Back to search

Let's talk about the challenge of laying this stuff out: you get something that looks great at night, and then as the planet rotates, suddenly a building casts a terrible shadow or something doesn't work in other situations. Is there a constant back and forth there? Is it constantly just rearranging puzzle pieces?

TL;DRBecause the sun is fixed, they physically moved the planet to validate times of day, shaped Lorville so workers' areas get little sun, and are discussing having the city change from day to night.

Ian LeylandArt Director, Star Citizen

Yeah. With Lorville right now, we had to create or find a way to give it the actual... So, rewind. Traditionally, you have a standard time of day slider. You can change that curve, so you can validate specifically what that cycle is going to be. We can't do that. Our sun is a fixed thing. So we just moved the planet around to get it right. I very specifically wanted sunset to be over the spaceport, looking from the habs. So we had to physically move the planet to validate that time of day, and then we're like, right, okay, how's it looking at two o'clock, how's it looking at one o'clock? So we do these internal time-lapses. I had a video I was going to show at CitizenCon. The presentation was already too long, so I took it out. But it just shows... and usually we put some music to it, because the right time of day will add so much to it. If the sun's at the wrong angle, like you say, it would wash out the scene. It doesn't create the feel. One of the things we very specifically wanted to do with Lorville: we were walking around it, and if the sun was in a workers' area, it just didn't feel right. It's like, why doesn't this feel right? Because if I'm in a sunny location, it has a certain feeling to it. So I was like, let's raise those walls. Let's push that landing zone down. So the feeling is that the sun never... or maybe in some places, but the sun just can't touch. So if you're a worker in L19, you're rarely going to get the sun on your face. And I thought that was going to be quite interesting. So straight from white box, it's something that we're trying to consider, and going forwards, how that city or how that location changes as the time of day changes. When you look at a cityscape as that sun goes down, you see those time-lapses, the city kind of wakes up. As that sun goes down, lights start to come on, magic starts happening. This is something that we're talking about internally: I want, when that sun goes down, the city to kind of change. So imagine I'm a player and I come to Lorville for the first time, and it was night. If I was a player and I came in the daytime, if Luan and I had those conversations, I want that experience to be quite different. And then that feeds into the AI. All sorts of really interesting things start to happen when you start to think about the possibilities of what we can do.

Reverse the Verse›LIVE - Building Lorville·
Published on this date.9 Nov 2018