One of the things Ricky mentioned [on yesterday's ATV] was improvements to the props team's entity system within DataForge. What are we talking about there?

Well, it's a pretty big deal for us because it basically means that it's very easy for us now to get things like material effects, lighting and so on dynamic on our props. So say, for instance, we can create a lamp entity, and when you shoot that lamp entity, it will spawn a particle effect, the light will go out, it will roll across the floor. And it basically means we can get all of that done inside DataForge, which a lot of people have probably heard of. It's an in-house tool we have for creating these entities. It basically just allows us to make those quite quickly and quite easily.

I would imagine it makes syncing with animations easier.

Yeah. So I think, to expand on what Cory was saying, it's our in-house tool chain to bring all the different elements of the game together. The ultimate goal, at least from my point of view, or the props team's point of view, is that when we make an asset, we know that it can be dropped into the world by anyone that wants to use that asset, and it will have the functionality built into it. So we're not having to constantly repeat the same setup, or we're not having to drop in one explosive barrel in one area of the game, and someone else uses it in their area, and they're like, oh yeah, it does this much damage, and then in another area it does this much damage, and that sort of stuff. It's a way of us containing all of that information just in the actual single asset. So it is a lot of working with other teams. It's a lot of working with the guys that write the tool and the guys that support the engine and just bringing all that information together. And I can't remember whether or not we talked about it last time or not.

I think we were just on the cusp of Item 2.0 becoming a thing.

But we're a lot more confident with the actual tool chain now. So we have the ability to set this stuff up. And then one of the things that is really nice that it allows us to do is we set up one asset and then we can child all the other similar assets that have the same sort of gameplay elements underneath it. It's the same system that the guys use for doing a lot of the other interactive terminals and airlocks and all that sort of stuff in engine. But it means that we can iterate the visuals and still have consistent gameplay.

You can inherit all of the features of a certain entity and then you can make changes to that. You can make children for that because it's an inheritance system, and then you can make changes to those for the art, but you can still retain all that functionality as well. So if you make changes to the parent, those changes will then propagate down as well. So it allows us to iterate on, as Ben said, stuff like values can be changed.

That's an important thing. I know it may seem like a dry subject, but building these processes that allow things to be inherited, things like that and the procedural generation stuff, those are the only ways we're going to get to making everything that we have to make for a game of this size. You have to build smarter, not harder, as they say. So a lot of what Star Citizen has been doing the last couple of years has been building these tools that will allow us to build the content as we go forward. And it's great finally being in content phase.

Yeah, and I think that's absolutely it. Because we are a content team. Everyone enjoys making pretty assets and making the things that they really want to show off. And then you get to the bit, and if that setup is really difficult and time-consuming and just repetitive, then it's no fun. Whereas if you have a system where you know that you can get it working once, it might be a case that we'll make an asset, we get a template set up and we send it over to design. They can balance it from a gameplay point of view. The lighting guys can light it and get their default lighting set up and all that sort of stuff. And then we can come back and we can just take that. And like you say, we're making a universe. It's massive. If you want to make that amount of content, you need smart tools and clever ways of working.

It's also really exciting just being able to shoot a prop and seeing particle effects and hearing sounds and it all working now. Seeing that coming together is really nice. I think in the latest ATV, that was something we showed off.