When fleshing out a system, do you work individually or in teams? Do you determine the physical properties of the planets/solar masses, or is that carried out by game designers?asked by Quantum Eclipse

This is a complicated question. There are a lot of steps in the system design process. At the start it definitely originates with the Lore team and we work together to do this. We all sit down together and we discuss what kind of system that we want. We start usually from the star and we work our way out with what kind of planets we want; how many planets are going to be in the system; whether there's a cool science thing that we read about recently that we want to include in it; what's going to make the system fun for the players, like landing zones, different of attractions, how it ties into the lore. We all participate pretty equally in this process, we all have suggestions that get shot down or accepted in pretty equal measure. Dave Haddock is the final arbiter of these decisions and once he gives a "yes" or a "no" then we have something solid where we can start as far as a system.Once we've had that discussion it's my responsibility to get that all written out. And I send off this information to our astronomers who we work with. And they go over the information that we provided them and they provide us with actual cool math that someone with a huge amount of experience and education can do, someone who is ... has been an astronomer for a while. They do things like ... they take into account orbital residence ... resonance ... and solar masses and spacing the planets out, axial tilts, perihelion and aphelion, whatever else ...

I'm just trying to figure out how to do that in the actual game.

Well ...

And that's the fun part right?

Yeah.

Once you get everything down and then you implement it into the game.

Yeah.

And we're building a lot of tech to support all that awesome stuff.

Yeah, exactly. And once we get this astronomical data back, I usually ... not usually ... I always go over it and see if they have followed the specs of the system that we want. If they haven't I'll send it back and we get a correction, but this is never anything that is done on purpose. It's usually like a misunder ... miscommunication, sometimes.And the astronomers will also suggest thing to us that we haven't thought of. For example Gonn is the first planet in the Oberon system: that is based on a dead stellar core. It's a dead stellar core right? That's really cool! Because there have been recent discoveries in the past ten years of dead stellar cores orbiting neutron stars and we wouldn't have come across that idea if not for our ... one of our astronomers. Brilliant idea.Once we have the final numbers, this is just like you were talking about, we generally work with Design or the tech artists and we try to find a way to get all this math and all this information into the game and so that it's fun for the players. And Design and Chris Roberts are the final say on what does and does not go in the game.

And I would say a lot of us are super excited about the procedural planet stuff that we see coming online and flying around the PU with the Large World, but this bring a whole other excitement value to those techs because that is what actually makes this stuff possible. So for you I expect you have a whole other appreciation ...

Oh, I do.

... for that awesome tech that's coming. And to get actually to start testing this stuff in the game environment is going to be super cool. And getting it out of paper. Cool. Awesome.

Yeah.

Anything else to add.

No, no. That's the process of creating a system.

Alright. That's an excellent answer. Hope people enjoyed that. I know I did.