Luan Vetoreti

They're mostly to do with frames per second.

I remember, actually, when I started, it was being worked on, but I didn't work on it personally. I think actually visually and the experience, I quite liked it. I remember watching it and I thought it was pretty good, but it was very specific to what it was built for. It was built before procedural planets was a thing, so it was a specific landing zone with essentially a skybox as a background, lots of buildings that were textures and simple meshes that went back, but the idea was you'd go down to a landing zone and there'd be nothing else on the planet to do. So that was a very specific plan for it. But obviously since then, landing zones are very different. You can fly all around them and they're on planets where you can visit more stuff. So I think lessons from that, and challenges from that, were how do we build landing zones where it's not "Okay, now you're in the landing zone, we just need to tailor the experience to being inside it." It's no, you have to tailor the experience to being inside it, to flying around it, to landing around it. That kind of thing is what I would take from that.

I would say hangars, for example, was one of the first stabs in the ground there. The hangars in Levski were built quite bespoke. They remain bespoke to this day. But it was also a takeaway from that that we need to go in a much more modular approach with various things and create common elements to share between different landing zones to speed up the work. Otherwise, this will take forever.

There was a lot about how you get into the landing zone as well. When I personally look back at it, if I was approaching it via a buggy or something, I wouldn't really know where to go a lot of the time. And now things are pretty straightforward with how you get into a landing zone, in, out, around, and all that stuff. Even to the point where in New Babbage we added those surface entrances as well.

Yeah, going on from that, the actual layout as well. Levski is very maze-like and hard to navigate around. There's lots of tunnels, and that's nice in a traditional level design, but these are social hubs. So in that respect, it wasn't very successful. And I think the later landing zones were much more successful with more of a streamlined layout, more of the social hub, and leaving the more traditional level design to other locations.

And also the multiple floors that they have in Levski create a bit of a, it's still there actually, this logistic nightmare of elevators.

I mean, we do have our secret lists of things that we would like to do. So who knows what comes. There might be certain spruce-ups we do, but we might not.

There's definite lessons from post-Levski which we've learned, which we'd definitely love to go back [and apply]. And when we release, we would be looking to do some cleanup and some major stuff. And then there's some just general cleanup. There's definitely performance in Levski which we'd like to tackle. The exterior is made of lots of little meshes, and we're looking at merging, either just merging meshes manually, just making larger structural meshes for the exterior, as well as tech that will do that kind of job for us. So there's definitely those kind of things which we'd be looking at.

There's some things that will just propagate to Levski by chance as well, which is we can improve some materials, some panels, some trims and things that we use on that particular art style set that will just inherently make Levski look a little bit better, right? So there's things like that as well. But I think probably on the planet side will be a lot of the improvements that come in, because our tech evolves a lot and we do a lot of updates, like using more realistic assets and materials now on the planet, that will likely propagate to Levski as well.

Yeah, and also from a gameplay side, we're getting more and more features into the game, so we'll add them into the locations as well. I think we'll probably get some kind of passes.

Things like hospitals and stuff like that?

Exactly.

Yeah, we added a full suite of hangars, and it never really felt like a full complete landing zone until we did that. Now it feels more on par and it's more consistent with the rest of the landing zones. So there's enough slots for players to land in properly and all that kind of thing.

Yeah, it required some extensive rework of the asteroid itself as well. Looking back on the asteroid that we had before, it was really good, but it obviously didn't have a lot of space for things like a blown-out back where you could put in all of these hangars really nicely, because we didn't really have, I think, the solid hangar metrics that we have now. And we obviously didn't have the hangars themselves. Things like where the actual racing location goes: before, I think it had some sort of tunnel or something that we had white boxed and put in. So we blew that out. So again, it required a lot of asteroid moving around. Those are things that we learned from later locations that we came back and applied, or had to reject some things to make it feel a little bit more like a modern Star Citizen location.

The beauty of common elements like hangars is that we can go to old locations and input them. I know there was a bit of rework in the asteroid, but in terms of inputting hangars, it didn't actually take too long, did it, Luan? It was quite simple because we'd already established what a hangar is. Maybe the art changes between landing zones, like in New Babbage you've got a different art style of hangars, but essentially we've established what that is, what the experience is for the player, and so it makes refitting old locations a much smoother process. That's the idea behind the common elements, like hangars and habs and things like that.

It was also one of our first locations where we had a landing zone that was in the middle of a huge city, where we had to develop the transit system of how to bring the players in and out of locations and travel through those very long distances. Those trains are very fast. But yeah, that was one of the challenges as well, because you have a big city that's located on a planet, you have the landing zone in the middle, and we had to add all these gates because maybe they come from a different direction. We actually timed it once: we had one gate to start with, and if you came from the wrong side, it would take you like 65 minutes or something to run around the city to get to the gate. And we were like, oh, we need more gates. This doesn't work.

I remember testing that. I just went to the editor, and I just walked from one side to the other side of the city just to see how long it took. It was something like that. That's pretty insane.

That's kind of when you start realizing the scale of everything, right? When you get on foot and start walking.

I remember talking to one of the artists a while back too about the whole scale thing, especially when it came to where the clusters of the city finish, and how we can have a player at the base of basically this massive city and get that scale feeling correct and make it feel tangible, and how they had gone over a whole bunch of iterations and designs to make it work. And it's pretty successful what we have now, but we learned a lot of lessons in that and have brought it through with the rest of our landing zones as well. But that was kind of the first time that we had run into that issue, because Levski is more of a localized location, but this is a huge city. So you have kilometers' worth of blending the city into the environment, right?

Besides, it's not like the people from Lorville want to keep everyone in or anything, but it's a city where you can't traditionally just slowly make suburbs and then a few houses are left and then farmland starts, etc. It's this very... Andreas, I think you quite like the Hurston policies there, but it's very walled in.

Like Andreas said, it was the first time we did a transit system outside of elevators. I remember conversations about this, and most people, to be honest, were like, do we really need to do an actual physicalized train that would run on tracks? Can we not have it go underground, or can we have it spawn and then go across and then go into a tunnel and then teleport to the next area? And to be fair, a lot of us were just like, come on, Chris, do we really have to do this? This is such a technical pain. And he was always adamant, like, no, I want it to be physicalized. And we did it in the end. And it was challenging. It was very hard to do. It did work out in the end. It does give that feel. And each landing zone has that interesting, whether it's a train or a flying shuttle, it is quite interesting to have, and it isn't fake and all that kind of thing. So that was one of the biggest technical challenges with Lorville, apart from the scale as a whole: trying to get the first working train.

I can remember Dan Trufin in those Tuesday meetings, just week after week showing the next version of the train, and Chris just being like, no, it needs to be a real train. It needs to be a physical train. It should hit people.

Just a small side note as well: I know there are some people who aren't necessarily super enthusiastic about traveling times, sitting on a train for one and a half minutes, like, I just want to sell my pistol, come on. But because they are physical, we do have to traverse those distances, and even though we try to make those trains as fast as possible, it's going to take time. That's just part of the scale of the universe, right?

And one thing that Lorville introduced, which is a pretty key part of the PU and everything, is the common elements. It was the first time we put in the hangars, the habs, the transit, security checkpoints. I'm trying to think if there was anything else. But the UK team was heavy at work on the common element part, whereas the German team was heavy at work on the actual Lorville side of things. So my involvement there was a bit of work on the hangars. Actually, I did the big gorilla head, as we call it, as you come into the hangar and it looks out. That was always a name of contention, but that's what it's called here. I also worked on the habs, the hab lobby at the top of the big crane-looking building, and the transit where the train actually comes in and out. And just on the subject of trains, I think honestly one of my most fun tasks here was that transit platform, because it was an opportunity to really look at reference of transit platforms around and make something that's very oppressive. I think my favorite part about it is, as you come in, you've got the gate and then you come in and you look up, it's nothing but pipes. And let me tell you, I spent like three to four days just dressing pipes on the ceiling of that entire platform. The rest came out much faster, but the pipes, I was connecting things from one side to the other going, oh yeah, this makes sense. And then you look up and it's just this network of pipes because you're below the plates. It was one of the most fun tasks I had here because it was the first time we were doing something really quite like that. So it was a lot of fun.

We have actually planned for public restrooms in most places, to be honest. So they're there. We just don't have that gameplay feature yet. So when that arrives, we will swing open the doors.

On a more serious note, like Andreas said, that would just be another common element. And we build our landing zones with a lot of future-proofing in mind. So we don't just have the shops and the hangars that we have currently. We always look for opportunities for a doorway, a corridor, a back alley, or whatever, where we'd say, okay, this is where a restroom could be. This is a door to there. So we know there's space for it behind that door. So we say, okay, in the future, when we get restroom common elements and we get pooping tech or whatever you want to call it, then that can be slotted in. Just like we were saying, Grim Hex did need a bit of rework, but from Area 18 onwards, there's a lot of extra space and potential and doorways and things like that to have all these kind of things, not just restrooms, but more stuff than that. Because we always want to future-proof a location. I know we're talking about reworking things like Levski, but we don't want to break it up and start from scratch and go, oh, we've got to redo it. It's more like modules that slot into a vanilla landing zone, as it were. And you can connect, hey, we can connect the hospital one here, we can connect more stuff on there. So that's always been our aim for a while now.

Many times when you walk through a city in the game, you might walk through some very boring place, and it's just a flat wall or a weird section that is just there as a temporary cover, that might turn into a shopping street at some point, or a public restroom.

Yeah, I was going to say, a couple of ways you can see how we telegraph what we're doing in the future is we'll either add a door that goes nowhere, or a really big empty space like Andreas said, like a corridor or something where you may think it's a bit weird, this area here. But there's usually some intention to expand, because we can't build that thing being tiny and then be like, okay, we've got to add this toilet, and now where the hell do we do it? I think actually, Boy, you added a nice toilet door somewhere in New Babbage, right?

In the Aspire Grand lobby, yeah. We have two restroom doors, so maybe sometime in the future.

It's the same with the transit tracks in New Babbage as well. Boy, you worked on that. There's the main one that goes to Aspire Grand, but there's a lot of other ones that sprawl out from that main one. And not all of them are perfectly connected up with the transit, but we aim for some to potentially go to another point of interest or somewhere in the future. It's always there. Sometimes we know, okay, we're going to put the hospital here, but sometimes we don't, and we're just like, okay, maybe in the future we'll put something there, but we don't know exactly what it is. It's just planning ahead, and even the foreseen and unforeseen things in the future we try to plan for, if that makes sense.

Favorite aspect is the utopian atmosphere.

For me, it's the plates. It really is that feeling of being under the plates most of the time. They're so oppressive. I think we really managed to put that through, right? And I think that's what makes Lorville so special. What I would change is, I think we've learned so much from building cities. I think there's a lot that we can go back to and do to the feel of the scale, either by improving materials, improving meshes. But even if we keep it within the same boundary of Lorville, I think there's a lot that we can do to the visuals to make it feel even bigger without changing much.

Yeah, I would double that. I think also the buildings especially. We learned a lot doing buildings. I would love to go back and do a pass on them and make them hold up from a lot closer, which would allow the player to get closer as well. So I think that would be a great thing. And I guess what I love most about Lorville for me is actually the CBD area. Because I was just doing low tech for a pretty long time, the grimy art style. Then we suddenly went to do this super shiny marble, this golden utopia. And that was super fun for me to work on.

It was refreshing for everyone, right?

It was a shock when you entered there from the rest of the city. You were like, damn.

I did panel materials for as long as I was here at that time. And then suddenly we had requests for marble and gold, and I was like, I don't even remember how to do these organic materials. What are we going to do? That was fun. It was a really good time.

I think that location in the CBD is probably my most favorite location. The brutalism, the sense of oppression that you get from just standing in that lobby is immense. And the only thing that I would change about it is a selfish point, and that is that I wish I did work on it, because it's fun.

I love the aspect when you get out of your hab and you see the dirty windows, and then you take the elevator down to the L19 Plaza, to the balcony, and watch all the spaceport and you see the dust and everything going off. I think that's really cool. What I would like to work on in the future is maybe expanding the outskirts, the suburbs of the city, more, adding more shanties in and populating it more with life.

Actually, Manuel, isn't your favorite part of Lorville, and my favorite part together, the restricted areas? He tells me every day, he goes, man, we should really make some more restricted areas.

I can't get enough. So we worked a whole lot of time on that last year and did some changes and reworks on that. So that was a fun experience, right?

To return to a previous question, I didn't really answer properly, right? My answer was a bit jokingly, but it's also a little bit serious. I do find the dystopian atmosphere of Lorville one of my favorite points there, because it lends itself to a lot of environmental storytelling. You can do a lot of interesting scenarios there: Hurston family versus people who are against them and all that kind of stuff, all the suffering of the small people versus the absolute decadence of the rich. So that's also something that I would like to return to work on in the future, because that is something that's really missing there.

Manuel and myself did the white box for it. He was quite fresh in the company then, actually. So I did some of the main areas and he helped with a lot of the extra stuff around. You can talk about it.

Yeah, so I personally worked on the Metro Center, actually, and some of the alleys leading away from that, and the alleys leading to Pacheco, connecting everything, and as well the plaza you come onto when you leave the habs.

Transit routes of those shuttles flying through there. First time we did a transit route that's not on a track, and we had to take a fairly solid object and make it bank and all this kind of crazy stuff.

That was a nightmare. It actually gives some freedom because you're not bound to the tracks, but it also creates more challenges.

How much do you bank? Like this in the curves? Like everyone just loses their lives. It took like three weeks to set up the transit.

For you guys, this is just something I was thinking about: how easy did you guys think it was to visualize Area 18 and how it would feel during white box? Because usually you get a feel for it, but I feel like Area 18, because of its nature of being a city planet with cities everywhere, it was really difficult to get a sense of how that space was going to feel in white box until we had some proper buildings and everything in there.

When I started with the white box, we did have the previous Area 18 to reference back to, of course, but there were certain things that we wanted to do to really sell the scale, right? For example, with the streets, we knew that we wanted to have buildings go up really high. And I know the first versions of Area 18 that we did had capped streets, which basically felt like they were going into a tunnel, right? So what we did in the white box, we tried to break that up. You have the buildings coming out on the side, but you still see a glimmer of light really, really far up somewhere, to give this illusion that you're really quite far down, right? And in general, just looking at various movies and stuff. It is one of my favorite settings, this cyberpunk-y feeling to it. So it is stuff that I also like playing and looking at in my free time. I kind of have that mindset of what to do. It takes a bit of creativity to see a white box, imagining this white thing here, that's going to be an amazing skyscraper. But it's just a box. Yes, but it could be a skyscraper.

I remember way back when we were trying to look at the initial version of Area 18 that we first put on a planet for one of our CitizenCon demos. We took the original Area 18 standalone level and basically just dropped it on a planet with the first iteration of the procedural planet tech, with all the hard surface elements on there. And internally, everyone's jaws were just on the floor. It was nuts. But in that same moment we also realized how much work was ahead of us as well, with how we were going to have to change that environment to make it not only work with the newfound physicality of the location but also performance-wise. And like Andreas is saying, this is half the reason we changed the layout as well, because a lot of those performance considerations had to be made. But also we learned a lot from the original layout to make it better as well. I look back on that fondly, because that was one of my first locations that I properly contributed to in the company. And from the art side of things, we did a lot of loose exploration into where we wanted the vibe to go for that version of Area 18, at least in the CitizenCon demo that we did way back then, that you can see is being brought through now, even though it's a completely different LZ now. But yeah, it was really fun for me.

You touched on a point there about dealing with the new tech and everything. What I did for Area 18, I specifically worked on the planet, along with Pascal. And I think I did some material work for Area 18. Taking the organic planet tech, I've spoken about this a lot in previous segments and things, but taking that organic planet tech and making that work for assets that are sometimes kilometers in size, sometimes hundreds of meters in height. And something that Boy said before as well: how do you take a flat city and put it on a curved planet, especially since our planets are a sixth scale or something like that, right? I don't know what the scale of our planets is, but there's so much work that you've got to do to figure that out.

I remember having so many conversations with you, with you pulling your hair out going, how the hell do I do this?

Yeah, it's like, hey Josh, meet me down at the pub after work, I've got to cry a little bit. But honestly, it was a lot of fun. I think me and Pascal had a lot of fun doing that. And there's so much that I'd go back and change about how we did the city. One thing specifically is just the mesh quality, really, for the planet city meshes. I think there's a lot that I can do to bring a lot of diversity to that now while still really keeping within the same performance. One really fun thing we did back then: basically, the way our procedural planet tech worked then is that you take these meshes and you spawn them procedurally on a splat map. So basically, a map that says on the red area, you're going to put in these meshes; on the green area, you're going to put in these meshes. And then it puts them in at different scales, rotations, et cetera. And one thing that I thought was really fun to do, because it felt like the planet was really still, and I really like adding movement to our locations, my favorite thing is to add movement to the locations. So, I hope I don't get too technical here, I'm going to try to make it easy: I got a texture that was panning, of these little glowing cars, right? And I got some strips of polygons that just went left, right, forward, and I spawned that across the entire planet, just to have a feel for it. And then you look back on it and suddenly there's all these little pinprick movements on the overall frame. And it just made it feel so much more alive. And I think now, with all the improvements in the tech and shaders and material work we've done, had we the chance to do that place all over again, it's one of the things that I could really, really improve, I think. Another thing, not that I want to take up the entire time here: because we went with a much more modern vibe with this ArcCorp than it was before, right? It was a bit more cyberpunk-y in feel before, whereas now the architecture is a little bit more contemporary. It feels a bit more like a downtown L.A. than it does a more 90s grungy city. But it was our first time doing large-scale panels, large-scale windows, large-scale this, large-scale that. And if you look at the quality of a building in ArcCorp and you look at the quality of a building in New Babbage and maybe Orison, it's leaps and bounds. The material work, the mesh work, it's leaps and bounds. We've really managed to take everything that we learned there every time and just improve on it, to a point where I'm like, man, had I had a chance, I could do so much more with ArcCorp.

I think I could jump in here because you touched on some things. My involvement was lead environment artist. So that's overseeing the landing zone from an art point of view, managing the team, giving them feedback, looking at schedules and things like that, boring stuff. I also did some actual artwork, looking at the composition of the cityscape as a whole. But in terms of what Luan was just saying, we had a lot of new stuff with ArcCorp. Again, Luan and Pascal really pushed the procedural planet tech to its limits at the time, because it's made for organic terrain, to spawn lots of trees on. It's not made for a planet to spawn lots of buildings on. There's a difference between a cluster of trees and a cluster of buildings and how they work, right? And also just in terms of the budgets: obviously we know an in-frame budget in terms of draw calls and poly counts, but in terms of how you distribute that between buildings, it was completely unknown. So you've got a landing zone itself with the hero buildings that you're walking around, and then you've got some buildings that you can fly around, and maybe they don't need to be such high detail, and then there's buildings lower to the ground and the small scattered ones by the procedural system. But in terms of trying to balance that all out, it was very much a new process. So it was a bit of trial and error, really, finding what we could push, what could work, knowing that it's not just a city, it's a planet city. It's a city that doesn't end. Whereas something like New Babbage is a city that does end eventually. It's a big city, but it eventually ends. And so you know, okay, let's do 1,000 buildings of 8,000 polys or something, and that's more quantifiable. Here it's like, well, I guess we just got to see how many buildings we can put on, how many polys we can push, and all that kind of thing. So it was very tricky trying to figure that out. But yeah, we did learn a lot from Lorville going to Area 18, such as don't have the spaceport in the city, which is what we did with Lorville. They're still quite close, but they're pushed away, and that helped with a lot of different things.

They're close in Star Citizen terms.

Yeah. Well, airports usually are not in a city, right? They're usually on the outskirts of a city, generally. So that's a good reason for that, right? You don't want planes flying around skyscrapers. But anyway, the other thing that Andreas touched on was the whole track and flying shuttle aspect. And I think it was actually a really good decision not to have trains everywhere. Not every landing zone is a train track. Some are flying, some are trains. And I think there was an expectation that every landing zone would just be trains at some point. But we decided collectively, no, let's mix it up a bit with ArcCorp and let's have a flying shuttle. And that allowed us to fly in between the buildings with the bus, which I actually really enjoyed. That's one of my favorite bits of Area 18, actually being able to go through the city and past the landings. It still gets me whenever I walk on the bridge and the bus is going past you. It's still such a great moment for me.

It is still one of my favorite landing zones, actually.

I have one. And it's pretty surprising coming from an artist. You probably think it's going to be art-related, but I think it's actually, for me, the sound design. I think that sound makes up a big chunk of the experience, right? And we look at the art a lot, so we get used to the art. And it's super refreshing when the sound designer submits their stuff. You go in the editor and it's like a whole new place when the sound kicks in. It's pretty awesome always to hear.

It's often one of the last things to come into the landing zone as well. When we've done all the art, well, most of the art anyway, we don't hear much of the sound, they've got to compose the music, and it often comes in quite near the end of production of the landing zone. So it is really nice to boot the game up and go, ah, there's either music or actual sound around, and it sounds like it's part of the location. It's really nice. I think Area 18 is quite successful in that.

Area 18 is my favorite for that. And I think for that exact reason too, the mood and vibe that you get in Area 18. There's a lot of other games out there that do it quite well, but Area 18, I don't know, for me it has that feeling of, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

I can second that actually. It's the whole mood and all the neon signs and the city vibe you have around. I think Area 18 also has a lot of potential for further expansions, with all the rooftops we have and all the things we can potentially do more with the city. And I think it's probably the location I would like to do more stuff on.

I agree, the ambience of Area 18 is by far one of my favorite aspects. It's just this sensory overload when you walk around, all the music. You walk around in the city, and after a while you get used to it, all the ads playing in your face and everything, and then you do your stuff and then you leave the city and go like...

Quite successful, I would say. The word diegetic is when the soundscape is coming from the environment. For me, I think New Babbage is my favorite landing zone, partly because it feels like the most realistic landing zone. It feels very grounded as a city. It feels like a realistic city. I know it's all sci-fi and everything, but the way it's structured, the transit route, talking about the navigation again, going around the domes, as well as flying around the actual city, it feels the most grounded in reality, which I've really enjoyed. And I just love snow as well. So I like seeing all the snowy dusting over the whole city, I think it's really nice.

I'm going to cheap out and agree with Boy. I used to have a career in audio before I did this. I think audio is one of the things that's the most important to me in almost any piece of anything. It drives the emotion, it drives the feeling. There's a particular moment that I find quite memorable during my time here, and that was my second CitizenCon that I was actually on location, which is when we showed off New Babbage. And there was something so incredibly special about the Carrack coming in, and the music just hit all of the right notes, and you'd see the landscape of New Babbage and you hear the wind and you hear the thrusters of the Carrack firing and the music is just swelling up. And that in an auditorium probably amplified the feel of it, sure. But to me, the music and the audio is such an integral part of the experience. And it's sad that we see it so late. It's totally understandable why it's so late, but we often just put on our own music that inspires the feel of the location. And sometimes we send that to the audio team to send to Pedro for some inspiration. So many playlists. But yeah, that's it for me.

The amount of times I've listened to the Blade Runner soundtrack while working on this game, it's insane, many, many, many times.

Yeah, I mean, okay, let's do it. I'll be right back. I mean, the way we handle landing and parking in the game in general is something that we revisit many times, right? And there will be moments when we change how things work. That's just the nature of it. So it's very possible that in the future we might see revisions to the way the player enters various landing areas.

Again, hangars are a common element, but certain landing pads I would class as common elements as well. And again, going back to future-proofing locations, you'll notice in both Area 18 and New Babbage, it's not just a landing pad on its own. There's always a door there for a potential elevator. That's helping us for the future. So, hey, if we do want to go inside a specific building, there's the potential there. We can link it to an elevator and so on. So it's not just CBD, but landing pads in general. We want to have the opportunity to expand on what you can do there, not just literally land on and take off again, but go somewhere further with that.

I mean, you talk about lessons that you learn from one location to another, right? That's a lesson we learned from Lorville, landing pads, which we applied to ArcCorp and so on and so forth. So we learned it after Lorville.

It's part of what we just showed. It takes a while to mark up and create those derelicts, and it's just a matter of priorities. They just have to have the time and the resources to go through and make additional derelicts.

And of course, the ship team has to make more destroyed versions of whatever ships they have and give us those assets that we can actually work with as well.

Like most things in game development, it always just comes down to a priority. An artist can be working on additional derelicts or they can be working on something for a new location. It's one of those things that comes in towards the end of sprints, like when somebody finishes a sprint early. It's rare, but it happens. When somebody finishes a sprint early, it's like, okay, let's go and do another derelict, or let's go and do another turtle in a bucket.

It's a very popular question, one that me and Cory Bamford, if you guys know him, often discuss. So he likes to say that anything that's not bolted down is a prop. And I like to retort with, so is a space station a prop? Because it is not bolted down. I guess parts of the space station are. So when we're making a location, say if this is in the white box stage, and we've just placed down some of the basic geometry that might make out these areas over here, these pods, we'll come in and we'll do something that's called a prop request pass. And what that is, is we'll look at the concept art, and we'll look at what kind of small items might be in the concept art that we'll need that we don't naturally make as environment artists. And we'll put the request list through to props. So in this case it would be something like this box over here or this table over here, the lamp, some of these magazines, the cup. There is a slight blurred line, but it's mostly the sort of items that are dressing rather than large structural... yeah, I guess structural is the best way to describe it. In this case, something like rocks and these parts here, these kinds of beams and structures here are all part of, say, an environment art kit that we'll just bash together.

It's a combination of both really. We have something that's called a design white box pass in which an artist and a designer will come in and sort of lay out what the space is. Usually this is after the concept art is done as well. So we have the mood of the space and we have an idea of what we want to do with the space. So the designers and the artists will come in and do this pass, which is a very basic pass done with in-engine solids, as they're called, which is kind of these very primitive boxes with grids on them to just mark out the metrics of the space. And it's a longish process. We do it in pre-production and we kind of just figure out the things that we want to do with the space: foot travel time, where some shops might be. And then after that, it's mostly the job of the environment artist to come in and figure out the actual building kits that we're going to use for this. In this case, we'll make basic white boxes for these kits unless we have something that is already appropriate.

So a prefab is a collection of predefined items and entities. So this prefab here will be built out of some junk piles, some assets here like this, these kind of structural elements, ribs, these floor pieces, and that's sort of more of the environment part of things. But for example, this prefab has a table and it has the props and things like that, but we also have markup for sound, for design, say you might have a cup that you can pick up there. And it's just a predefined collection of those items. Prefab is short for prefabricated.

Those prefabs can include just about anything. They can include interactable items, movable items...

It's literally all kinds of stuff. It differs from an object container in that the object container is the final, I guess, resting place of all of these items put together so we can stream them in and out of the universe essentially.

Prefabs are for building the universe so you don't have to sit there and place every silly little thing, so the procedural generation tools don't have to go and place every silly little thing. And then the object containers are more about performance and streaming things in and out of memory and stuff like that.

There are some different things we can do with object containers that we can't with prefabs. Say we make a set of architectural pieces that we can tint different colors. We can put that as a modifier on the object container. So we can make all kinds of similar, but different colored areas and all those kinds of little things like that.

We certainly try. Very much try. Being stuck in a hole is one of the QA Ten Commandments. Can a player get stuck? It's one of the primary things they will always test for. First thing. The reality of the situation is that there's a whole lot more of you than there are of us. And you guys tend to be a bit more tenacious with where you try to get to than we can sometimes be. And this is true of any video game. I'm not speaking just of Cloud Imperium Games. QA the world over does their best to make sure there are no places where players can get stuck.

And of course, the scale of the game we're making means that it's much, much more difficult to test for every single little area that might be in the game.

It just reminds me of, depending on how long you've been following the project, in late 2015, we went live with 2.0, which was the first version of the Stanton system. And there was one item that wasn't bolted down, as it were. It was a Big Benny's vending machine. It was one single Big Benny's machine that was physicalized and could be moved. For months, maybe almost a year, all throughout 2016, we saw players just seeing where they could move that box, seeing where they can get them out of the space station, get them onto their ships, take them to other space stations. There was even a thing called the Big Benny's Challenge, where you had to get the box and get it back into the hab in which you spawned. And the hab that you spawned in was up a flight of stairs. So without being able to pick this box up, they had to just continuously go prone and roll and try to get the box to shift slowly up the stairs. And I saw people doing this for hours. Just hours.

There's one thing I know: players will do anything they can to put something where they shouldn't.

So that's always my example of when people say, why doesn't QA test for this? Oh, we test for plenty. But there's no way to account for everything that a player will do.

And they'll come up with things that you just never thought possible. Like what you just said, with the rolling.

Well, that's one of the key aspects of building a sandbox game. It's about building a world, or in our case, a universe of possibilities. So we are continuously surprised and amazed by what our community can do with the tools that we've provided them.

And it's always interesting as well to imagine, as we develop these tools and we make locations more versatile and we give players more control of things that they can do, what insane things are going to happen years down the line.

I was actually talking to somebody about this earlier. Let's just put it this way: nothing is set at this point. We're still in alpha. The purpose of being in alpha is that nothing is set or final. We're here experimenting, letting you play, watching you play, and then making adjustments as we deem them necessary. One of the more difficult aspects of setting LODs is the changing speed of ships, because the speed at which LODs adjust is relative to the speed at which you can fly or approach a planet. So as the speeds of ships are being tuned, we talked the other week about how combat's being retuned, or combat's always under tuning. Again, we're in alpha. So will the speed of LODs and stuff. So it's one of the reasons why when we jump into the editor like this, we can zoom out from a planet and zoom in to a planet far faster than a player can. So we tend to get more popping when we look at it in an editor like this, because we are moving much faster than anybody could in the game, so the LODs can't keep up. So it's a constant question of balance and adjustment.

And it's something that we do ourselves when we're making LODs and making all these performance passes. We'll start moving around really fast and start seeing things pop too quickly. It's like, oh, I think we need to adjust these LODs to pop more slowly, but then in reality, it's because we're going too fast.

Exactly. No player can travel as fast as we can. So you don't balance for the speed at which we can move. You balance for the speed at which players can move. And while that's in flux, so will be the LODs.