Jacob · VFX Technical Artist

Potentially. It does create that aurora borealis kind of... It's partly due to positive ions hitting the atmosphere, which is a magnetic field, and you get that movement because of the magnetic field. So you inherently get that movement from it. So yes, it can be used to generate the vector field required for it, but I know Mike has also done tests way back in the past to show off the whole particle system creating aurora borealis just from particles alone, so we've got many different ways to do it.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

That was when we first had the spline-guided particles, wasn't it, I think?

Teo · VFX Artist

The Pyro system actually might require that sort of stuff, sun flares mostly. There was talk about it back when we did CitizenCon. So more tests probably will be made towards that.

Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

Yeah, we've had discussions with other teams actually regarding solar flares. One question that I would straight away ask with something like that is, how close can the player actually get to that thing? Because Jake could make an absolutely phenomenally accurate looking sun-like creation with potential for really nice solar flares, but if design decided that actually you couldn't get that close because there's no tech in the game, and this is just purely speculating, by the way, but if you can't get close enough to it, then why invest all that time and resources into making it look so detailed?