CitizenCon 2019 - Terra Firmer

CitizenCon 2019 Session

Panel began by showing the evolution of planetary tech all the way to the upcoming Planetary Tech v4.0. It discusses what they’ve added, what got iterated, and deep dive into technicals on how they built the tech. Planetary tech v3.0 had a lot of limitations that v4.0 is alleviating. For more details, please watch the panel as it’s very packed with info and pretty pictures.

Album with some pictures here

What are some things coming with planetary tech v4.0?

- Terrain simulation, displacement of sand and soil based off of wind and such

- Parameters such as Temperature and humidity

- Replace pre-baked color textures with two layers of climate data

- Overcomes issues when transitioning from ground to space

- LOD Transitioning is significantly more fluid with less pop-ins and no global textures. You can see the actual ground texture from outer space.

- Allows more planetary diversity

- More future proof, a fundamental change on how quickly they can add planets

- Improved object scattering, object generation, physics, and terrain generation on demand

- Some of the procedural objects are turned into mineable entities

- Less texture memory usage than v3.0

- Clouds, however not in alpha 3.8

Initial summaries by "Mr. Slim Goodbody" on the /r/starcitizen discord, used here with permission.