Teo · VFX Artist

I mean, some of the effects that have been around in the environments mostly, like Lorville and Area 18.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

I think for me, you probably sympathize with this, Teo, but I think for me, one of the problem effects is smoke from the barrel of a gun, which sounds like a really simple thing to do, but that's really, really tricky to get looking good. Two reasons. One is the lighting model of our particle system at the moment; it's not fully PBR, so it's not quite accurate in real-world terms. So again, with our game, you have to make sure that your effect looks right in daylight, you have to make sure it looks right at nighttime, up in space where the glare of the sun is intense. So what we end up doing is, you want a nice subtle smoke emission from the barrel, and you always get this from the artists and designers working on weapons, because you just get a little bit of smoke coming out the barrel. And the problem is that you do that and it looks great, but then you see someone firing it in space and it's super bright. It's like, oh God, it looks really bad. So now I've got to tone it right down. And then I've toned it right down, so then I get people saying, no, I can't see any smoke coming out of my gun. So it's really tricky in that sense. And also another side of that, I'm sorry, I don't know if this is boring or interesting, but another one is the fact that you can move around really quickly. Obviously we can't spawn too many particles; even with the GPU system, we can't spawn too many. So you get this problem where, if the smoke is emitting from the gun while the player's moving it around, you just get these little blobs of smoke, and that kind of breaks the immersion. That doesn't really look good. So just a really minor type of effect, I guess, in the scheme of things, but that's a really tricky one. That always causes me headaches.

Leo · VFX Programmer

The past year, I think atmospheric entry has been kind of a headache as well, just in the sense that we had some trouble figuring out when to spawn the effects. Our ships don't really fly fast enough to physically accurately spawn the effect when it should happen, like in real life. So we have to kind of fake it, because it's a really cool effect. But yeah, we've had a lot of back and forth between different teams about what we can do to change the experience or change the calculations. For me, I guess it's a bit more from a technical point of view, not really visual.