In Alpha 3.0, how will the procedural planet tech be applied to our four planets in the Stanton system, like ArcCorp, Hurston, Crusader and microTech? Will these be the planets as they've been designed to be, or will they be stand-in planets like we saw in the V2 demo until a new patch?

No, we're definitely building the Stanton planets to how their lore is. So microTech is this sort of, whatever you want to call it, ice, snow planet. Think Hoth from Empire Strikes Back. And Hurston is a sort of over-polluted, mined-out planet. So potentially some of the stuff you saw in the Homestead demo would have some elements of the more desert-y stuff, but there will be a lot more petrified trees and this whole place will be over-polluted, probably a polluted ocean. In terms of ArcCorp, that's some stuff that we are working on, but we do feel like we'll be able to cover large amounts of the planet surface with buildings. There's a massive object rendering tech that we have that's very efficient, it's all very GPU bound, and that's actually what does, say, all the rocks and all the trees that you saw at the massive scale that you saw. That's actually all pushed onto the GPU and done very fast, which is the same way we would do the buildings on ArcCorp. Crusader is slightly different because it's a gas giant. So you'd be up in the clouds, and then there're floating platforms. So that in some ways is almost like a space station, because it's a platform you land on. But that's what we're focusing on. Of course, it wasn't mentioned, but we're putting Levski in there, which is a more kind of mining, rocky planet. So it'll be looking a lot better than what you saw in the Gamescom demo, because that was Planet V1. It didn't have all the ecosystems that we have and all the extra tools, which are getting better every day. So what you will see when 3.0 goes live will be at least as good as what you saw at CitizenCon, but most likely better, because the other thing is we're going to have more time to work on them, a bit more polish, whereas what we showed at CitizenCon in the Homestead planet was put together in a relatively short period of time, and also the tools were still being iterated on, which meant that the...

Tools and assets, that's the thing.

Yeah, which meant that if they build an ecosystem and they do height maps and everything, and then the tools change a week or two later, they've got to redo it all. So that was happening a lot. Things would change in the tool set that would invalidate a lot of the work that was done, so we're redoing a lot. So as that tool set matures, which it is doing, and the artists get more familiar with it, use more of it, and we do usability improvements, I think it's going to be spectacular. If you look at where our spaceships were when we first launched in 2012, and they got better in 2013 and 2014 and 2015 and 2016, now you look at what the vehicle team's turning out, and it's amazing. The same you can say on the characters. So I'm just excited by the gameplay possibilities of the tech, because we catch a lot of flak for, oh, well, you're taking the time and the scope's increased, but the kind of gameplay that opens up because we can flesh out these worlds. They're not just a very isolated landing area, where maybe you'll have a loading screen, or you're still streaming it in and you're on rails going down there, which was the original design, to whole play areas that are open planets with very different ecosystems. You could have all sorts of gameplay that you normally, traditionally would not have in a traditional space sim game. You could have people stranded on a planet playing basically a version of a survival game. You can have people playing domination to control their own parts of a planet that there's minerals they're fighting over. So the possibilities of gameplay or adventuring or exploring, it's like watching every sci-fi movie you've loved, and you can create all those scenarios now.

It's a good point, because I think that given the level of detail we're going to be able to inject into these things, and the fact that the occupations will be able to take advantage of this in so many different ways, from a design perspective, the difference between being able to land on realistic planets and control it to that level of fidelity, in addition to all the stuff that we can put in space and the transitions between them, it's completely mind-blowing. And I think that there's going to be a lot of players that are going to have all the content they want in just a small part of one solar system, much less the rest of that solar system or all of the other systems that we're eventually going to be in.

I think the story and the adventures people will be able to experience in the game when it's a little further along, it's going to be like nothing else. I'm as excited or energized now, more so than I ever have been, because I can see all these pieces there. We've got them all there and they're close enough. Yeah, we've still got to create a bunch of extra content and we've still got to make sure everything connects properly together. But we're very far along on it. And so I'm not looking at any piece of technology to create this dream game that I don't feel we're going to have. So what we're really focusing on now is connecting everything, making sure that it scales, it will run efficiently, and we have the tools for our artists and designers to work with. Next year, I'm feeling like it's not the sky's the limit, it's, whatever, the infinite universe is a possibility.

Well, this is actually having ripple effects all through the occupations and how we were going to implement them, and it's opening up dramatically different possibilities that we would not have had if we didn't have this technology. All of a sudden things like discovery and mining and farming will take on, just many, many new doors will open that I think players are just going to get a complete kick out of.