Would the volumetric clouds you showed at CitizenCon be affected by passing objects? Can they swirl if you try to fly through them?
TL;DRThe core gas cloud can't swirl because its voxels are far bigger than a ship, but contrails exist and particles may react as ships pass, with a physics-effector approach something they'd like but haven't committed to.
I think this comes back to that again, doesn't it? The actual core gas cloud tech couldn't swirl. For a start, its voxels are quite a lot bigger than a ship. I don't know how big one of them ended up being, but I remember that you managed to lose a Caterpillar. You put a Caterpillar in the level and then you lost it just by flying away from it.
Yeah, it's just there for like a pixel, isn't it? You couldn't even see it. We had a test video before we finished the whole trailer, and someone asked me, I think it was you, if we could have a derelict somewhere, just to sell the scale. And I had four or five Cats. They are actually in the video, but you don't see them because they're so tiny. But the point is, like what you're saying, a single voxel of the gas cloud is way bigger than the vehicle. So if that moved, you would essentially get a Minecraft type of effect where a block just moves.
Well, just a very slow fade. But at the same time, if you put a layer of particles there, are we swirling them as the ships fly through them?
We do have gas cloud contrails. They were seen in the video. That's one of the things: the gas cloud itself has a bunch of data that we can use. So I don't think we're going to get swirls, but we do have contrails. So there are visuals. You're going to see something happening with the vehicle as you fly through the gas cloud, and possibly when you exit, while you're still in that transitioning area.
Do you have physics effectors on particles? Some sort of entities or markup or something. If you've got some smoke coming up, you can wave a thing through it and it'll...
Yeah, well, I don't want to commit to things that we haven't done yet, but I totally want that.
Yeah, that sounds like a pretty cool thing to have.
In fact, weren't we just looking at a tech demo someone did the other day for that? There was a helicopter.
Ah, yeah, there was this video someone made with vector fields. Vector fields for the helicopter blades, and it was pushing the rocket trails. Everyone's looking at that because it's so cool.
I'm just going to say now, yeah, I totally want that.