TL;DRNo definitive answer yet: the team wants to avoid end-game armor and min-maxing, but is still considering minor suit benefits and may implement gas and air effects.
I think that type of philosophy is the heart of Star Citizen, right? I think we've said it countless times, we don't want to make end-game armor. We don't want to make 'when you're level 53, you can get this armor.' I don't think that's a Star Citizen philosophy. What we want is there's always going to be a best kind of armor per situation. Because if we had the end-game armor, no matter what you do, from farming to exploring, you'd wear that end-game armor. But we don't want to do that. So the explorer suit, for example: the character team doesn't put stats on it. That's more gameplay and design. But for us, we were thinking, what type of shapes can we make so that it'll look like it can take hazardous environments and stuff like that? Maybe they have the little thing on their arm to have readings of the environment. Not saying that's going to be in there, but just visually.
On the design side, there are gas components on the helmet. So in the entities themselves, once we get it into implementation, there are all these components for gas, air, all that stuff. It is completely within the realm of possibility, and probably the plan, to implement those things. When you're on the surface, if you're on Hurston, it's like, oh, this probably shouldn't be this.
It's a very cautious thing. It's a slippery slope. You see this a lot in MMOs, and Todd Papy was talking about this the other day: you play an MMO today, and you get to level 60 or level 70 or level 80, whatever the level cap is, and then you start seeing everybody wearing the same armor. Every warlock wears the same armor, every rogue wears the same armor, and we don't want that. The work that you guys are doing is very good. And you don't want to see that get sidelined by min-maxing. All the work and all the effort you guys put in to make this living, breathing universe and to make the best game of Barbie dress-up ever in the world gets sidelined by somebody figuring out that this particular armor gives you the absolute best red-out, black-out protection, so that's all anybody's wearing. So to answer the question, it's a thing that we're constantly considering. It's a thing that we're constantly mulling over. It's not a thing that has a definitive answer just yet. It's been a topic of discussion in the community forever. It has been a topic of discussion internally as well. Luckily, right now, it's not something we need an answer for. So we can still afford to have that conversation. We can still afford to wait and see if we can discover an implementation of this that lets us have our cake and eat it too. Some minor benefits, but maybe not enough that you don't put on your super cool, this-is-my-signature look.
TL;DRPlayers probably won't get free color picking, but heavy material variance should let orgs get near their colors, with current plans subject to change.
To me, the question sounds like someone's asking, hey, my organization is these three colors. Will we ever make something that lets them color their stuff in that direction? It's tough because, will we limit that by size of organization? Because we can't fill every request, right? There's only a certain amount of time to do that. I think we're going to have enough. We're doing quite a bit of material variance. So I think you'll be able to make the color scheme you want with pretty much any armor set or clothing set. At least get near what you are setting up for your own organization.
Yeah, I don't think we're going to give the option for... but this is theory here. I don't think that we're going to give players the option to choose specifically, like, hue number 246H mixed with Y. I don't think we're going to be that specific, but in the ATV that Shane brought up, you have 21 different color variants per asset. And so there will be a lot of options for the players to still customize to a certain extent. But I don't think we're going to hand you a paintbrush and be like, just do what you want. I think there's going to be a level of restriction on customization, but we'll still give you a plethora of hues to play with.
This is a good time to remind folks that we are talking about current thinking, current implementations and current plans. And again, folks who have been following the project since the beginning will tell you, this is game development. The only constant in game development is change. Even if this is what we're thinking today, it doesn't necessarily mean that we won't have a different idea about it six months from now or a year from now. Just keep that in mind when we're talking about that. It is an ongoing discussion, just like the stats thing, coloring your spacesuits, coloring your ships. It's a thing that has not been 100% set in stone, nailed down, we can do it or can't do it. It's not a thing you jump into lightly, because it's not a genie you can put back in the bottle. So we want to build out the world, see what we construct a bit more, see the universe that we make before we start making decisions about what you guys will be able to customize in that universe.
On that note though, the can versus will: we definitely can do most of these things, and we kind of have. I think where we start to limit ourselves is how does it affect the player or other features? Because we can do all these things, but then we cut into draw calls or memory or what we're sending over the network, and then we've got to start pulling back and be like, do I want to give a player a million colors or do I want to send ship data or something? Don't quote me on that.
But also, to add to the material variant thing, the way we do it is very unique to each armor set. The more racing-style undersuits and armor will have more bold color across more of the assets, whereas combat stuff might only have some slight accents. Whatever makes sense for that armor, for the manufacturing. A lot of games will have, okay, these two spots change, and it becomes very predictable where the color change is going to happen, and we're not doing that. We're keeping it very much so that each armor set has that uniqueness to it.
TL;DRLegacy armors are older armor sets that were unoptimized, with high polycounts and heavy draw calls, so they're being rebuilt and improved to fit the newer pipeline.
So legacy armors are pretty much older versions of the current armor that we have in the game. The armors that were made about three to four years ago did not respect any of the zones, and also the characters...
Yeah, they were not efficient. So really, those were put in not as a proper game-type asset, but as in, we're getting some art and we're giving it to the players for them to play around with, not like this is good for the game.
Also, they were draw-call heavy. Now we have the new layer shader that allows us to merge draw calls based on the material stack. They didn't have that at all; it was just draw calls everywhere.
And those were also made before Josh Herman, and also before I joined on as well. And I kind of mentioned in the ATV, a lot of the concept art was done by contract freelance concept artists. It was just all over the place. And so what we wanted to do was, since we have to optimize the old armors to the new, we were like, should we just use the old sculpts and do it again? And we're like, no, if we can make these assets look even better, why not give it that pass as well? And so we decided to update all the light, medium, heavy, marine, and outlaw.
The performance thing was what I really wanted to get to, so thank you so much, Gage, for hitting that. It's very analogous to the ship pipeline. I keep going back to the folks who have been following the project for a while. You've seen a tremendous evolution of our ships. The second iteration of the Freelancer series. Remember the Freelancer that had all the rivets? They're currently still in your hangars: the Freelancer MAX, the Freelancer MIS, and the Freelancer DUR, for instance. The Freelancer MAX has a resource footprint equal to the Idris.
A backstory on those. I might have said this before on RTV, I'm not sure. But some of those models, because they were really just there to get in for the player quickly, are literally the concept model.
Yeah, it's literally the concept model. They took the rivets from the concept model of the Freelancer, and instead of rebuilding it and baking it down, they just... no normals. So it's one of those things, this is game development. And game development is not just building a game, it is learning how to build a game. And when you're trying to build the biggest, baddest, most awesome game of all time, there's going to be a learning curve. That's what the development of our ship pipeline is, and it applies to the character pipeline as well, with the armors.
TL;DRSix legacy armor sets have been redone, there are currently no plans to remake more, and focus stays on Squadron 42 and PU-relevant assets, with 'legacy' being a development term.
We want to put a lot of focus on finishing S42 assets and PU-relevant assets before we go back and start remaking more. The legacies were a special case for the players.
I don't think we'll ever make a legacy armor of something. Or we might, maybe, I don't know, for story purposes, if there was an older race or an older human colony somewhere. But we would treat that as a new asset. For this one, the legacy armor was just like, the stuff we have in the game is so unoptimized, we need to get rid of it and we need to fix it. And so that's why we call it legacy.
It makes me think of those movies where the old RAF pilot shows up wearing the old-school bomber jacket and everybody else is wearing more modern stuff, and he's like, no, I'm still fine with the old stuff. That's the kind of thing. It would be a new asset. It would technically be a legacy model. Legacy is a development term as opposed to an in-fiction universe term.
Although the marine armor is technically supposed to be older. If the current ones are Mark III, then these would be Mark I. I don't know the actual lore behind it, but...
TL;DRScarves and capes are possible but must be built into armor or clothing assets and fit the zone system; direct player toggling is not expected for armor.
Yeah, we do. So with the Legacy Outlaw Light, the chest armor carries a scarf with it. But that is part of the core. We could have undersuits that have the scarf, but it would get zone culled when you put armor on. So yes, we can do it, but not as its own thing. It still has to work. No specific scarf item, but there can be assets with scarves that have to fit within our system.
I mean, we have the trench coat that people played with, so that's the same thing as a cape, basically, just without sleeves. We don't have any capes, but yeah, we can definitely do that.
Oh, yeah, the zone hiding, pretty much. So there is an issue on the animation side of that hiding, because we use sim joints, a simulation setup, on those. So when we zone hide the cape, we have to do a cleanup and rebuild of the skeleton of those joints. So that's where the issue comes in with just hiding them on and off. So we'd be making pretty much two assets then. We could do a core that has one and one that doesn't, which isn't a big deal. It's really just one asset, and you turn it off on one on export.
TL;DRZone culling removes the hidden parts of underlying clothing when a layer is worn over it, avoiding overlapping geometry, poke-through and puffy jackets.
It's basically, so I'm wearing this shirt and I'm wearing this jacket. Without the jacket on, you see all of the shirt. When you put the jacket on, everything that's not visually seen will actually be zone culled out. So it doesn't exist anymore. That way, when you're doing animations and stuff, you don't have the shirt poking through. It allows us to not have jackets be incredibly puffy to allow for that shirt geo to stick around.
Really, it's avoiding layers. Because you don't want layers of geo over each other. It just never works. Imagine the body, the shirt, the jacket, and all those plates of geo on top of each other. So with Corey's zones, we split it up, and then you can just start ripping them out based on markup.
Yeah, without zone culling, you'd have to line up the edges so perfectly that when it is deforming, everything is deforming exactly the same, and even then there's not really a guarantee.
So basically, imagine each weapon gets attached to a bone that's on the character, somewhere on the skeleton of the human, let's say the upper spine. So if you have a gun attached to the upper spine, we have that joint with its offset, basically holding it out this far from the body. So let's say we have another layer: we put on torso zero, which is a shirt, and then you have torso one, an armor. We would extend that joint on that item further to allow it to move. So when the system is fully polished, you will see these weapons adjusting based on the clothing you put on. So if you put on a cape or something.
TL;DRAttachment adjustment to clothing layers exists but isn't fully reliable yet, and the team says some clipping will always remain, especially in zero-G, because cloth simulation runs locally.
Yeah, because we do have it. It's just that with the immense variation we have, it's not 100% functional. You can play with it enough that you'll notice it start to fall apart every now and then, which is why we're honing it, and we're still building out the whole design spec as we see more clothes need different specifications. But if you ever see a cape clip a gun, send it to Corey.
Yeah, zero-G sim is just the beast. It's a nightmare for simulation. Anything that's simulated, right? Because I've seen some people on Twitch doing ICC missions, and it's out in space, and they're all flying around, and they'd be wearing the Sand Nomad. And that thing is just all over the weapons. It is kind of annoying, but I hope the backers will understand there will always be some sort of clipping. We can't simulate real life yet. We can't have things collide on every single part correctly. You'll have to forgive us, but there will be some things that will clip.
It's always a matter of give and take too, because there are things that you can do when you're the only player in the universe. You're playing a single-player game, everything is local on your machine, that's it. But when you're talking about a massively multiplayer environment, where now that simulation has to be sent to everyone else in the area...
I'll stop you there. So actually, simulation happens locally per machine. So it's not that the simulation would be sent. Just before we get the comments on it. Simulation wouldn't be sent to other machines. Basically, it tells other people's machines, oh, they're wearing this, and then it would sim locally on their machine.
But single player versus multiplayer is also relevant, because in a single-player game, let's say you're playing Arkham or something, that cape is designed specifically for that environment on that character, and you can put years of polish into an asset. Versus we now have all these characters running around, and it can alter draw calls per scene. It's not like you can completely hone in.
Yeah, so Watch Dogs is a really good example. The main character has really good cloth on him. But if you notice, okay, his jacket goes so far down his legs. Most other NPC character assets have a similar length, because they're reusing everything they develop for the main character everywhere they possibly can. If you're going to spend that much time to make it that good, you want to use it everywhere you can. For us, every asset is the hero asset. It's a balance to get.
And that brings up something interesting with zero-G too, because another reason it's such an issue is that in most games you have your set of animations, and you can test your sim against all those animations and make sure, okay, it may not be perfect, but it works within this animation set. I'm doing all these actions and it doesn't clip. But then you go into zero-G and it's like, I'm diagonal with one arm this way, going 10 miles an hour that way, and it's just upside down.
And I've seen a lot of games where they bake in certain animations for the cloth and stuff like that. So even though it looks like, oh, this has a sim on it, it's not really a sim, it's that animation. It's doing the same loop of that motion, which is cheaper to a certain extent. But it's always the same. And since that character or that asset will only be in a fixed number of levels and fights and will do a set range of actions, they can do that. And normally that number is a lot smaller than what our game has. So they can afford to do that.
TL;DRConcept artists are told to make things look good first and the team will figure it out, but they still consider zones, movement and lore, and some rules can bend while others can't.
I mean, Gage actually does have quite a bit of say, because the armor needs to function like an armor, because if you have a solid piece of metal here, then...
Oh, yeah, so Jeremiah, they'll send stuff over midway through the phase, so that when they're fully done I don't look at it and be like, I can't do that, dude. Go redo all this. Take that off.
Yes and no is the answer to that question. So technically, I would say, what Corey and Gage, Sean Tracy, and Josh tell me is to do whatever you want and just make it look good, and we'll figure it out.
Aesthetic first. But I think, as a responsible concept artist, something that I personally do is try to take into consideration, for instance, the basic knowledge of zones and also just basic movement and animation. I try to think of it. But there have been times when I just was like, you know what, I just want to put this thing here. In case you'll be like, that's not going to work...
But then the thing is, freedom creatively, yes, but if I was tasked to make, I don't know, a Xi'an armor, I'm not going to make a human burger-flipper costume. I would still have to communicate with design and with writers to get the correct lore.
TL;DRBackpacks are possible visually, for example as part of a shirt or jacket, and zone culling can hide them under other layers, but the clothing pipeline's technical rules mean it's not a simple add-on.
So we can talk about the visuals of them. I'm not going to talk about it from the design side. Yeah, we can have backpacks. If you have a backpack on a shirt, it's technically a jacket, as far as the zones go. If it's a backpack on a jacket, it's just part of the jacket. Unless we do the super secret Torso 2, which allows us to break some rules. That's like the bending, but we try to avoid that. The special-casing stuff just gets muddy, so we try to avoid it.
Actually, I think with how you wanted to incorporate the pants accessory zone and the shirt accessory zones, you could have a backpack zone, which basically gives them free rein, and then when something goes over it, fine, it turns off.
Yeah, so you have a shirt and it comes with a backpack. When you put a jacket on, through zone culling, it's gone. So there's a lot of room to play with things. We just have to really think about the technical requirements to then do that thing, because it's rarely ever just straightforward. Well, we have A, B, and C, and then where can we start to...
I think a lot of people think, oh, it's just a backpack, just put it on. It's not that easy. Once we have a fixed pipeline, an actual working rule set for clothing and customization, we have to stick to that design philosophy. We can't just be like, I'm going to put a unicorn horn straight through his chest because screw it, why not? Or, in real life I can put on five jackets, right? But game-wise, unless we specifically design from the very beginning with the knowledge that someone's going to put on five jackets, then I guess we could come up with something. But that wasn't the intent when we first designed the whole game. Zones.
As an example, for clothing, we have a technical checklist to go through, and it's around 40 points. It's getting big. That's for an entire character to check, for PU assets: PU clothing and all that, not armor. And the reason for that is we're trying to maintain as high quality as possible, but we have some pretty extensive modularity, and more modularity takes away quality. So we're trying to fix that by doing some really, really in-depth technical stuff. So it's a lot to learn and it's really unwieldy to use, but the result is you don't end up with, all right, all my clothes are giant puffy things that don't look good, but sure, you can swap them around.
And you'll see a lot of games do that. Whenever you see games where you switch things, they're big. You're pretty much wearing Arctic wear. It's to fit.
TL;DRGlows, particles and animated light effects on armor are technically possible, but they don't expect to do it anytime soon; moving-LED looks like Tron armor are pure character art that can be done.
Glows, particles, thrusters. There are all the attachments and stuff that Gage's team sets up for grenades and all that. I don't know why you couldn't also put effects emitters and stuff on. We kind of already do for the jetpack. From a technical standpoint, yes, we can do it. I don't think we're going to do it anytime soon, but...
Yeah, that's pure character art. But if you want, oh, I applied the rotten meat effect to me, and now there are flies all around me, that would be a visual effects thing, and I don't see why we couldn't apply that. Halo did that. They have lightning you can apply, you can apply flies around your character.
So we tried a lot of different things with lights actually going through the character. We also did some old drawings way back in the day of actual moving LEDs on top of a jacket.
And some of the clothing and armors you guys have made already do that. Really, what it does is just oscillate the UV space. So if you have some kind of varying texture and just have the UV move down or something, it'll animate for you. It is dope. Tron can be done.
I mean, I would say if any team here is doing something... So we have ships that mix alien technology. There's no reason the characters couldn't do the same thing.
TL;DRClothing and armor will affect characters, such as item ports and possibly speed, and can already carry stats, but how far this goes is still being tested.
Yeah, they will and they can. Let's talk about the armor we have right now, light, medium, and heavy. Each one of those allows for different ports. So I was going to have Gage speak about item ports, but generally what it means is you can put on more stuff, if you wanted to talk about that for a bit.
Oh sure, and also this goes heavy into design too, which is kind of outside of our team. A lot of what we'll do is implement what design wants to do with these clothing or armors and then we kind of make that happen. So like you said with item ports, or even maybe speed variations. In this one it says speed, so if you have certain armors, obviously you're not going to run as fast, or maybe it'll be an enhanced armor, maybe you could run faster. Especially with clothing. But yeah, so absolutely. Clothing will affect you. How drastic that will be, I think, is still in the works. It's up for debate. We test it out.
TL;DRThe early customizer lets the team find and solve problems on a small base, such as the neck seam, and builds groundwork for items, UI, entitlements and persistence.
Definitely an advantage in terms of seeing some problems early that we solve now. Like the neck seam, we went over this a little bit in the interviews. The neck seam problem, while we could have solved it later, finding it now allowed us to then solve problems on the female as well. And then the techniques to solve that will be carried over, and now we know what to do. So going forward, when we have more assets, more aliens maybe, we know how to solve this problem.
I was just going to say, it's a lot easier to fix problems on the base level. When we release the full product and you have a large amount of stuff, we're going to be like, I don't know where to put things, I don't know what's causing this issue. But when we start off with a small package, you can start focusing on those base issues and then we just stack on top of it. So it's a smoother transition to the final product.
It's building blocks for a lot of things, everything from the items to how the items interplay, making sure that you're seeing other people's characters in the same way that you're seeing your own. We're looking at things like icons, we're looking at UI. So it's not just getting that small thing, it's a bigger set of things.
And the entitlement tech, too. We got a lot of that out of the way, which is really nice. Persistence. There's a lot of things that happen. Doing that on the small side was much better.
Actually, as an Easter egg, too, there is a certain combination of things you can put on currently that will eventually make you bald. Good luck finding it.
TL;DRWearing clothing over armor isn't possible right now because of how the system is set up, though undersuits or light armor might be doable and the team is looking for ways without huge asset costs.
Right now, no, because of the way that the system is set up, the hierarchy of where items live. We could potentially build one that's specifically for armor, but it would be difficult to transition the states.
Yeah, it depends on what the base model would be to fit under, stuff like that. I think we could potentially find a way to make it work on certain sizes. So like you're saying, light armor but no medium armor.
But it is something, I mean, I think a lot of people want that. We're just trying to figure out how to do it, how to do a lot of those rule-of-cool things. How do we do those things without having to make a ton of assets, a ton of work to support it?
Also, I understand a duster on top of the armor thing. It looks cool in our heads, but when we're making an MMO, we have to make sure that duster fits on all the armors in that category. That's when things start to get a little strange. Imagine if we had to make a duster for every single asset.
TL;DRThe speakers mention working on the Titan suit, Vanduul variants and culture, and a Hurston cow creature, stressing that concept explorations aren't guaranteed to reach the game.
I've been working on the Titan suit. So I did spend time working on the Titan suit: the movement, requirements, the abilities, what it can do, what it can't do.
Oh, I can't say. So I have been working a lot on the Vanduul, just different variants of it, what the culture of the Vanduul is. We all know generally what they look like, but what the culture is.
With concepts, if you're a subscriber, you can go to your Subscriber Vault and you can see a variety of concepts for a lot of things, for different ships and whatnot, that don't actually ever make it into the game. A big part of the concepting phase is not just finding the things you do want, it's discovering the things that you don't want. I'll go by Jeremiah's desk and I see him working on a fat Vanduul. Again, there's no guarantee that's going to make it into the game. It's an exploration.
Chris is an incredibly visual person, so sometimes he needs to see something before he knows he doesn't want it. Sometimes we have to show him a thing before he goes, no, I don't want that.
For concept, I like to view it like it's not just, hey, make this suit and I just make one suit. I like to cast a wide net. I normally do, I think this is what Josh wants or this is what Chris wants. And then I tweak it a little bit further, and then I go toward Crazy Town. Normally on the third or fourth iteration, it's like, what about this crazy bug-like looking thing, right? And sometimes that's the one Josh and Chris like, and I'm like, oh really? Okay. But I like to cast a general net so that Josh and Chris would have multiple options. And if they like one idea, they'll be like, that's a really cool idea, and they'll flesh it out even further. So my job is to present options. So that's why the fat Vanduul.
For the things that I'm working on, it's sort of on the back burner, but the cow creature from Hurston. It's not our priority, but I like to work on that whenever I get a chance. And that's funny, because it's just jiggly and full of eggs and stuff. It's not pleasant to look at.
TL;DRArmor and clothing silhouettes create variety on a single body type, with concept artists drawing on varied references while considering movement and anatomy, and riggers handling big shape changes.
Silhouettes are the biggest thing for me. You can do a lot of crazy things with different kinds of silhouettes. But we also have to consider movement, the anatomy of the body, so we can't just go crazy, right? So it's a lot of research, and trying to stay away from generic reference, like body armor, where you're just like, oh, I'm just going to do another one of those. Getting references from outside sources, like maybe nature or just some weird pattern that you've seen, as an inspiration to come up with new shapes. But for me, silhouette is the biggest driving force to come up with different ideas on the human body. And you can come up with some crazy, crazy things. And then normally when I do something crazy, I walk over to Gage's desk and apologize to him. I'm like, I'm sorry, you've got to rig this, man. You've got to skin it. So be ready.
So if I'm understanding you correctly, what you're talking about is designing armors and clothes that change the silhouette of the same static character in order to provide the appearance of variety.
Armors do a great job of that, especially when you go from, let's say, the base male to light, medium, and then you go to heavy. There's some intense shape changes that still work pretty well.