Did anything from the previous hangars inform your decisions about the new [Lorville] hangars, or are they being developed from scratch in a whole new direction? What can you tell us about the hangar development?

So these hangars had to run. So when we were developing, figuring out the complexity of the landing zone, we're like, okay, we're going to need a spaceport, we're going to need hangars, figuring out exactly what we need. With the hangars, we design, create a specification: small, medium, large, extra large. And we were thinking, right, how big is the extra large? And I'm like, right, it needs to fit a Reclaimer in. I'm like, right, okay, that's going to be a big hangar. So we obviously did some visual design, and at the end of the day, we had a box to play with. We got a box from levels and, all right, what can we do to make this box interesting and make it run? So a lot of the work that we put into it, not just artistically, was getting something that we could run very efficiently. Without going into the details: just how we authored the meshes, even how we authored the master material and the arrangement of the IDs, so when the engine tried to render it, all the IDs were optimal. So for example, if the painted metal was ID 16, if it was ID 5, we'd get a little bit of a perf saving. So everything about it, we had to make sure that we could hit our modular goals to hit the different hangar sizes. It had to run, and it had to run very fast. So that was critical, because the star of the show is the ship. So we need to make sure that all of that surrounding is focused on the product, shall we say. So most of the lighting budget went on making the ship look good. We tried to make the space feel detailed, to get that scale, but it needs to be cheap so that we can have more budget for the ship. And then what happens is, because it's not necessarily just a closed box, when that door opens, we've got to draw whatever's on the outside of it. And when what's on the outside is Lorville, it just needs to be even more efficient.

That's one of the biggest things when you're making, say, the LODs for the hangar or anything like that. One of the things we did, we would put it under stress test and we'd go all the way out to, say, as far as I think a ship would come in from quantum. And you open those doors and then you have to balance the performance. You have to go, okay, how far away am I seeing this from? How expensive, or rather how cheap, can I make the mesh? What can I do to really save on performance here? I think we've done a pretty good job with the hangars in terms of performance.

We're not getting shouted at. This time. No, to be honest with you, performance is something that we are actively drilling into every day. Understanding exactly how the GPU processes the content we give it is a very deep conversation. And then when you make a modular game, it's very different, because you're giving it loads of individual chunks. So then finding the most efficient way to author those assets, we're still trying to understand the best way to feed that.