Hi everyone!
Abrakam put together a dev diary detailing some aspects of the art creation pipeline that they used during the production of Shadows of the Shroud, so you get a surprise Tuesday dev diary this week.

We’ll still have my dev diary about our next update on Thursday, which will be a little later than usual.

Take it away!

I'm Mikhail Pestov, a 2D artist at Abrakam Entertainment, and I'd like to tell you a little more about the portrait creation process for Shadows of the Shroud.

Today I'll be talking about the Tankbound portrait, which was a particularly special one that we knew was planned to be linked to a new Civic, but this process was generally the same for each one we produced.

These were the concepts I was provided by our lead artist: Jordi.

Brains!​

As you can see, details can range on these initial concepts from being very abstract to quite detailed. In this case, Jordi had also prepared a 3D concept, which is not typical but is done on some occasions. He must have liked this one.
My job is to render the final illustrations and prepare them for animation... so based on these, I tested several different options.

Psionic portraits were unique in that each was prepared with a special "Ascended" version.​

Sometimes the team and I immediately agree on a direction, and sometimes... well, sometimes, we need to do some heavy reworking. At this point in development we decided that we simply had too many 'brainy' portraits lined up and wanted to limit their appearance going forward. No problem, we can do that.

Brainless.​

We decided a pseudo 'energy' would be appropriate for this type of setup. While I typically work from an existing concept, I often have to create something new and solve non-obvious problems. This is an ongoing process involving communication with my teammates, feedback, ultimately to help make a character truly interesting!
In this case, we decide that this is much closer to what we want to see. The team approves the direction, and I start rendering. This is a process of refining the sketch more carefully, correcting mistakes, adding details, and texturing materials like metal or glass in greater detail.

They've got legs, and they don't really know how to use them.​

Once everything is ready and we feel that it's 100% right, I move on to polishing. This stage includes adding textures, small abrasions, highlights, scratches, etc. Things you'd expect to see on mechanical tanks that move around in spaceships.

Which tank are you?​

At this point, the figures reach their final appearance. Now I move on to the final, most technical, stage: the preparation for animation.

This involves painstakingly separating the portrait into its base components. This often means adding or redoing something if I recognize there will be problems in animating a particular element. Once the team gives it the thumbs up, I send it to our animator who brings it to life: Bastien.
And that's how a baby Tankborn was… born.

Hi everyone. I’m Aurelio La Ferla, Senior Hard Surface Artist at Abrakam Entertainment, and today we're gonna give a look at my approach on both the Mindwarden and Psionic 3D shipset for Shadows of the Shroud.

The process I followed for both shipsets is similar on some steps, but really different on some others.

We have to keep in mind that Mindwardens ships are more spiky, most of the time formed by squared and triangular shapes. Psionic, on the other hand, have more soft shapes with curved silhouettes. This is fundamental to understanding the best approach in the modeling/sculpting phase.

Starting with Mindwardens, I'm gonna talk a bit about the general steps trying my best to not be too technical and boring :)

As previously said, Mindwarden ships are mostly based on square and triangle shapes, so what I did is basically start the modeling process from very primitive shapes following the concept previously did by the concept artists.

Primitive building blocks.​

After having a rough base to work from, I then added details, bevels, and generally smoothed them out to make them as clean as possible for the highpoly.

The smoothest triangles you'll ever see.​

Once I do this for all the main pieces, I start to put them together. This is building the structure of the spaceship piece by piece, always following the concept until I have the complete ship built it up in highpoly.

Highpoly Mindwarden Colossus.​

After building the highpoly, what I usually do is a quick highres render, with some basic metallic material and lights and send it to the rest of the team for design approval. Now it really starts to come to life.

The forbidden flower.​

Once the 3D highpoly is fully approved, I’m ready to move on to the lowpoly model. For the Mindwardens specifically, most of the time I tweaked some of the base pieces used for the highpoly to repurpose for the low.
When the lowpoly is ready and the structure of the spaceship is done, I proceed to work on the UVs. This is the flat 2D representation of the 3D model, fundamental for the baking and texturing phase.

Like taking apart the most complicated cardboard box.​

Now it's ready to bake, but using a computer as an oven. This is the process that “transfers” the details from the highpoly to the lowpoly model. The whole reason for doing all of this is to have everything look highly detailed, while still being optimized for real-time performance in-game.
The very last step for me is the texturing.

Ready to seal the Shroud.​

For the texturing process I used materials produced by one of our technical artists. Now the model is ready to be rigged and animated!
Finally, here are some final renders of the Colossus:

For the Psionic shipset, the process is more or less the same, but the initial approach is different ‘cause the shapes are more soft and curved.
The process always involves:

• Highpoly

• Lowpoly

• UVs

• Bake

• Texturing

But the initial part is more of a “sculpting” process.

Basically, starting from primitive shapes, I sculpt every piece of the spaceship and put them together. The sculpt is an easier and more proper way to approach these kind of shapes.

Digital clay.​

Once again, with the highpoly sculpt finished and approved, it's time for the lowpoly.
In this case the approach is different from the Mindwardens, ‘cause here we are gonna have a highpoly sculpt that needs to be lowered down in terms of its tris-count, or number of triangles it has. The Mindwardens started basically as triangles, so they cheated a bit. So, we are gonna build a more clean and lower density topology through the “retopology” process.

Exterminating triangles.​

And this is the final result of that process. As you can see, the model went from a really high tris density to one that can be used more practically for animation and in-game.
The retopology process is not always necessary. Sometimes if the sculpt topology is clean enough, it’s possible to lower the tris-count just by simplifying some shapes or removing some edgeloops.

Once the lowpoly is ready, the rest of the process is the same as above.

Here some renders of the final result:

Behold, the Psionic Ion Cannon.​

Hope you all enjoyed it!

by Eladrin

Hello everyone!

We’re currently running a 4.1.6 Open Beta on Steam, which we’ve recently updated with a fix to slavery production bonuses.

Here’s a list of everything currently in there:

Note: Two new additions under Bugfixes since last week are bolded.

Improvement​

• Teeth of the Eater fleets now move to merge with already existing ones on spawn, to prevent clogging.

• Added tooltips to the Great Awakening tradition to clarify Psionic Assimilation living standard.

• Adds tooltips to Automation Building for Tankbound when the Building will not automate certain jobs

Balance​

• Disciple of the Cradle leader trait no longer removes job output as governor and now adds trust cap as councilor.

Bugfix​

• Fixed default zone showing up in Broken Shackles planet UI

• Symbiosis living standard tooltip no longer displays string ID.

• Shroud-Forged pops can now be recruited as Assault Armies or Psionic Armies.

• Fixed being able to build the same district zone specialization without closing the planet view

• Planet governor skill modifiers no longer apply to fleets now

• Now shows the proper leader tier frame again in the UI

• Radiotrophic pop upkeep now applies

• Terraforming a planet into a machine or hive world no longer removes buildings in the rural districts.

• Distributed Design Center and Metallurgical Research Lab buildings now correctly give additional bonuses on ringworlds.

• Alloy Nano-Plants and Civilian Repli-Complexes no longer have increased costs and upkeep on ringworlds.

• Going for the Cybernetic ascension as a Hive-Mind now properly blocks the Psionic Ascension.

• Hard Reset Empires that have started to Cybernetically ascend may no longer take the Synthetic Evolution ascension perk, and vise versa.

• The Council Cleanup event will no longer attempt to create pops on stars

• Fixed Ocean Paradise starts not showing the farming district at game start due to a mismatch between capped and uncapped districts for that origin

• Ecumenopolis Urban Districts now add Production Overseers jobs.

• Fix issue that caused uncapped districts to be destroyed on the monthly tick

• Chattel Slavery and other modifiers that failed to apply production bonuses to slaves now provide workforce efficiency bonuses to them instead.

  • Known Issue: We’re still trying to track down an issue causing Unemployed Syncretic slaves to continue disappearing instead of demoting properly, but they appear to come out of hiding if new jobs open up. Please let us know if you see this behavior happening with other Civics or Origins, as “conventional” Xenophobia or Authoritarian slavery appears to generally be working as expected.

• The Growing Like Weeds achievement no longer requires EXACTLY 25k budding pops.

AI​

• The AI is now less likely to bankrupt itself through the use of Eternal Vigilance.

Stability​

• Fixed CTD in set_hostile effect when it cannot create a relation between the countries.

• Fixed CTD on MacOS happening sometimes while highlighting sections of demographics pie charts

• Fixed CTD when starting to explore an astral rift that previously had progress done

Modding​

• Removed the duplicate uncapped district types and made their functionality part of the base type. is_uncapped is a trigger now for district types that handles this

• The overnight command now keeps two extra saves, at 2275 and 2325.

• Added the -incrementalsaves command line parameter which keeps additional saves at 2200.01.01, 2275.01.01, 2300.01.01, 2350.01.01, and every 50 years afterwards until 2600.01.01. (Only applies to non-Ironman games.)

Now I’d like to go over our planned roadmap for the next few months.

We’re currently integrating localization files into the 4.1.6 branch and submitting it for certification. If everything goes according to plan, it should be able to be released early next week.
Fixes will continue as part of 4.1.7, which like 4.1.6, should remain as an Open Beta for a few weeks.

Our initial list of changes that are already in our internal 4.1.7 includes:

Balance​

• Changed the Cradle of Souls chosen trait to give +30%/+15% Political Power as Planet / Sector governor instead of +750%/+500%.

• The Cybernetic and Cyber Commando traits now allow species to live on machine worlds, even outside of a driven assimilator.

• The Opus core world for the Hard Reset origin is now size 25.

• The Extradimensional Experimentation planetary decision now has the Data-Driven Theorem Facility increase physicist output and give them zro upkeep.

• Cybernetic Creed empires with Civil Education no longer start with a massive consumer goods deficit.

Bugfix​

• Fixed an issue where your authority wouldn't change to Imperial after appointing your ruler as Divine Sovereign

• The Divine Sovereign civic is now properly removed, should the chosen leader of an empire die.

• Added missing Production Overseers jobs to multiple rural districts for Tankbound empires.

• Corrected missing full stops at the end of the Great Awakening tooltip.

• Restored the ending of the Fleet Maneuver event chain.

• Added missing upkeep modifier from Tankbound to habitat rural districts.

• Updated ringworld colony designations to follow the new standards

• The relic world specialization being blocked by the collapsed spire will no longer have repeat lines in it

• The Retirement Home achievement is once again achievable

• Fixed a wide range of the galaxy's species going on a hunger strike (including MSI for some reason!)

• Fixed the Nivlac trait not displaying an icon, it now shares its icon with the Extremely Adaptive trait.

• Alloy megaforges now correctly have a volatile motes cost and upkeep.

• Fixed missing species name in event title and descript when awakening psionic abilities.

• The Minor Artifact Decision "Initiate Performance Competition" will once again be providing working modifiers

• The Hard Reset species traits will once again be localized

• Sabotaging Starbases should no longer generate ethics options that mention your target's ethic.

• Fixed modifier removal being displayed twice in Order Restored event acceptance tooltip.

• first_contact.15, the event that talks about the location of your contact's country's homeworld will no longer sometimes try to tell you about their star instead.

• Fixed being able to take the Hegemon origin while being Egalitarian

• Hard Reset origin and Tankbound civic are now incompatible due to mutually exclusive mechanics.

• Empires are no longer required to feed any pre-sapients they find in the galaxy. (But your cat will still claim it has never been fed).

Modding​

• Added the soft_traits parameter to origins for traits the player should start with but can remove without making their government invalid

Our order of priorities for the Custodian programmers are currently:

1. Get the overall MP Out of Sync rate back to 4.0.23 levels. ✅

   • We’re currently a bit better than this target as of 4.1.5, but if it slips back up it will become the first priority again.

2. Focus on Performance improvements to get average overnight daily tick times for 300 year games under 375ms. (3.14 performance target.)

3. Reduce the MP Out of Sync rate for desyncs that recur after resyncing to 60% of the 4.0.23 rate.

4. Continue working on Performance improvements to get overnight average daily tick times for 300 year games under 350ms.

   • This target approximates the state of the game between the releases of First Contact and Galactic Paragons.

5. Rewrite how slavery is implemented.

After this, work will continue on these in parallel:

• Reduce the MP Out of Sync rate for desyncs that recur after resyncing to 30% of the 4.0.23 rate, which would bring us to levels that are notably better than the historic average.

• Continue working on Performance to get down to 300ms average daily tick, which approximates the performance before the release of Overlord.

• Rewrite how ethics divergence and factions are implemented.

% Out of Syncs over time since the 4.0 release.The designers of the Custodian team are splitting their time between post-release support, helping me with the Ship Experiments that I described in last week’s dev diary[forum.paradoxplaza.com], and a broad Economic Balance pass.

As always, these plans are subject to change, especially if a spicy target of opportunity presents itself for gains or other critical issues arise. Ethics divergence, for example, might increase in priority if we think it will significantly help with reaching our 350ms target.

When November approaches, we are planning on switching the Open Beta branch over to a 4.2.0 Open Beta that will contain a “safe…ish” change to how modifiers are handled, which is expected to provide some hardware-dependent performance improvements. The 4.2.0 Open Beta will also include improved performance and desync telemetry to help us track down issues.

This first modifier change is considered “relatively safe”, but must still go through an Open Beta as modifiers are such a foundational part of the game. Ideally this modifier change will go live alongside the Infernals Species Pack in 4.2, but if the Open Beta shows issues it’ll stay in that branch until we resolve them.

Post-4.2, the Open Beta will turn into a longer running 4.3 Open Beta, which will be updated at a regular cadence. This Open Beta will include more aggressive modifier optimizations that we do not feel are safe enough to include in 4.2. After a few weeks, if they continue to show promise, the Ship Experiments and Economic Balance branches will be merged into the Open Beta.

The 4.3 Open Beta will run over the holidays, with regular updates until it releases at some point in Q1 2026. The Ship Experiment and Economic Balance branches will be considered experimental for this Open Beta and will be maintained separately from the main 4.3 branch, so we’ll retain the ability to either revert the changes or to keep them in Open Beta longer for a future release if desired.

Next week we’ll continue with more information on the upcoming patches.

See you then!