During the holiday live stream on Dec 16th, not having anything substantial to show, Chris decided to show a proof-of-concept demo running in CryEngine level editor and try to pass it off as something that is coming soon to the game. This was my immediate response:
“it’s all smoke and mirrors. as an engineer who has done this all before, I tell CLEARLY how they’re faking it“
Note that the procedural generated planets was a $41m stretch goal that was for “future iterations of Star Citizen”
Just another piece of tech which, like VR, Star Marine etc will never see the light of day.
Of course the crazies are lapping it all up, trying to make comparisons to ED:Horizons (a released, and working game btw) etc.
I know better. As do some of the people who, like me, have actually worked on this sort of technology before.
It’s nothing more than a glorified CryEngine mod. In fact, there is a tutorial on how to do it, as well as an entire thesis paper on it.
All they did was take the Nyx mining base and put it in the middle of a proc gen height map. Any graphics engineer can clearly see the discrepancy between that base and the height map around it.