ravengales-glade

[ravengales-glade]

searching "sso" on tumblr without actually clicking on #sso will make it so that you see about 5-8 posts that are typed exactly like this image that have nothing to do with horses or gaming

[ravengales-glade]

lemme have a looksie at others horses before champ OH GREAT HEAVENS

[ravengales-glade]

Bless up to the person who called this out on Reddit. Star stable is once again working with AI, this time in their music.

I could accept the shitty, hastily put together excuse that the Spotify banner was a mistake. Firing real artists is not a mistake. Signing a contract with a company that says this about AI is not a mistake.

Boldly and proudly watching on as someone declares that your values, and we as your audience, align with ai slop, is not a mistake. Having wanted to do this SINCE 2023 when you first heard of dj dex proves that the AI art wasn’t really a fucking mistake either.

I’m going to shoot your servers

I will point out, nowhere have I personally read that all of the music is generated in an AI program. The only references I’ve seen to AI is in the programming and her voice, which allows her to be used as a chatbot. However seeing as she sings in the Stay song used in the Fort Pinta disco, there are at absolute best pieces of AI generated bullshit in the actual songs used by SSO.

The Reddit post

The article

The AI quote

[ravengales-glade]

I made a quiz for horsetistics who love torturing themselves :3

[ravengales-glade]

Anne heard it was pride month

[ravengales-glade]

Star Stable Extra May Blog - The New Tack System

Highlights:

- The goal of fully finishing this before summer 2025, which was promised to us at the end of last year, is no longer achievable - The system works, but they only fully tested it on three different breeds (for which the new system is going to be available as soon as they can) - There is no expected timeline in which they'll be able to move all the Gen 3 horses to the new system. - "We are also building for the future with this system, as anything new we want to do with the horse tack really benefits from this system. We would love to add highly requested tack items like blankets, multiple saddle bags, additional horse decorations, bareback pads, and more! There is more than just the tack system holding us back from releasing new tack slots, but it is one of the most important upgrades we need to do." (look under the cut for a picture of an experimental horse blanket👀) - "Some of the old horses already have visual issues and bugs. These will mostly remain as is unless they are related to the tack system. Continue to make us aware of the most annoying ones, and we will try to fix them as we go. But remember, we are only supporting Gen 3 and newer. " 🤔... wait, newer? (hint at new gen in the future? or maybe they mean the newer versions of older gen 3 horses) - They are planning on creating completely new meshes for saddles and other existing tacks. When? No one knows, but they have to coordinate with the artist for the testing time. They will only test some horse breeds, as this new system should make the tack fit all the gen 3 horses. This also means that with some horses, there may be some clipping issues that they miss. If that happens, they encourage players to let them know about the issues, and depending on the severity, how much time it needs and how fixable the problem itself is, they will fix it as soon as they can.

The whole game blog ↓

The New Tack System

By Björn Jankes (Art Director)

Last year we started a project that we, at the time, called the "no (more) retrofit project." Retrofitting is the process we use to make sure our different horse breeds can use the new tack items we create for them. And by tack we actually mean new tack meshes (the 3D art term for the shape of the piece), as we can already provide color and material variations on the tack fitted to each horse. We wanted to make this process less time-consuming and allow us to more easily make entirely new pieces of tack available to most of our horses at once. The current system is very time-consuming, requiring us to manually fit each piece to each horse and test them for any issues. 

There are many reasons why we ended up in a situation where we cannot simply "copy and paste" the fitting of the tack between horses, but mainly, it is due to the fact that we have over and over again sought to upgrade how we create our horses over the years. We are always striving for better looking, moving, and sounding horses.

The solution

To not be stuck with only the tack pieces we already have and have an infinitely-long list of horses to retrofit at any point in time, we decided to create a technical solution to help us. Lotta S, our lead character artist, led the charge together with Petar from the engine team. We have been working on this new system for quite some time now, making progress towards a release. In the fall of last year, it looked like we would be able to get the system done before the end of the year and start getting horses out soon afterward. This was communicated in a blog post, saying we would retrofit "all Gen 3 horses by summer 2025". But, as many of you know, game development is not always a straight road and that date is no longer realistic for completing all the work.

We are at a point now when the system works, and we have worked on three horses as test cases and aim to ship them to you as soon as possible. However, we will not even try to make promises on how quickly we can do the remaining horses. We will bring them in small batches, and since the system is now in place, we will start seeing things go faster for each horse we do. The new system is now simply called the "new tack system," and we call the process of moving horses over to it "porting" them to the new tack system. We are super excited about this new system and eager to bring the fruits of our labor to you players!

So what is taking so long? 

We did not fully understand the number of placement issues we would have, just how much testing it would require, and one more thing: living up to our own quality standards. The amount of fine-tuning we put into placing tack on our current horses is quite a lot, trying to minimize clipping, stretching, wrongly placed straps etc. The previous process required us to do this in a custom way on each breed, allowing our inner perfectionists unlimited ways to fix minor issues. The new system is based on having as few custom tweaks per horse as possible, allowing us in the art craft to quickly set up new pieces of tack or adjust placement on older pieces. This means changing placement is done per horse but will affect all of that type of tack on that horse, and some tweaks (to the meshes for example) will affect all horses.

As you can probably imagine, such a huge change creates some… interesting looking issues. However, we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel! We chose three very different looking breeds so we could test the system to its limits, and we really do think that will pay off when working on porting the rest of the horses.

What will this give the players?

One thing this will give the players is, of course, the ability to use new tack meshes we have created since the last retrofit of that horse. This is very welcome for many players. The long list of exceptions in the shop will ideally be a thing of the past (but still applicable to older breeds, sorry Gen 1 & 2). We are also building for the future with this system, as anything new we want to do with the horse tack really benefits from this system. We would love to add highly requested tack items like blankets, multiple saddle bags, additional horse decorations, bareback pads, and more! There is more than just the tack system holding us back from releasing new tack slots, but it is one of the most important upgrades we need to do.

Visual bugs & changes to existing horses

When we port old horses to the new system, we will do our very best to ensure the quality stays high like it is now. However, we will not mix between the old and new systems on the same horse, so there will be slight changes when moving over:

- Placement and size of tack can change slightly (sometimes this will look even better)

- We need to make some adjustments to the thickness of pads and other meshes to minimize clipping (parts of the tack going through other parts or the horse)

- Some minor visual bugs will slip through the net but CAN be fixed if we get reports of them

Some of the old horses already have visual issues and bugs. These will mostly remain as is unless they are related to the tack system. Continue to make us aware of the most annoying ones, and we will try to fix them as we go. But remember, we are only supporting Gen 3 and newer. 

New tack pieces?

As I mentioned, we have a lot of plans to bring you players new tack pieces, and first will be something we already have a tack slot for, which are new models of saddles! And thanks to the new system, the ported horses are able to make use of these new models immediately when released. The trick is to coordinate artist time with testing time so we can deliver some sweet-looking tack pieces that fit well. No promises on when the new meshes are coming, but it is happening. 

When we release new tack pieces, we will have a selection of breeds that we will test, but we will not be able to test all of them fully on the same detail level as we have done in the past. The system is built in such a way that we should not be seeing major issues, but please let us know if you do find things we don’t catch. We will then continuously decide on what we do based on the severity of the issue, the time to fix it, and if fixing it could cause worse problems. 

I also want to personally thank the team working on the system, the implementation, the porting and the testing. Thank you Amanda, Christian, Francis, Lotta S, Lotta A, Natalia, Oliver, Petar, and everyone else contributing to making this happen!

We hope you are as excited as we are about finally seeing new tack on old and new horses alike and about having more fun things brought to SSO through the new tack system in the future!

[ravengales-glade]

so, guys, just so we're on the same page, when you use lisa's old (white) design as a base, and make 0 effort to include her mexican heritage at all, that is called white washing. just so we're on the same page. we're on the same page, right? right? hello?

[ravengales-glade]

Kinda curious to know how everyone is doing with the trail... I have two accounts and I'm on level 9 on both, each day I try to reach 2 levels on each account, so hopefully by the end of today I'll be on 11

What about other players? :)

[ravengales-glade]

i know lore-wise they're supposed to be emotionless like robots but i think the dark horses doing horse stuff behind closed doors is a funny concept

Jay wanting to rip their hair out bc Acerbus rolled in the mud right after a bath. Katja having to convince Morticia no that oil barrel isn't going to kill them (idk the gender of Katja’s horse-) because it's in a different place today. Sabine giving in and giving Khaan head scratches when he begs for them and being like "if you ever act this way in front of the Soul Riders I'm selling you to a slaughter house" and he just snorts like "uh huh sure"

[ravengales-glade]

Oh yeah, speaking of Fripp!

[ravengales-glade]

seeing the white!punk!lisa revamp from Professor Rattle "I'm Racist" Youtube in the thumbnail for that dumbass video when looking up anything abt sso online should get you a payday as recompense. idgaf that you have nostalgia glasses hardcore for a lisa that hasn't existed for 4 consecutive games, if not more -- she's mexican and a pop star now, and the only thing that changed between starshine legacy and now atp is that she's mixed now. even when she was styled "punk" it was pop punk. have you even heard the songs from star academy or are you just grasping at straws for reasons to be racist

[ravengales-glade]

i dont think this guy likes trailblazers

edit to add cause this is my main gripe

[ravengales-glade]

Star Stable has a lot of unrealistic things about Jorvik, but one thing they get right is Jorvik City Mall. It has the dead mall look nailed!

Most storefronts boarded up and closed

Eerie distant music playing

Empty 99% of the time

Stores that are open are outdated and nobody goes to them

Mall Santa

Forgotten

Glitchy

[ravengales-glade]

New code

COZYCORECODEFORYOU

Gives a fluffy cat pet

Here's the cat:

[ravengales-glade]

ok here's what i think after trying to organize my closet again. the wardrobe NEEDS to remove the scroll bar within the pages. the game is borderline unplayable for me now because i cannot use the wardrobe anymore due to disability. i have arthritis in both hands but especially my right hand, which is my mouse hand, due to EDS. the scroll bar is fucking awful. it isn't reactive enough to be functional, but it needs to be that unreactive in order for it to work as a page scrollbar. the pages are not big enough for that to even make sense, though??? i really need sso to either make the wardrobe ENTIRELY. CUSTOMIZABLE. or totally remove the scrollbars within the pages and just make them fit to the wardrobe UI. i suggest doing that, removing the extra space or downsizing it somehow, and just adding more tabs. that's the only way i can see the wardrobe working for me without making the wardrobe fully customizable. i don't mind a scrollbar existing for different scrolling through the page tabs on the side but one being within the actual pages themselves makes the game basically unplayable for me because i don't have the motor skills required to use the TEENY tiny scroll wheel within the pages (and even if i did, nobody likes dragging a scroll wheel) and i don't have the mobility to constantly be scrolling up and down as it's a very painful and frustrating movement for me. in an attempt to make the game more accessible they've basically barred me from playing the game. i'm not mad or blaming anyone for it because they didn't appear to test this before launching it, meaning we're the feedback, so i don't expect them to notice this. that's why i'm making this post. until they make the pages not require scrolling of any kind, this game has stopped being disability friendly, and i am barred from playing it and have no other options but to either stop using the wardrobe, which any player will see the issue in quickly, or limit my ability to play it, which is frustrating and doesn't make the game feel worth it to play.

Post summarization: without removing the scroll wheel within the pages (not within tabs), the game has become significantly difficult and frustrating for me to play due to disability. I suggest a total removal of the scroll bar within the pages in favor of simply adding more page tabs.

also, closing remark: please god make the wardrobe not full screen. i can't stand it

[ravengales-glade]

you cannot seriously be expecting us to pay that much in jorvik shillings for fully statted gear with a bank size of 10000 AND not have a comprehensive system to separate out stacked items. like this is getting fucking ridiculous either sort out your inventory management system or increase wallet size since i know absolutely nobody working at sso listens to/cares about the players telling them that the prices in JS are TOO GODDAMN HIGH!!! Because we've been saying this for YEARS now and nobody has listened. and yes i noticed the winter village shit is like, 9500 instead of 9900. THAT IS NOT ENOUGH. my guess is they feel their "hands are tied" due to how their prices have changed over the years but at this point this is starting to really drive me up the wall. i don't care. don't put the effort on me to drum up EXACTLY the right amount WITHOUT losing JS due to your stupid money cap. sort out your inventory mechanics, increase the cap on JS you can carry, or do like, literally anything. i've never seen such a simple, universally hated problem in a game with so many solutions and absolutely NONE of them are being taken. it's almost like they want to force you into going the easy route and buy starcoins instead, which curiously enough, don't seem to have a cap 😃 So we know THAT'S possible!

[ravengales-glade]

Trying to see the code hidden by a big ass tree in winter village be like: