Eddie Hilditch

So, yeah, I got this question. I was like, it's a very good question. It's a very big question. I think it goes beyond just sort of scale, obviously, with something like Earth. Earth is a planet that everyone is familiar with. Hopefully. So doing a planet as complicated as Earth in terms of the amount of biomes and the amount of variety within a single planet, we can't do it with our tech right now. There's too many different variables in one planet if we go from the deserts of the Sahara to Antarctica to vast urban landscapes to fields and farms, jungles, everything about the flora. We think about the variety of biomes. We think about the urbanization of Earth and the sort of human-made infrastructure on top. We think about the number of animals. Think about the flora. There's a huge amount of things that could keep us going for a very long time. So we are not where we need to be to create something as complex as Earth with the tech yet. That being said, every improvement we make to the tech gets us closer to that. And it's about at some point being able to have the tech to be able to do something as complex as Earth.

To do it justice, right? I think it's safe to say that every moon that we work on, every planet that we introduce, and all the new biomes that are created for each and every one, Hurston is adding oceans, for instance, each of those that we do is another step closer to the tech that we'll need to make Earth a reality in the Star Citizen universe.

Exactly. And Hurston's also where we're sort of making our first tentative steps towards huge cities integrated onto the planet's surface and things like that. Everything we do adds complexity and diversity to the planets. If we take Hurston where it is now, it's much more than, say, the current moons are in terms of variety of things that you will see on the surface. And it's also a much bigger planet than the current moons. So we are getting there. We are not where we need to be yet to be able to do something that is a step more complex than somewhere like Hurston. But that is the dream, for sure. And it's something we are working towards. The best answer I can give at the moment is that we don't know yet, but we are working towards it.

It's something we've discussed. It's something we talk about a lot. And yeah, it's an end goal at the moment. But a distant planet, let's say that.

Obviously we are developing ArcCorp. We're running to a schedule for all locations. They are being treated as separate locations. We're currently planning to do all the planetary bodies in the system first. So the Aaron Halo does come secondary to that. So I think for the first release of ArcCorp as a planet, you will not be seeing the Aaron Halo in just yet. One of the big challenges we have with the asteroids in particular from a visual point of view is making them look good when the sun is directly behind you, because at the moment we don't have any kind of atmospherics inside the asteroid fields, and that's a bit of tech we're waiting on being developed from the graphics side of things. Without that you kind of get a very flat read when the sun is directly behind you. It's something you can already see around Yela with its rings. So it's been treated as a separate location. There are these huge, cool gateways. I'm sure you've seen the concept art. Something we're very excited to develop. It's just not being developed at the same time as the ArcCorp release due to the schedule that we're running to, basically.

I mean, we're talking about two things, right? We're talking about Crusader, the gas giant, and we're talking about Orison as the landing zone. We have an initial white box for Orison laid out. That was just an initial sort of ideas pass to make sure, oh, maybe the shop's here, this is the medical area, this could be the mall. An initial sort of flavor pass and layout pass for Orison. So we have that. The bigger challenge, the much, much bigger challenge is Crusader itself as a gas giant. It is very challenging from a technical point of view to get a gas giant that works from orbit all the way down to essentially the surface when you have nothing concrete to put your feet on. The graphics team are working currently on the gas cloud tech. Where Crusader comes from, it will probably be born from that tech. We're not at a stage yet where we can create an entire planet with that tech, but it is coming at some point. I have personally, just as a little sort of experiment, taken some early gas cloud tech that they've been looking at on the Squadron 42 side of things. I've put the white box Orison that we have and I've stuck it onto the side of Crusader just as a little test. Yeah, it looks pretty good. Even in a sort of rough state, you can see the potential of having this floating city, essentially. And it's very nice to fly around with the gas clouds being all this sort of beautiful soft volumetrics and stuff. It's very satisfying, but also incredibly rough right now. So we're not going to show any of that.

Of course, folks can follow along with the RSI roadmap that's available on robertsspaceindustries.com. You'll notice that now that it goes out to quarter one 2019, Crusader is not on the roadmap yet. It is still very early days in its development.