Spencer Johnson

Right now is a slurry of a thousand different bugs as we prepare to get 3.9 out the door. One of the most recent ones was that quick buy bug. But I don't know if I want to talk about that now or if you want to wait for the ISC feature. Things are coming. Sort of what you'll see at the start of every quarter is the spillover of, these are really important issues before we go live. And they're always all over the place. And they always sort of pop up when new features go in and new pieces of tech come in; old things start to break. Even though our team hasn't done any feature work on the character customizer in months, there's a bug right now where selecting your gender isn't persisting into the PU. Since we have a microservice architecture with a lot of new services coming online all the time, sometimes you see problems there. I'm just all over the place right now on bugs. That and the new shopping features we've added are also spitting up a lot of bugs.

Oh, man, do I even want to say it? My big thing is to try and get it into the front end. So one of the goals for the friends efforts this quarter was to allow people to see, create parties, see who's online, easily add people, connect to people, get that two-way handshake, have a unified friends list so we don't have platform contacts and Spectrum contacts. We wanted to bring that all under one umbrella and just make it easy for the players to get into the game as easily as possible, with the people that they want to play with. We added stuff to easily just right-click, join contact. You can shoot off to their server immediately. You can party jump easier now. If you miss the boat on the party jump, you just have a join leader button up at the top of the party window. We're trying to do everything we can to reinforce that, get people playing together who want to be together as fast as possible. Part of that game loop, in my opinion, is jumping into the client and messaging your friend, "Hey buddy, I'm online, add me to the party." It really, to me, kind of completes that loop, and we'll have access to all the same chat functionality that we have in game as far as the groups and party chats and all that stuff. So it should be pretty easy to throw into the front end there. So yeah, that's my next big one, to kind of complete that game loop. And then from there, I don't know if I even want to say, but I'd like people to be able to create orgs in game. Those are my future thoughts on this, just to really create the backbone of the social structure here. Right now, there's things we're doing on the website that I feel like it would be great for players to be able to pull in and manage in game.

It's worth mentioning that these front-end UI features are finally starting to come in for fun stuff because we're going through this arduous process of moving that over to Building Blocks, our new UI tech, so that it's actually possible to do things in a not deprecated system. Now that that's rolling online, the features are starting to come.

As more Building Blocks features come online, you'll see these new UIs improve in terms of functionality as we just get more and more tools.

That's been the benefit of Building Blocks. We have gone through and iterated on that new front-end friend stuff so quickly compared to what it would have been in Flash. That would have been a couple quarters of work to try and get that into Flash. We could change the whole design of it right now this afternoon if we wanted to. It's that easy to kind of bounce stuff around. So it really came together very quickly. We got a little bit of a late start this quarter and we still kind of got it in before the end of the actual official quarter. And yeah, it's in PTU right now, so there it is.

Someone in chat just mentioned if we were trying to use this Building Blocks stuff for store purchasing and that flow, which is exactly what I'm working on right now. And that's part of a long process of converting all of our screens that has just started, actually. So the prison deposit kiosk is the first shopping kiosk that is using Building Blocks totally. And we're going to be iteratively doing a couple every quarter, one or two a quarter. Like, all right, now this screen is using it, now this screen is using it, and getting down the process. Each one's getting a little quicker. But it's part of a long sort of vision of updating our shopping experience.

And it's a company-wide goal as well. I know they're working on stuff with the ships, and mobiGlas is going to get a treatment relatively soon. Those are other teams, of course, but yeah, it's a huge initiative for us to kind of convert this over. And once it's there, even if we may not redesign the experience right away, it sets us up to be able to rapidly iterate on it in the future. And that's the great part of it.

At black marketplaces, sure. It's a matter of ownership, and I don't know, actually, Spencer, you might be able to speak to the ownership transition and where that change actually happens.

Yeah, I think there's a couple of directions that we could take that, and I think there need to be both design and technical questions. Because there's certainly some stopgap things you could do, just like, okay, we'll try to check to see what were the last few ships this player was flying and who owns them, et cetera. But I'm sure everyone knows every time you interact with any screen that involves ships, you only see the list of ships that are in your account that you personally own. And I think the best way forward to get that feature would be adding a system behind the scenes of tracking player-associated vehicles. Which we have a little bit already; I used something a little bit like that for the last prison ship feature we just added. Basically a way of tracking the last vehicle you flew that we know you own, that we know has a quantum drive that you can use to get around and stuff. So we want to expand on that and have a way of saying, here are all the ships that I am somehow associated with right now, and have an interface for your friends to allow you to say, this person's associated with my ship right now, it's cool if they fly it. And maybe sometime in the future, it's cool if they spawn it from any ASOP terminal, or they could see it in their cargo list while we're either in the same party or same group, or some list of features there. So yeah, I think that would be the first step forward, making this a proper player-associated ship system, right? And that can drive several features, including selling from stolen ships, because the way you'd be associated is, I have stolen this ship, that's my association.

Yeah, ship permissions is something that we've been talking about as part of that social structure, right? Maybe at the org or the party level or something, you can say, this person can access it. Despawning and spawning, again, is a little bit different.

And some of the work that's going into the cargo decks is specifically about that, being able to drop cargo off there and then set it for another person and have the ownership switch from you to another player. Ownership is a strange topic that touches a lot of aspects of Star Citizen. I think just in life in the PU, it's figuring out who owns every little thing in the universe. It's definitely a conversation that we'll be circling back around to more than once.

The idea is no. Extremely trolly. But the troll in me is like, please? It sounds so fun.

This is exactly why we had that conversation the other day, Rob. We just talked about this.

It's funny, the timing on that. Yeah, I don't think that's a good idea, personally. I think it's relevant to kind of see where they are. We'll have the Jared Huckaby troll option for sure. No, we want to kind of broadcast the state, what it is, but the conversation that Spencer was referencing was, should I be able to see how much money they have or how much of a certain thing they're trying to buy? Because eventually, they're going to go get in their ship and maybe fly off, and should I follow them? Should I loot them? Do we want to give away that much information? And I think there needs to be a certain level of privacy there, but we do want to try and at least show, oh, they're on the commodity screen and, bang, purchase complete, right? We want to kind of show some of that, but not...

And there's also a little bit of confusion about what information you might display. For example, when things come online in the future of having a concept of discounts, like, oh, this player is going to be paying a better price because they're in the Casaba members bonus program or whatever, they have a voucher, coupon, something. They'll be seeing a different price than what you would be paying. So are you going to be seeing the price on the screen that they're paying or the one that you'd be paying? There's a lot of weird questions where it's not certain what exactly you would want in that scenario. And then you have that privacy concern, like Rob said, is a big thing.

Yes, that is definitely in the plans as well. It's partially implemented. Yeah, it's actually technically possible now.

Sort of.

I put it in a certain way, in case anyone tries. So right now, the problem lies with the way that we set up the shops; they are very specific to single items. And when I think of the sellback feature, I don't want to have to go, oh, I need to take this item and go sell it over here, and this item and go sell it over there. If it's a weapon, I want to sell it back to the weapon shop. If it's a ship thing, I want to sell it back to the ship shop, right? And we can't group them by item types right now, so just weapons as a full sale thing. And that's the kind of functionality that I would wait until we have, so we don't have to go through every single shop and add a bazillion items and "yes, can buy, sell." No, just, here's an archetype of a shop, and there you go, this is what you can sell back to them. And the way we kind of looked at it, at least in previous conversations, was that commodities are the profiteering, right? That's what you go out and make money with. Items are more of a money sink within a game. And it's true of most MMOs, right? You can go and sell it to another person for a profit. Free enterprise is always available there, right? And that's where the player trading system comes into play. But as far as selling back to shops, that's more notably a money sink in most games, and I think you'll see something very similar to that.

Now, I should mention that the goal as a project going forward is to minimize and reduce the number of wipes. No more wipes every patch. The ultimate goal is to reduce the sheer number of wipes to none if at all possible. But as far as the rare occasion when something like that might happen, what do you think with regards to the seed numbers?

So there's a couple things. For one, it is not a challenging problem to solve. In fact, for the core of what people are probably most concerned about, like the facial structure, because that's so floaty, a continuous amount of changes, it's not easy to get the exact result again. That's actually just 48 numbers that define that. And so the number of characters you would need to have this seed is, I think, like 200 characters, which is not something you could remember, but it's very easy to copy and paste. I would actually personally really like to see that feature added, of being able to copy and paste this and insert that seed. Like Jared said, not because we want to get back to where we were after wipes, because we're trying to get rid of wipes going forward. But I think it'd be really cool to be able to share this with your friends. Be like, "Yo, I just made John Cena," to everybody. There is a design risk of, do we really want everybody running around the universe looking like John Cena? The exact same face, copy and pasted a million times. So I think it'd be fun and really great. And at least that aspect, the DNA changes, is not super complicated. We'd need to do a bit more for remembering and serializing your gender and hair and skin color, eye color, all those things. I think it's really more on design, if we want to schedule the time to do this.

If I recall, we had a conversation that included the ability to share your character structure and design with other players. We hadn't even been discussing it in terms of wipes. We had been discussing it more like, your organization wants to set up a clone army or something. How do you do that most effectively?

Or two players want to play as twins.

Yeah, or whatever. Or a family, like a family-owned freighter or whatever. Mom, dad, kids, that kind of thing. Which is really useful.

I think there's several ways we could do that. It's not in our current plans right now. I think it's just because Character Customizer was kind of, we put a pin in that back in Q3 last year for the moment, right? It's not done by any means, but I'll think about it. Maybe we can do a stored seed number and that can get saved out to our long-term persistence variable somewhere, and maybe we can restore it. I think there's options there. Do you want to have to copy and paste a 200-digit number? What does the UI for that look like? Maybe there's some more graceful ways we can do that. I think it's more important to focus on the long-term persistence side of it. That to me is what they're really talking about. How do we ensure that this is going into a service somewhere that doesn't get wiped as often, if at all? Because there's some things that we definitely don't need to wipe unless data changes out from underneath it and it's just not possible to put it back. And that's usually the cases where we end up getting into a situation where, oh, we've got to wipe the DB again, right? But hopefully we're figuring out how to avoid that as we go to this long-term stuff.

Could. I don't know. That's somewhat of a new topic.

It's hard because we always want everything that's in-game to be diegetic and of the universe, and an in-game Issue Council would distinctly be out of game. I guess it would take you out of the universe that you're playing in. It's something to think about.

I would really like to see that, because you could directly, easily send client information to a tracker. It just spits out the log right to our servers.

Yeah, there's definitely a lot of benefit to that. It's stuff that I know Turbulent and Benoit's team, with the Hex tooling that they're doing, is going to incorporate a lot of these customer service tools. And I'm not sure what the Issue Council support is going to be on that. But once they get set up there, I think it's certainly much more reasonable to just integrate that end of the game and send your logging and messaging out to the same tooling that they see on the website there. So it's doable. A little outside of the US PU team's realm.

Certainly the friends system, the social system. Man, I'm excited about the work that we're going to be doing on that in the future as well. Like I said, my anecdote before wasn't a lie. I've got friends that I want to get in here and playing with me, but I've been a little hesitant because the onboarding experience hasn't been particularly good. And now I think it's particularly good. So I'm looking forward to getting some of those people in and looking at the amazing work that everybody else has been doing in the game. And that's really what our job is, to make all that stuff much more accessible and visible to the users. So that's my favorite one so far.

My answer is a little less about the feature and more about the process. I would say the Character Customizer is probably my favorite one to work on, specifically the Character Customizer experience, because I was not the one who implemented the actual face morphing, but rather the whole front-end experience of it.

It's definitely the funniest to work on, too.

Making that random button is pretty fun, especially before we had symmetrical faces. So that was a ton of fun just for playing with, but the process of making that was the most enjoyable too, because the core of that work was done between myself, John, and one of our other designers, Calix, with lots of ancillary parts and helpers and such. And this was actually before we were under the purview of US PU for most of that development, like Q2, Q3 last year. But that was most enjoyable for me because we were actually able to iterate on it multiple quarters. I'm sure you guys remember, technically there's been three live versions of the customizer, and I did work on all three of them, but ignoring the first one for now, when we redid it with DNA initially in Q1 of last year, we had those radial sliders and stuff. We did that, but we weren't super happy with it, so we spent more time to reiterate on it, and we had a really close-knit team of only a couple developers, and personally, I could iterate with John and Calix, and even though I'm a programmer, I like to pretend I'm a designer sometimes and be like, "Well, guys, what if we did it like this?" And that was when the job was the most fun for me: a small team doing lots of iterations to make the best experience. And obviously, we have the benefit of this being a very isolated feature that's separate from the sheer cluster of PU features, but the process itself is what made that one so enjoyable to work on.

The Character Customizer almost got to cheat in a way, because it was completely separated from everything else, where everybody else has to develop their feature and then integrate it with everything else, which is where bugs often come from.

You'd think that, but now we're relying on so many microservices that break all the time, and I get bugs. It was the loadout service. It was the variable service.

Oh, man. I've been here for too long and worked on too many things. It's been six years. It's crazy. There's something to be said about it: I've had the most fun working on projects that have, again, kind of been an isolated thing that the team doesn't have to go to a bunch of external teams to get support from. It's just the iteration time, the turnaround speed that we can do things is much better. I had fun working on the quantum travel stuff. I had fun trying to figure out the mission givers. Talking with Tony on the economy stuff has been a blast. My role has kind of changed and morphed over time, much more trying to work with Tony on future schedules and plans and trying to keep these guys moving on a day-to-day basis, more so than making things as much nowadays. Which in and of itself has been kind of fun. I've always enjoyed the games industry because it's always something new and different every project. So I'd say those things. I'm really happy with the Friends stuff. I've wanted to work on the social system for a while. I look forward to what we're going to do with that, and I look forward to seeing how that's going to affect the game and just the numbers that we're seeing. So yeah, I think anything that I've worked on where I've gotten to actually see a tangible result or comments and thanks from the fans has been just a joy. Because that's why I do it, right? I make games because I want other people to experience things and have fun. And so to see the fans on Reddit or Spectrum or wherever react well to something that we did was cool.

Yeah. We actually just started talking about that the other day when planning improvements for this next quarter. And conceptually having undo history and stuff like that is definitely on the radar. I think it depends on which level of undo we want to do. I think we were talking about having an undo stack. So what we do is just save off all the DNA values, which is actually a really small set of data. It's like 200 bytes. It's a really short string of characters.

So much of the complexity comes from the fact that we have all these different types of modifications. We have changing the DNA deformer as well as changing the actual items that are attached. And that's when it starts to get a little bit more complicated in terms of how we're going to manage that history.

Yeah, because actually all the eidonomy stuff that we have right now for hair, eyes, soon-to-be beard and stuff is actually totally separate from DNA. This is actually an item being attached to you. So we need to have this history of your changes be sort of agnostic to the data that you changed. Like, okay, if you changed DNA, we need to say, here's the value, refer to that value of the DNA matrix. If you had an attachment, it's like, okay, well, what item port and what was there?

And the smarter the system can be about that, the better we can have it update. If we don't have any idea what the change was and we just say, okay, here's the last state it was in, we have to reinitialize the entire character. He's going to pop off screen for a second and then come back on. It's just a way worse experience, and you don't get to see the actual change happen so you can judge it. So you have to just hold more of it in your head at a given time. So making it smarter is worth doing because that'll make it a lot more usable.

Yeah, I think so too. That main point is there's a couple of data sets in here. The main one is kind of the anatomy, the shape, the geo.

Yeah, and how the colors are being attached, how all the materials are being attached. That's totally separate from the matrix.

So I know I made the joke in the ATV where it was like, oh, I see blonde, I see brunette. Actually, that data's not in there. It's just a joke.

So we have the DNA matrix for the anatomy, and now we need a string for the eidonomy.

Basically, we need some sort of data to represent what hairstyle, what color, what skin tone.

In addition to it being useful, I think that there's just something that's really beautiful about any time we expose the data in our game, because for once we don't have to fake it. We have so much going on in this game that we can just say, here's the actual values of it, and have that represented on screen in any number of ways. And I think that it's very easy to end up with something that's kind of beautiful and engaging just on the data side of it. In so many things, you'll have the doctors manipulating all these aspects of it, and it's all just hand-wavy. It looks nice, but it doesn't mean anything. And here, it's actually tied to something that's real. And sometimes that thing that's real is still abstracted away, like the way that we do our blending. Even just having my manipulation of the world result in actual changes to it, I always find that compelling.

Especially as a programmer, when the data is written in hex, it doesn't take too much of a leap to say, oh, I can actually look at this and see what it means. This head has this much weight in the face. It doesn't take too much explaining to say, oh, okay, this is what it means. I really see what this code is doing here.

I do think it's cool. And that's why I make that matrix joke, because it really is. You're looking at it, and you're like, oh, that's head ID 9. It's blended at 20%.

And so I would have totally wanted to have a copy-to-clipboard function. So you could just paste it and be like, this is my dude. You want to tweak it? You think I have too big ears? Here's the guy. Make your own ears on it.

And especially since we reset them every major release right now, I think that's a nice way to bring it back. But one big point about it is, what we're doing right now, you'll see it on the next roadmap publish, but we have a V2 planned. We've got lots of iteration to the actual UI, the actual interface. We've been talking about it a lot this week anyways, taking in the feedback from people and everything. So I don't want to go too deep into it, because I'm sure we'll do an ATV or something like that about the next iteration of it. But the whole mentality around that is simplify some of the interface a little bit, make it a little easier to get to what you want, take up a little more screen space, try to make things a little more clear. But the point being is that we're going to change some of the content that is in there. So one of the things about being able to output that string would be, between releases, if we change that content, that string is going to mean something very different all of a sudden, because our indices are going to change, the amount of heads are going to change, the hairstyles are going to change. So unless we're very additive in the way that we add the indexes, we're always going to basically clobber that data. So once we're in a state that we're actually pretty solid on our data, that would be a better time to do it.

We can also have an internal mapping, too, where we try our best to future-proof it and say, if we're going to change the order of stuff, it won't break it.

Exactly. So for the next release, it knows, okay, well, if they are importing data, that ID 1 is actually ID 4 or whatever we want to do with that.

Okay, so hybrids. So what's super interesting about the hybrids, and what do I mean by hybrid? A hybrid is a resulting head that we can reuse as a source head again. So where it kind of started was what we found when using it, and this was over the course of the last years anyways. What I found when using it is that there's a lot of redundancy within faces, within heads. And you probably even notice it right now that we've got nine male, nine female within the system right now. But of those, for example, on the female side, there's probably four of them that are mostly the same. They're very close to the same, let's say, archetype. So there is some redundancy within there. And what's interesting to see about it is it makes the average head that people end up creating look a little heavier on the sort of Asian, Eastern European kind of side right now.

Okay, I wasn't imagining that. I thought that was me.

No, that's what you noticed. A lot of people kind of look like that. And a lot of that has to do with just the source heads themselves. So what we did in this early iteration, because we didn't want to make this thing wait until halfway through this year. We wanted to get this in front of players. The main reason was we wanted to get that feedback, because we use it all the time.

Yeah, and interacting with it is so key to the actual feature that just seeing the results isn't sufficient.

So the heads within there have some redundancy. So what we want to do instead is make each piece of data that you are sourcing be meaningful in its own way so that there's no redundancy in there. So what we're going to be doing over this next V2 thing is, what we've done is cross all the Squadron heads and everybody. And there's so many benefits to doing it this way. We've archetyped all the heads. So there's a huge mosaic that basically has every single face that we've got. And what we've done is kind of align all the people into their own archetype. So to use an example, I'm almost scared to use it a little bit, but Sandi and Rhona Mitra have a very similar archetype of a face. But then between the two, there might be unique features of each. So what we're going to do within the data sets is, instead of just the nine male and nine female that you've had since the first character creator, it will replace all of those with our hybrids of meaningful data sets. So we'll take the unique ear of that guy, the unique nose of that guy, the unique brow of that guy, all within the same archetype group, and make that a single head.

Yeah, we're distilling it to the extremes so that you can pick between those extremes.

Yeah, exactly. Meaningful data so we don't have redundancy across it. So what it does is it makes it a lot easier to use, because each of the data sources are unique in their own way, and you don't have a lot of redundancy to sort between. And this doesn't mean that we're only going to have four or five heads. Even within that archetype and hybrid approach, the reason we can do this is that I can take very specific features of maybe an actor that we can't use the full likeness of and create that into a hybrid. And that's actually not an issue at all. We're making people that aren't actual people, but are combinations of people. So basically, we're using our own system to source our system, which makes some sense. The other cool part about that is, because we're going to have this ability, it does make a pipeline for us making guys like mission givers or new heads a little bit easier. But what's really cool about it, I think, is an interesting design idea that we're trying to flesh out between myself and Todd and CR. I call it the loopback or the feedback pipeline or the sins of the father kind of idea. Legacy, or heirlooming or something like this. If you create a character within Death of a Spaceman, after you've died a certain amount of times or whatever, you can't respawn and you have to create a new character. But I would love to be able to then source back my original character as a source head within the pool. And this is totally possible because, again, it exists as a combination of those hex values. We feed it back in as a source and then we blend against it. You can only do that so many times, because eventually you will just end up back at the average if you just keep blending, blending, blending. You'll just end up back at the average over time. But I like the option for characters to do that. So I like this concept of, if you were playing the game as a criminal or something like this and you've got a certain amount of reputation, that when you roll your next character, if he's kind of, quote, unquote, the son or your child, some of that reputation comes with you. Because if your dad's a horrible criminal, maybe you start life with a little bit of that, and you have to work against it, or if you just want to make something anew. But I love the idea of being able to source back the player head.

Would we do anything where we could source from different people, from other players? Your head ends up in my pool because of a certain reason.

That kind of goes to the copy-paste of the data. We could absolutely do that, because if you could share the data between players, you could feed that back into your pool. But, and by the way, a lot of this is theorycrafting still. I don't have a plan for that. Hybrids are in. That's happening this quarter. The sins of the father kind of thing is a little bit different.

Yeah, we're exploring all the potential consequences and ways we can really leverage it.

So we've talked about possibly having the gene pool or the head pool basically controlled via the org. So for example, the org could expose all the heads, all the characters that they have within their org as sourcing. It's a dangerous road to tread, though. If they just want everybody looking a certain way or looking a certain type or something like that, they can absolutely do that.

You'd be able to deviate from it, but there's also an element of family or whatever you have to it. Just things to think about. People spending time together.

Yeah, I like the idea of dominant traits sticking around. What if I have a player that has this massive crooked nose and I just never die, and eventually this guy's like 100? Traits stick around in the gene pool.

But that is an idea that has been expressed, that orgs could share individually within there.

It's about having different colored eyes. As far as the asset side of it, I don't see a reason we couldn't support it. I don't think that we do, and I haven't heard of any plans to do so. How do you feel about this, Sean?

I love the word. Again, I'm just like, different eye colors.

It's a pretty rare condition in the world.

It's way more common in animals like dogs and stuff. We already support asymmetry, so it would just be like locking one eye and then...

Yeah, I mean, actually, the helmet thing was a big part of that asymmetry decision, because we supported manipulating your face directly asymmetrically. And that was problematic, because even if you end up with a non-homunculus character, when the helmet morphs to match your face, the asymmetry in the helmet becomes really apparent and problematic.

That's a really polite way to put it. It looks awful. You have a Slaver helmet that looks like a face, and then you have half of it looking like it was melted.

On the material side, which is what supporting heterochromia would need, I don't know if we have anything coming down the pipe for being able to do any manipulations of material at that scale. That would be very similar to how you would handle alterations to eyebrows, makeup, flesh tones.

So we did build this into the character system from the get-go as an option, because I thought eventually we would want this. And actually what I thought eventually we would want would be holographic upgrades and things like that that you would put on one eye, or a contact lens on one eye or something like that. That's your AR lens or robot eye or something. But within the item ports of the character, it's actually split up into left and right eye. We use one of them right now. That's all. And it has the two eyes in it. So the easiest way to do it is actually just to add another set of eyes, and then we zone cull one or the other. So there's actually four eyes, but we're zone culling the opposite ones. And that totally works right now. We can do it. So I think depending on how much people want it, yeah, sure. It's not a nightmarish add, but it's not planned for this quarter.

I want to be able to make Cable from X-Force.

Right. No, that's exactly it. Things like scarification and having any sort of post-manipulation, things like having augmentations or prosthetics, those would all be handled on the asset side at this point. Same as adding a hair, which is a weird way to do it, I'll admit. If you're adding the extra eye in or you're adding a scar or something, it doesn't initially make sense that you would attach that to a person, but that would probably be how.

And then the color is somehow attached to the person, which is fun, too.

That's the sort of abstraction you have to get your head around in order to manipulate it correctly.

It's going to be the same tech as doing different kinds of eyebrows, right?

Yeah, somewhat. And people have probably noticed this anyway, some of the skin tones for the females have makeup built into them. There was this character art pass where they did a makeup pass, basically, against all the heads, so they added some eyeliner, eyeshadow kind of things. But whether that's a separable thing, it's completely up to character art on that front. It's, again, not a huge nightmare to do. We have a great feature within the skin shader to deal with it, but I'm not sure that it's going to be perfect, because the thing we have in the skin shader is really good for tattoos, for decals, for dirt or mud, for face paint, basically.

It doesn't do the blending nearly as well.

Exactly. And it doesn't adapt the specular. So the biggest thing that happens when you put on makeup is you're changing the light reaction on your face. A good example is you put powder on so that you're not as greasy-looking. We don't really have that control. So if we put makeup in, it would look like face paint and not like makeup, because makeup changes the specular reaction of that skin. So we'd have to support that. That's all. So right now, to have a really good makeup, it has to be pretty much painted into the texture itself and not a layer on top. So we would need something like that. So if we do progress on the tattoo front or the face paint front, we'll have to do something in that way. But right now, we wouldn't just put the makeup in, because it would just look like face paint, and it would look like a bunch of game developers thought, what would makeup look like? And we have Joyce Platten here, who is a beauty specialist, let's say. She has podcasts and everything. So we had her come over a couple of times, and we talked through this quite a few times, and we even showed her the decal stuff. She's like, mm-mm. That's not at all what it should look like. Please don't do this. So, yeah. Face paint, yes. Makeup, not really. It's kind of built into the shader, and I know some of the skin tones already have it within there.

Yeah, so that's one of the things that we're trying to do for the V2, to make those decisions less segregated. We want to make it so that you're able to jump back and forth between all the elements that really impact your choices much, much more easily. So we want to bring the skin selection into the same screen as where you're doing a lot of the head selection stuff. That's some of the stuff that we're exploring right now. And yeah, that'll definitely help that process. Because right now, if you want to see what this feature would look like and you start going towards something, like, oh, the skin tone doesn't really feel right anymore, I want to go towards something lighter or darker or different, then you need to navigate away from the thing you were just doing. It's definitely a UX problem.

Yeah, it's like context switching. You totally lost the perfect framed shot of what you thought that person would look like with a different tone.

I mean, V1 of this character customizer with blending is all about how do we communicate how this novel system works to new players. One of the things that was really important is it is not a sculpting system. So we don't want to use any tools that operate similarly to what you might use in ZBrush or Max or anything: I'm going to take this thing and move it over here. That's not how the data works. It's not something that's going to be able to actually get you towards the result that you're expecting from that. And the moment you try to do something and it reacts incorrectly, you immediately have a break of that mental model and you immediately have a bad experience. So step one, not sculpting, we need to communicate that. And then step two was trying to communicate that when you're blending these things, you have the full breadth of choices at every step. So one of the initial things is, we keep showing you the heads, they come in and out and they do all that stuff. Because we felt that it was important to try to get across that when you go to edit the nose, you don't need to be using the same pool of four heads to manipulate that nose that you used for the brows. You can have a unique head selection on every single one of these features and blend them independently. That is a level of control and minutiae that, the feedback has proven, is a little bit beyond what is helpful. So we've sort of keyed in on the thing that worked, the thing that was nice about the way that we set it up, which is trying to make the coarsest, broadest choices early and refine from there. So each choice is how do I get closer to what I'm looking for, instead of how do I identify which thing I need to change. So it's focusing in more on the next step: I want to look more like this guy. I want to look more like this. I want this skin instead. So bringing that into the same panel, making it so that you don't have to go to a different step, is absolutely part of that process of how do I give you the clearest, broadest choice such that you can refine from there.

So for the V2 stuff, what we've talked about a lot is, currently, with the UX and the way that people end up making their characters, we're not feeling like they're actually getting the result that they necessarily want or expect. And a lot of this is experimentation, but rather than being beholden to what your result is, because I think a lot of people play with it, and they'll get to a result that they're kind of happy with, but it kind of takes you there rather than you taking it there, if that makes any sense. In the V2 version of it, that whole mentality is kind of switching, where we'd rather you have very precise, as Calix talked about, ever-increasing complexity controls within it, but get the result that you want out of it a little more directly.

Yeah, if you go into the system with an idea of what you want, we want you to be able to get it. Currently, that's a bit more difficult because you have to sort of comb through the system for the tools that you need. And that was in service of trying to explain this novel system, but it muddied up those choices. And so we're trying to clarify those choices so that they can be a little bit more useful and available when players want to use them.

This is actually something we talked about. And then I was like, all right, that's great. We made a task and it was at the bottom of like 20.

And then Spence goes, Sean, do you want emote animations, or do you want the heads to blend when you press X so it actually goes away? And it's like, we've got to make a call. And I'm like, yeah, I want them to blend. And actually, we tried to get the different animation at the end in time. I don't think we made it.

Oh, that got in. It is in. It kind of cuts to the new animation.

Oh, really? We've got to maybe update the Mannequin blend time. I didn't know it got in, because we did get some animation at the end. Nobody liked the pose that we had at the end, because it was super slouchy. The female looks very slouchy, and with the angle of it, at that FOV and with that perspective, it makes her head look tiny on the body. It does to the male, too, to be fair. It's just more obvious on the female. So short answer is, yeah, we want to get that, but it'll become a priority call once we get closer to the end of the quarter, I'm sure.

Yeah, we wanted to expand the review step with a lot of those sorts of things: checking out your emotes, checking out different loadouts, checking out different lighting situations.

That's right. And I don't know if we've talked about it much, but the example I keep using, and hopefully people recognize it, is the XCOM photo mode, or XCOM 2. When you were making your soldiers, you had this great little photo mode that you could go into, where you could see different attachments on them, put different backgrounds, things like that. That was kind of the mentality around review. We'd also like for V2, and I'm not sure if we put this in the estimate yet, to have the different loadouts. So we'd like to be able to show you guys at the end of that, similar to how other character creators in MMOs generally work, where they like to show you the really, really awesome armor, like endgame, perfect, you've got everything. So I can imagine just having three loadouts within it would be nice. So basically, no clothes, civilian clothes, and awesome armor. So you can just see how your character is going to look with each one of them. I think it would be a nice thing.

That first meeting, we were going in and was like, OK, we're going to do party mechanics, party systems. Sit down in the meeting, we're going to go over everything. All right, Chris, what are we looking for? What's the scope for our initial stuff versus what we want to do? And he's like, yeah, so groups are everything. Everything's a group. And so we're doing everything. And we need to have that foundation. We can't just sort of piecemeal it out to be like, here's the party and we'll integrate it with groups some other time. No, everything's a group. AI's groups. Anything that...

Insurance club membership.

Yeah, that's a group. If your criminality missions, these things will put you into groups. Everything is a group. Groups are groups. Groups of groups are groups. Organizations. Yeah, it's crazy how many things this ended up touching when I was like, oh, I'm going to invite somebody to my party. This is day one. I've got an idea for how... oh, my God. Oh, no. So yeah, it's been quite an undertaking to figure out what all those moving parts would be and how they would sit in for everything.

Yeah, I think in the ATV that we did yesterday, something that I had said is the way to look at the parties and groups and the features that we're working on is sort of two things. They're not separate, they're part of the same whole, but what we're delivering for 3.2 is basically the party system, playing with your friends right now: I invite Ken, I kick Ken because I don't like him, I invite Calix, and you're playing there. And all those simple requests, those things going on. And so what we want to do right now is, all right, let's use this old system, give it some new UI, use mobiGlass, make the player experience better, because that F11 menu is a little nightmarish. Get some F11s in chat.

That was a big part of it, right? You needed all this arcane knowledge to use any part of the system.

Make it more user friendly, attack what we can right now, and with Benoit, build underlying systems that can tackle things like orgs, things like the Insurance Club membership that I brought up before, and all these interesting different features. The cool, fun stuff hopefully we'll get to deliver soon, but we start with: let's address the current problems while building a framework for better things later. Those are the two things.

Now, some variation of this question comes up quite a bit. There's a notion that the trading system is somehow linked to the grouping system, and I don't believe that's the case. Trading system would be more a service beacon kind of thing.

Not quite. It sounds like you have an answer. I'll let you go first.

A little bit. I guess they're only linked in the sense that sending people money and other items and stuff, in my opinion, should be handled using similar aspects of the shop code, which is something else that I wrote. So they're only linked in the fact that I would work on both features. But I do want to see that, because right now there's not an easy way to send aUEC to your friends outside of service beacons. So I want to see a design on my desk to get more shop stuff for trading and sending money and things.

I can already add that we've actually touched on this question on the aforementioned Calling All Devs. And while trading is not actively in the game right now, the initial design step is for it to be an evolution of the service beacon system. I don't remember what episode that was, but you can find all episodes of Calling All Devs available now on YouTube.

It's part of the whole contract concept of: I'm going to create a job and send it out to a particular person and they'll accept that. And then when things conclude, you'll transfer money. That seems to be the core element of it. We had wanted to get mission sharing, reward sharing, all these aspects into the group system. But those, again, start to balloon out into whole systems that are, A, not already set up to think about the party and groups and influence moving around in that way, and B, have a lot of things to test. So it was very much not safe to get that in in the timeline for tier zero, particularly because just getting everything built over to the new system took a fair amount of the time that we had. So I imagine that you'll be setting up essentially a contract and rules for how payment gets distributed among your party, among your group if you have any org dues or something like that. Those would all be individual things that get set up. And the party would just have an umbrella of rules for how to handle most situations that you can then deviate from, to make it as easy to use as possible and also give you the customization that you need.

Correct. Not for tier zero. Yeah, we're trying to make it so that you can even complete a mission based on the party. So even if he has the mission and everybody is there with him trying to get it done, I think that he still needs to be the one to complete the mission in order to get the reward payoff. And so that's one of those issues of: this needs to be dealt with in a deep and holistic way, or else things like that just won't work the way that they're expected to. As far as reward sharing, we were initially thinking maybe we'll just split evenly, but not everybody's going to want to do that. Where are we going to put the options to opt in or out of that system? And it's just not ready yet.

It wasn't a free feature, unfortunately. Something like, and Ken could probably speak a bit more to this, having your vehicle be unlocked for your group members, you could get that in pretty quickly with the systems you already have. We'd probably just have a half-assed solution of trying to get missions to work with groups. So Calix said it best, really: a holistic solution of, this is how the mission code changes to accept multiple people. Like if my friend kills a dude, I killed the dude. Mission success.