Star Citizen is one of the most exciting projects in the entire games industry right now. Rarely before have we seen such an ambitious title, and certainly not with so much crowdfunded money behind it. Now after years of work, it’s starting to look like it’s all coming together. No longer is Star Citizen just a place to buy and look at expensive space ships, as its detractors once claimed. With space combat, FPS mechanics and missions to go on, it’s starting to resemble creator Chris Roberts’ vision at last.

There is, of course, still a long way to go before Star Citizen is complete, but as we are shown some of the finer details of the upcoming 3.0 version at Gamescom , it becomes clear that what was once dismissed by some as impossible, is finally coming to be a reality.

During the demo a pair of players seamlessly transition from interplanetary travel to walking around on a planet’s surface, and then head off into the wilderness to retrieve some cargo. The core of the mission takes places on a single planet, but still takes close to an hour to complete, showing off the sheer scale of the worlds within Star Citizen.

While other space based games have used procedural generation to create galaxies with billions of planets, Star Citizen is taking a slightly different approach. Instead of having an unfathomable amount of barren, homogenous planets there is a much smaller universe, but each planet is truly massive and filled with interesting locations.

“To be honest if you have a billion planets no one can ever visit that many or see all of each planet,” says Roberts, CEO and founder of developer Cloud Imperium Games. “Even right here, we have got seven billion people on Earth and there are still a ton of areas you can go and not see another person for miles. What you need is two, three or four hundred planets with such a level of detail that you can visit places, explore and do all that stuff on, so that people could spend lifetimes moving around them.”

Chris’s claim of each world being exciting to explore, despite taking literal hours to travel across, seems too good to be true, but it quickly becomes apparent that, in the demo at least, he is correct. A completely unintentional failed drop from our ship to the planet's surface means a good 10 or so minutes of driving across an area of the world we probably weren't meant to see. Instead of just holding the accelerate button the player at the controls is forced to plan a route on the fly and tackle surfaces that he can reasonably climb, as some of the height changes are significant, despite most likely never being touched by an developer before.

“We are using the procedural generation to create the undulation in the terrain or determine the distribution of trees or rocks and we are using that to fill out large areas, but the areas are specified by an artist,” says Roberts. “The way that works is that the artist can create biomes, which are templates for different areas. So you can have a template for woodland forests, or a temple for jungle, or grass land, or mountains and even within in those you can have several variations. Then you paint the big area, you basically say ‘this area is mountainous, this is woodland, and this is where the ocean is’, and then the procedural code takes that and uses that as a guide to place the biomes correctly and alter the height map. In two hours they can generate a planet and then they can spend time tweaking areas by hand.”

The procedurally generated terrain is shown off © Cloud Imperium Games

Unfortunately the planet that we got to see was relatively devoid of any foliage, or significant landmarks outside of the terrain itself. But this demo was missing some key procedural tech, which is set to be implemented in the upcoming 3.0 release later this year. According to Roberts this tech will increase the potential of procedurally generated areas significantly, potentially making them as detailed as some handmade areas.

“We still have some work to do on the V2 procedural tech, but it is going to be awesome because it will allow us to really craft things with character,” explains Roberts. “It can be to the level that you might see in Star Wars Battlefront, say like the moon with the little Ewoks on [the Forest Moon of Endor], we can craft areas with that level of detail with the new tech. It's going to look super cool and realistic when it's done.”

A ship flies through the atmosphere © Cloud Imperium Games

Going to this much effort to create planets, which others have proven can be done entirely through procedural generation, could be seen as overkill. But Roberts points out that unlike other games that feature procedural generation the idea of Star Citizen isn’t just exploration, and as a result having unpredictable planets and locations just doesn't fit the gameplay.

“Even though we have 100 star systems, which pales in comparison to billions or quintillions or whatever, with three or four planets each, that is 400 worlds that you have to build with enough detail for a first person shooter, which is what we are doing,” says Roberts. “Ultimately the world and universe is going to be hand crafted. I think that will make a better experience and game that way, because you feel like it all has a purpose and it all means something, so that the world makes sense to you. The ultimate goal is to have very specific hand crafted worlds and locations that have character.”

The Gamescom demo certainly hit that brief. The hub locations were bustling with activity and full of interesting little side stories that we were unable to explore other than a quick mention of ‘oh you can go and speak to that person and do this’. When out in the wilderness or just flying low over the planet's surface it is clear that there is a ton of variation, and a lot to explore, and that was even without the latest procedural tech.

Star Citizen certainly won't live or die on its world building tech alone, but if everything goes to plan, and each planet feels like a real location that you could spend an entire lifetime exploring, we could see ourselves interstellar sightseeing for much longer than we ever could in No Man’s Sky. We can’t wait to see how it plays out.