Gas clouds currently look great from perspective but inside it looks like a fog, in a recent video we saw them react to sun and light beams how is that coming along?
TL;DRGas cloud interior effects were ready but held back because the room system's pressure value wasn't ready, so they're working on restoring it, plus new collision effects with rocks and metal bits hitting ships.
Yeah, so for the initial gas cloud release that went into 3.12, we did have the effects, the interior effects, and when I say interior effects, I mean all the kind of small, high velocity, high detail noise that gives you that sense of parallax. We had all that working and it was all ready to go, but unfortunately there were just some of the hooks we were dependent on. It was the pressure value, wasn't it, of the gas cloud provided by the room system. That wasn't quite ready to ship because there were some knock-ons to the actor status, I think. So the designers had to just keep the pressure set to zero. So we are working on that at the moment, getting that back in. Everyone in this call, actually, has been working on that. I mean, Jacob, yourself, you provide the method of creating the gas cloud in the first place, don't you, for the artists? You're integral to that process. So yeah, I'm losing my thread here. But yeah, we're working on it, and it's all happening. It's all going quite well. I think Teo and Leo got together and added a really nice new feature, which is, do you want to talk about that, the collision?
Yeah, sure. It's basically inside the gas clouds. Some of them are themed differently. Some of the themes are asteroid field or mining themed, and you would expect little rocks or micro asteroids flying about. And when the ships go quite fast, you'd expect those items to interact with the ship, so the rocks would interact with the ship's hull and break apart as you fly through the gas clouds. There'll also be some metal bits in some cases, but yeah, all of those will interact with your ship and it'll feel really cool. And audio actually are hopefully going to pizzazz it up and add that extra layer. But yeah, it's coming along.
Looks really cool. I'm quite excited about it. And the cool thing from my side was that it's using existing tech from the atmospheric entry. So it's using the SDF. It's using the same kind of system for dynamically placing the emitter so that it follows the direction of the ship. And it was a relatively quick thing to add on our side that I think will give a lot of extra nice environment.