What sort of impact has Planet Tech V4 had on development time? Does it make making planets or moons faster, or just better? Or both?
TL;DRPlanet Tech V4 removes much paperwork and is more artist-focused, taking simple planets from weeks to days, though the speakers can't estimate how long entirely new planet or biome types will take.
I'll give a very simplified answer and then Sebastian can give it a bit of technical stuffing. We've essentially removed as much paperwork from the whole development process as possible. What we had in the earlier version of our Planet Tech, and it's something that I had as one of the slides in the presentation, is basically this file structure that we had with all these separate files that kept the settings. This was really slowing us down. One of the most important things for making things faster. So by getting rid of that space, getting rid of that time, essentially we free up more time to work on the actual artistic part of it. So creating more content, more library items, more assets, more textures.
Yeah, I mean, that kind of sums it up, right? In essence, I'm not going to put in numbers, but it's gone from weeks to days for simple planets, just with how the process changed and how much more artist-focused it is now. It's just better all around, I'd say.
Part of the challenge going forward, and this applies to many things, not just Planet Tech V4: we have now refined the tech that was used to build the planets that we've built, the moons that we've built. But as we go forward, we'll be building things that haven't been built before, different planet types, different biome types and stuff like that. It's hard to completely estimate how much faster it will take us to build something that hasn't been built yet. It's always a challenge in all game development. But I can say from watching you guys convert the existing planets and moons from V3 to V4, and not just the quality increase, but the incredibly, relatively short time span that it's taking you guys to do that, it's exciting what Planet Tech V4 can potentially do for us going forward.
And to add to that, we were doing it while building the tools and learning how to use them. So it's only going to get faster.
I think the tech is really solidifying. And I think already from going through this process, reworking everything, there's a lot of best practices that come out of that, that anything that comes after will benefit from.