Can you explain a bit about your process for creating the first procedural location and what look and feel you are aiming for?asked by Daz

I get asked a lot about procedural planets and rightfully so because it's cool stuff and I think we made some progress that people weren't expecting, and kinda dumped it on people on that livestream which was pretty awesome to do. The first procedural planet really had nothing to do with the aesthetics, hey were we trying to pull off aesthetically... nothing.To be honest with you it was just about proving tech so textures were pulled in of a certain memory footprint that we knew we would most likely have and then the tech was just pushed until we got that up and running. After those first steps then we had an environment artist 100% dedicated to working with all of the tech guys and engineers that were pushing on procedural planets.They needed to sort out the best approach on how to get rid of seams, how to make those nonexistent. What limitations and parameters should or shouldn't be set, on and on and on. There's so much detail that's going into that, now work is honestly right now as of this moment going on to some extent but a huge progress is being made. We've already done tests with different types of geometry and different types of look and different type of atmospherics, to really see what we can come up with.One thing that was interesting is Pascal our environment artist was working on stuff, he'd been playing with this one planet and mind you it's huge, for a good amount of time, a couple weeks I think. At one point he kind of made some noise and some of the guys had come over and looked, he had actually seen something like a new formation that he hadn't seen although he'd been looking at this thing for, you know, weeks... in getting to a new part he'd seen a new formation look really, really cool but was completely unique to anything else he'd seen over the last couple of weeks. That's cool, it's telling us that the parameters there are working, it's keeping things new, it's keeping things random but still staying within the guidelines that the tech is putting forward.