Star Citizen hits $39 million, next stretch goal adds procedural generation team

Star Citizen has now netted $39 million in funding, and the new $40 million stretch goal would add a procedural generation R&D team for "creating entire planets worth of exploration and development content."

The Roberts Space Industries website notes the latest goal unlocked the "penultimate user-chosen star system," and Chris Roberts went into detail on the next stretch goal.

"Our previous stretch goals have been about expanding Star Citizen immediately; adding new ships, new systems and more," wrote Roberts. "Each one has added something to the game while allowing us to widen our bandwidth: hire more employees, expand our development facilities, purchase new technology and so on. Now it’s time to look a little further in the future.

"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. If we can develop a truly great procedural generation system, one that lets us create entire planets for you to populate, then we can expand the game to add these features (and more) in the future."

Roberts goes on to say the $40 million goal would allow Cloud Imperium to allocate funding to develop procedural generation technology for future iterations of Star Citizen. To do this, the studio needs a "special strike team of procedural generation-oriented developers" to make the technology a reality.

You can read up on this more yourself through the link.

Thanks, Blue.