As Star Citizen continues to develop, new information and videos are getting released frequently. From alpha build gameplay trailers to star-studded cutscenes, Cloud Imperium Games has been showing off just what the game can do. Now, the studio has released a breathtaking new video showing off how the game will procedurally generate planets.
The video, backed by some awe-inspiring music by Pedro Macedo Camacho, starts from a pilot’s eye and continually zooms out from him to his base to the entire planet. The process is completely seamless, and during the pull-back, the video imparts technical information explaining how the generation works.
According to the video, in order to render the planet face as the camera pulls back ever farther, ”atmospherics are based on a physically accurate model of light transport, taking multiple scattering into account” and ”this allows (the game) to render atmospherics correctly + automatically for any viewpoint, from outer space to ground level as shown here.”
Procedural generation is necessary because ”since the planet could never fit in memory, the planet surface is procedurally generated on-demand at different LODs as the camera moves.”
Star Citizen is due to be released in 2016 on PC exclusively.
