What happened that caused Frankfurt to crack procedural planets so quickly?
TL;DRMarco Corbetta took on procedural planet tech as a personal challenge, even though it wasn't top priority, because the team knew its impact on assets and tools.
And for the record, I think that was awesome on how we just kind of went, bam, here you go. And not only did we put together an awesome video, but then you had Sean and Chris playing it live, and you're just like, wow. It comes down to the background and technical abilities of the guys that we have here. Marco Corbetta was the one that really is owning that technology and driving that and building it up. He's getting help from others, of course. But when we first joined, that was something that we knew was kind of on the ultimate list of what we wanted to do. If you think it all the way through, the technology that you're going to build for that is going to inform potentially how assets are created that need to live on it, how textures are created, to the point where you'll have an elaborate tool set that will allow the designers and the artists to manipulate how things are procedurally put on there, in an efficient way. So in thinking it through and understanding what impact it was going to have, Marco, in a sense, basically said, look, I need to do this now. It wasn't the highest priority at the time, but we really knew and understood what impact it had. A lot of the guys here have crazy work ethics. He took it on as a personal challenge, I would say. And next thing you know, we're standing around Hannes' desk, and we see this tiny little dot in the distance. And we start flying to it and flying and flying. And literally 10 minutes later, we're like, okay, come on, really? And then we sped up the ship a little bit and we literally flew straight onto it. And we all were like, what did we just see? What is going on here, right? And that was very rudimentary. But I think it was maybe a week or two weeks later, Pupil to Planet came out and we just said, awesome, let's show this to people now and let's show them that it's not just a little video and here is a pretty little standalone thing we did. It's actually a functioning game, it's a functioning engine. The tech is still in its preliminary stages, but it's there and it's solid. And I think Marco, not only did he prove it out, but now it's matured and designers and the whole art team's playing around with it and pushing it where it needs to go. And before you know it, it's going to be in players' hands, which we're excited about.