Will planets have variant biomes and/or weather regions or will each planet be uniform? Do you think current procedural tech will be capable of generating flora and fauna at a fidelity close enough to the art you are producing?asked by Duke Dirty Work

That's a great question. There's actually two questions within here. Right?

Yeah. Yeah.

So the first one that I want to deal with is, "Will planets have variant biomes?" Of course! We have to. Otherwise you're gonna end up with planets that all looked rocky.

Yeah.

Planets that all looked frozen. Planets that all look...and we've got some of the best atmosphere technology that I've ever seen.

Oh it's incredible.

It's absolutely phenomenal.

Yeah.

We've got... I don't know how much we're talking about this yet, but we've solved all kinds of lighting challenges, let's say. Thing like GI on the planets. There's some good solutions already in place. I don't see any reason why we wouldn't have variant biomes. Now if he's talking about variant biomes within the planet itself. You've got a planet, up north is going to be the polar icecap...

Yeah, yeah, and down...

On the south is gonna be polar icecaps. In the middle, does it get warmer and stuff like this?

Yup. Desert or something, who knows.

Absolutely! There's no reason we can't do this. Weather regions is a bit of a different story. That's a lot harder, because sure we can do all levels of code. We know where you are on the planet, we know what sector you're in, what's around you. But how do we communicate that over to the player?

And how deep do you go with the design? Do you have it where, when you go to that location that it's always raining?

Exactly! Or is there a hurricane?

Or do you do it where there's actually some kind of weather happen? I think there's a lot of...

Right, right.

Things to solve with the weather.

To give you guys an idea, these are the things that we're thinking about. The fidelity of our planets are gonna be such that you've not seen this before. There's no question.

Right. Oh absolutely. I've seen it, it's awesome.

Now whether you have moving weather and things like that on it? That's a problem that we're not yet ready to solve. They're already taking a look at it, things like volumetric clouds and all this kind of stuff, to have moving weather patterns and things like that within the planet?

Yeah.

That will be something for another time, I think. I do think that that's gonna be one of the pieces we wanna do.

Yeah, eventually.

I think it would be amazing. So the second piece of this question is, do I think that the current procedural tech will be capable of generating the flora and fauna...

Right.

At the fidelity that we are? Yeah. Absolutely, that's the goal.

Yeah. Because the art is still making the assets. So the fidelity will be there, right? It's just a matter of this procedural tech deciding where to populate the plants and the animals. Right?

Right.

I don't see any reason that we can't have the same visual fidelity that we have for the rest of the game.

That's the drive, that's the direction, right?

Yeah.

All of us have worked on. We've all worked on little levels that have been hand authored so much.

Yup.

Our goal with this whole system is to be able to make an entire world at that same level of fidelity. We want to have trees that look like Crysis. We want to have...

Yup.

We want to have animals and things like that within them. Absolutely we want them to be at that exact same fidelity.

It's just...

And do I think it's possible? Absolutely.

I think so too.

With most of the stuff that we've seen in the last little while? Absolutely.

Just have to be smart about how you author your art. As long as you go for a very technical, practical approach and optimized approach. I think that's really quite possible.

No, and that's it. To be honest too, the other thing with it is generating forests, trees, even animals and things like that. Getting them all placed on the planet is difficult yes, but there's harder types of planets to do.

Yeah.

One of the more difficult, and you've worked on things around this, is like procedural city-type planet. What then do we do and how do we keep it at that fidelity for a planet that's covered in an entire city?

Yeah.

That's a lot trickier, I think anyway.

Yeah. Well, you know, it's just a matter of you just making everything as modular as possible and then who knows what you could do ...

Exactly.

With the right game play code.

I hope that answered the question. I know we're being a bit obtuse, but it's only because we want to be able to show you.

Well, we haven't gone into a lot of things... yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Before we get too ...

They're all happening. It's all a moving product.