is to give us more control over portraits, both for existing species and future. Using vanilla models as base, we have run into issues with such things as hats! And animations! And eye placement!

With proper custom models we'll have the ability to determine the boundaries of accessory layers, set up our own deformation points on the skeleton, allowing for more elaborate animations.

And what does that actually mean for our mods? Are we so obsessed with hats that we would render all of our existing portraits obsolete and have to redo them from scratch just to enable bigger and fancier headwear?!

YES! Of course we would, what a silly question? Oh! But I guess there are some minor side-benefits too!

For one, it would allow us to consolidate body and clothing templates across our mods! This in turn would allow for both more cross-pollination between their respective art resources. But how, might you ask? Don't asari and elves and any potential future species have different body types? Do we intend to make them all look the same?
Nope! Not at all! This is where the ability to design our own skeleton comes in. By having precise control over the number, position, scaling and animations of the paperdoll's bones, we will be able to morph each species portraits' body shape to an extent, utilising a shared rig but applying species-specific idle animations.
Vanilla Stellaris already utilises this technique with their own space elves - you may notice some weirdness (particularly around the neck and shoulder areas) when looking at raw assets, but thanks to their animations, those deformations are not visible in game.

And secondly, this will give us the ability to finally get back to creating MORE species and more portraits for them much faster and easier! For now, our long-term wishlist includes:

• Pixies (with animated sparkly wings)
• Quarians (with and without suits)
• Catgirls and boys! (you could call it my... pet project!)
• ...and probably a lot more down the line!

In the short term, we want to convert Asari, Elves and Drow to the new system. This will force us to remake a lot of the existing assets, possibly toss some and add new ones to replace them, but it is something we have already committed to, and the earlier we take care of it, the better. I, for one, cannot wait to get back on portrait-making again!

Expect to hear more on Portraits 2.0 throughout this year. If everything goes smoothly, we're hoping to release our source files and templates to the community and help bring Stellaris portrait modding to the next level!

And on that note, this is all for this month! Next Monthly Mod Report is, amongst other things, going to go into more detail on the planned Patreon revamp in hopes of making it a bit better suited for how Team Nessassity actually develops and presents content as opposed to the generic and, to be quite honest, nonsensical model I've been using up to this point. So please look forward to that! As always thank you for your continued support despite my being a hopeless derpsicle, and always have fun playing Stellaris! <3