Is it just position, or are there atmospheric conditions that will determine how that [lighting looks]?

So many atmospheric conditions. Oh, my goodness. So Carsten Wenzel, again, one of our heroic programmers. Carsten was at Crytek before. He wrote a lot of the atmospheric stuff within time of day for the CryEngine. So to do it sort of properly, I'm sure he really liked being able to do. So what we did was make it so that the atmosphere has pre-computed gradients that we can put into it. The artist is actually aligning what that atmosphere does based on the sun color that's coming into it. So we can make an atmosphere a little more green. We can make it a little more red. You can change the composition of the atmosphere. You can make it thicker. You can make it thinner. It's really, really important because you can go on different planets. Some need to look like there's just a sky above you, but other ones are going to have a very thin atmosphere where you can see all the stars, you can see most of the stuff that's just beyond you in space. So this was a pretty big system that Carsten worked on quite a bit. And the benefits, I mean, you're seeing it already, that we get all this sort of real-time atmospheric scattering and shading for free, depending on what positioning you're in, from the system. I think that's the biggest strength.

I like the way you use the term free.

Well, it's not free because Carsten just busted his ass working on it for however long, so it's not free by any stretch.

You went from a system where you had to create this skybox, this texture set for the morning and for the afternoon and for the evening. And then you had to have these reflection pass textures that had to get baked for every situation. And then what are you going to do? Blend through them all. Then what happens if you change your ecosystem? To have an artist manually make every single sky for every single possibility just wasn't feasible. And so this system allowed us to have these endless possibilities, so to speak, with very minimal artist labor. And so a lot of the texture memory usage that we would normally use comes for free now. A lot of the labor that we would normally pay for comes for free now. And you get a much more realistic system.

The other thing is the performance on top of it. The performance of this particular atmosphere system makes it so that, yeah, we can change all that in real time, have multiple planets. It's so much higher performance and higher quality than the Crysis stuff that was in there before, CryEngine.

And that's exactly what we're talking about. Higher quality, less labor, more efficient. That way we get things to the backers faster and make it better.

But there is a drawback to all of this, right? And the drawback is that though the artist can change some of these atmospheric conditions, it's not all of them. And this is the mark, I think, of a really good graphics programmer: they'll give you enough rope, but not so much that you'll hang yourself. And the best ones, and I shouldn't call Carsten a graphics programmer, he's far beyond just graphics, but yeah, that's a big part of it.