Team Nessassity Mods - Portraits, Portraits, Portraits, Portraits, Portraits. Have I Already Mentioned Portraits? (Patreon)

So... did you know it's almost the spooky month? I just found out...
SO HI! WELCOME TO THE STILL-SEPTEMBER-ABSOLUTE-LAST-MINUTE MONTHLY MOD REPORT!

I hope everyone's been enjoying the Toxoids Species Pack and you didn't lose any hair in the process. Because I've heard that's a thing that's been going around lately.

ANYWAYS, the update came with a few more surprises than we expected so the past couple of weeks have been dominated by an air of paranoia as we kept finding and patching up little issues here and there. BUT I think everything is under control now (jinx) thanks to your timely bug reports <3

And I've actually managed to find some time to enjoy some Stellaris myself! What was supposed to be a bug-hunting playtesting session ended up drawing me in for like a week-long campaign where an unfortunate spawning location boxed in between a Hegemony, a Driven Assimilator and a bunch of expansionist jerks didn't look promising at first, but a lucky encounter with a nearby wormhole and a very early discovery of the wormhole travel tech completely turned the situation around and allowed me to find a new home in a friendlier corner of the galaxy.
For someone who loves designing interesting home systems and building them up throughout the game, I think that was the first time I decided to just... leave Valshaquellar to its fate in the galactic danger hotpot and completely migrated my civilisation into the unknown frontiers on the other side of the galaxy. In the end, what was intended to become a grand monolithic empire wound up transforming into that weird, decentralised, wormhole-hopping collection of militant exclaves that menaced the galaxy with their... scattered omnipresence which only got more ridiculous after I took over the L-cluster.
I haven't figured out what I want to do next in that game yet, but I when I do find the time to continue it, I think I might just go for Becoming the Crisis. I mean... I'm already a bordergore crisis, but it would be nice to make it a bit more official!

In a way, I think it brought me back to the time when I had no idea how Stellaris worked, and I would keep starting new games and just going with the flow of what was happening, without having a grand plan from the outset.

And it was also a good reminder just what kind of stories Paradox games are best at telling - the emergent kind. When random nonsense meets complex systems meets human agency, and the butterfly effect takes it from there to surprise you time and time again. It's the kind of thousands-of-hours-of-playtime magic that I've been unable to find in most other games.

Oh... but speaking of weird unpredictable tangents, you're probably not here for that! Let's talk about the mods instead!

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Khorgis Khan - Scourge of the Stars

The doge and corgly! Our secret collaborative project which I mentioned in the previous MMR!

If you missed the release announcement on our Discord, it came out a few weeks ago to hound the galaxy near you! Please give it a look, it's IMPOSSIBLY CUTE! Nessa worked some real magic to turn Jon Dunham's fanart into functional portraits, complete with high resolution textures, a custom skeleton and ADORABLE super expressive animations!

And, as it happens, this little project also served as our trial run for...

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PORTRAITS 2.0

Now, we've been mentioning and musing about PORTRAITS 2.0 for... quite a long time now. I think it was while we were developing the Lhùren portraits that we realised borrowing the vanilla portrait infrastructure was greatly limiting what we could do. While the human skeleton was good enough for relatively basic portraits and outfits, we quickly ran into issues with some of the more extravagant designs for hair, headwear and accessories that we were planning.

So we decided then that to fully realise our vision, we needed to develop new portraits from scratch. New skeletons with custom bones and layers and new animations that could utilise them. Until we could make that happen, we decided to stop updating the existing portraits and didn't want to create new ones based on the legacy setup.

But... as you might know, over the past couple of years, we've been mostly focused on shipsets as Stellaris was constantly introducing new ships and space structures that we wanted to cover, so the PORTRAITS 2.0 project kinda fell by the wayside, and because it was bottlenecking all portrait development, Team Nessassity as a whole stopped creating new species mods.

Until now!

Our shipsets are almost complete (yes, I know, Asari Jugs is still pending, we haven't forgotten <3) and that means we will be coming back to portraits soon.

Khorgis Khan allowed us to finally take the first tangible step in the direction of PORTRAITS 2.0. Over the course of its development, we figured out how modern Stellaris portraits work, reverse-engineered their creation process and came up with protocols for creating custom skeletons and animations.

So, what does that mean for our existing and future mods?

That is actually what we wish to discuss with the community in the near future!

Now that we're able to do whatever we want with portraits, the possibilities are endless! And just to give you some examples of what we've been brainstorming internally:

• Waist-up portraits, enabling more interesting outfit designs.
• Visible, articulated arms and hands which can hold accessories such as fans, weapons, glasses of expensive space champagne, etc.
• Scalable bones, allowing different body shapes for different species without having to create bespoke versions of outfits to match
• Large HATS and other ornamental headwear with dedicated layers separate from hair layers.
• Complex multilayered hairstyles composed of toggleable modular components that can be animated in detail, with different bones assigned to different layers, so things like twintails would behave differently from loose hair, etc.
• Different ear-shapes with matching earrings, both of which could be animated by independent bones to enhance motion with simulated physics.
• Visible, articulated tails! For... reasons.
• ...and much much more!

And actually, the much more part is where we want to involve you! Once we wrap up the current art projects (mostly orbital rings), I will open a special channel on Discord where you'll be able to submit your ideas for other things you would like to see in future Team Nessassity portraits! (Including the upcoming rework of Elven and Asari portraits)

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And... that's all for today. I was originally planning to post some updates on the Asari orbital rings and some other progress we've made, but I think it might be better to save them for the next MMR, which should be much closer to their releases!

Until then, I hope you're having fun playing Paradox games as much as I have, and you're looking forward to our (hopefully soonish) return to portrait modding! We're very interested to hear your feedback, so please let us know what you think on our Discord!

And as always, thank you so much for continuing to support us and enabling us to get better and better at what we do. We couldn't keep doing this month after month if it weren't for your constant encouragement <3