Just curious about how procedural generation will work on planets with large bodies of waters(oceans?) and how will that effect performance? Is is hard to render so much water or easier on the side of the player? Also: Space whales?!asked by Fallun

Excellent question.

Space whales, I love it.

I don't know about space whales, but I do know working with oceans in the patch, it's shader driven?

Yup.

So I think that it is achievable without killing performance.

Absolutely and again, Carsten Wenzel is one of the... He's unsung, he's very quiet unless he's very angry, but he's written white papers for the engine, he's been there from the get go and he's actually working within this. He's actually training one of our junior programmers to do this particular implementation. So him and a gentleman by the name of Tiago who went ID software I believe and worked on Doom, worked on our oceans originally within the CryEngine. I think I can go out on a limb and say the oceans within the CryEngine were one of the best features within the engine.

They're amazing, it's incredible.

We had scattering through the waves, all this crazy stuff that eventually...

When you go underwater, the volumetrics, it's just gorgeous.

Exactly. So I think you can expect at least that level of fidelity, but what's tricky again about water is how, first of all the highlight changes at a distance. So when you're approaching a planet, the planet has got to react very differently, specularity wise to the surface first of all.

Well the furnell is just..

Exactly. Then when you get up close, you want to see waves, but you don't want to see it tiling everywhere, so we've got this real big scale problem that we're going to have to deal with, dynamic tessellation on this stuff, being able to have displaced waves and things like this and then additionally if we want to go underwater, which a ship to design should be able to do, right? Lets hope the design says ships are submarines also. To me, if a ship can go into outer space, it can go underwater right? I think it should be able to go underwater, but whatever, we'll see how that goes with the design in terms of that design thing. I think that's should happen.

If you go underwater, space whales indeed.

I'm going to have a task when I get back to my desk to make sure the jet pack supports underwater as well.

Oh! That's a good point, right. What a Pandora's box right, cause you get under, you open the back of the Cutlass and what happens, right. Shouldn't the water flow in, right, but with the local physics grid like pushing water out, I don't know. There's all sorts of crazy...

A submarine though is built to withstand the extreme weight and pressure that the water puts on it and I don't think a ship needs to withstand the same amount of pressure in outer space.

Yeah, I'm not sure, wouldn't you think a missile hitting the side of your has a lot of pressure?

I feel like a missile hitting the side of your ship is close enough.

Right, I don't know, anyways.

I don't know, I'm just saying. When J.J Abrams did it to the enterprise, I think it was kind of dumb.

What? Put it underwater?

Yeah.

Oh I think it was fine, it's got shields, shields!

Are you talking about Voyager home?

No the one where.

Isn't Voyager home, it's underwater?

No.

No?

No.

Oh that shot, that shot when he's coming out of the water.

The new Star Trek with that J.J Abrams did where the Enterprise is hiding underwater.

And then it comes out of it.

Yeah it was cool, but it didn't make any sense.

[Laughs] But it didn't make any sense, fair enough.

Anyways, sorry.

Can ships go underwater if the Enterprise can do it.

Who knows.

No. [Laughs]

Yeah right and again this will be a design debate and as you see there's a couple different mindsets. I'm sure all the players are gonna go "Ya, Absolutely they need to go underwater" because that will be more fun.

Then other people will be like "No! Finish the game!".

Nah we can do a hunt for Red October things.

I'm more interesting in the space whales personally.

And the Space Whales.

[Whale noises]

We talked a little bit earlier in a question about Fauna anyways so space whales, megafauna, I think we're gonna have to support something like this. Whether it's whales or big big things on the ground, walking around.. Yeah sure, space whales, let's do it. You heard it here.

[claps in the background]

So that pretty much pushes Chris into a corner right?

Do you want to hear my space whale joke?

Oh yeah, I do.

So a space whale walks into a bar and he sits down next to another space whale and the space whale goes [Whale noises] [Whale noise intensifies] and then the space whale looks over and goes... You are wasted...

[Laughs] You're wasted! Awesome.