If you thought the world of Star Citizen was going to be huge, just wait until it hits (and it will) the $41 million stretch goal, as that will then add procedurally generated planet surfaces to the game, meaning continents, atmospheres and everything in between, all procedurally generated within the game, freeing up developers to continue expanding the universe and its line up of ships.
"Among the most common feature requests for Star Citizen are atmospheric combat and ground exploration. These are the single biggest things we would like to include in the game, but they’re also something we know we can’t have day one. Our universe is a big place, and creating the hundreds of existing landouts properly is enough of a challenge… building entire continents and atmospheres in the current system would take a lifetime. That’s where procedural generation comes in," said Roberts Industries in a recent address to the community.
And that's the big downside to procedural generation: it won't be ready for the launch of the game, but giving the fact that the dogfighting demo has been pushed back already, that's not too surprising, Star Citizen is an extremely ambitious game. Expecting it all to land perfectly when stated, when so many other crowd funded games have faced delays, would be foolhardy.
"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."
The founder of developer Roberts Space Industries, Chris Roberts (of Wing Commander and Freelancer fame) has previously said that he plans to have the game updated and tweaked for upwards of a decade, so while procedural generation may not be ready at launch, when it lands it could make the game a whole new level of huge and give it continued relevance as the years rollon.
Star Citizen is expected to be released in early 2015, with several other modules released in beta form before then.
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