Quick facts:Planet Tech v1
Planet Tech v1, known at the time as Procedural Planets was Cloud Imperium's initial foray into creating close-to-life scale planets for seamless exploration. On April 1st 2014, the $41 million stretch goal was met, associated with a "Procedural Generation R&D Team". With the acquisition of many former CryEngine developers including procedural generation expert Marco Corbetta, author of "Planetary Generation in Games", Foundry 42 Frankfurt was quickly able to develop the early stages of planet tech. Although procedural planets were initially pitched as a post-release feature, Corbetta insisted he could work on it in his spare time if he could focus on it. His workload got lightened so he could work on it.[1]
Work on the technology was first demonstrated in the Pupil to Planet video on the Holiday Livestream 2015, in which the camera pans out from Joaquim Steiger standing in over-ground Levski to reveal the full (then-planetoid) Delamar, with jagged rocky terrain, a large crater and hand-placed assets like mining towers.
v1 was demonstrated with gameplay in the Gamescom 2016 demo, throughout which the player travels from Levski to a placeholder moon of Delamar. Re-entry effects play out over the cockpit of a Freelancer. Ground vehicles were shown interacting with the terrain for the first time with the Ursa.
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- ↑ SCAA Interview with Brian Chambers, Nichole D'Angelo, YouTube, 27 Feb 2017