Star Citizen Procedural Generation
Here’s a great clip from today’s live stream event that CIG ran. It shows a planet that was created using procedural generation. Additionally it shows footage of the seamless transition of landing on a procedurally generated planet, at a procedurally generated ground station. Very exciting.
Procedural Generation was added as part of the $41 million stretch goal. This stretch goal was reached on January 4th, 2014. Here is the description of the stretch goal:
Procedural Generation R&D Team – This stretch goal will allocate funding for Cloud Imperium to develop procedural generation technology for future iterations of Star Citizen. Advanced procedural generation will be necessary for creating entire planets worth of exploration and development content. A special strike team of procedural generation-oriented developers will be assembled to make this technology a reality.
I really hope that they throw enough randomization into the seed system to create very unique worlds. We saw some great procedural generation in Spore that failed to create large quantities of unique worlds due to lacking seeds in the randomization process of procedural generation.
Star Citizen has a similar tipping point. The number of variables that go into seeding a planet created by procedural generation will determine the range of planets that can be created. The more variables, the greater variety of planets we will see.
Atmospheric flight and landing is new to Star Citizen. While it was on the list of planned features, this is the first time a live video of it in action has been viewed. With Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 going live last week, the “Universe of Star Citizen”, it’ll be easy for developers to slip in content like this.