CitizenCon 2954 wrapped up last weekend (at the time of writing) and with that we got a LOAD of new information that I'm gonna cover over the next few days and weeks. This is a summary (yes the panels are this long and this dense with information, barely a second was wasted honestly), and even with this being a summary there are some things that you should just watch on your own. I'd at least heavily recommend watching the final demo.

The first panel was named "Brave New World" and was described as "Introducing Genesis, the innovative suite of technologies and processes within StarEngine that breathe new life into immersive worlds, achieving the fidelity and scale required to fill an entire universe."

What was announced:

GENESIS: It's planet tech V5, taking planets that look good at some angles and from a distance, to current gen planets that look just as amazing on the ground as they do from 50,000ft in the air.

The Laws of Nature

But why update Planet Tech again?

Planet Tech V4 suffered from being static biomes placed randomly across a planet that lacked variation and real density, you could go to a forest biome on one side Microtech and have it look the exact same as another forest biome on the other side:

"If I take you to the other side of Microtech, you'd be excused if you thought we just turned around and looked at a different part of the forest."

Planet Tech V4 lacks diversity and density because biomes are handbuilt and lack variety due to the intensity of the labor (it'd be a nightmare to manually place every little detail on these planets). It's also limited by the fact Biome Placement is only determined by temperature and humidity.

Why does CIG care this much about scalability?

CIG can't fake these planets like other games, These planets need to look great not only in first person walking through a forest, but at a OM-X marker miles away in a spaceship and EVERYWHERE in between. CIG are trying to achieve visual quality that surpasses next gen, not "good enough" and "looks good from a distance but not really when you get close".

Genesis can take advantage of Temperature, Humidity, Geology, Soil-type, Soil Depth, Soil Quality, Incoming Light, Erosion, Ground Water, etc. It seems excessive, but when you plan to make planets this big and this detailed without faking an inch of the space, you need a way to speed it up.

Genesis, unlike Planet Tech V4 has specific parameters and datasets that appear not only for a generalized biome but on individual areas as small as a few feet.

Genesis has to look better than Planet Tech V4, whilst performing better in a server meshed environment with thousands of players and all the destruction and chaos that comes with it. Let's see what they achieved (with the pretense that this is all still in active development):

“Is not this a true autumn day?"

Seasons are here, finally bringing true variation to planets so they aren't just static unchanging landscapes.

Performance in Genesis

Performance improvements with genesis start with "Virtual Textures" which allow scalable, high quality textures that not only look better, reduce pop-in, but also increase performance. This is done with their new GPU Virtual Terrain System which blends global data maps cached in the GPU that scales as the camera moves which is vastly faster than the old CPU legacy system, allowing the higher res textures and better performance.

Another massive improvement (even if it may seem small), is much better tiling, which is one of the main issues the current planet tech has that limits it from ever achieving true realism in daytime:

GPU Object Scattering also allows CIG to move the terrain data off the CPU and to the GPU which is not only MUCH more efficient and performant, but allows much higher object density, resulting in those deep, 20+ mile long render distances for trees and smaller objects.

Finally, this is all a bit overwhelming and it may not seem like a big difference since it's a lot of small things, but they add up to make a HUGE difference in the final product. Here's an amazing comparison between Planet Tech V4 and Genesis:

Genesis brings in physically based planets with emergent biomes, greater density, faster rendering, and even more seamless transitions (in a game centering around seamless transitions).

(new) Emergent Biomes

The first new biome is... The Swamp!

The second new biome is... The Jungle!

The third new biome is... The Redwoods!

Civilization

All that nature is great and all, but what about actually doing something? Right now we have a few (about 10-25 per planet depending on the size and location) custom-made, beautiful locations that are handcrafted and placed directly on planets. This is fine with 100 player servers, but not with server meshing fast approaching. We need MANY more locations so you don't end up going to a backwater hidden settlement and having it look like you just walked into a spaceport.

Introducing... STARchitect!

A new toolset allowing CIG to scatter modular settlements and outposts logically and with full control over how and where this happens.

CIG wants to not only have beautiful areas that serve gameplay, but also tell tighter clearer stories about these peoples lives and how they live in these areas, with logical exploration that creates natural sub-narrative development. To do this they group these locations together, as people would naturally build settlements closer to something like a shop, distribution center, mine, etc.

They call these "clusters", these clusters may vary in the sense that there may be a Mining Cluster, that's near a resource, on a lawful planet, with protection, trade posts and caves. Or maybe a Unlawful Cluster, that's far from other clusters, has crashed ships and weapon shops.

On this side of the shown planet alone, there is 3,042 locations all fully ready to hook up to the mission system. So instead of having to fight over 13 locations on one planet for a mission, everyone can get a mission, at a true MMO scale.

Light and Sound

Global Illumination, with all these new areas and environments, manually lighting all these area's just isn't a feasible option. Global Illumination 'just works".

With Rasterized lighting outdoors is a major challenge as all you can use is the sun and the sky to make a scene look good (again nothing is faked so you can't place extra lights).

Glossy and reflected objects (SSR) previously looked quite garbage if it wasn't just a mirror or a foggy metal. Raytraced reflections can come and improve these reflective objects with real reflections.

Overall, while the SSR lighting indoors still looks amazing, the global illumination captures the dark areas and difference in lighting during the day past a simple light cast and actually reflects the lighting change (for example in a room with a window the difference between sunrise/sunset and the middle of the day and the amount of light in the room.

It's kind of hard to summarize and or show sound, but the sound portion of this keynote was basically just being able to more easily add specific sounds and to have them be scalable with the new genesis tech and procedural systems. They also covered adding delay and the doppler effect to sounds (ergo a explosion a mile away sounds like an explosion a mile away).

Nature's Wrath

Clouds have been massively improved visually, however their currently still static clouds. CIG are enabling clouds to move, change, develop, and dissipate realistically alongside a host of visual improvements:

It's not just a cloud and light rain, it's an entire weather front. Storms and weather events are coming to star citizen. Pictured here is a heavy thunderstorm:

Finally, the player and his friend get into their ships and fly away to try and escape the storm. It's a incredibly cinematic moment as the visuals and particle effects are amazing and barrels roll across the surface of the platform as the thunder pierces through the air. When the player enters his RSI Zeus MkII CL ($160 pledge store buy now flyable now 3.24.2) (i own one), the rain bangs against the metal creating a familiar resonating tone as if you were hiding in a box truck, not only that but the rain dynamically gets quieter and becomes a deeper tone when he closes the gate.

Alas, the Zeus MK2 escapes which brings the Brave New Worlds presentation to a close. Again, like I said earlier I HEAVILY recommend watching the original as (even though this is over 1500+ words), this is merely a summery and you simply can't get some things across over an article.

As for timelines, a lot of this stuff seems decently far along but it's mostly up to getting everything around it (the servers and the gameplay and systems that enable genesis) to work well (the servers not to crash when a thunderstorm happens).

My guess: Late 2025 to early-mid 2026.
CIG's guess: Not stated. (so not immediate future or really soon at all)

Watch the Brave New Worlds panel in it's entirety here.

TLDR:

• Dense Planet Vegetation
• Larger Render Distances
• Raytraced Lighting, Reflections, etc.
• Dynamic Seasons
• Dynamic Weather
• Constantly growing and changing planets
• Better Planet Textures
• Much more distinct areas in biomes
• Swamp Biome
• Jungle Biome
• Redwood Biome
• Thousands of POI's able to be placed on planets, in clusters of thousands.