Currently we enter the atmosphere at about 10,000 feet. Is there any plan to extend the atmosphere to higher altitudes?

Yeah, and it's all extendable. It's all user-defined, so the artist defines it. I haven't measured some of the ones that we have in there right now. But absolutely, I would think that would be a big part of it. I think one of the big reasons they made them pretty shallow was just the amount of time that it took to get down. So I think if they did it realistically, it would just take a long time. But yeah, short answer is that it's actually just a setting.

And what's cool, I think, that I completely didn't even think of until I realized it, is they do put some code in there that makes sure that the engine knows when you're within the atmosphere and when you're outside of the atmosphere. And that allows us to do a lot of cool things, probably down the road, with some gameplay support. Like, if you're flying in, what is the flight system when you're outside in space? And then if you notice, we have a different flight system when you're actually on the planet. And that's how it knows: that atmosphere and the code that they put in there to tell us when you're in and when you're out. And then we could probably start transitioning effects in. What do effects look like? Contrails on ships, all this stuff that would happen inside of an atmosphere that may not be as realistic in space, right? So that's something I'm really excited about.

Does a ship go slower in atmosphere? It probably would.

I mean, we teased some of that in Homestead, but that was the idea, right? When we had that planetary reaction to the ship. And John Pritchett, one of our physics engineers, very, very smart, talented guy, that's what he's been working on a lot, right? Not just how the Dragonfly works on a planet, but now also how does your ship fly in there? Which ships fly better in atmosphere than in space? These are all great things that we're starting to develop, and I think it gives a lot of opportunities, really exciting opportunities.

One other thing along the lines of what Forrest was saying: so it knows whether you're in the atmosphere or not, and what it also knows about is the gravity around the planet. So that's super cool. The fact that there's even a small falloff that happens in there as well. So we have a variable amount of gravity on every single one of these planets. What we don't necessarily show in Homestead is the funny thing that happens to all of us, really. So we're flying around in the atmosphere, whatever. You're in a Connie and then you get out of your seat, right? But your ship turns off. So this is one of the Item 2.0 things anyways; we're going to leave the ships on or give you the ability or something like this. But yeah, as soon as your ship turns off, guess what? Gravity's on. So you're walking to the back of your ship and you don't realize you're actually hurtling towards the freaking ground at whatever rate. And then you get halfway out and the ship explodes and you're like, oh right.

And that's going to be helpful when you're in space too, because say you want to get out, leave your headlights on facing an asteroid and fly over to it, kind of use your vehicle as an extra light source. So that's super cool. But it is fun to work in these planetary tools, because the whole engine, the toolset, was kind of built for this kind of flat plane field. Now all of a sudden we're working on this planet where you're actually like this in space compared to where that normal plane would be. And so the next challenge really is working on the toolset to make the workflows easier.

And all the things we have to reimplement because of that change. A nice example is what we ran into with the cloth from the Nomad. I think this is a perfect way to explain what happens. Again, consider that the CryEngine really had this idea of Z up. That was it. Z is upward. So we had this cloth implementation that we put on the Nomad. Cool when he's standing on a perfectly solid plane that has Z up; yeah, cloth is falling downwards. However, if you happen to be on the bottom of a planet, no longer Z up, but you're like this, the whole cloth simulation system was assuming Z up. So it thought the gravity was going this way. So as you stood up, your cloth was coming straight up from your head like this. So it just looked absolutely ridiculous. And it was totally different depending on where you were on this planet, because all of a sudden you're upside down and the engine just had no idea about that. And that happened for a lot of different systems, so luckily Ivo Herzeg already put a fix in for that, so that was not a dramatic change that had to happen, but it's so many things like this.

It's the discovery process, right? And I think that's what we were talking about earlier, not just in the production planning phases, but just going through this. Some exciting discoveries, some frustrating discoveries, but all of them making it a better product at the end.

And because we're really concentrating on making it scalable, because we want this game to be around for a very long time. So in the past, Crysis, you just drop that wind entity in, and you're good, right? But now we're like, wait a minute. We don't want to just have designers place wind entities over an entire planet so that it kind of moves. Now you need a system that's more procedural, that can actually make sure that the wind is curving around the planet properly and working. It's just all these little things, but that's the fun of it and that's the challenge, but once the foundation's built, then we're really sprinting.