How close are we to seeing lightning or anything dynamic inside gas clouds?

Am I allowed to say we're quite close? Is that non-committal?

Well, without putting a timeframe on it, obviously, as I mentioned earlier on, I've been looking at the lightning effects options that we've got in the game. I know we've shown over the last couple of years examples of really nice looking lightning. We can do really cool stuff in our engine. What I'm doing at the moment, part of my ongoing Q1 task, is I'm looking at the tool set to see if it's user-friendly enough, to see if it can do all the things that I know we're going to need to be able to do when we have lightning in Pyro locations, like say in a gas cloud in Pyro, perhaps the art director, Ian, wants that, let's just say. I need to make sure that we're able to do that. And then the other side of it, what we can't currently do, what we haven't fully implemented yet, is the systemic placement of the lightning. So in various CitizenCons, actually thinking about it now, we've kind of shown what we want to do in the gas clouds. We can currently manually place really, really good looking lightning, but we want to, and this is where Leo again would come in and the other VFX programmers, we want to have a system where the data of the gas cloud drives those effects. So maybe design want lightning to become increasingly stronger the closer the player gets to an area that is dangerous. Or maybe it needs to just be more frequently flaring up and frequently occurring. And whichever design decision gets made there will dictate how Leo implements that lightning. So yeah, it's coming along. And I appreciate these things sometimes take longer than might be expected. But lightning is a very, very powerful thing that we've got in our game. And it's really fun to play with. It's good fun.

So basically, it's all on Leo.

I mean, it usually is. The artists, we just go, oh, hey, I want to be able to do this really cool thing. Can you go work out all the details, please?

No, we do have a team of programmers for the VFX team as well. So we'll share the burden. But yeah, the lightning, again, it's one of those interesting projects. I think almost all the projects we do are interesting because we get to do more than just implement the lightning that you place in a location. What we want for our game, everything needs to be systemic. So the lightning needs to be dynamically spawned, let's say. And currently, we have the tech to place the lightning just in the level. But that doesn't really work at the scale that we want to develop the game. So for us, we've had a lot of discussions about this already. And it will come down to how do we drive this lightning systemically. So do you have some kind of electricity value in the gas cloud? And then different gas clouds can have different electricity values. And then if you go into the denser parts of the gas clouds, you have more lightning. And then lightning is spawned in the denser parts. And then for the programmers, it's how do we manage all those lightning things, that they are kind of like separate objects. So how do we manage them? How do we make sure that we don't spawn too many lightning objects and those kind of things? So it's quite interesting to work on these kind of projects.

If you want a visual update on how that might look, if you catch the end of the main CitizenCon 2019 presentation, when the Carrack arrives in the Pyro system, there are some of those lightning events happening in the background. That's the system that we're talking about.

You made them, didn't you?

I placed them, yeah.