Howdy, got a question about the procedural tech; how far is it going to go with the planets? We know about rocks and grass, but what about life forms and plant life? Basically I'm asking about the blending of artist created content and procedural content, what's the mix like?asked by Coryphaeus

Our plan is to have all levels of planet from sort of the basic sort of rocky, barren planet which we sort of showed a little bit of when we showed the tech at the end of last year, and by the way that's moved on pretty significantly from where it was when we showed you last year, so that's looking a lot, lot better. But, ultimately, to take it to the level where you get a Crysis level, which includes things like obviously the grass, which you mention the rocks, the vegetation, trees, plants, water, oceans, streams, wildlife, alien wildlife, birds in the sky, all that sort of stuff. Ultimately, our goal will be to create ecosystems and some certain level of weather and stuff like that on these planets.So that's sort of our roadmap and what our goal is to use the procedural tools to sort of generate massive play areas cause an artist can't do that by hand, but it's very much sort of Artist overseen and Designer overseen. So we don't just have a formula and it just creates stuff and that's all it is. It's using those tools to create these areas, and then the Designers and Artists are influencing it by looking at areas and tweaking it, essentially doing a little guide, hints to the procedural system of what they want to see in this area. They want this to be sort of a plain, or is this mountainous, or is this going to be a desert, or all these kinds of things.We'll also try to have some ecosystems with some of the wildlife, and allow us to place down a lot of emergent gameplay that isn't necessarily around like landing areas, cause landing areas are very cool, and we build those and we'll build a lot of those out of pre-fab sets so we can build some fairly quickly, and some of it will be pretty bespoke because yeah, Earth is going to be Earth, and Terra is going to be Terra. But it's a big universe and we've got a lot of stuff to populate.So, we also need areas where you can land, and for instance maybe you are going around as a miner looking for minerals, or all these sort of things that once we have a procedural world, we can open up where you go down and look for natural resources. Those can be generated procedurally, and then players can go down and mine. We can also create all sorts of missions down on planets, like for instance a supply mission; there's like scientific outposts that we just sort of have this couple different sort of temporary science outposts or installations and the mission is to take supplies to them, but you can't land your ship nearby where the outpost is, so you have to land it at the closest available area and then load up the supplies into your buggy or whatever vehicle you have, and drive it up to them and deliver it to get payment.Maybe there's a downed ship that you have to rescue off a planet, and we can have farmers or settlers. So there's a lot of kind of fun sort of almost mission based immersion stuff that we can have so it's not just about spawning stuff out in space, there could be stuff that spawns down on planet's surfaces that cause destinations for you to do stuff. So that's very much like what Tony, and I, and Todd Pappy have been talking about in terms of like the mission, sort of the bigger mission immersion setup that we're going to do in the procedural universe. It will be very cool and it will be done to the fidelity that we sort of achieve to, and you'll see, which is very tactile, very there, seeing it actually happen.I think that's the strength of Star Citizen is that instead of it being very big picture, very pulled back, it's there looking at you. Like you're in your ship and you can see the seat and the controls, and you get up, and you can go get in a bed or get in a shower, or go to the toilet, or sit down at the dining table, and everything's there. You can touch and use it so it feels real. We want that level of interaction with fidelity throughout the whole game. So we won't be able to do four hundred billion star systems like that, but we'll certainly be able to do quite a few using procedural tools. I think it will feel really rich, and really dense, and really cool. You have the tools in such a way that the players actions are generating interest and action for other players or other NPCs. I think it will be a really, really, pretty cool experience. So yeah, I'm very excited. I just wish these things were happening quicker!