New Stars Reach Trailer Shows Recent Footage of How You Impact the World, With New Talk on How They Use the Cloud

mmorpg.com:

Stars Reach has released its second trailer, showing off progress in development, using pre-alpha footage of some of the landscapes, exploration, combat, and more. There’s also a talk featuring Raph Koster on how Playable Worlds is using the cloud for development. 

In creating the sandbox MMO, Playable Worlds is using AWS and Unity. Accompanying Koster at this talk Is Daniel Whitehead, AWS Principal Solutions Architect. Stars Reach isn’t just a sandbox, it’s a simulated galaxy with hundreds of planets. There’s a lot that’s procedurally generated. Down to what level, you ask?

“Each…[planet] is actually the output of a real-time cellular autonomous simulation, which means that we know the humidity and the temperature and the adhesion and the materials for every cubic meter of the world.” This is done via their proprietary World Generation Service.

Stars Reach will be a game where a lot of things can change. They have to learn how to provide all of these tools and support changes on the fly while still preserving performance for players, through the tech they use and things like using effective data management. 

This is a very technical talk, because it was given at a Unity conference: Unite 2024. There's a ton of info that MMO players can understand even if not on top of all the technical intricacies. Some of the interesting points also include how they stream their assets via the cloud so they're not actually putting the art in their client build. The client itself is intentionally lean to be more responsive in this persistent state world.

Speaking of change, the new trailer highlights this, where we can see recent build footage of people terraforming, affecting the land, combat, exploration. There are also some of the creatures you'll meet, and even some info about what kind of professions you might pursue, and other ways you can create your own experience in the galaxy.