During the panel you talked about how space is actually quite boring: lots of areas of nothing between two points. How do you go about finding the sweet spot between realism, which would be absolutely nothing, and the urge to fill every single nook and cranny?
TL;DRThey say empty gas clouds are fine and intentional, since contrast between dense, busy areas and empty ones matters, and the packed engine room shown was only a demo of their tools.
That's a really good question. Actually, I think some people might find it boring, and maybe we've used the word boring, but there's nothing. In our game it's going to be really nice to have the contrast. I think I might have even said this in the presentation, but there might be times when you go into a gas cloud, say in the PU, and there's nothing there. It's just the VDB as it was, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's just going to be pretty. There's not going to be any kind of event with that.
I've seen people on the internet, after seeing the gas cloud demo we showed, saying that maybe we want to fill every single area with all this stuff, which is not entirely true, as you mentioned. We want that contrast where you see a very dense area, like in real life. For example, you can have a very rich storm with wind and debris flying. We want that. But we also want empty places, so we can enjoy these areas with all this stuff. You need contrast to appreciate what you're seeing. If you don't have it, then it's all the same, so it's not really good.
It's worth pointing out, going back to your presentation, that you just filled that area with all of the stuff.
That's not like we're going to fill all ship interiors with everything.
That's just like, this is all of the cool tools that we've got.
That one specific room had so many things. It just felt right to have so many things in one engine room, but you would go to the following corridor and it's pretty empty, really.