Terra Prime is the jewel of the empire and has been in the files for ages. Someone's just managed to extract most of the chunks and has tried to put it together in a manageable-ish format.
This is a brief glimpse released by the devs of the top of the tower in the center in an internal build, as of early 2014.
[video=youtube;oMN3nWMWQng]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMN3nWMWQng[/video]
The funny thing is, Prime actually was a driving force behind some of the early retooling efforts on CryEngine. Vanilla Cryengine's map sizes have a limit of 4km in each direction. Chris Roberts felt it was so important for Terra Prime to be a huge city with the proper imposing scale that he instructed the devs to hack support into Cryengine for 8km-a-side maps -- so that Prime could be larger than 4km x 4km. (Maps now have an engine limit of 8 billion km a side at mm or sub-mm precision.)
So, this is validation that meshes of that map continue to exist -- and changes in the files have shown that work is being done to bring individual areas closer to finished quality. This is a video of assets from the tower and its atrium, end of 2015, showing the new meshes with a bit of Cryengine sandbox set dressing to make it look more proper.
[video=youtube;w-iT_iNHagQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-iT_iNHagQ[/video]
Note that the textures are almost all ones applied by the video creator, because Star Citizen's PBR texture system is proprietary and, for obvious reasons, they're not releasing copies of their in-development internal versions of Cryeditor. As a result, none of the actual textures are rippable in any usable form.
So how much of that is going to be playable area?
[QUOTE=_Axel;51041481]So how much of that is going to be playable area?[/QUOTE]
In terms of what? Open buildings, or city streetlevel exploration in general?
Not sure about open buildings / building interiors, but the entire city in general will be playable.
[QUOTE=_Axel;51041481]So how much of that is going to be playable area?[/QUOTE]
Well, there are two answers, what we know of as planned, and what could be in the future based on the existing technology they've shown in development (namely the alpha 3.0 demo with procedural planets). Obviously, the second answer will be speculation, but not without reason. Unfortunately, it's also not short.
The first, established answer is, actually not much. A lot for a single landing zone, but out of ~8km or whatever the final size ends up being, not much. Here is a texture for a transit map in the already-established high-speed subway system that will shuttle players between the three primary playable areas, datamined from the game files a year or more ago.
[t]https://i.imgur.com/IDzbjr3.jpg[/t]
The three established areas are highlighted in the above map:
- the Landing Zone, where ships come and go; on most planets this is the entirety of the zone without extra places accessible by ground transit
- the City Center, which is the site of Terra Tower, the huge-ass structure in the above video and the showcase piece of the whole place. For reference, in the tower-and-atrium video, in the long shot at the end (and probably prior, but I wasn't looking/didn't notice), there are a pair of ships on the right-hand side; the tall, thin-skeleton'ed one is an unloaded Hull E at 372m, and the blocky stout one beneath it is the Reclaimer, 150m bow to stern and 50m high, all using [URL="https://robertsspaceindustries.com/ship-specs"]the published stats[/URL].
- and finally, The Blocks, which is the low-income higher-crime bad side of town, for when you need things done or bought/sold in a slightly less than visible and reported fashion, if you know what I mean.
All in all, that covers everything Terra Prime needs to offer from a gameplay perspective: All your normal shops are in the LZ for routine access, important places like ship manufacturer HQs (and their accompanying showrooms) and significant NPCs will be downtown, and all the shady business goes down in The Blocks. That's what's known and it handles it all nicely.
Now, here's where things get into speculation. The devs have not ruled out future plans of player housing and apartments and such on planets, and now that the technology to procedurally generate planetary surfaces is working internally and undergoing refinements (the Gamescom demo of 3.0 is v1 of procgen but they were promising to soon show us an improved v2 that wasn't then ready for prime time) this means there may be a purpose to those other neighbourhoods/wards shown on the map.
This is pure speculation on my part, but it's entirely possible based on the technology they have: In theory, you could have a mission that says "go talk to Bob X, he's at his job at blabla in Archer", and you get some indication in the mission log that you need to get off at Corona Pier and then follow the AR GPS for 3 blocks to the NPC's place. When you get out of the subway, everything's procedurally generated with NPCs wandering around randomly with at least slightly interesting behaviours -- the buildings are basically empty and mostly meaningless except for the one you need and maybe a few random standard shops and the occasional security station, but it at least could look convincing while you go to your NPC. It'd need to be fun to actually do this, and there are definitely ways to make this fun and many more ways to make it tedious bullshit, but in terms of immersion (something Roberts is almost too focused on) it's a big step up from everyone important in a city being within 200 feet of each other.
It'd be a snap, relatively speaking, to extend this sort of thing to player housing; it'd actually be a ton of work producing all the new content needed to support such a feature, of course, but the underlying technology that'd be required is already like 60-70% there or in the works already. Where they'd have the problem is making it not a tedious experience of walking through dozens of blocks of the same six building patterns. I'd honestly rather just have every player improbably living in the same one apartment building in a cool hand-made location just a little ways away from the bigass tower if the alternative was a few hundred acres of generic copy-pasted ass that's impossible to navigate through.
The reason this is all speculation is that, given the current state of development, it's really way too early for the devs to worry about that. It's something that the engine nearly supports already anyway, so it wouldn't be that much of a leap for it to happen from the technical sense -- that means it's a design problem, and design has about 2-3 years worth of other things to implement first.
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