What is going to be the biggest technical challenge of Alpha 3.5?
TL;DRThe biggest challenges are making a fully built-up city planet look good, getting missions, content and a distinct no-fly zone working, and improving the day-night cycle and night glow without costly numbers of light sources.
Biggest technical challenge of Alpha 3.5...
Is it making a planet entirely covered by man-made structures?
Yeah, dealing with making that look good. Right now, they've been working on that for a while, so I think there's nothing in there right now that scares us. But obviously then there's just the tech challenges of getting missions up and working over there, getting the content working, getting the no-fly zone, which is different than the no-fly zone at Hurston, working, and just the technical challenges of building a city planet. And then from there, there were graphical improvements that they wanted to improve on, like the day-night cycle and how the planet glows at night, just like a city does versus the countryside kind of thing. So working out those types of things.
This week's ATV had a feature with Luan from the UK environment team. One of the things that we were discussing, it didn't make it into the show, we're going to have it in a segment later on, was the glows. Hurston doesn't have to emanate its own light. I mean, it does from Lorville, but not on a planet-wide scale. So figuring out how a planet can emanate that light without building a million light sources that just kill our GPUs is an interesting challenge.
And it's the transition, too. So basically what we showed at CitizenCon two years ago was kind of canned, meaning we knew what the establishing shot was going to be from that space station. Versus once it goes live, then the planet's rotating, so therefore you're going to be dealing with the twilight zone and that transition.