How important is it for you to work in modular tilesets? Do they free you up, or do you ever find them creatively stifling? Is it a complicated relationship?

It's a bit of both. It's a complicated relationship. You have this set that will help you. We're making a modular game. We're trying to make something that can expand. And you're not going to get that, as I touched on in the panel, by making custom pieces for everything. Otherwise, you'll be here for centuries. So you've got to break the environment down in a modular way, but you also have to create enough variance in these pieces so that you can try to break up that constant... I don't know what the right word is here. But you also use the dressing and the lighting to make those different areas feel different. Though you might be looking at the same wall here and there, the dressing and the lighting are going to help you understand these are different places. I'm sure you have much more to develop on that.

Sure. Ultimately, yeah, Luan's right, we are a modular game. Unless you have lots of tilesets... within a tileset, there's many different components. Until you've really fleshed those out, you're going to see repetition. So because our engine is really good and it's all real time, we can build out locations fairly quickly, straight to metric, and get to that. But then when you start to look at it and you see that repetition, that's when you start combining: okay, this guy's going to be unique, let's do something unique for there. On a location, we run to the rule of 70-30 or something: 70% of that location is going to be modular, 30% is going to be unique, because it doesn't matter how good your modular set is, you're going to see that fatigue. You're going to see that repetition. Probably more important for me is even just outside of a singular location. If I had a two to three hour play experience within Star Citizen, I've gone to this location, I've gone to this location, I've gone to this location, it's very important I'm not going from one modular location to another. We have to find ways to break that up. Some may be more modular than others. Some may be a bit more custom than others. It just depends on what that location is. So it's an absolutely essential part of our pipeline, but we have to try and squeeze in as much time as we can to fit in those unique areas. Otherwise, if the player's saying, oh, that's that same one, that's that same one, it breaks immersion. That's not really what we want.

And that happens at the start of an environment as well, because when you lay out the architecture the first time around, it is all the same wall piece. And the more you look at that, the more you just want to start breaking that up. But that's when you start seeing certain areas. For example, in the transit, when I laid everything out, everything was two and four meter pieces and it looked pretty hideous. And then I saw, this is a chance for me to do something interesting with the wall here. So then I took that and I tried to find different tilesets or different wall pieces that might make that area feel a little bit nicer. And I would even go as far as to create... if there's a 12 meter area and it's all broken up with these lines, and you want to create something more interesting and more bespoke and you have some time, you certainly go in and you try to create a new piece that not only could be used here, but could be used by someone else later down the line elsewhere. But these tilesets are ever-evolving. You always add a little bit here, a little bit there. We create a new location and suddenly we have a few more pieces, or we go back and we touch up a couple of other pieces. It's all about this variation that you just get with time.

And then going back to just the art styles within the game, we've got some great art styles that we really want to get into, but the investment of time into a new building set is quite a lot. So we have to be very measured when we do that process.