Over the years, I’ve tried many ways of making living worlds. This video here explains how we are doing it on Stars Reach. Which you can now wishlist on Steam.

As you can see if you watch the video, we’re already pulling off something a bit unusual: modelling a world at MMO scale using cellular automata. What that means: we know the humidity, the temperature, the material, the viscosity, the adhesion, for every cubic meter of the world.

In gameplay terms, it means that you can dig a pond, fill it with water, watch the plants around it green up, watch the dirt in the pond turn to mud, get slowed down by the mud when you trod through it, watch the pond freeze over in the winter and slip and slide when you walk on it.

It means you can drown a monster who breaks through the ice. You can heat up the pond and watch it turn to steam, and float away. That’s OK — it’ll precipitate somewhere else.

Everything does what you expect it to do. Which sounds sort of ordinary, until you realize it’s also kind of magical.