Thats great news!

But whats about the citiziens portraits? generate to or use humans as citizien?

Since the citizens are actually code with pictures, that's a bit of a different thing.  We'll probably look at having the art for those generate eventually and have the behaviors (bonuses) be human since they're the safest.

Is the early access released?

Hey, could you have some way of providing the Early Access discount on Steam? I supported you Early Access but really prefer Steam much more as a platform. 

Sold! This alone is enough to sell supernova to me. 

Well, I literally just went through this with Zen on PinballFx Early Access and it was certainly possible. You sent an email to their support with your epic account or proof of purchase and they sent you a Steam code. It is possible if your respect your Early access supporters. 

Please do. I want to pay the upgrade price today on Epic, but really don't want to own it there for all the platform benefits. I'll either buy your game in 2-3 years once it costs me $20 to buy, or today if there is a path to own on Steam for a comparable price. 

So I picked up the expansion based on this feature. (The other stuff added is cool too, but I really thought the idea of having AI generate the stuff for custom civs was awesome).

It seems to me there needs to be way, way, way, way, way, way more training for it. At least for the "image generation". I don't see how it's really "generating" anything when I see mostly the same images coming up for a civilization, regardless of what the description is. Super disappointed about this, but I hope it's just because it's early stages.

I havent even started a game because I couldn't get it to generate an image that was even remotely close to what I wanted. Even when I tried to make a civ of cats, none of the suggested ones had anything remotely like a cat (even though I've seen a few images in the past where it was basically a human with a cat head).

As for the text it generates, it's pretty good so far, although similarly, I think the AI needs to be trained on way more data because it tends to get repetitive very quickly (but I'm not really as concerned about the text description as much as the images).

Hopefully I can get over my OCD with the images and start a game lol.

Yeah, I tried again, and it finally had some that were cats. I guess you just have to keep trying and trying.

The text has been good so far. I just noticed some similarities because I kept re-generating, but again, I'm sure that will get better over time.

I hope more gets put into the images. Not just for the leader, but for citizens too. It would be awesome to have the race look how your leader is generated.

Also would be great to eventually have it generate ship designs as well, though I imagine that would require a lot more work than the text/images.

Another example of a race I described as looking like a hybrid of humans and spides gave me a bunch of pictures of humans. It did well with my cultural description of them though.

So I'm only likely to get a portrait matching my description if someone else previously requested something very similar unless I keep trying until my description has reached the front of the queue? I guess I can see why you'd want to save on compute here especially as your player numbers scale up, personally I'd rather have the wait for output based on my prompt.

I'd be happy having the option to wait, not everyone would be happy to wait, I would.

Ive been experimenting locally with Stable Diffusion already among other things trying to make portraits for GC4 so I'm well used to waiting and tinkering to get good results out of generative AI. 

10min per image. So 90 minutes for all 9.

But at the way things are progressing, I wouldn't be surprised if we have real time animated generation before the end of the year.

6 weeks ago we didn't even think we'd have generated alien images. We were going to have that part just be the player selecting from the existing list of images.