What I’d like to talk about today is a re-work, and a major expansion, of the Hostile Activity system introduced in the previous release. It was released in a baseline state where the only two factions involved in it were the Luddic Path and the pirates, but it was always intended as a way to put a lot of different content in front of the player.

So, the changes here are two-fold: 1) taking some lessons from how the existing mechanics worked out, and 2) adding a *lot* of content to the system, so that it can be seen in its intended and more-or-less final form. It’s certainly possible that more content will be added to it here and there, but the amount of content it’ll have in the next release will be enough for the system to “work” – it just needs the variety, more on that a bit later.

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This post is about the process of implementing scripted dialog content into Starsector. It’ll get technical toward the end and I’ll do a tutorial on how to implement a new piece of character interaction.

So! I’ve been given to understand that rules.csv is notorious among modders of the game – how unfortunate!

In response, allow me to present a spirited defense of this data file and its attendant content pipeline. I’ll talk a bit about what it is, why Alex made it the way it is, how I came to use it, and how it can be used in general.

(It’s probably important to explain what the heck a rules.csv is in the first place, isn’t it.)

The rules.csv file is the primary, but not only, means of creating dialog interactions within the game Starsector. This includes almost all situations where the player engages with an entity – a planet, fleet, or character – where a textbox pops up and allows the player to choose from a set of responses. After choosing a response, stuff happens, more text is displayed, and a new set of possible responses is presented. This interaction loop proceeds until the dialog is closed.

This system is the basis for conversations with NPCs, for most interactions with campaign objects (planets, derelicts, sensor arrays, jump-points), and nearly all of the missions and story events.

In short, rules.csv contains the data used by what amounts to a custom scripting language that hooks into the game code to drive almost all content which doesn’t involve the combat map or the campaign map.

It’s a big deal!

Though some may find it hard to believe, I do enjoy using rules.csv because, above all, it’s lightweight. Every step is fast, simple, and responsive. I’ll walk through how this looks in practice in the tutorial section of this post.

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For the most part – for almost the entire part – I have been working on new game content since the last update. Talking about it in detail is 100% spoilers, and while I do believe there’s an interesting blog series to write about the overall strategy of narrative design in Starsector during a long development cycle, properly contextualizing it… well, that’d be spoilers.

What else to write about, then? Man, I dunno – but then I had a discussion with Alex about creating an illustration to go with the content I was working on and decided to show him all of my sketches leading up to the final composition. “This could be a blog post, couldn’t it,” I said.

So, hello. This is a digital painting blog post. I’ll show you my process and attempt to explain in hindsight why I made certain decisions. And, to come clean, this is only partially motivated by my desire to insert fan art for Alastair Reynold’s Revenger series into Starsector. (More of it, anyway.)

Earlier this week I created a mission which involves having the player fly out into the fringe of the Persean Sector to dig around in some ruins. There is indeed a Galatia Academy mission which does this very activity, but I assure you that this new mission does it slightly differently! And thinking about these two missions, I was struck by a notion: why not draw some Revenger fan art why not do an illustration of a salvage team finding loot in creepy ruins which could be used for both missions? This situation comes up fairly often in Starsector anyway, and I never really did previously create an appropriate illustration for this sort of thing. Great!

My mind immediately goes to the sequence in Alien where the crew of the Nostromo investigates a derelict ship on LV-426. That era of science fiction movie art production is a huge inspiration to my take on the Starsector aesthetic, as I’ve written about before somewhere on here at some point.

Here’s the shot:

Fantastic! Love the suit silhouettes, the texture, the grim lighting. It’s a bit too organic and boney for what I’m going for, but it feels like a good starting place in terms of setting the mood.

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Let’s talk about the options the player has for moving around the Sector! For a long time, the set of movement mechanics has been incomplete, with additions made here and there (slipstreams, unlocking the use of the Gates), but still lacking some of the options that in my mind would make up the final picture. Perhaps “final” isn’t the right word – things will certainly be tweaked as necessary – but it’s about having a more complete set to tweak, rather than what has been, until now, a partial implementation.

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I’d like to take a moment to talk about the development of narratives in the last update, and maybe in the game in general. I should note: this is a process post, not a lore-dump. So this is about how I went about coming up with these ideas and implementing them, not what Baikal Daud’s favorite flavor of ice cream is. More on anti-lore later. But yeah, I’m dying to talk about all of this but I have to play it fairly close to my chest to avoid spoiling what we’ve got in mind for the long game.

Two things first.

1. As anyone who’s written creative fiction knows, it’s terrifying to work on something for over a year and then show it off to who-knows how many thousands of people all at once. Especially in a field you’re not really ‘proven’ in (though, uh, arguably this feeling was far more pronounced with the introduction of the Galatia missions. There, yes, I was legitimately freaking out a bit. This time, much more confident and comfortable.

… Nonetheless, not everyone is going to like what you do. But I’ve been in games for, what, almost 15 years? And shipped at least one trainwreck. C’est la Vie! Regardless: You’ve all been very kind.

2. And: I know you guys want narrative payoff for the hanging plot threads at the end of Galatia, for the Gates, and now for the fate of the Church and Askonia. And I want to give them to you! But we have to do it when we have the mechanics in place to do it right. I know that sucks to hear, but I think playing the long-game will pay off. (- I think the narrative slow-burn that eg. Andor did was really, really smart because the payoff was fantastic. I have no idea how Disney executives approved that show and let them get away with what they did.)

Oh yeah, this is going to have spoilers for v0.96 story missions. You’ve been warned!

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