Someday you're going to be done with water and move on to something else. If you had control over that, what would you work on next?

If I could choose what I was going to work on next, God, there's so many things. I really want to go back to the spawning, and I want to make our planets more physicalized, which means nothing. I want the planets to be realistic. So we currently have our climate, we have temperature and humidity. I want more detail, more control, more proceduralness, so that you can click a button with some randomised parameters and generate an entire unique planet just like that. So I want to say, well, this is the local sun of the solar system, and this is where the planet is, and these were the materials that were around when it was forming. Where are we likely to have continents? Where are we likely to have resources in the soil? What plants and rocks are likely to have come here? I'd like to, and I don't know if we'll ever be able to do this, but I'd like to do full terrain simulation. You could do those cool simulations where you have a flat piece of terrain and you start introducing water droplets and it forms the naturally occurring erosion, because that's not what the rivers are. The rivers are finding where a river works given the current terrain, because we can locally edit terrain with a terrain modifier, but we can't completely reshape the planets, because our procedural tech is relying on reading these fixed height maps that we have. We can tweak it here and there, but we can't reshape the whole thing currently. But it'd be really cool to do a full erosion sort of thing. Whether that's ever going to find its home in the PU, though, in our Star Citizen, where we're finding hundreds of planets and stuff, I don't know. But that's the sort of thing I'd love to work on.

It's hard, because I don't think anybody's going to say we don't push technologies in ways that maybe other games sometimes don't. But there are always considerations for the multiplayer aspect, for the MMO aspect, for the server. There are things that we could easily do just for a single player. You can control the perspective. You know it's only being seen from one place.

Exactly. I mean, with the planets, the best example is if you've got one planet and you've got 20 gigs of hard drive space, you can go into so much detail and you can have so much locality. But actually, that's not where we need to push the boundaries. What we need to do is push the boundaries so that you can have hundreds and hundreds of planets in minimal, minimal data in one game download. And as well, if you wanted accurate height maps of Earth, that's terabytes. And if you want the level of resolution that we have on our planets on Earth or something smaller even, it's just not possible to read it from raw data. You can't do that. You need to be streaming it in like Microsoft Flight Simulator does. And even that, that's a really, really, really beautiful game. But you go to the terrain and it's not the fidelity that you'd expect when you're walking around the terrain. It's a flying game. It's designed to look good from above. And it really does. But that's not the problem we're trying to solve. We're trying to generate these beautiful, unique planets, and we're trying to do it in such a way where it's scalable, because we don't need a one-to-one replica of Earth that is down to the centimetre in every single place. We need fully explorable planets, and we need many of them, and we need it to not take up several terabytes on each of our users' hard drives or SSDs. So pushing the boundaries in the right way, I think, is the right takeaway from that.

There are probably six or seven people all running to Reddit right now to make a post about how somebody at CIG said they can't do Earth and Earth isn't coming. He's talking about the current tech and the current place that we're at and the current resources we have and the current intentions and the current directions. Obviously, folks who have been following the project for a long time know that Earth still exists in the 30th century. And when it comes time for that point on the development wheel to roll around, we'll be discussing how and when and where we'll be doing that.

I'm not unconfirming Earth. I'd say if you're working on planet tech and you want to make Earth one day, then each of the decisions leading up to that needs to take it into account to some degree. You don't want to accumulate all of that tech debt.