Immediately following our already-published interview with Star Citizen's Chris Roberts, we encountered Technical Director Sean Tracy, recently responsible for educating us on the game's 64-bit engine. The Technical Director took a few moments after CitizenCon to share details about the lower level technology driving the night's demonstration, like real-time physics, poly per pixel budgets, occlusion mapping, and more.

Tracy's role for the CitizenCon presentation primarily had him demonstrating the production tools utilized by CIG for planet development. This includes Planet Ed, already somewhat detailed here and here, which is the team's creation kit for planet customization and design. The toolkit takes the approach of getting artists “90% of the way there,” allowing them to fine-tune the final 10% for faster production pipelines and a hands-on polish. The tech demo showed a walk-through of CIG's team using large brushes to paint the surface with biomes, hand-placing bodies of water and buildings, and blending everything together.

In this final part of our recent Cloud Imperium Games LA office tour, we conclude by talking with Technical Director Sean Tracy about upcoming technology to be shown at CitizenCon. The annual Star Citizen backer event will take place on October 9, Sunday, at ~3PM PST.

Until then, this discussion dives into new character technology that will be shown at the event, resource consumption and management, CPU thread assignment and the jobs engine, headbob and image stabilization, and authoring tools for Star Citizen. The previous three parts of this tour can be found at the links below:

• Pt 1: Chris Roberts on Procedural Planets V2, Alpha 3.0, & CitizenCon

• Pt 2: Chris Roberts on Character Tech, Weather System, & Engine Architecture

• Pt 3: Sean Tracy on 64-Bit Engine Tech & Procedural Edge Blending

Cloud Imperium Games has been talking about its 64-bit engine conversion for at least two years now, but we've never had a chance to properly explain the benefit of this move. Following last week's interviews with Chris Roberts (Part 1: Procedural Planets V2, Alpha 3.0 & Part 2: Weather System), we sat down with CIG Technical Director Sean Tracy to learn about CryEngine, the technical inner-workings of procedural planet generation V2, and more.

Tracy sat in on our first meeting with Roberts, and was able to prepare some additional points of depth with notes taken from that meeting. The entire discussion with Tracy ran for about forty minutes. We've split that into two parts:

• Part 1, today, is on 64-bit engine technology, world space coordinates, edge blending, and meshes and layers.

• Part 2, Wednesday (10/5), is on CPU threading, system resource and load management, character technology, and more CitizenCon info.

Note: You may find our previous discussion on DirectX 12 & Vulkan of interest.