Sean Tracy · Technical Director for Content

Well, we've actually been working on that for a while. That's the thing. So when I say we put the demo together within two days, that's not a lie. I mean, we absolutely put that together within two or three days. However, the underlying tech of that, a guy by the name of Marco Corbetta, who's one of the best gameplay programmers in the industry. He was the main gameplay programmer at Crytek. He eventually became the CTO at Crytek. As well as Carsten Wenzel, who is our rendering guru. He basically wrote the CryEngine from the get-go. So they were long at Crytek by the time I arrived. So these have always been my idols, and now that I'm working side by side with them on stuff, it's pretty exciting. But they've been working on this, trying to fit it in between the releases as much as you can.

So what's super interesting about it is, it's pretty isolated in terms of technology, where it is in the code, because it is so new. But what's super interesting about it is that Marco had done so much work originally on Far Cry as well as Crysis 1 on the terrain systems. So basically, he's taking a lot of the procedural work that he worked on for those and bringing it up to a scale that's just never been done before. And Marco's always wanted to be working on more procedural work. Between Crysis 2 and Crysis 3, we were working on a procedural building generator, so that never really saw the light of day. The next thing that we worked on, and Marco and I were together actually within the Austin studio when we started it up, we had worked on something for a game called Hunt, and what this was was a completely procedurally generated game, very much like Diablo, where you have tile sets and you sort of move those around. So he worked on that sort of level of procedural generation, and then finally he gets to work on the ultimate, which is procedural worlds, full procedural worlds.

So all the underlying tech sort of came online within the last month. Maybe two months. It's only been usable, really, for about a week. And I mean usable as in you play it and it looks great and it's fun to play and it streams in pretty fast. It's not super laggy, all these kind of things.