Will we see sonic boom effects as we pass through the sound barrier while in atmosphere?

That's a really good question. And we want that definitely to happen. It's an obvious thing that you're expecting while flying in the atmosphere, but unfortunately it's quite complicated to make it look good. So we are looking into that, and actually I think a few weeks earlier we briefly discussed the so-called signed distance fields in one of the ATVs.

About three weeks ago.

Exactly. And basically by having that technology... and by the way, signed distance fields are just voxelized versions of objects, basically. You can voxelize anything, starting with that, ending with the vehicle. And that is a very GPU-friendly representation of an object. Creating a 3D mesh, it's not really GPU-friendly in some ways, and signed distance fields are just a different way of representing an object. And by having that, we can do a lot of very systemic effects, such as sonic booms. And we want to use that technology to improve all the atmospheric flight effects. So atmospheric entry, debris going through the atmosphere and leaving a trail behind. We are going to use them for a GPU particle system in the future to do all sorts of odd effects. But at this point, we don't have them. Definitely we want to have them, but as always, we'll see what the future brings.

Yeah, but those are in the works. They are definitely coming. And I mean, we have them already, but we still need some ways to hook into them. But the cool thing about sonic booms in this game is, I remember from working with, I think it was John Pritchett, who we did a lot of atmospheric entry stuff with. He sort of designed how that works. So I imagine the sonic boom will actually be physically correct, right? It's probably going to happen when that ship reaches Mach 1. And that makes this game cool.