Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

They're coming along well. I mean, I guess it's similar to the shields topic. It's long been talked about and shown, and our very patient backers will have seen lots and lots of updates on the gas clouds. We still have weekly syncs with all the people that are involved in it. I would say it's going well. Earlier on with the gas cloud work, we were more focused on Squadron in particular, but more recently, at least this year, we've been discussing options with the PU team as well. There's lots of nice-looking gas clouds for Lagrange points. The actual tech itself, again, that's more of a graphics thing, and the tech itself, the gas clouds, that's pretty much all in a good state and looking pretty solid. We've started to do a lot more thorough testing in terms of: let's get a gas cloud in an area, let's get loads of ships in there, let's have dogfights, let's get bigger ships in there, and let's really try and break this thing. There's lots of work that comes from that, just more boring stuff, like bug fixes and lots of things that we didn't really anticipate previously. From our point of view, things like the different space loop effects. We want to have themes to the gas cloud. So we want a designer to be able to take a gas cloud that the artist has made, and if you placed that same gas cloud five times in a row, be able to change all the properties so that it actually looks and behaves in a different way, and the experience inside is different in each of those variants of that same thing. So all those kind of loose ends that we're trying to tie up, I guess. We want to make sure design is as far ahead as they are, so the whole thing syncs, and then that's when we're going to feel confident about putting it in there and letting people see it for themselves.