Jacob Ward

Yes, so all the heads that have been in the PU previously are going to be in the new one. There are actually going to be some in the background that you don't see, but you can access through one of the customization modes. They're partially activated because we're still polishing their face rigs, so we haven't fully activated them. And obviously, I think at CitizenCon we've mentioned, like Forrest mentioned, that we're working on adding 60 more heads total to the customizer and we're still working on that. But they will come in the future when they're ready.

And then just to kind of follow up on that, not only do we have all the heads that previously existed, but what we've also done is we've given them a visual facelift as well. We've calibrated their skin tones, we've increased skin detail, we've balanced maps, specular maps, gloss maps. And so not only are we kind of improving the pool and all this stuff, but we're also giving everything that existed a great facelift. So I think it'll be awesome.

Yeah, that's been really great. It's been cool to see everything that Forrest has been able to achieve with the old skins and see the difference that it really makes to give these updates to getting the correct tones so that we can use this new color picker system to allow the players to pick just from there, not making it overly complex.

And this means that we can also now apply any skin tone on top of any set of skin textures. So if you don't like the positions and stuff of the wrinkles in one skin texture from a previous character customizer but you like the skin tone, then you can mix and match now a bit there.

So there's sort of two sides to save and load, right? So there's the saving as in when you save your character to our servers, our persistence database, and then that's the one that loads in every time you enter the PU. And what we're also introducing is long-term persistence for that character, so that should also be able to be maintained between wipes. Then the other side of save and load, what we've added with the new character customizer is the ability to save out custom head files. So that's a single file that contains everything you need to build your character. So that's your gender, your DNA string, your hair, your eyebrows, your beard, if you want one. And the new thing is also all the custom materials that we have. Backwards compatibility has been a huge part of developing that and something that we're really keen on keeping with every patch. So the dream is that we should be able to load in any custom head file from any previous patch into the current patch. Now, I can't really make any promises about if something becomes problematic and we have to remove that feature or how that feature works entirely or do a massive overhaul. So, for example, if we for some reason have to completely change how makeup works in the future, then that part of the character we might have to discard from older files, or run some sort of conversion, which would be the preferred way of doing it, some non-destructive conversion on that part of the file so that when you load it in, you might not get exactly the same makeup, but you'll be able to get as close as possible. So I guess the short answer is yes, these files are intended to be backwards compatible, and we're going to do everything in our power to make sure that from 3.23 onwards, you'll be able to load any file saved now in any future patch.

I think that also goes for the art side too. It may not look exactly the same, but that might also mean that we've made improvements to something. Maybe we've fine-tuned the way the makeup works after seeing people use it, or maybe we've updated a hairstyle as well.

So it's conceivable we might alter or update an individual hairstyle and you would just get the newer version of the hairstyle as opposed to the old one.

Correct.

Well, E-Tech, in a company of 1,300 people across five studios across four countries, there's literally Andre and the people here who are working on this right now. So it's a pretty small, dedicated team who are spending 20 minutes out of one afternoon talking about it. So I think when you put it in perspective, it's not so bad.

I'd also like to emphasize on that. This tool was developed, obviously, for the backers primarily, but was also developed in a way with some extra debug UI things you can activate as a developer, on top of the UI the backers get. So we as devs can customize NPCs with the system for both the PU and Squadron. And that's why it's an important tool for us. And the fact that it's so powerful is enabling us to make NPCs quickly that look unique and look special and high quality.

It's a point that was somewhat glossed over in the show, but this is literally the same tool that we're using internally to make NPCs for both Squadron 42 and Star Citizen. So this is work not just for the players, it's work for us, for the game, that we can share with the players.

And developers are way, way more demanding than the players as well.

Yeah, for Squadron, that's the other thing: we've got hair and the hair needs to look great, and Andre's making some great hair and that hair goes into Squadron. And then we also, like we said, wanted to get everything propagated to Star Citizen. So it's like, why not put it in Star Citizen? We already need it for Squadron. Let's double our wins and get it over to SC.

I would say the first thing that I think of when I hear that is, first of all, awesome. Second of all, it's solving the issues of what a camera could create. So, for example, when we do our skin textures and stuff like that, there's a lot of requirements, especially again with physically based rendering; we can't have shadows in the diffuse map, right? We have to extrapolate the normal information or height information, essentially spec cavity, specular occlusion, stuff like that. So the real question is, let's say the camera can take a picture of your face to eventually bring in as a texture, not going into any additional data that could potentially actually shape a head or something. But assuming we're just talking about textures, I think that those would be the biggest issues to solve: how do we clean up that data in order to get it game ready by processing the textures, which currently our artists do, and Claire Engle has done for us. So that's just the first thing that pops in my head when I hear that.

Okay, so I think there are some ways we could go about this. I think once we have all the 60 heads from our gene pool extension, once they're in and we have their textures, together with the skin tone tinting that we can already do, I think we have enough variety in terms of the textures, I would hope so. In terms of the shapes, it's going to be a problem of finding a way to recognize the features. There are already some SDKs out there that we could use; face detection itself does that to a degree. It shows you where the eyes are, where the mouth contours are. So you could leverage that to a degree, recognize those features, and then try to find samples in our gene pool that can approximate this. So we have a vague idea, or a pretty good idea, of what needs doing. It would be super cool for the players to use that. Even for NPC creation, you just show a photo, and the software would create that face or approximate it reasonably closely. But again, priorities. It's not very high up on the list, I guess.

I keep thinking about it now. And then even on a simpler turn, just with the skin tone itself, if you knew what the offset is, because what we do with the skin tones now is we calibrate them, we balance them to make sure they're accurate to the real-life talent. So if you did have mid-gray or whatever in the shot with you when your image got taken, or some kind of Macbeth chart, obviously that would increase the... whatever. But theoretically, if you did have some kind of mid-gray or something, we would know some offsets on what would actually be happening in your environment to bring you back to a neutral skin tone color that could then be applied using our current palette, at least matching the closest possible. So I don't know. It's interesting. It's a fun one to think about for sure.

Yeah, Andreas mentioned the thing I was thinking about: using Faceware, not for the textures, but to determine the location, the spacing of certain things, and just to give you a base shape of the face that would be somewhat closer to you that you could start with. There seemed like there's potential there to me.

It's a good idea. It's a great idea. I mean, you've got to start somewhere. You've got to start trying things.

I mean, one thing we already do is with face sculpting, we take a position of a point and we use that to decide what heads to blend between. So once you've got the positions of those points, through however we want to detect it through the camera, then it's actually solving the same problem.

I mean, obviously that's your head. That's what I would like to add to the character customizer. Your head, Jared.

I want to add more randomization, right? So we've got some pretty basic randomization being rolled out with 3.23, but stuff like hair color and things: right now we just sort of randomize a simple natural color. It'd be super cool to have some advanced stuff with dye and wear and stuff. Yeah, I like randomization. I like hitting that button. And I want to see more cool results.

I think just for the head scan library, it would be awesome to be able to scan your own face, obviously, and then maybe have it in the bank, adding to that bank so someone else could get my disgusting nose on their face. That would be something.

But you bring up a good point. Andreas was talking about this in the pre-chat. Scanning the face is only one part of the process of getting a face in here. There's still a lot of processing work that gets done after you sit in the booth and get your stuff done.

I'd just like to flesh out the preview page a bit more, the one where you can see a full character, like the stuff that was mentioned: playing different animations, different lighting scenarios, even swapping different outfits or something so you can see how you end up looking, like a fully fleshed-out character, together with your facial appearance and everything else that you customized. I think that'll be really cool to have more options there. But that can be near-endless spending of resources there.