In this episode, we recap the latest news of Star Atlas from the past week.
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Podcast Transcript
[00:00:00] Hi, this is Matt with the Intergalactic Herald. Welcome to my Star Atlas Week in Review podcast. This is podcast number 36. Do apologize. Not fighting a cold this time, but dealing with vaccination. So still cold, like symptoms, shall we say, so sorry for the coughing and things like that.
[00:00:17] Anyways, so a couple initial things anything mentioned here, if you want to find the links to the videos or the articles, please go to, excuse me, intergalacticherald. com and look for News Recap number 85 you can find the links there always looking for anybody who wants to be a part newsrecap.
[00:00:34] com. guest on this podcast. Again, if you go to IntergalacticHerald. com, go to the contact page, you can submit your request there. Two projects that someday I will get back to working on in Star Atlas. It’s been quite a ride the last few months for me as far as priorities and things like that. But anyways If one’s a merch store, intergalactic gear, so intergalactic gear.com I have a merch survey there.
[00:00:56] I’d love for you to fill that out and gimme some feedback on what kind of merch you would like to see for Star Out West going in the future. And the second one is my paid community called Intergalactic Coalition. I have an interest survey on the website, so if you go to intergalactic coalition.com, you could fill that out.
[00:01:13] Looking to help or start a community of star out gamers that, would like to hang out, maybe aren’t interested in joining the guild, but yet still want to kind of hang out and meet people and maybe not participate so much in the, the official Star Atlas Discord, which of course is a little more wide and lots of people there and hard to stay up on the chats and what’s going on.
[00:01:35] So this is much more of a threaded discussion with email alerts on discussions you want to follow. So those are the few, excuse me, I’m working on. So for the content section of this podcast big news of the past week, of course, was the break point. Conference. So Solana, the blockchain apparently has a conference in many different places once a year.
[00:01:58] This one happened to be in Amsterdam, I believe. And so lots of different companies or efforts or whatever rated to Solana were giving presentations. And since Star Alice uses the Solana blockchain they gave at least one main presentation about Star Alice. And then I think I think Michael Wagner, the CEO was on someone else’s let’s see what it was.
[00:02:18] Oh yeah, Buddy Link, the technology that’s being used for the referral program. So, so there was a, 30 minute presentation Michael Wagner gave it. And I kind of go through the different components of that. Again, if you want to watch the video or the presentation, its entirety, there’ll be a link in the news recap.
[00:02:36] If you go on to the IntergalacticHerald. com website. So started the presentation off with a gameplay demo. This was of the UE5 one, and I have to admit, very impressive. The showed a lot of the different combat elements. So this would be I was gonna say player versus player, but again, person, people as opposed to ships.
[00:02:57] So again, your, your character. Sorry, I’m trying to think character. Yeah running around different it looks like it was weapons and shields and using the jet boots to fly around. So so yeah, that was, that was very cool. Another thing they showed in that video was the ship skins.
[00:03:15] So, in addition to being able to customize your… character, your faction character you can definitely do ship skins. And again, as been mentioned in previous presentations, the idea is that these skins aren’t just, well, they are for purchase, but they’re not just invented. You actually, one, have to mine different resources to actually build them.
[00:03:36] And then artists can come in and use those resources to actually craft Or design, I should say, I shouldn’t use the word crap, but design a skin, and I have to admit, they were cooler than I thought they would be and again, I haven’t really played a lot of the, the games that are out now where there’s a lot of the, the skins for purchase, I, I guess Fortnite, or I think there was Hats and Team Fortress or something like that.
[00:03:58] Again, I, these haven’t been video games or PC games that I’ve been interested in the recent memory. So but just seeing all the different things and how you can customize I actually was really kind of going, you know, I get it now why people like these because you can personalize, which gives you a sense of even more sense of ownership.
[00:04:15] Now, of course, with Star Atlas, we actually own the ships with them as NFTs or sorry, FF. Well, SFT, whatever objects on the blockchain. So, you know, being able to customize with decals and colors and things like that, I get it. It’s, it’s, it’s kind of cool. So I could see, you know, taking the base ship and everybody’s, if they want to.
[00:04:38] By a skin or build their own skin will be personalized and yeah, I think it’s really cool. They also did show some of the character customizations. It was really nice, I think, to finally see all three of the factions being representative. Kind of got used to those three initial characters that seemed to be around for a long time.
[00:04:56] And now yeah, they’re totally different and you know Yeah, it looked really good during some part of the presentation, but I kind of clumping it under here under the unreal section or the product was metagravity. So again, this was the, excuse me, technical system that allow I guess they’re aiming for 30, 000 characters walking around within one you know, star atlas instance.
[00:05:21] Again, there’s some of these terms that are thrown around. I, I don’t really understand what they mean. I thought all video games allowed a lot of people, but as the person from Metagrab would explain that it doesn’t really work that way and it’s really a hard technical problem and all that. So again, didn’t know this.
[00:05:38] I just assumed people were doing this, but maybe it’s just, you know, the old days of the quake servers where those You know, maybe a dozen people and I don’t even know what fortnight has if it’s 100 or something. So yeah, it was a very, very cool demo. I’ll give you that. Even if again, they were all automated and just walk into straight lines.
[00:05:55] I mean, nevertheless, that was pretty cool realizing that they’re only walking in straight lines because they didn’t have 30, 000 testers. So so again, that was pretty cool. So in addition to the unreal which again, we call the showroom they did do another video demo or video of the demo of sage.
[00:06:15] And this is again, the next version. So again, we’re currently in sage labs. Previously was escape velocity. Next one will be star based. And this again is the still browser, but this is much more three d, not just the Tech Space Sage Labs one. So they showed a little bit of the mining. I can’t remember if they showed the combat.
[00:06:33] But anyways, again, it was, it was, you know, in game footage. So that was pretty cool. Another thing they mentioned was guilds. So, again We call them guilds, inside the game they’re going to be called DACs, short for Decentralized Autonomous Corporations, but basically the DACs. And they showed a demo of how there will be signup and, anyway lots of how it’ll interact so that people can be associated, but again this is all going to be on the blockchain.
[00:07:00] So that was Pretty cool again that they’ll be on chain registration. They did have a couple slides for the BUILD program, which was really great that some of the community members got to be promoted. So I think like the other merch store Galilee Merchants was there was was on a slide.
[00:07:17] I think the couple of the three d model creators I’m forgetting the sites. But it ended with I think really cool too. Oh, grace. Anyways, it’s a gentleman or a person, excuse me, within the Starrus community that’s donating to real world charities. And I think that was a great cross section of a lot of the builders that were shown there.
[00:07:38] And that was again, great that it was there. And then the last one that was brought up again was excuse me, the mobile app or slash companion app or the play to move. So that was kind of interesting. And related to that was this first time I had heard about it was these recruitment packs or That may not have been the right term, now I see it written down, but anyways crew packs, I guess I think was and it was noted that it could be first quarter 2024, so not a lot of details there other than a small comment that if you already have a ship, you’ll get one of these included.
[00:08:11] So, so that was the really brief summary of the, of the breakpoint presentation. Again I highly suggest you watch it yourself. Again, it’s only like 30 minutes watch it at one and a half times speed if you want to, but you can see all the videos and get that. So so my initial reactions to that Breakpoint 1, it took a little while to figure out there was some, there was a certain cadence that Michael Wagner was doing and I, I, I didn’t dawn on him until later.
[00:08:40] It his presentation was focused on the audience and it wasn’t the Star Atlas audience. It was the Solana conference so again, they were talking a lot about only this can be built on Solana how all the Game logic is built on chain and things like that. And again, I think that’s perfectly natural in fact To be honest, that’s where you’re at.
[00:08:59] You’re not at a gaming conference, you’re at a Solana conference, so you should be promoting that. And I think that’s where, again, the, the having MetaGrad AVB get on, which again, shows how they’re building stuff there. And then how Michael Wagner was called on for the BuddyLink one, which of course is obviously also about Solana.
[00:09:17] So I guess, I think we have to remember that the presentation, though it had some cool things that we as Star Atlas community were interested in, it was really, again, focused on the audience, which was a Solana conference. I guess, again, under the category of critical criticism, or yeah, yeah both the DAC platform and the mobile app were videos.
[00:09:39] They weren’t anything real. Even the DAC platform was an animated opening laptop, not a real laptop. So, I guess it’s fine, it’s a presentation. But you know, we’ve known about this stuff for a while now, at least within the Stardust community. So, again, if the audience was sort of broader, mentioning what things are, that’s fine.
[00:10:04] But… It was a little, whatever, not to actually see any real game, or not game footage, but real footage of, well, how does the DAQ platform work? How is the mobile? And again, we’ve been hearing about the mobile for a good amount of time now, so it was I guess a little underwhelming that it was a rendered, you know, mobile phone thing.
[00:10:24] Even though, again, what it showed was interesting, but there was nothing real. The UE5 stuff though, that looked incredibly great, but again, I know I’ve been harping on this for a number of times, but again, what kind of computer do you need to run that? And again, I may have mentioned the last one.
[00:10:43] I’m thinking of finally getting a better video card because the most recent version of the showroom just won’t run anymore. A couple versions previous did, and I think it’s my amount of video RAM. I only have six, and the recommended is eight, so it’s not too bad. Like I should be shocked, but video cards aren’t as cheap.
[00:10:59] And so again, even though all the UE5 stuff looks really cool There is a barrier to entry
[00:11:10] But I guess I was still kind of impressed by all the upcoming product development that is coming so and again, we have heard about it before but if you Aren’t in, you know, checking discord daily or watching all my videos or other content creators and you just saw this for the first time it comes across as very impressive the, the, the fact and again Michael Weidner stated this and I think again, this is the, the cool differentiator that a starless has is that they’re making different products, but all the core is on the blockchain, on the chain.
[00:11:44] So your ship is your ship. Now you might see it in the web version, or you might see it in the UE version, or yeah, anyways. So, again, I think that’s the important part is how the product development is going. But, even though it was all really cool, we have been down this path before. We’ve heard about this stuff for quite a while now.
[00:12:07] Now again. Last year break point was when FTS, FTX happened. So that was the, the major cash crunch. Then we’ve had the, the layoff, I’m forgetting what date that was. So team is much more nimble now. But of all the things that were mentioned the only one that was called out that I recall seeing an actual date was again, these crew packs for the first quarter of next year.
[00:12:32] Now I know there’ve been. Talk and pushing hard to get the next version of the showroom out. But again, they didn’t really mention that, that, Oh yeah, we’re trying to do this. The sage thing we know is coming star base. Again, we, we’ve heard a lot of it. So again, I don’t want to come across as like, again, they they’re promising and not delivering.
[00:12:55] Because we understand why things are taking what they do. You know, team is reduced, things like that. So, again, I guess if you think my overall initial reactions is, it’s very optimistic. These all look really great. I still love the concept of the beyond chain aspect to this where everything’s the same.
[00:13:14] Obviously, they, Didn’t even talk about the economy. They didn’t talk about any of the, the political stuff, i. e. the polis, the Dow. So it, if anything, give them credit, they were focused. I’m assuming, again, these are deliverables that are in the pipeline. We’ve heard about them being in the pipeline and it’s just a matter of time of fine tuning.
[00:13:33] And again, Sage Labs exists, Escape Velocity exists, the showroom exists, things exist. But I guess I’m getting a little more pragmatic that. We’ve been down this path before we’ve heard about these things. I, I’d like to see something, you know, again, we’ve heard about the mobile app and I’m like, well, you know, I’m taking the dogs for a walk.
[00:13:53] It’d be cool to have a mobile app, but I don’t have the mobile app now. So, um, anyways, again, not trying to leave it on a, on a, a negative note, but yeah. I guess a little underwhelmed. So next thing the Atlas Brew occurred. Now, this actually occurred before the presentation, but due to the way I was listening to things, I actually listened to it afterwards.
[00:14:11] So it was the well, I don’t even know when it occurred, to be honest, because of the time zone things, but did listen to the weekly Atlas Brew. They were the presenters, two, two out of three were actually in Amsterdam. So that was cool that they were, you know, speaking live from the event to have the Atlas brew.
[00:14:28] And it was great getting reports of kind of how the in person community events went. I believe there was a Kind of only for the starless community like a boat ride dinner And then there was some sort of like meet at a bar or something, but that was open to other people saw some Tweets or something about meeting the starless team was like meeting with the phantom team and things like that.
[00:14:51] So it was really cool to hear about that. And again, that’s why conferences are cool, you know, especially if it’s not just as an attendee, but you’re actually a presenter, you’re making connections and things like that. So, so all that was really great to hear about. They also mentioned that the next year, 2024 break point will be in Santa poor and they were thinking, Hey, we should have a, you know community get together or meet up there and.
[00:15:13] I like that idea, but I’m in the United States. Flying to Singapore is just not going to happen. Flying to Amsterdam didn’t happen. So anyways, but they did mention the talk of maybe having a future Star Atlas conference. And again, not saying that will be for sure in the United States. And again, I know the Star Atlas community is global, but I think, and again, This might just be the, the way that it has to work is, you know getting everybody together on one place on the planet might be kind of hard, but doing regional ones, you know, maybe better just because, you know, I, sorry, I was actually thinking again, I might, whatever the plane ticket is to Singapore, I could go buy a cool ship.
[00:15:50] Would I want to go and meet people or buy a ship? Hmm. I might want to buy a ship. I know that’s terrible, but anyways. I still love that they were talking, they were sharing and, and I think again, these kind of in-person meetups and things like that are great. So kudos there. Now, one small pet peeve, , they overhype that presentation.
[00:16:12] I’m sorry. And again, I, I don’t fault Santi, Santi or or Dom or, or, or Jose. I mean, they’re star US employees. They’re excited and all that, but. It wasn’t the best presentation ever. It was good and there’s nothing wrong with it. But and again, I’m, I’m not really trying to fault them. It was just, if I had heard that before the Atlas brew and then watch the presentation, I don’t know, I, I might’ve come away a little more Negative, because the presentation was fine, but again, it wasn’t earth shattering.
[00:16:43] I still actually go back to the, the break point previous where they laid out all the seasons and, and all the I think that might have been the first time Sage was announced. So I, again, I, again, it’s just critical criticism, not, not anything, but I was like, It was a great progression, but it wasn’t earth shattering.
[00:17:04] It wasn’t the best ever. It was, it was good, again. But I’m being a little more pragmatic. I, again, I’m coming up now to be almost two years with, since the first time I bought my Star Atlas ship and heard about the community and decided, and again, I’m, I’m still very interested in it. But I guess. Yeah, I think, sorry, just going off on an aside, when people talked about, oh, the game would take three to five years to be built.
[00:17:30] I don’t know if I really realized how long three or five years is. I mean, you just say names, but being almost two years, wow, it’s, it’s, it’s a long time. And anyways, but again, I don’t want to be just a small little criticism. It was good, but it wasn’t that good. So kind of wrapping, or not wrapping up, but I kind of mentioned some, or anyway, so I had my initial reactions, but then a couple of days later, and of course, that’s why I’m recording this podcast now, I did kind of have some additional things.
[00:17:57] And again, this might be a little more critical, but one, the only completely new announcement was these crew packs, which again, cool, but it was so quick. I don’t really know what this is. Again, is this the talk of how we’re going to Our crew is, again, I guess I just don’t really know because it wasn’t explained.
[00:18:15] It was just a quick video. But we’ve heard again that our crew, if we have a ship now is already included in the future, you’ll, you’ll build a crew member. And again, this goes back to the mobile app and this is the entry point where people can do the. Move to earn, and then if they want to, they can pay to turn it into a crew member, and then that crew member can have a ship.
[00:18:38] I mean, kind of also now wondering, are crew members independent of ships? I mean, we’ve always saw them the same, but a player, could they just go into Star Atlas and walk around the Central Space Station without a ship? Again, not really sure. It was still interesting. It was the only one that had a date, so that’s kind of cool.
[00:18:55] Maybe again, that’s… It’s a sign that if they put a date, it’s probably going to happen. But again, first quarter, 2024, I mean, that’s three months. Again, again, we’ve been down this. But anyways the UEFI footage was really cool. But again, after a few days, I was like, it’s just a first person shooter. And I know it’s not first person.
[00:19:15] It’s third person, but it’s a shooter and it was cool. But I was interested in space exploration. I’m interested in political intrigue. I’m interested in gigantic space battles. I, I, I played quake before. I don’t, I mean, again, I’m not saying I won’t play it, but you know, and again, maybe this is the, the first thing, the easiest thing, the, the start.
[00:19:43] So again, I, I, I want to make sure to always give credit to startups. They have a grand vision. And you can’t build the grand vision on day one, excuse me. You got to build up to the grand vision. So uh, a shooter, first person, third person, whatever, there’s nothing wrong with that. People play shooters on PCs.
[00:20:01] They play them on consoles. Great. Go for it. But again, after a couple of days, I was like, yeah, it was great footage, but I, every game in the First person shooter has things. So on the Sage footage, again, a couple days later, I was like, I think we’ve seen this before. So, it, it wasn’t anything, again, maybe we haven’t seen it before, but I was realizing, yeah, ships flying around, I got it.
[00:20:28] And then really nothing new on the DAC or mobile. So, again, I guess this is where. At first you’re kind of hyped, and it looks cool, and it’s a presentation, but then a couple days later you’re like, has this really changed anything? And again, I don’t want to sound negative, it’s just more of, and again, I guess maybe this is the problem, you’re going to a presentation, you hype it up, And, and then it doesn’t meet expectations or my personal expectations.
[00:20:55] But again, like I said the target audience was Solana. So a Solanas con, a Solana Solana conference, not a conference of gamers. Definitely not star Atlas gamers. So you probably tailored it to that thing. So yeah, these are great. These are all done on chain and all that. That’s, you know, you know, target audience message.
[00:21:16] Perfect. So I guess the way I wrote down is in the end, it was all nice to see, but I kind of feel like it was a sugar high. Short, but it wasn’t lasting. And so we’ll kind of see where we go from here. But again, I’m still very happy with the progress of development that was actually shown. Things are moving forward.
[00:21:32] It does feel like their cadence is better. The goals seem more realistic. Again, going from the current showroom to what we saw, that would be a, a gigantic leap forward. I think would be a great product to put out there. So anyways, again, to summarize my kind of couple days later reactions. Cool.
[00:21:54] But again, kind of, it’s over now. What do you got now? So we’ll see, you know where this comes back once the team, you know gets back, it’s over jet lag and, and see like, you know, what’s the, what’s the goal for November. We got the holidays coming up. I. Want them to take breaks. I want to take a break.
[00:22:12] I get it. So let’s, let’s see if, if, if you know, anything’s kind of in the pipeline for the rest. Speaking of the pipeline, the other thing that did come out was the the raffle drawing. So I believe it closed on Wednesday and then I didn’t realize that the drawing was automated. So there was no humans involved cause I guess it’s all on blockchain.
[00:22:33] The company’s hedgehog. I can’t remember. Anyway. So the first drawing yeah. Or, sorry, yeah, the first drawing occurred on Friday a few people live streamed it, I didn’t realize what was happening, so I didn’t get what was seen, but anyways, I went to the website, checked, no, I didn’t win, but again, I wasn’t put a ton of tickets in.
[00:22:52] But yeah, somebody won. And interestingly, somebody who won the biggest prize, the tank ship, also won the second biggest prize. And I think somebody mentioned that a person posted how many tickets they had. So, don’t quote me, but I thought it was like 18, 000. Raffle tickets golden tickets. So, yeah, I only put in ten.
[00:23:12] So, I guess, you know, again, same thing with the lotto. You know, the more you buy, the more you’re, better your odds. So yeah, so, I mean, I, yeah, again, I guess I wasn’t willing to spend a lot of money to just hope I’d get something. So so there’s still seven more of those. So, we’ll see how the rest of them goes.
[00:23:31] But yeah, so, I mean, it happened Cool. Yeah. Sorry. Again, I guess the theme of this one is cool, but you know anyway, so that’s, so that’s that’s content. It’s what happened to Star Atlas this past week. So just to wrap up then again, Excuse me. If anybody’s interested in chatting with me on the podcast, again, love to have a guest, please go to intergalacticherald.
[00:23:51] com and fill out go to the contact page. While you’re there, sign up for the weekly recap newsletter. Again, I go through and find a whole bunch of other Star Atlas content creators, both video and articles. Though as someone mentioned recently, I, I don’t. I don’t really curate any of the tweets or discord tweets because I’m, again, it’s called Twitter, whatever, sorry, X, posts, whatever, you know what I mean.
[00:24:18] It’s just really hard to figure out what’s going on in those every week. And then the other one I don’t really curate is the discord because there’s really no way to link to it unless you’re already in the discord. So So in some senses, again, I’m only looking at the publicly accessible one, but most of the content creators are commenting on tweets and discord stuff and other videos and things like that.
[00:24:39] So, you know, but I guess I’m only doing YouTube and articles. And again but anyways, if you want to sign up for that greatly appreciate it. And you get it all sent to your mailbox email account Sunday night. Pacific time, U. S. time zone. And then the last two are gonna be the two projects I’m working on.
[00:24:57] The Intergalactic Gear, which is the merch store I hope to launch at some point. So please fill out the merch survey I have there. Intergalacticgear. com And then if you’re interested in hanging out with a bunch of other Star Atlas gamers, who maybe don’t want to join guilds, but still want to talk, but aren’t in Discord every day, I’m looking to start a paid community.
[00:25:16] The paid part helps offset the costs because the community platform, unlike discord is not free. And part of the fees also help. To support me making this content being a community manager in that group working on the merch store, basically my Star Atlas efforts. So if you’d like to support me the paid community, it’ll be one great way.
[00:25:35] Plus you get to hang out with other people and we’ll have you know, internal chats and things like that. So that kind of wraps it up for this Star Atlas Week in Review podcast. Thanks for listening. Have a great week. Again, this is Matt with Intergalactic Herald.