Star Citizen Live: Planet Content Team Q&A

It is a decent amount of time investment to make clouds, especially since we're so early in the process. We don't have all the knowledge and all the tools we need or want to get whatever specific visual target. So we do have to spend a fair amount of time to develop those and figure out what we need to do to get the visuals we want. And then the system is still very much subject to change and will change dramatically over time. So we don't want to spend too much time making things that are going to have to be reworked a lot of times. So we're definitely working on rolling out more clouds to more planets. As long as the system is so much in development, we're not going to just do them for all of them. We're not going to do generic ones for all of them. We want them to feel different and portray the planet in a way that makes sense for the planet and just enhances the atmosphere or the vibe of the planet, if you know what I mean. So that's pretty much the thing. We want to do each planet justice and not just have something generic everywhere. But to do that, we need to spend our time on it and not throw away all the work we do. So it's an iterative process that takes a bit of time, if that makes sense.

Like Sebastian explained, we do talk to the engineers, right? They ask us what we would need to create underwater biomes. And then it's a back and forth. We make some white box kelp meshes, for example. And then we say, OK, we need them to sway in the water. And if that's not something that they've done yet, they have to make that and come back to us. And that's the process that we have for creating this. Obviously I don't want to take anything away from their upcoming river special, which will touch on the underwater stuff. But we did look into that a little bit to support them early on so they know what we eventually need. Basically, we want to scatter stuff around bodies of water. We want to have different vegetation underwater, different rocks. How do the rocks behave in comparison to planet surface rocks? Just so that the player sees what he or she would expect to see if they go underwater.

So these conversations about underwater stuff are happening now?

I mean, it's a process, right? It's a development process. It starts somewhere, right? Eventually, they ask us. But I don't want to spoil anything, right?

It has come up, though, with rivers and players walking into the river and them dying feels a bit weird. So, sparking conversations about underwater.

The problem is twofold. I'm going to touch on the technical side of things, the larger issue, which is that with Star Citizen, we have to make things that work from all distances. So it needs to work from space, from orbit, and from the ground. And right now... but that's something that's actually being worked on soon, very soon I hope: a better representation of things in the distance on the GPU instead of the CPU, because then we can draw them much further out in much higher quantities. And that's a big blocker right now that prevents us from doing really dense anything at a distance, and forest obviously being the big item that we as a team and I guess the fans as well and our art director and everybody wants, is pretty much the biggest thing that's being held back by not being able to draw enough good-looking things far out. But hopefully the Planet Tech team will touch on this if they come on the show and elaborate a bit more on how they're going to solve this issue. But it's definitely one of the top priorities for our team and I hope for everybody as well.

So that's something that's been worked on for a long period of time, as Max and Sebastian already talked about. This is something that you don't do once and it's done. You want to study all the possibilities, all the different vegetation types, be it alien, be it more Earth-like. That's an effort that's being made in conjunction with a new vegetation shader that has been worked on for a while now and will still be worked on in the future, where we will not only have touch bending so that the player interacts with the vegetation, but also stuff like better far-distance rendering, which we will look into, better billboards, things like that. Probably new wind, if we have the possibility to study that, and also a new approach to coloring the vegetation, which will allow us to not only use LUTs, or what we call LUTs, which are basically color lookup tables that allow us to make very easy and fast variations of the same assets, but this is also something that will allow us to do stuff like seasons and health on plants, for example. So this is all an ongoing effort that's being done together with the touch bending and all of that.

Using LUTs to help depict seasons. That's the first I've heard of it.

Yes, so basically the current system doesn't allow for a very dynamic way to change the colors. Sometimes you might need to do some hacky ways to achieve that result, and there is ongoing progress on a new tech that will allow us to just recolor vegetation using those color lookup tables, essentially. And these will provide not only a better quality, but also make it easier to do that variation. So stuff like seasons will be possible, once that is done, of course. And also having health states for plants and stuff like that will be way better and easier.

Health states for plants? You shoot a plant in the arm and it gets an injury?

Yes, exactly. Let's see what the players do.

We would very much love to do that. Earth is obviously the big goal we eventually want to get to. There's a lot of things that still need to be solved to be able to do anything as diverse as Earth. But I think we can definitely already do something that's more diverse than single-biome planets. And I think we're already doing that for the most part. For the future, we'll definitely do more diverse planets. And we'll also come back to existing ones and add more diversity as the tech evolves and allows us to do stuff like that, like rivers and waterfalls. Once those are going to be a thing at scale, we'll definitely come back to them. And probably also make some biomes that go along with them, just so they're nice. But all the other stuff, we all want to do that. It's just, more or less, all the interesting biomes, like a swamp, you definitely end up being in a place where you want terrain displacement, like snow or mud you walk through and wade through, and get the player trekking through and leaving a depression in the mud, stuff like that. A lot of interesting and exciting things we do want to do and we hope to get to in the near future or in the far future, we'll see, but it's still the goal. Until we've done Earth, I think we aren't there yet, tech-wise and content-wise. So it's definitely the goal and we will just get more and better the longer we do it, but there's still a ways to go.

If you look at how we started with Cellin and Daymar and Yela, they were technically like Star Wars planets, right? They only had one thing. And then we tried to push it with every new release. And then eventually we had microTech, which was very different. You have the icy, snowy parts and then the lusher regions with the trees. So I don't think it's a spoiler because people saw some of that already during CitizenCon, but I feel like Pyro and Nyx will push the biome diversity to a degree that's different and better than what we have right now. So I think people will enjoy that when they eventually see it.

No, no, no. I assume the Planet Tech team will get into this a bit more in detail, but a lot of the things that make a river work will also make a lava [river]. Just like the name implies. And for roads, a lot of the tech that has been developed and is being developed for the rivers, like adjusting the terrain so it's flat and looks like a riverbed, can then be applied to make a road flat and drivable. But I assume, I don't know, I'm not on that team, there's lots to do to make the roads happen. And it's most likely going to be more collaboration between Planet Tech and the locations teams and not so much us. We're just there for awareness, but I don't expect us to do all that much work with roads or on roads, since it's mostly going to be connecting outposts and connecting cities. So basically based on what those teams will need.

Probably since forever, but definitely since we worked on planet tech before, that has been the big thing we always try to get to work but haven't been able to figure out how to do. And it's still very difficult to do, just because of how our tech works and a lot of the specific quirks to make a planet at scale just work, and at all distances. It's something we always come back to. At least once a year, we're like, oh, can't we do this to make cliffs happen or overhangs happen? And I think there's a lot of very interesting stuff that's planned to happen in the next... whenever, we'll see, in the future. I don't want to commit anyone to anything. But there are definitely technical improvement plans that will make things like that more feasible and allow us to do better things easier and quicker. And one of them could hopefully be, if not overhangs, I mean probably also overhangs, but just better-looking cliffs, or any cliffs at all, and really straight cliff faces, which we really can't do right now because... Things are being done and I'm very hopeful that they will improve a lot of things and allow us to do things we couldn't do before. Fix the tiling of the ground textures, make proper cliffs, integrate assets better with the terrain. All of these things will piggyback on some fundamentals that are being worked on in the near or some future.

Sometimes we do have these things happen where you have a weird bug, right? But then the fans really like it. We have this one example, it's called the scatter rock, I think that's the name of it, and one day Sebastian sent me a thread from the forum and he was like, oh, was this a point of interest or was this a bug? And people complained that this huge overhang plate on Magda, I think it was, was gone. And apparently it became this travel destination for people to check out. I don't know if we took it out on purpose or if someone just tweaked a setting in the procedural generation and it disappeared, right? But if we look at that, it just looks wrong, right? But then obviously the players see it and feel like, oh, what's this? Looks different. That's super cool. Let's go there. Let's meet up. So we did feel a bit bad that it disappeared, and we brought it back. But in general, we also want more interesting cliff formations, more points of interest for people to find. But like you say, we could build that, but there's so much space that we would need to fill. And until we have a solution that lets us confidently fill all of it at the same quality bar, we don't try to do that. Because then it just sticks out like a sore thumb, right? You have this one area that's neatly dressed, and then you go five minutes to the right and it looks a bit procedural again. So that's a tricky balance.

I guess the plan is that you only find certain mineables on certain planets, right? So that there's an incentive for a player to visit the Pyro system instead of going to Stanton again, right? Because you need a very specific resource. We're not in the loop, I think, on the whole economic aspect of it. If they need us to make different assets, like new harvestables, new mineables, we're happy to do that, right? But I don't think the plan is that you can find everything everywhere all the time.

I think we already did some new harvestables for Pyro in the past. It's been a while now since we started work on Pyro. So I think they exist, but it's been over a year since we worked on those, maybe more.

That's not a spoiler, right? OK, we made some new stuff. We made new content for a new system.

It is worth noting, though, that while there certainly should be things that are unique to Pyro, these systems have been explored and traversed for decades in our fictional timeline, sometimes hundreds of years. So there's going to be cross-pollination. There are going to be people who bring melons from one system and plant them in another system, with these colonial outposts and stuff like that. So I think folks can expect a mixture of things that are unique to the Pyro system and things that are shared with Stanton. I mean, even the stuff in Stanton, if you look at the lore of some of the harvestables that you see in Stanton, the fiction behind them originated in other systems and they were brought to Stanton in the lore. So there's going to be some cross-pollination, and that includes the fauna as well, because settlers bring cows with them, horses with them and stuff like that.

If we're talking about local altitude and depth, I guess people can refer back to the CitizenCon talk from two years ago, when Ali talked about the planet tech at length. I think he went into this issue at length. What has changed recently: there was a hard-coded limit to the global elevation. That has now been drastically increased, and so we will be doing more with that and having more height differences across the whole planet, but not necessarily in a very local area, because it still has the same issues of texture stretching and that stuff, which isn't gone until... Some of the things that are being worked on will hopefully make the planet shader much cheaper again. And then we can afford to do things like triplanar projection of textures on the terrain. And then we might be able to finally confidently do very steep slopes and have assets integrate with them. But until then, we really won't be doing super steep terrain parts.

So I guess I could start by saying that, at least personally, I guess each one of us has a lot of crazy ideas we would like to see for caves, like lava caves under a volcano would be awesome. But of course, as we talked about, there are tech dependencies. Ice caves, fungi caves where you have a lot of bioluminescence going on, stuff like that. I personally would love to see that, but I guess...

Right now we have rocky caves, right? So we definitely will need more archetypes for caves, because we can't put a rocky cave on, I don't know, the icy regions of microTech. So that will need its own cave. And we've done work on that.

You're allowed to say that we're working on new cave archetypes.

I never know what I'm allowed to say and what not. We have plans to extend the current cave systems and add more archetypes. So rocky is what we have, but we want to improve the look of the rocky caves. Then desert caves that will fit nicely on Daymar, which obviously are going to look way different than the rocky caves. Then we're going to have, hopefully, caves that are more overgrown, like moss and lots of foliage, ice caves, and acidic caves.

It wasn't one of us, but that's more a limitation of the system, where it can't differentiate between the golf cart vehicle that we have and the rover, for example. So we understand that that's frustrating. And it's also tricky for us to get that right with some of the randomization values that we have, where a small rock that the golf cart would get stuck on, or that you would expect the golf cart to get stuck on, but the rover to drive through... We have to decide on one or the other. For now. Eventually, the system is going to get improvements. It's going to automatically check, for example based on the bounding box, if an asset is supposed to have collision or not have collision. But for now, we understand it's a bit of a problem. So we try to avoid that. Little succulents make the vehicles flip, which is unfortunate.

And we can't wait for the succulents to start exploding when you drive over them. Hopefully it will happen.

We've heard the feedback in the past, and I think we try nowadays to keep in mind that there needs to be a good balance, right? It can't all be covered in boulders and rocks to get stuck on. So we also went back, and I hope the fans and the players will see that, we did go back to the old moons and try to have more drivable space in there. But for us, it's a struggle, because obviously we want to cover everything nicely and have something interesting everywhere. But I also understand that if you want to have a race and you get stuck every five meters, that sucks. But for example, on Pyro and Nyx, we did keep that in mind from the get-go. So there is a good balance of biomes where you immediately know, okay, this is one where driving is going to be tricky. And then you have another one where it's like, okay, this is a good one to drive through, to kind of guide you a bit. So we're doing better on that.

You can say it's the one you worked on.

I'm going to say Pyro 2 for that.

And I'll say Pyro 4.

Why Pyro 2, Daniel?

So the thing about Pyro is that I feel the planets feel unique themselves. They have an identity, I think. And Pyro 2 mostly because it was a planet I worked on and it was the first planet I worked on for Star Citizen. But also because it is a more deserty kind of planet with a mix of other stuff going on. And I like the color palette that it brings and the vibe in general.

And Max, why Pyro 4?

Like I said before, it has more biome diversity, which is nice. And I feel like it's a good mix between more alien-looking, otherworldly biomes, but it still feels grounded. And I like the colors of it.

Pyro 3. I liked working on the clouds and the moss, mostly, and the colors are great. I think black and yellow just works.

Pyro 3 was the one from the CitizenCon demo, right?

Yeah.

It's always on our backlog to make sure it doesn't rot and break horribly, but we are aware that it has declined a tiny bit in quality, and there's an item on our backlog about going back to it and evaluating what its current state is and what we can do to improve it. It has always been the odd one out. It's breaking all the rules of the planet tech, always has. It's very difficult and tricky to work with, and it's very easy to break. Obviously, we would like to do it justice as much as we can, but it's also not the most fun planet to work on.

When we talk about the systemic solutions, ArcCorp is a different beast from every other planet and moon in Star Citizen. It uses different tech. It's a whole other thing. I think it's safe to say to everybody who was asking, and it was coming up a lot in the chat, that it is not forgotten and it will not be ignored. It's just that with the tech that's being developed by the Planet Tech team, and stuff that's pushing the tech forward with Pyro and with Nyx and with other things beyond that, our focus is just there on the more organic side. But there will be a day when the wheel of development spins back around and it comes back to ArcCorp, just like it does with everything at some point. And it'll get its time in the sun.

Just by the nature of planet tech evolving, eventually it will have changed so much that it breaks ArcCorp, and then we'll have to go back.