Town Hall Report – December 18, 2024

Santi (Community Director) and Michael (CEO) kick off the Town Hall, sharing that they will be going over every product in their pipeline today!

They start by reflecting on the past year, going mostly over the same list that they shared during the IMPACT Summit. Topics mentioned: DAC Platform, MetaGravity stress tests, DAO voting, Crew, and the Local Markets.

Surprise Interruption: The team airdropped an exclusive limited edition Dragon skin for the Calico Shipit to everyone who played SAGE Labs since the launch of Local Markets and the Faction Infrastructure Contracts.

Star Atlas – Calico Shipit Dragon skin – Airdropped at the start of the Town Hall

Promotion Chip

ATMTA Team members on Stage – Chip, Danny, and Santi

Danny (CPO) and Chip (newly minted Vice President of Game Product) join the stage to talk about Unreal Engine 5 progress. Danny starts of by sharing that Chip was recently promoted to Vice President of Game Product! Danny is basically passing the baton to Chip with regards to all UE5 game production, including Fleet Command. Danny will still be directing the game and the art (among other things) and they will also take charge of the SAGE Labs stuff that Chip will be handing off to him.

Star Atlas – The new Game Menu [UE5]

UE5

Chip takes over and tells us that they opted for a show, don’t tell approach, showing the current state of their progress instead of just talking about it. It also means they are going to be live demoing with Danny sharing his screen while Chip does most of the talking.

Star Atlas – Crew Card selection [UE5]

Crew Cards

First off, they are showing that Crew Cards have made their way into UE5!

When opening the Crew selection, you see your Crew Cards on the left-hand side and a 3D model representation of the one you select on the right.

However, not all Crew Cards attributes exist as UE5 assets just yet. The team created a so-called loaner matrix that maps crew card attributes to what is already available in UE5. As more assets become available over the next year, players will see their crew becoming more detailed / fleshed out.

Some models like the Punaabs and “fat” Usturs are shown (and usable!) as Clay models. Clay models have a skin color that represents their rarity (color).

You can favorite cards, which will get them added to the splash screen. From there, you can select any crew Card to be your avatar in-game!

Deathmatch

Chip continues by hosting a new peer-to-peer deathmatch multiplayer session. He’s showing off a brand-new map named Paizul’s Arena. The map is still in an early block-out phase, just like the Sogmian District on the ONI CSS where, so we learn, this Arena is a part of. It’s a more traditional gladiator arena (both from the outside and within) where there is the background noise of the virtual crowds slowly building up to a crescendo as the timer ticks down to 0.

It’s super fun to see Danny run around with a Punaab carrying a gun that is bigger than the Punaab.

Star Atlas – Deathmatch in Paizul [Punaab carrying a big gun]

Chip shares that the team implemented all new gun sounds to make them sound much better.

Racing

Next up, Danny hosts a racing multiplayer session, which Chip joins. They both spawn in the game, proceed to spawn a ship, and race each other. Danny picked a VZUS Solos, while Chip selected the Fimbul Airbike.

The way this mode works is that the host can, at any time, initiate a multiplayer race with anyone who is in his instance. Up to 6 players can join, and the minute the race starts, those players are locked in.

While racing, Chip comments that the team did a full overhaul of the flight mode, including hover mode. It feels much better now, closer to what people would expect.

Star Atlas – ONI CSS block out [WIP]

ONI CSS

Next up, Danny shows in single-player mode the current state of the ONI CSS, which is looking great despite still being in a blocked-out state. It gives a great impression of what this one day will look like!

The team now added space for all the land plots (for the habs). All the plots have been laid out in the Sogmian district, and the team will next move to the other districts (Mierese, Photoli, and Punaab) to lay out the plots there as well.

The MUD (Volant Station) and ONI CSS have received a lot of attention so far, and next up, the Usturs will be getting some love. Instead of their CSS, the team will work on fleshing out their homeworld planets for Season 0.

Star Atlas – Galia [WIP]

Project Galia

Next up, Danny finally clicks the big “Enter Galia” menu option.

At the moment, Galia is a Single-player, open-world game mode. You spawn in the hangar of a Starbase that floats in a demo star system. It even comes with some quests!

The minute Danny approaches the ship he spawned, the hangar bay doors open. They implemented zero-G in space, so you will float and can use your jet pack to get around. The view is great, looking across an asteroid belt and colorful nebulas!

Danny flies the Pearce F4 outside and sub-warps to a nearby planet. It looks epic! Also of note: there are no loading screens; everything streams in.

Star Atlas – Galia – Flying over an Ice Planet [WIP]

Chip comments that they are using a 3rd party UE5 module dubbed Exosky Planets. Planets are still in the early stages and will start to look even better when they go in, manually tweak things, and provide polish.

Danny shows off an ice planet before heading off to another planet. We learned that you can only use subwarp once you’ve gained some altitude.

The next planet is called Urbis, and it is an Earth-like planet with clouds.

Chip chimes in to share that you can walk on planets correctly, as you are subject to spherical gravity. You can also fly in hover mode across the surface and will even notice (or, more likely, not notice) that bullet casings are subject to that gravity model as well.

Star Atlas – Fleet Command [WIP]

Fleet Command

Lastly, the duo jumps into Fleet Command!

After a short while, all the fleets that are currently in SAGE suddenly pop in and are shown as a 3D Calico Evac model (for now). This is literally the state of the SAGE Starbased (on mainnet) right now! From high above, it looks like an ant colony of sorts.

Fleets are selectable. It looks like your own fleets are shown as your actual ships (showing one ship per fleet). You can not yet give commands or perform on-chain transactions in Fleet Command, though; it is purely view-only at this stage.

The most important: Everything the team has shown is available right now on the Epic Game Store!

The team launched the update to UE5 on the EGS right as the Town Hall was taking place, and everyone can now go, update their game (or download it), and, for the first time ever, participate in awesome self-hosted multiplayer games!

2025

Danny shared that, over the first half of 2025, the team will work hard on polishing everything shown before, and adding a few additional game modes. Of course, Fleet Command will be brought to parity with SAGE. Some more work will be done on the Galia game mode as well. But really, a lot of polishing will take place. They also plan to introduce incentives to play as well, mostly looking at off-chain metrics, such as playing streaks and other things. They are ignoring on-chain for now because it is too easy to “game”.

StarPath

Back to Santi! He shares that V3 of StarPath will be gated to key contributors, primarily content creators and guilds. They will have to adhere to certain requirements to be able to participate, which will be announced next year.

The CORE Graphic Novel

Michael shares that Act 3 will come in 2025.

Tim McBurnie (who is responsible for CORE) has been focused on cinematic production for most of the past year. One part was showcased during IMPACT. The second part will be coming out next year. Tim has been storyboarding a lot, but now he is almost done and will return to work on Act 3 of CORE.

Crew App

Time to rip off the band-aid: The team suspended all internal effort on their move-to-earn app. Michael shares that the team ran into issues with the cNFT crew. They could take a step back and go off-chain (which they do not like), but that would not solve their biggest issue: creating an algorithm to verify movement data was just too much work.

They are, however, in talks with a big traditional company from Web2—that has also branched out into Web3—and has a decade+ experience in the field of such algorithms. That company has over 10 million accounts registered. The team may end up with integration in that company’s app instead of having their own.

In short, the team is looking for a partner to create an easier path to implementation.

Star Atlas – End of Year Town Hall

Never Alone

All rewards are about to be minted. Mission 3 memories will be distributed soon, and then players will be able to claim their rewards. Trading will go live after the distribution of Mission 3 memories!

There won’t be a Mission 4, and there won’t be a Guild competition. Due to the team’s shrinking, they had to reduce the scope.

Then, memories will be able to be exchanged for rewards. This will go through the MetaCrafting mechanic that can be found in SAGE.

Note that instead of 3 out of 4 memories (as originally announced), you will likely need 2 out of 3 to get the big rewards.

Marketing

Marketing Initiatives for 2025:

• Website overhaul, getting out of the way, improving communication over the various channels.
• Show, not tell & tutorials.
• Content creator program–gives power and tools to our creators across our channels.
• Onboarding on the website. StarPath will live on the website as well.
• Knowledge Sharing
• Expanding market, making things more accessible, fleet rental, hackathons.
• Support Atlas Grace.
• IMPACT Summit 2025 -> Merch

Community

In 2025, there will be a big focus on supporting key contributors and international communities. The community team is looking for ambassadors across the world.

Santi says they want to “double down on the decentralized ecosystem”. They want to be closer to guilds, content creators, and builders.

Planning to hire an extra position to focus on meeting the needs of these key contributors: Ecosystem Manager.

Closing Never Alone, but they will launch a new thing! You will still have access to exclusive stuff by being active in the community.

Santi

Santi has been promoted from Director of Community -> Director of Community and Ecosystem

Congratulations!

ATLAS Locker

Michael sheds more light on the ATLAS Locker (says he won’t be focusing on an upcoming paper that is more POLIS related: Future of Star Atlas … network connectivity)

Current benefits:

• Earning POLIS
• Tiered marketplace fee reduction

Michael gives an example of Amazon subscriptions. They sell annual subscriptions that come with a truckload of benefits. The rewards are so good that it’s foolish not to subscribe to it. This is what he wants to do with the ATLAS Locker. Everyone should feel compelled to lock at least some ATLAS into the Locker.

To make this a reality, the team is working on proposals such as:

• Leveraging the total locked ATLAS liquidity to determine a certain amount of ships that will be rented out to the community. Rental earnings will go to the ATLAS Locker “lockers”
• Preferred NPC pricing – If you want to sell loot to a Merchant in UE5.
• Discounts on Crafting fees
• Reduction in respawn times and repair costs.
• Gamification -> Skill tree-like. Rather than forcing you into choosing, the higher the tier, the more points you have to select benefits.
• Create a one-time option to buy points. Revenue will also go to the DAO.

Fleet Rentals

As mentioned before, Rentals are brought to Star Atlas by a collaboration between multiple parties: Forged (GG Collective), Groove & Anthony (SLY), and ATMTA. They have been working on this feature over the last 6 months, and it is really close to being released! It will go live on the Player portal. Michael notes that this is not a scholarship system, as it will cost money to rent a ship.

Michael hopes this will unlock more low-income countries. But it’s also a big opportunity for passive investors.

This mechanic uses the PlayerProfile and combined permission system. The assets are safe for the owner, as they can not be extracted or sold. The assets are secure.

Fleets need to be pre-formed in SAGE with Crew. It would be good to think about the optimal fleet composition.

5% of the fee revenue (total fee is 10%) will go to the DAO, and the rest will go to ATMTA and the other involved parties.

Rental is coming online very, very soon!

Tech Talk

Brett (Vice President of Engineering) joins the stage to shed some light on Solana, the infrastructure, and StarComm.

StarComm V2 – Slowly being rolled out to more and more features of SAGE. Inventory and other features are still on StarComm V1. All issues in V2 have been resolved. Any issues they now see are all related to V1.

MagicBlock is creating a super high-performing system that the team is looking into.

The team is also looking into reducing the total number of transactions. The team is looking into a lot of optimizations to reduce rent costs across the board, even if those are reclaimable.

They are also looking into packaging multiple on-chain instructions into one transaction.

Recently, the team saw low land rates. The team will work on smarter retry systems as well.

IronForge (RPC aggregator) made it a lot easier to track on-chain issues.

The team is running read-only bare metal validators to feed data to StarComm. They also run their own devnet (Apollo) to test their code every day.

While Apollo has so far only been used as an internal testnet, there is the option to use it to roll out free-to-play functionality to newcomers. In that scenario, that game instance won’t provide any earnings, but this would allow people to get exposed and try things out. This is where the upcoming POLIS paper (see Atlas Locker intro above) plays into. This could evolve into a dedicated L1 for Star Atlas, but it’s too soon to say.

Fleet Command 2025

The team has started working on a major expansion to SAGE/Fleet Command, which they internally refer to as C4, as it will include 4 major new features.

The team paused releasing new features for SAGE while working towards feature parity with Fleet Command, but they did not stop developing them. The following will be released in 2025 in one big bang:

• Crafting Habs – Giving utility to the hab assets and the lands that were sold. Enhance crafting capabilities. Design your own crafting hab, and adjust crafting parameters to your liking.
• Claim Stakes – Allow mining of planets; Mining drills and power Plants will affect your mining capability. Cultivation facilities.
• Combat – Atomic on-chain actions (all processed in a single transaction). Conquer territory and destroy enemy fleets.
• Council Rank – Major progression system across everything. The time to pre-level your account is running out! This will unlock ship configurations, enable the usage of certain size classes, and allow you to customize your SAGE character. Career types (freelance career first, later on: licenses). Progression will be added to every game system, old and new.

This will change the entire gameplay! The team is locked in on the feature set, and the plan is to bring this to the players in one big release.

Before that, however, the team will run a public playtest on Apollo to test these new features first.

Brett adds that this release will complete the foundation of SAGE!

Break

The studio will be on a break from December 20th – January 6th

-Fin-