what's the most impactful VFX you have done that no-one thinks to ask about?

I would just say that the conversion work we did from CPU particles to GPU particles, I think is something that no one really noticed and nobody really talked about, but it had an incredible impact on performance. Just the other day when I switched some of the distortion impact effects, I noticeably felt a reduction in this kind of micro lag. I don't know, it wasn't a drop in performance, but it did feel better. And yeah, that's not talked about a lot. And the entire team does a lot for that work.

That's a great shout, yeah, because even though we've had the GPU particle system for a long time, just for the sheer volume of effects in our game, there are still quite a few CPU ones that we want to eventually replace with GPU. And as Teo said, doing that actually provides, not necessarily slightly intangible, but it provides a performance boost. And actually, in our game, a really small performance boost for one scenario like that, if you think about 20 ships, however many ships, all firing that weapon, the performance gains are big. And that's a huge win for the player. I guess I've got a similar sort of thing with laser projectiles. When I say we, the VFX programmers gave me a minimum pixel distance option on the projectile shader that we use. And what that means is that I can keep that projectile, as long as it's alive and it's on screen, at a minimum amount of pixels. And even though that's a really minor thing, seemingly, in the field of battle, that was absolutely invaluable because it meant that you could still see them. It's just a readability thing. It just meant in combat, it made a difference that people probably wouldn't have really thought much of.

Yeah, so as a programmer, it's a bit different. The small gains that we do are more for the artists, I would say. I mean, we do performance improvements and those kind of things. But the small things, like making the setup easier or finding a good formula. We have the wingtip vortices on ships. It's all physically based. And as long as the planets and the gas clouds are set up with pressure and temperature and humidity, it will work with different combinations. And it means less setup for artists. So as long as they make sure the effect is set up on the ship, they don't have to tweak values of we want this here, this there. It's been a long process. I think we got some good formulas, physically-based formulas, and it's quite satisfying finding those and making the future setup for ships and anything better and easier for artists.