Are you impressed with how far Star Citizen has pushed CryEngine? Did you think it would ever be used in this context?
TL;DRSean Tracy is very impressed with how far the engine has been pushed, saying he never expected solar-system scale and citing the local physics grid, the inverse depth buffer and planet terrain streaming.
In this context, i.e. solar system scale, no. Even originally, when I was demoing the engine for Chris years ago, the scale of the game was smaller. We never expected to do a solar system scale or anything to this sort of effect. I'm super impressed with where the engine has gone with this. And in fact, there's still CryEngine in there, but there's so many improvements across the board that I'm really impressed with. I say super a lot. One of the biggest ones is the local physics grid stuff. It's a unique selling point within Star Citizen. It's a unique feature that I've not seen in any other game. And that by itself, just experiencing that, was really, really cool to see. Additionally, there's so many changes around there. The 32-bit inverse depth buffer stuff, so that we can actually render out to that sort of distance. And then when I first loaded the procedural planet, when it had terrain streaming working all properly... the scale I've gotten so used to working on, they're small now. An eight-kilometer level to me was massive, because if you're talking terrain and just running around as a guy, that's a lot of terrain to work with. So the scale just boggled... it's not even mind-boggling, it really screwed up my sense of perception, even in the editor, because I might be working around and I've got this planet there, and it just looks like a little sphere or whatever. And I start zooming in, start zooming in, I'm zooming in. I've got to turn up my camera to 1,000 meters a second. And just to give you an idea of the amount of change that goes on in the engine, we have these little buttons for camera speed, and we had 0.001, 0.1, 1 and 10. So we've now had to add 100, 1,000, and we even have the 10,000 one, but there's no real reason for that yet. It's just crazy, the scale difference, to sort of wrap your heads around. So I'm super impressed with the stuff that's been done to the engine. And no, I never expected to see it at this scale, I guess, is the answer.