With the dev cycle being so long for Star Citizen, how do you deal with the ever-changing graphics tech and rework, and still keep moving forward?
TL;DRGraphics tech churn is manageable since most changes are straight replacements, but all existing assets must stay compatible, so old and new shaders ship together until artists migrate assets.
So I think every AAA studio with its own engine has the same challenge, really, of keeping up to date. They constantly have to make new post effects as new technology or new ideas come about in the industry. So that's not massively different for us compared to any other, I don't want to name them, but I'm sure you'll know the ones that aren't using big engines or part of multi-studio publishers. So I don't see that being massively different. We only have a couple of differences internally. One is we can't wipe the slate clean every couple of years when we release a game, or however frequently a big studio might. So we can't say, well, that was good, we did mostly good, but we didn't like that technology, so next time we're going to do a different one. We have to build the next version of whatever it is while we're running. So that does introduce some complexities. But overall, especially for the graphics team, it's not been a problem for us. Most things are straight replacements. You replace the old bloom effect with a new bloom effect. You replace the old shader with a new shader. It's not a major problem. I've been in a quick dev cycle at a previous company, and it's not that much different. I don't find it a major challenge. The one point that I would say is different, though, is the art pipeline and the artwork we have. We have to maintain everything that has been built. We can't say, oh, we've done this new technology, but these five spaceships don't work anymore. That's just not an option. Everything we make has to remain backwards compatible. And what we tend to do, say for the art pipeline, is we make a new shader that can do, I don't know, like the tint system for the spaceships so we can more easily roll out new skins. That system won't work in an old spaceship. So we'll ship two versions of the shader, the new one and the old one, and then when somebody gets the chance, they'll go back to that ship, assign the new shader, maybe fix up anything that needs fixing up, and then we're good again. We can't demand that they work at the same frequency as us, so we'll do the new technology and they will opt into it when they get round to it, which might be the next week, it might be a few months. And once we get close to around 80% adoption, we'd have to poke people with a stick to try and get over the hurdle so we can delete the old technology. And that's constantly happening. We have lots of different technologies that are in the process of being rolled out across the assets. So that's the biggest issue. But it's not really a technology issue. It's more of a data management issue with the size of the content of the game, which is very huge. I don't even know how many spaceships we have now, but it's big numbers.