Was some of that [long pre-production phase] due to waiting for various SDF tech coming online?
TL;DRYes, largely: the effects were always meant to be driven by signed distance fields, which depended on upstream vehicle and physics work, though that wasn't really the reason for any delay.
Yeah, very much so. So we knew from quite an early stage, really. I know that the backers have been aware of this for a long time, that the SDF, the signed distance field, we knew that we were going to be using them to generate these effects and to have the effects kind of driven by the SDFs. So we knew there was a lot of work that was upstream. We sort of use the terms upstream and downstream. We're one of those teams that are downstream from other teams. So we knew there was a lot of work that was going on with the vehicle teams and the physics teams that was necessary in order for these SDFs to become a reality. So yeah, that was a large part of it. That was not really why anything was delayed, but that was what we needed to be able to have in for us to do our thing as well.