Hi everyone! Today I want to talk about two things - one is a new experiment that we are running for an alternative ship appearance browser in empire generation, and the other is the Q&A session that we held during PDXCon.

Ship Appearance Browser

Currently in Empire creation, when selecting the appearance of your ships, we display a preview of a sample ship utilizing your empire's colors.
Current Ship Appearance Selection We have a bit of an experiment coming that will be rolling out to a portion of you soon that temporarily replaces this with an in-game ship browser that lets you switch between any ship and manipulate them so you can get a better look at them from different angles.
Cropped 3D Ship Preview In our quest to constantly improve Stellaris we want to measure what impact a change like this can have, so that it would be easier for us to know how to prioritize these kinds of changes in the future. If everything goes well, the change will become permanent for everyone going forwards. If you end up in the trial, we'd love to hear what you think of it!

PDXCon Q&A Transcript

During PDXCon, we hosted a developer Q&A session on the PDXCon Discord server, with seven of us answering almost a hundred of your questions. It was a tremendous amount of fun and we hope to be able to schedule more of these. (Most likely on the Stellaris Official Discord server. Join us!) Here's the transcript of the questions and the answers, as well as a rundown of all the Stellaris panels and activities during this year's PDXCON. Next week we'll give an early peek at our autumn plans, after which we will take a break from dev diaries for the summer. See you next week!