What is procedural food for Star Citizen? Why are we doing this?

You're not going to be able to fry an egg and watch the egg white go from translucent to white. The reason we're doing that is because of the software we're using to create the food. Because that software is procedural, it allows us to get these values and expose them and change them, so we can very easily iterate on and alter these assets we're creating, to get rapid iteration on them and get them to look right. So it's a byproduct of the pipeline we're using to create that stuff that gives it the procedural stuff that you saw. In the game itself, we're basically going to be baking all that information down into a texture for the most part. Baking, that's a good pun. I didn't actually mean to do that though.

That pun was definitely intended in the ATV. I know Ricky said it wasn't. It was.

Yeah, so we use Substance Designer. Go ahead.

So basically, it's not a system in-game. It's basically an art tool that we're using. A byproduct of that is being able to have that extra control over it.

I think people look at it and sometimes question the fidelity we're going to. What Substance Designer gives us, and the fact that it is node-based and more procedural, is that rather than having to create high polys of stuff, or photosource stuff that probably won't stand up to quality, or do the whole photogrammetry thing, which has its use cases...

Yeah, we do use it in some pipelines.

But for us making this, Substance Designer is a really quick way, especially in David's hands, the guy who made it. He can iterate on this stuff really, really quickly and get the quantity of assets we want really quickly. And also it means that if we do need to make changes, we're not having to go back to stage one again like with all the traditional methods. We're just like, oh, can we tweak that yolk a bit, or can we adjust things, or if the writers want the curry to be more greasy, or it needs to be more lamb, because lamb curry is a big, big deal in Star Citizen. So having that ability to make changes and get the look we're going for without having to spend loads and loads of time creating the source assets is really advantageous to us. And the other thing is, again, we're making a universe and we don't have real-life reference of alien cuisine. So having tools that aren't tied to real-life source material is, again, really important. And that's why we take that approach with Substance Designer.

It's basically non-destructive. So once you've created something, that's not all you're left with. You also have all the stuff you used to create it, and you can go back and tweak those things and just get a different result. You can basically hit a randomize button and get 20 different curries if you want. Well, obviously within certain parameters that a curry could change. I'm not promising 20 curries in the game.

We saw some comments, some people think that creating procedural tools is somehow additional work, and it's actually the exact opposite. You build the tool to reduce the amount of work that you have to do in creating all these.

That's absolutely it. The Substance package has really been gaining momentum over the last couple of years. It's almost industry standard across a lot of development studios. It is about creating things smart, and it's not always about taking the fastest approach. If you can do stuff really fast and it might not be to quality... If you can do stuff fast and it improves the quality, then it's a no-brainer.

Yeah, it's the best tool for us, and it's not a waste of time to do it that way. It basically just means we get more reuse out of the time we invest in it.