Developers discuss Genesis planet tech: biomes, settlements, roads, rivers, mud, wet ground and rock distribution. They cover weather (thunderstorms, sandstorms, clouds, snow) and Star Audio, including Doppler, sonic booms and ray tracing.
I mean, you already see lakes. There's what, 15 of them on Microtech and about 18 of them on Hurston. We want to take a look at things like smaller ponds that might form without kind of a necessary or a visible water source. But it's not kind of scheduled or road mapped. And along with waterfalls and deep ravines, it's stuff that we want to be able to do. And we are approaching a place where we're in a better position to implement that. But they're not kind of like things that we have tasked out and planned out. Cliffs is something we are going to take a better look at as part of the current plan work for Genesis. People are always sharing the old canyon screenshot from Daymar. And that wasn't a viable way of doing that across a planet. But we're hoping to come up with a more holistic approach for doing these cliffs. And we've already improved the cliff rendering in terms of what is shown on the terrain mesh itself, which is a big part of what's missing at the moment. So yes, on that one and the others are kind of like from my heart, I want to do them. But I have to wait for my heart to match the bullet points on paper.
SI guess it's more like a content side question than like a tech limitation. Genesis never really limited us in terms of what we can do. It's more like what we do on the content side and making it realistic. Obviously, we've made a really nice progress already towards getting closer to what Earth and nature has to offer. It's always our primary target and goal just because it's familiar and it's a really great reference point. And now we're really looking forward to doing more alien things and adding things that make it feel less familiar and just different, but without going into the uncanny valley kind of thing. So it's a balancing act, but we have a nice baseline now and now we just go from that and make it more and better and alien.
JHDo you think we'll eventually get to something that's just completely unrecognizable, something far more, I'm thinking like Felucia in Star Wars or something where it's all a bunch of magentas and neon blues and stuff like that, just a completely alien world? Is that something we're working towards?
SIt's definitely, we've tried this in the past. Actually, Hurston was meant to be like blue trees in the beginning, then we iterated on it and it ended up being more or less like Africa now. But yeah, we'll definitely try that again and again until we get it right, but it has to feel good and feel believable and make for a nice experience to be in the place. But it's definitely on the roadmap to possibly be a thing.
WWell, quantifiable is a weird word here because we're not done. So we haven't measured how long it takes to make a planet because we can't make a whole planet yet. But the design and the whole way that we've built this tech is with speed of iteration and quality in mind. We're already getting quantifiably better quality in areas and we want to keep working until they're all of the areas of a higher quality as well. But also, we can't kind of measure how quick all this will be until it's done, until all the supporting systems are done. So just because we can pump out a planet in a day doesn't necessarily mean we can work out everything else that makes that planet an interesting and unique location. That requires content from all sorts of other things, from narrative to level design to locations to lore. There's no point pumping out a million alien worlds that are all lifeless. They've got to have meaning. And that's kind of what we've done really nicely with Pyro, I think.
ABJust to clarify, we're also not going to be pumping out a planet in a day or a million planets I mean, it's as long as a piece of string, isn't it? You could pump out something in a day, whether it's worthy of releasing in a day would be a very different question.
We haven't confirmed which ones we'll necessarily do first. But like the things that have been talked about are potentially on the cards. Things like sandstorms, obviously snow, and then potentially variations of those, like acid rain, rather than the type of thunderstorms which are intended to be our first target. In terms of what we're excited about, I personally want the sandstorms. I think the tech is quite well geared for that, and they look really good. And we've got some recent films that give a lot of nice visual cues. So I'm looking forward to seeing some of that in the game, personally.
Thankfully, the list for what we need to do for clouds is finally starting to get shorter instead of longer. That's nice. We have the fundamental framework falling into place. But there's obviously still quite a few more things we want to try and do, like improving to shaping, shading, performance as well and make them all more stable. As far as the tiling issues are concerned, that's more of a content thing as opposed to a tech thing, as in we have plans to make tools that will definitely improve that and just produce better-looking cloud formations with less of those issues showing up. Obviously, it would be nice if we could throw unlimited resources at everything, but we are still making a game and we have similar limitations to what we can render on the screen as all other games. It's just that our scale is a bit worse or better, depending on who you ask. That makes it a bit more difficult, but we definitely have plans and know how to tackle those issues a bit better in the future. It's just iterating and iterating and learning how to best make the data to drive the system in the best possible way.
Ultimately, yes. It's on our development plan and it's not the most difficult thing to do, but the more difficult things to do are the fundamentals of making the Doppler sound good, making every sound that plays in the game work well with it. But we do have the data that we need in order to drive sonic boom, and as you saw at CitizenCom, we did some shockwave stuff on distant explosions, and that's pretty much the same concept. So, yeah, we will get there, absolutely.
Yes. It's all down to, I mean, it's kind of a content thing really to get the burp sound itself, but there's no reason why we can't then delay that and create the sort of horrific experience that you seem to be wanting.
Those challenges are absolutely significant. One of the first things that came up when we first implemented a prototype of this was that when you walk away from somebody speaking and you start to see the lip sync go out, that's kind of like, it's realistic, but people have seen movies oft enough that they don't expect it. So we have to strike a balance between realism and the experience people are a little more used to on screen. There's also the challenge of camera zoom, that's huge. So when the camera's zoomed in and the audio listener is actually significantly further away than it appears on screen, that causes problems, so we're having to overcome some of that as well. But yeah, plenty of challenges.
It can create as big as we want really, but the intention is not to create cities. We don't have hundreds of cities. We want our cities to feel very unique. We want extra care and love to go into them. So we're not currently planning to build anything as big as a city with it, and you'd probably need to adjust the algorithm a little bit to the scale of content to make that work. But towns, definitely. Lots of small, medium sized towns. Yeah, we certainly want as many of them as design think fits the game. I'm actually personally looking forward to lots of really tiny things. I want mini settlements. I want the guy in his caravan and all that. I want a bit more of that in the universe. But yeah, hopefully lots of small to medium sized towns. And once they get a bit larger, I think that's where you really want to handcraft it and make sure that it has a strong narrative backing for it from design.
WSo it's kind of a bit of a toss up really. We use the term vertical slice specifically, and that's something I'll kind of dive into a bit. We've kind of tried to do a bit of everything so that we can see the whole picture and then kind of tweak our design from there and start finishing out each bit. And that means that yes, we could build a planet, but there's no way we could ship it. It's not performant enough. It's not varied enough. It doesn't check all of the boxes that we want. There'd be all sorts of problems with the tech that is working for the difficult bits, but not working for the bits that mean that you can have 30 in a solar system and then 30 in another solar system and so on. One of the reasons we've approached it like this is because there's kind of such a fundamental change in the tech. Like the Genesis and the Planet Tech improvements are not just kind of changes to the output of the existing system. It is a fundamental kind of reshuffle and redistribution of work, which is largely because V4 kind of addressed the needs of planets, although the Planet Tech that we have kind of addressed the needs of planets as they were at 3.0. But nowadays, there's a lot more requirements from that tech, whether it be kind of server meshing things, base building things, harvestables, persistence. So we've approached it from this vertical slice, which means, yes, we can build a planet, but it's not the standards we want. But we're now at that point where we take that. We can say, OK, well, here's what worked. Here's what we need to redesign. Here is what we know is great. We've solved some of the big tech problems. Now we're transitioning to more of a kind of milestone based approach where we're saying, OK, well, now we're going to finish out GPU spawning and now we're going to finish out the orbital look and so on. And we can start kind of taking chunks of tech and finishing it. And I think one of the really important things as well is that we're not aiming to release this as one big floodgates. And suddenly everything is out and boom, you've got Genesis. It's going to be features coming online, type bit by bit. And one of the one of the early bits of tech is actually already in the 4.0 streams that are going out to EPTU right now. The planetary rewrite of how we store and subdivide our planet into patches and so on is already out there in the world and working. And that's kind of one of the benefits of having done this as a vertical slice. It means that we're starting to reap the benefits already. In terms of greybox, Seb, you can probably explain better what you meant by greybox in your sections.
SSo in our process, we usually have whitebox, greybox, and then final and polish. For vegetation, it doesn't really work that well. Whiteboxes don't really represent vegetation assets super well. So we just make a very rough version of it. Also, we were asked fairly late into the process of making the videos to add those labels. And we might have been a bit sloppy. So the swarms were definitely further along than the jungle, for example. Jungle definitely very much what we consider whitebox. Swarms and redwoods a bit further along, with the swarms being the furthest. And yeah, it's all coming together. And we are working through them. And a lot of what you've seen in whitebox is further along now and might be close to polished and final. And then we just need all systems there, every other system to make it into new planets and then release the thing maybe one day. No, I don't know.
SObviously, for CitizenCon, we made the biomes look their most intense, most dense. We want to see what does it need to look like at its most densest, I guess. But obviously, with the new system and everything having ideal conditions and less ideal conditions, you will have varying distances. It could be over multiple kilometers and just have the forest or have something turn into a forest over a large distance, or it could be over some meters or get clearance in the forest. The system will support all of that. We've just only shown the most dense and the most purest version of each biome at CitizenCon. So that's why they look very dense and not very friendly for landing and everything, but it's going to be very unique and varied everywhere on the planet, so you might have very different experiences depending on where you are.
JHWe did see some areas where there were paths carved through the jungle and the forest and stuff, so it is possible to create paths and stuff through this stuff.
STechnically, yeah, but they will also just happen naturally based on what data we put into the system and how fertile the soil is in certain areas, and maybe that was water washing it away and then you have a path cleared out from certain species of vegetation that don't want to grow there, or there's more, I'm not going to say more rocks there, but there could be more rocks that don't have enough vegetation to grow, but stuff like that. And it's all going to be more systemic and also more physically plausible. We won't have rocks everywhere anymore. They will be where they would be deposited based on erosion of hydraulic or thermal nature.
WI can say regarding roads is that it's definitely something we want to do. A lot of the river tech when it was made was made with kind of like and roads in mind in terms of there's a lot of similarities in terms of kind of like dynamically creating and destroying things as you approach it on or across a long spline, because if you just load a mesh for a 100 kilometer road, that's obviously not going to work. But it takes some time and some investment into the tooling and it's making the assets and getting design and so on. We want to approach it. We're not approaching it this second.
ABYeah, just to add to that, we've got Will's done a lot of the groundwork for that. So on the planet side, a lot of the work has been done or wouldn't take much to take it further. You know, there's not a huge difference on the planet side between a river and a road. Where the work remains is there's a bit of graphics work to do. Obviously, a road doesn't look like a river. We need whatever stylistically we need to change there. And presumably, you know, the whatever assets would be distributed at the side of the road would be slightly different to a river. But probably the biggest difference is we assume it would come from Starchitect. Like you would have to place all these locations on the planet. And then we have to figure out what would be the logical distribution of roads. There will need to be rule sets. You know, does this planet support roads? Is there areas of the planet that will and won't have roads? You know, maybe outlaw bases don't have roads. They don't want to be signposted with a big motorway to an outlaw base. But, you know, some places will. So it's that element that is the biggest part that's missing. And then obviously there'll be a bit of once you have decided to connect two towns or locations. There's some code to figure out what is the best path to get between these two. Do I carve straight through every mountainside or should I weave around them? So there's a bit there. So on the planet side, we've kind of done it. But mostly on the tool side, we're deciding where the roads would go. And then a little bit of graphics to actually make it look like a road.
Yes, we've recently just changed that so it does do what you would hope it would do. So it keeps track of the average amount of water in the ground and it evaporates over time using a physically plausible model, which we tweak to be a cross between whether you want it realistic or what feels good for the gameplay based on the scale of our planets and the wind speed and stuff. Yeah, it will stay wet for some period of time after the rain has passed. So we're all good there.
So it's absolutely been designed as a replacement. Some of those issues that you hear are due to some fairly naive culling of sounds, which obviously in Star Citizen you can't predict what's going to happen. We have a very limited budget for how many sounds we can play, how many ships we can play sounds for, things like that. And Star Audio is absolutely planned to replace all this stuff and improve all these situations. So in the example of weapon fire cutting out, we have a much more intelligent budgeting system that will take into account the importance of those sounds to the player at that moment, whether they're visible on screen, how close they are, how many other sounds in the similar categories are playing. So we can definitely improve all those things with Star Audio. It's just a case of working through all our systems because we have audio systems hooked into pretty much everything the game can do. So we need to work through all those things one by one and get them all hooked into Star Audio. And eventually, sometime down the line, we won't have any of the old system.
It's something we've talked about a little in the past, myself and Ali, but never really been able to dive into it deeply. But it's certainly something I'd like to revisit because for things like reverbs, for understanding what materials are present in a room, understanding the damping effects of those materials, that's something that we really would need something like ray tracing to help us with. Yeah, but let's let the graphics through their side of ray tracing first and then maybe we can talk after that.
SThat would be so cool. Maybe we'll do it, but it would be lame if you spoiled it now, right? Can't tell you the things you need to discover until you discover them.
JHYeah. I will say the scenes for such things have already been planted with things like this here, for those who recognize what that is from CitizenCon year past. So yes, we don't want to spoil that, but I think you'll be happy at some point.
As far as our side goes for planet orbiting, it could be turned on, but it's going to make quantum traveling anywhere very difficult because the system isn't set up for that as far as we know. In terms of more complex orbit, most of those things are totally possible with the systems that we have in place. We would depend on design and lore to explain maybe why we want some of those things. But yes, one of the things that we do need to do, of course, is axial tilt to match our seasons. The seasons are going to be coming and actually we don't need to wait, unlike orbit, we don't need to wait for any other system to turn on seasons. We could turn on the seasons and just have it know where the tilt would be, even if we can't tilt or move the planets yet. So that is dependent on us finishing out that stuff and finishing out the content in terms of making it look right and so on. But yeah, very excited for this sort of stuff to come online when it does.
Obviously we need to revisit some of the data that every planet is based on and the goal is more physical possibility and this is definitely a big part of what we want to do. Will has talked about the separation of different layers and snow being the last one. Obviously it makes sense to drive this purely by climate and temperature being the most important one for that. So yeah, there will be a technical requirement to do that and obviously we really want to do it as well just for more consistent, more believable planets and it's going to be good, I think.
SYeah, I think it's basically the same answer on the last question as well. It needs to be. We need to make it all more plausible and the data will be and then it'll just happen.
ABWe kind of need for the weather, we need the data to be more physically correct so that the weather can match. We can't have it snowy in somewhere that's 20 degrees Celsius. So it comes hand in hand. The weather will be based on physically based stuff. But then Seb has to go and make sure the planets are following them physically based rules. With V5 it'll be automatic with the new planets. But when it comes to the older planets, we'll have to touch them up to make sure they do, but they are plausible. Maybe some bits get more snowy or less snowy as that happens to make sure it all makes sense physically.
Yes. One of the design points for the new planet shader is that the different soil categories, like the kind of visual appearance of soil will kind of have a matching set of what they look like in different amounts of humidity. So you'll have a cracked clay and a cracked soil and whatever. And then you'll have a damp and then a saturated and then like an oversaturation. I don't know. I've just pulled those categories out, but something like that. So that's kind of based from the beginning that we want to incorporate that into our data. And then we will, some of it will come from static data like being next to a river or just being in an area where there is higher water availability. But then kind of transitioning these based on local rainfall is definitely part of the plan.
We can report the surface type back to physics and then other systems can change their behavior based on that. I don't want to speak for all the other systems that would have to then come and change their behavior. So the physics on the wheeled vehicles and the actors and so on. But all of these systems already do respect different surface types. Audio is another important one, of course, as well, because soil and mud sound very different. So by changing the surface type at some sort of threshold, we hope to be able to provide the information needed for this to the systems that would then change those behaviors.
All right. Conceptually, obviously we've looked at a lot of papers and weather simulations and how clouds form and move on Earth. And conceptually, they will follow the general planet's rotation from orbit and from a larger picture point of view. They will be deviating from this direction, though, just so you get what you get in nature. Obviously, we might not be able to do the full thing, like running a full weather simulation on the servers might be problematic for performance, to say the least. So we're trying to make it as efficient as possible but also look the best. So they will be able to deviate from the primary direction they are moving in. How far we can push this, we don't fully know yet. We're still exploring what we can do with the tech, how we can improve it a little bit further, and what we can do with the data to make it do more with the same amount, ideally. But yeah, we definitely plan to have varying weather patterns moving all over the planet in believable ways based on the data that the planet is providing.
We're incorporating some kind of technology decisions into our tech at the moment that will allow us to better support individual behaviors on assets, which is a long-winded way of saying that there's a lot of stuff that goes into being able to scatter 20 million trees across a planet and then being able to point at one of them and say, I want you to be chopped down. But we're bearing it in mind.
ABI mean, ArcCorp does use the planetech. I mean, there's a lot of special cases on ArcCorp. It shaded differently. We kind of abused the system a little bit to get the results we want on ArcCorp, to say the least. It probably will be a similar story. We're not planning on spending a year making bespoke ArcCorp tech. But there is parts of the new system that we're hoping will allow improvements on ArcCorp. Obviously, things about the amount of light that will gather underneath a tree and whether a fern can grow isn't really relevant. But there are many other parts that are relevant with the density, with the way we position things. We have a grid pattern for where we're going to put things, but then we randomize it. We could kind of just remove that randomization and get an actual grid pattern more naturally. And yeah, a lot of these rule sets, they're built for nature. But some of them, again, they're more powerful this time. So we might be able to abuse them again to get something nice out of ArcCorp. But we're not focusing on that at the moment. We're making sure that we can deliver every other planet. And we're hopeful that we will then be able to do something nice with ArcCorp at the end as a result. Because all planets must eventually use this tech. There is no option long term. They all must use it. It's just a question of how much we have to change to make it suitable for ArcCorp at the end. Which we won't fully know yet until we give it a bash.
SIt'll definitely get weather though.
SThat's definitely in the cards for sure. I don't know if we want to talk about the whole entity thing. But conceptually, yeah. We'll definitely be able to have them. Right now they're tied to the biome they're in. But in the future we can be more specific and spawn them on cliff sides. Or where the rocks fall down at the base of a cliff. And then you will find them there and stuff like that. That's definitely possible, I think.
WI think we want to treat a harvestable like any other asset. If it's a mining rock, we want to spawn it according to parameters that we would spawn a regular rock. We don't care whether it's a here's a game entity that you can mine versus here's a static piece of geo. We want to do them with the same rules. And it'd be the same because you get those revenant trees that you go in. No, revenants are bushes. Then there's the heart of the forest tree or whatever. We want to scatter them just like any other vegetation based on the same data and the same rules. So if you're asking is it going to be more realistic, then I would say yes. I think Seb also alluded to the new kind of entity management spawning-y stuff. I don't think that's going to help the specificity of the locations. But it's definitely going to help the density of these things. And I won't elaborate into that right now because the managed entity system is a very techy, boring subject that you can't cover without a TED Talk.
Well, some of the biggest blockers are just the sheer volume of systems that we have running. And the design of Star Audio is that we take all the features embedded in those game systems and make them all part of the engine. And we're chipping away at that. So that's the biggest blocker for it to be covering everything is that we need to have every single possible audio feature covered within the engine. Whereas right now there's a lot of game code, a lot of very specific code for certain situations that's been designed for those specific situations. So it's all about making everything as generic as possible and making all these features available to whichever game system wants to use them. So the biggest blocker is the sheer volume of work involved. That's the only way I can put it.
This is kind of linked to what I said before with chopping down trees. There's kind of a few complications that come here. If you think about I want to knock over a tree in my ship, that sounds like a simple behaviour. But there's all the gameplay stuff about how you would go around and chop a tree and the kind of design behaviour from that. And so none of that's done. So we need to wait for that. And then from our end, there's kind of three core bits that we need to worry about. There's promotion, which is taking our very kind of highly optimised tree asset that renders in a particular way and is spawned by particular system and replacing that with something that we can interact with and uniquely address and tell what to do. There's the management system, which I alluded to, which is essentially about making spawning of entities server meshing friendly and persistent. And then there's persistence itself, which is kind of like, OK, well, you've crushed a forest with your Idris. There were, what, 700 trees under there that we now need to remember have not done something. And actually just creating 700 entities and chucking them in the entity graph is not an efficient way of going about that. So we need to make complex decisions like if a tree becomes fallen over next to your base, you probably care about that tree. But if you knock over 500 trees on your way to New Babbage, we could probably come up with something different to record that there are fallen trees in this area, but not 700 unique entities for each fallen tree. So there's a whole tonne of work that goes into stuff like this. And it's not even like it's not even really kind of planned for or guaranteed at this point. All I'll say is that we want our system to be able to support more complex behaviour and start to approach these problems.
All right. So since we need to address the whole general V4 data versus V5 data anyway for the planets. And the clouds are just part of that process anyway. They will come out of the same toolset basically. Our aim is to have a default weather behavior for a planet. If you generate a generic planet, it will just create ideally the weather patterns for cold air moving underneath warm air. Pushing it up, causing cumulus clouds to form into cumulonimbus clouds. I hate that word. And everything in between ideally. And then also having warm air moving over cold air. Which will cause the straightest family of clouds to form. And that's our default behavior we want to do for every planet if we need to. And on top of that there will obviously be different things. And then you have a very specific need for a certain weather pattern. Or very different or alien planets with alien clouds. Whatever that means, we don't know yet. And we just try to do that as well. But the idea is that we can cover as many different cloud types as possible with the resources we have. And then vary it based on individual planet needs.
I mean, hurricanes and typhoons are the same thing. Just different names depending on where you are on the planet. It's just like very strong winds. And from orbit you have this giant circling weather front moving around. We might not be able to do it like that from orbit. We'll definitely be able to turn up the knob a little bit on what our weather looks like. Compared to what you've seen at CitizenCon. Obviously needs a lot of work from different departments to make this all a coherent experience. Tornadoes, it's not really a weather cloud thing. They move at a very different rate and the clouds will be able to move. So it would be more on VFX and graphics. I don't want to commit them to do anything that they might not be able to support anytime soon. But yeah, definitely we will have certain planets with cyclones on them. If they will move the way they do in nature, we need to see how far we can push the system. Or if they will be a little bit less. But yeah, I don't know yet. We'll see. We're still learning. We're still working with the data and the tools. Expanding them, exploring them, making better data. You can expect a lot of iteration for the weather over the next few months and maybe years.
That one does actually come up a bit. We would kind of like that one. All of the stuff in the atmosphere ends up being quite difficult though. Especially when they interact with each other. So the clouds and the atmosphere in the same volume and then the rain is covering the same and then the ground fog. These things are all overlapping and quite problematic. For the Aurora Borealis, I take it. I mean, I've not looked at the science, but I assume it's always above the cloud layer, isn't it? And if it is, that at least simplifies the problem a bit for the rendering side. We've certainly made accidents that look like Aurora before in VFX and graphics. Usually bugs, sometimes intentional from artists. Yeah, that's one I quite like, personally. And it's possibly easier than some of the others. But it's also quite separate. We have to intentionally decide we're going to stop doing this. Aurora is what we want to do. We haven't quite had the creative direction telling us to do that now. Maybe we want Aurora for this next release, but it's certainly plausible. That came from up above.
WI think we'd like that because we feel the small too, especially as we introduce more and more advanced atmosphere. It breaks our nice illusion that our planets are full scale, which I hope all of you continue to believe because I certainly do in my heart. The thing about bigger planets is it stretches the complications with precision more, which we're hoping to be able to do away with. But that's one problem. Obviously, we need high resolution textures. At the moment, if we have a global texture and it's, say, 2K, that gives us a certain number of kilometers per pixel. And obviously we have local data, too. But if we make a planet have twice the surface area, then suddenly we have half as much resolution for the same kind of budget. So we need to consider those decisions and consider how the tech can deal with that. But you also get kind of gameplay problems with that as well. If I make a real life size planet, we have fast ships, but like suddenly getting from one place to another takes 10 times as long. And it's not necessarily good for gameplay to have that. So it's a convoluted question. We appreciate the reason that people are asking that we feel the same. But also there's a certain amount of the why question, which I guess you can ask for a lot of our features, which is what we have works. What we have is great. Should we invest more time in making it bigger? Is that a good use of our time versus going and doing rivers, too, or finishing out something else sooner? So if you put up a poll that said roads versus bigger planets, I bet roads would win. So, yeah.
ABI'd probably add that eight times is probably, like I say, it probably pushes all of them aspects too much. Too low res, it's too much memory, it's too much of a knock on for the gameplay. A smaller increment would be more appealing, I think. You know, like a doubling or something like that. Because just being able to double the scale of our mountains would be nice. Double the scale of our global features, our mountain ranges would be nice. So something 2 or 3x, we know would be more chill. But 8x, pushing a few too many areas at the same time probably for us. Yeah. And then the other thing we talked about, we didn't mention, is content density. We have to fill it with stuff as well. We'll see with Starchitect hopefully helps fill that gap a bit. But we just don't want to, like, if the current game, we don't want to put things miles apart. As we start to see the product of Starchitect, we might be able to see, okay, yeah, things are feeling too crammed and, you know, claustrophobic. Maybe we do need a bit more space and we'll try and explore that. But yeah, probably 8x is probably pushing it, I think.
SI mean, we can finally do denser and better vegetation, so maybe we can do less rocks now. But we do love rocks. I know, but kidding aside, with the new local data, it will be, the distribution will be different. It will not be as even anymore. The big rocks will be more out of the way to some extent. And it will be more obvious where they are, and you will most likely be able to drive much further without being constantly thrown around by hitting a rock.
ABYeah, it's not like we won't ever have places that do have a lot of rocks, but hopefully the most common scenario might be, I'm driving down a valley, there's a nice clear path down here. But up on the sides, there's like, you know, you can see the big piles of rocks coming down each side, but you can kind of make out a clear path. And it's not like just a random roll of the dice where they're, you know, a rock like immediately in front of you. So we're hoping it feels better, but until we type of finish a planet, drive along it at speed, you know, we'll have to see. But yeah, we're hoping this leads to much more realistic.