Much has been said about the PS4 and Xbox One, especially with the advent of the Xbox One X. It’s obvious that the technology has a deadline though and thus speculation is steering more towards what the PlayStation 5 and next Xbox could present whenever they release. With major analysts predicting the PS5’s release in 2020, we won’t have to wait long regardless.

To speculate on the potential of next generation consoles, GamingBolt spoke to Simul Software founder Roderick Kennedy. Founded in 2007, Simul Software is the company that created trueSKY, touted as the “most advanced and reliable sky system” currently available. The software creates weather system data and can generate volumetric cloud and atmospheric data.

We asked Kennedy how a potential PS5 and next Xbox could change the gaming landscape in the future. “I anticipate a big move towards procedural content in the next generation or two. The generation of content is not limited by computing power, space or even bandwidth so much as the human capital that’s expended in creating it,” he said.

“I think what we’ve pioneered with skies in terms of 100% generated content, albeit with artistic input and programmed control, will become the norm for 3D objects, textures and gameplay elements. None of that takes away from the craft and creativity that goes into games, it’s a new set of tools that developers will use in ways we can’t yet imagine.”

This is interesting for several reasons especially given the responses to procedurally generated content in games over the past few years. Of course, as Kennedy notes, this will be a new set of tools that could be implemented in unimaginable ways. Surely no one considered that games like Star Citizen would be possible with procedural generation but time will tell if the rest of the industry follows suit.

What are your thoughts on the matter? Let us know in the comments and stay tuned for our full interview with Roderick Kennedy in the coming days.

One part of games that often gets only lip service paid to it, but is hugely important to immersion – especially as we transition to photorealism in our graphics – is skyboxes. How a video game sky looks can absolutely set the tone for the atmosphere of a game and its world (and indeed, wonderful sky boxes are the reason that games like Skyrim, The Witcher 3, Breath of the Wild, and Horizon: Zero Dawn have such great worlds- at least in part).

The leading provider of tech for skies and skyboxes to developers is Simul Software Engineers, whose trueSKY technology is the most advanced and reliable sky system available for other developers to use. trueSKY is cross platform, renderer agnostic, and also heavily dependent on the GPU.

So when GamingBolt had a chance to talk to Roderick Kennedy of Simul Software, we decided to ask him about how the differences between the PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X impacts the middleware- after all, the latter has a far more advanced GPU (the Xbox One X has 6TFLOPs and PS4 PRO has 4.2 TFLOPs of GPU). Does this mean that trueSKY would run better on the Xbox One X?

“Yes, it allows more work to be done in the same GPU time, so if a developer allocates 1.5ms for the sky, trueSKY can do (on Xbox One X) almost four times more work: rendering the clouds at double the resolution for example,” Kennedy said. “If you want to use the extra power to go from 30fps to 60, you can still do about twice as much per frame, so resolution could go up by about 30%.”

This is really impressive and we can’t wait to see what trueSKY can do on the Xbox One X in future games. Stay tuned to for our full interview with Roderick Kennedy in the coming days.