Jason Cole

I don't think he'll be. They're literally talking about scheduling a shoot to shoot more stuff specifically for 3.0, to add stuff. So how much they'll add, I don't know. It's still very pre-production. CR intends to add more.

But as production goes, we know from now, kind of the beginning, to the end of when we have it all there. But as we go through the process, sometimes there's a little more here, sometimes our attention has to go to a different area and so on. I know the list is thick. And I believe the assumption right now is you would definitely have more than just Miles in 3.0, but I know more details will come out of that in the next few weeks probably.

Absolutely. My main focus isn't really usually the PU, so that was the first time we ran that system. So now that we have learned it, we'll hand that more off to the PU guys and they'll do a lot more with that stuff.

It's good. I think our team here in Frankfurt is really strong. UK has a pretty good team. And then Austin is really good as well. They actually had more stuff to go into the PU. There was actually some subsumption where people were walking around in that space in the market and stuff that we were seeing in earlier builds, and then for some reason on the last build they didn't go through. Because it was actually pretty awesome. There were guys walking up to the bar and then sitting at the bar, drinking and then walking away.

And that's a fair point to say that there's a good amount of stuff that we're doing. What we showed at the live event isn't everything we have, right? It's what came together and worked in a way that we thought was representative of where it should be. We have a good amount of stuff that's also from all the different studios that's got great progress, and things are just about there, but we want to make sure that they're fully there before we're presenting them outwards.

It didn't take very long. We shot the Quest Giver stuff at the end of the last PU shoot, or the last shoot, right? And then we literally had three weeks to put everything together for Eckhart and the Hawkers. And Mekin, too, actually. The other guy that waved flag soon or whatever. So that was within three weeks. And then on top of that, we were testing the system. We hadn't run that system. So we're using an OptiTrack system that was getting solved in-house. And then we were syncing all the faces, which we've done before, but we did it old school, manually. This time is the first time we actually used the tools. So we ran into a lot of issues, actually, within those three weeks. We're updating our facial real-time runtime logic, right, for the faces? So we're going to use more of a facial board so we can have more control over Look IK and turning that on and off and all that stuff. But for Eckhart, we actually had to revert to the older system, because all the NPC heads haven't been completely updated to the new one, only the three of them.

So it'd be hard to gauge the actual time then. If you had to do it today, with what you know and what you've learned, and now that the pipeline's in place?

I don't think it would take us long. It was pretty straightforward. He had maybe less than a minute of time. I would say maybe two weeks at the most, start to finish, if we had somebody specifically on solving, and then an animator right off it, and all the tools were working properly. And that's being very generous.

And usually in the estimates that we give out on the production end, and even when we ask other leads to, we also have to understand that we need to put a little bit more time into those estimates as well, to foresee if there are any issues that come up, right? So if we say two weeks, we may go, oh, well, we think it'll take us seven days. But you need to allow for that time just in case something comes up, or other tasks come in that may take some priority and so on.

It's weird too, because there are some things that you think will take two weeks and they only take two or three days, and then vice versa. You think something's going to be easy...

No, that's acting.

That's him trying to be sketchy, right? Looking over his shoulder.

Yeah, exactly. I wish we had more time to make it look better. We just didn't have enough time. But the thing is that eventually the Look IK... right now we can only turn it on and off, but we can't blend it. So eventually he'll be able to look at you, and then when he doesn't want to look at you, he'll look away. So when you're sitting there, he's generally looking at you, but he's not actually making eye contact with the player. But when he flags you over, when he goes, 'Hey, come over here, have a seat,' that's Look IK on. He is looking and turning at you and talking to you.

And that's not only the eyes, but a portion of the upper body blended through.

Yeah, exactly. So we're trying to get more control over that so we can really dial that in.