How important is it to you that this game sets a visual standard for modern games? Will you try to make the graphics advanced enough to test enthusiast PCs in 2015?asked by Socrates

Yes! I will! Heheh... no, it's really important for me. I mean I think if you know the games I did in the past - you know, Wing Commander onwards - they were always trying to set a visual bar, and sometimes they probably went beyond what most of the machines could do at the time. Strike Commander is a pretty good example of one that, on a 486 66MHz it was a pretty amazing experience, but if you didn't have something like that then frame rate wasn't so great and all the rest of the stuff. But it was the very first PC game that had real-time proper 3D texture mapping, Gouraud shading... so it had a whole bunch of stuff that didn't show up in other games in the PC gaming world until quite a few years later. And that was mainly because we were sort of pushing it, and we read up a whole bunch of white papers from places like SIGGRAPH and tried to adapt that into the old days of software rendering - which luckily we don't have to deal with now with all the hardware rendering.But yes, so I'm very keep on pushing it. One of the reasons why I picked CryEngine was that it's visually a very advanced engine. CryEngine is the engine which did Crysis 1, which I think probably to this day is still sort the game you would think about that pushed the PC hardware platform, and was probably the last one that really had that ambition. I really would like Star Citizen to continue doing that. So CryEngine was a good base but we actually have a fair amount of graphics engineers and some core engine people, so besides the stuff we get from Crytek which actually trying to do some really cool stuff ourselves and enhance it, and we will continue to try and push it. So whatever is available in 2015, and beyond (2016, etc) we will always be trying to upgrade the visuals and push it. You can sort of see it as the game goes along. The Hornet has now been through 3 iterations; so there was the iteration from my original prototype that I showed in 2012, then we did an up-res of it for it's first debut in the hangar, and then we did yet another up-res of it for the dogfighting module, where it got fully PBRed and stuff. And you've seen the 300i get an up-res from it's hangar version, and we're doing similar stuff for the Constellation, and the Aurora, and a bunch of the other ships. So we're always constantly trying to look to push it and make it better, and I think that's one of the reasons why you guys are excited by Star Citizen.