What are our current intentions for weather?
TL;DRThey want full weather systems eventually, including things like storms and sandstorms, but this isn't a promise of specific weather such as hurricanes, and weather would need game systems beyond VFX, with groundwork like biome humidity and temperature already in place.
With CIG being CIG and with the project that we're working on, we want full weather systems eventually, don't we? We want all of that. You want to be able to see it when you're on the planet or the moon. You want to be able to see it from space as well. So obviously, we've got fantastic real world reference and footage of these phenomena. And we want to get as close to that as we can in real time. And across a server, you want to be able to have, you're up in space, you're looking at the planet down there and you can see this giant, let's just say a hurricane or a giant rain formation. You want to be able to see that from a distance, but there could be someone that's right in the middle of that, right in the thick of it, in a storm. And it's those two extremes and everything in between, as always for our game, but for the VFX in particular. So yeah, sandstorms, I've seen people asking questions about sandstorms. I feel like, yeah, just everything that you would expect from a weather system, we want to support that in the future for sure.
So obviously we are a very ambitious game and we are going to pursue pushing this tech as far as we possibly can. Mike's not saying here today there will be hurricanes in the game. He is saying that we absolutely want to pursue that and every other weather system. And the reality is that it wouldn't just be a VFX thing anyway, because the VFX team would create a thing that looks like a hurricane, but if we're talking about weather systems, then...
That's much higher up the chain. That's a very fundamental game system there.
And we've already seen a lot of the groundwork, like Leo just said, that's there. The planet content team has gone through in all of their different planetary revisions. Now all the different biomes are set with humidity zones and temperature zones and stuff like that. So we have the foundation for something like that already in place now through the work of the planet content team. So it's definitely something we're moving towards.