Gabriel Hector · Systems Designer, Manchester

That's the thing we always find out in the last moment.

David "Bone" Gill · Technical Director, UI

The geometry for planets and stuff is streamable, but when you start talking about being able to see other players, other locations and stuff, and whether they're exactly on your server and all this kind of stuff, that's the stuff that gets complicated.

Zane Bien · UI developer/programmer/designer

But actually the interesting thing to mention is when we do account for, in our map system, things not always being streamed in, maybe the spaceport on the other side of the city isn't streamed in so you can't really see it or whatnot. When we make that work across the board, the map should work regardless of whether things are being streamed in or not. It should be totally independent of the entities that are existing. It opens us up to look at maps of far away places anywhere that we've cataloged them. So if you're on another planet, you might be able to see the map of what you've explored and not even be there. So that's an interesting byproduct of that, two benefits in one.