Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

Can I? Am I allowed to? Seriously, am I allowed to?

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Yes, you are. You are absolutely allowed to show tractor beam work in progress. There's no secret there.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

I don't have any videos of the tractor beam.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Well, describe it to us.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

Do you know what? I'll maybe show the concept. Well, basically, the tractor beam itself, even the FPS one, we're going to be improving, because I'm going to give full disclosure, I'm not really a fan of the tractor beam as it looks. I think I'm allowed to say that, I hope I am, because I just have. I'm not a huge fan of it. We went through a few iterations with it, and just to be completely honest, it just didn't quite end up... it serves a purpose, and it's a really fun item, it's a fun actual game mechanic, but we know we can do better with the visuals. We've got some ideas on how we want to improve it. One thing that myself and Rob do, so Rob is my senior VFX concept artist, we work really closely together. There's lots of back and forth. We talk about ideas. He's a great guy for adding logic to ideas, so it's never purely visual. We're always trying to think of how and why it would work, and obviously within the parameters of making it fun and being in a sci-fi universe. But we looked at things like sonic waves and things like that for the tractor beam. And we've got a new GPU particle refraction option now, which we didn't have before. That's relatively new in our toolkit. So I'd been playing around with using a fully refractive beam effect, as it were. Sound patterns, sound waves, things like that. So it's a work in progress. It's something that I'm actually doing on the side, really. But it's going to look a lot better. That's my promise. That's my pledge.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

SCL isn't the show where we normally show things. I put Mike on the spot there with the question. But if we don't get it today, I've got a Sprint Report in two weeks. I'll see if I can't fit it in there.