How can gas clouds or nebulae even exist within a star system due to the pressure of the solar wind?asked by Lord Styles
TL;DRHow gas clouds can exist is left to designers and backstory, but the clouds drive pressure values that affect particle effects and other systems, and which gameplay effects apply is up to system designers.
I'm going to say that's a question for the designers. We have to work that out, come up with the back story. That's one of those things that luckily artists don't have to worry about.
What is quite interesting about the gas cloud itself is that it does drive gameplay parameters. For instance, the pressure: we have atmosphere systems within the gas cloud entity. Whenever you go inside the volume of one, it will drive a pressure value in the atmosphere, and that drives other systems. What we can do is that we actually drive the particle effects in there, so you see more different types of particle effects, and the intensity increases when you go deeper in and the pressure gets bigger. It's quite interesting how these different systems end up being tied together. That's something that happens quite a lot across Star Citizen, where we tie a lot of these parameters together.
Folks who saw the vertical slice for Squadron 42 saw how the Coil had some adverse effects on the ship systems, with the communications being garbled and stuff like that. There are certainly gameplay elements to this work, but again, which gameplay elements come into play when, where, and how are the realm of the system designers as opposed to the VFX artists.