Since planets and moons have different atmosphere compositions do you plan to design different re-entry VFX effects based on the gas and temperature?

I think it's a really nice idea. It's definitely something that I think would be worth looking into for the future, definitely. I think it's feasible. It's definitely feasible. And again, probably Leo will be able to talk a bit about the way that those effects are set up. Because again, it's a great example of a system that's driving the effects. So yeah, for me, it makes a lot of sense. It's entirely typical of our game, isn't it? It's a visually nice feature, but it's also going to give readability to the player from a gameplay point of view as well. So very important, visually and for gameplay too. But yeah, in terms of the setup, I suspect that that's perfectly feasible.

I don't know if you remember, when I was working on the atmospheric entry effects, I actually pitched different colors based off the... I actually wanted that to be in the first release, but it didn't really make sense because first of all, we needed a stable visual state for it, but also we didn't have that many different atmospheric compositions. So anyway, that idea was put on the side, but yeah, as Mike said, it's possible and would look cool.

Yeah, from a technical point of view, it's definitely possible. We do have all the data available on the ship to actually trigger those effects. It would be more a challenge to get a good setup that's easy to set up for artists and that's systemic again. We always need everything to be systemic. It's necessary because we want this to work on hundreds of planets, all with different atmospheres.

It's all about the strength curves, Leo.

Maybe color, maybe size. But yeah, it's definitely possible, something like that. So for us, the first step we need is an investigation of what changes we would have based on the atmosphere. So does it affect color, does it affect size, is it a completely different effect because it's aesthetic or whatever? Those kind of things. And then artists at least will go and do pre-production. And I think Mike can tell more about it. But it's like artists will tell us what they want. And then we go and discuss options of how we can implement it.

Yeah, Leo just mentioned pre-production. That's a massive part of the VFX pipeline, and it's really just R&D. Before anyone does any effects, they have to have done a pre-production pass. For something really simple or something that we've done a lot of before, let's just say like a muzzle flash, the pre-production still exists, but it's probably a very small task, like identifying, yeah, there's an existing weapon in the game. It needs to look like this. So there you go. We've ticked that box. We know what it needs to look like. But for something exploratory, like what Leo's describing, it really is just going through a process of understanding what it could look like, what it needs to do from a gameplay point of view. Is it performant? Is it going to be just ridiculously complicated to implement? Is it going to be a year of a programmer's time, et cetera, et cetera? So yeah, lots of exploration in pre-production.