Star Citizen: Subscriber's Town Hall w/ Sean Tracy, Josh Herman and Chad McKinney

Not so much the external apps. We're still really focused on core gameplay. So for 3.0, we're working hard to get Item 2.0 systems in with MFDs in game for the ships. And so that's where most of our focus is. And when we get that in a better place, I think we can start to look at some of these other more auxiliary inputs and see what we can do to bring those online. But right now it's just about in-game core behavior.

So just to go on, definitely what Chad's talking about. We've got to work on the sundae, not just the cherry. And sometimes getting it out to things like a flight controller chair, for example, that I can think of maybe a small percentage of players actually have. And it is really easy to focus on the cherry. It is really easy to spend a lot of time on these minor things. Not minor, but maybe not as global as you would want them to be. It's like MFDs in the ships, for example. That's screens that are actually in the ship for all the players that are playing the game. So we've got to focus on that before we focus on these things. But having said that, implementing these kind of features or support for external stuff like flight controller chairs, various different flight stick setups and these kind of things is not a dramatically difficult thing to do. It's just where does it get prioritized into the grand scheme of the game.

So not something that's off the table, just something that we're not ready to dive into yet.

Sure, and maybe I can give a bit of a preview of stuff that's coming along and what's being worked on right now anyways on the Spectrum side. Look at our Spectrum overlay. There's a lot of work going on behind the scenes with the guys that develop Spectrum, as well as our audio engineers, as well as our UI engineers. And we have to get our Spectrum overlay implemented in the game. We've been talking about this for a little while. So the hope from that is that should we get some of the web-based Spectrum stuff overlaid, just sort of like a Steam overlay or something like that within the game, exposing web-based things like that to a tablet or something else is not as difficult as it would be just having the game talk directly to an external iPad or something like this, because all of a sudden you've got a Windows machine needing to talk to some sort of iPad interface and all this. So if we had a Spectrum web-based overlay, we could implement some sort of, not remote controls, but controls into Spectrum that could do things within the game as well as be controlled from the web. So that's kind of a cool thing too.

Yeah, we're still working on them. I think one of the things that we're doing right now for all the assets is making them one-to-one, meaning that everything that the males have, the females have, so that when we finally release them, they're all going to be kind of equivalent. So we're not going to have a massive amount of assets for just the male, and then when the female comes on, there's like two things you can do. And we're actually very, very close to that. As we produce things, we basically make it part of our pipeline now to make it one-to-one. So it's no longer just make the male asset and then be done. We were doing that for a while and that created a really large backlog where you make a costume, you make another costume, make a costume, and all of a sudden you've got 10, 20, 30, 50 costumes and you have to go through them all to make sure that it's one-to-one. And we're actually very close to that, which is really good. But aside from that, we're just kind of waiting for a bigger character release. So we want to do a bigger release where we can bring on full character customization, and that's probably when we'll drop it.

So maybe like a patch where the majority of the content is the character stuff?

Yeah, or at least that would be where a lot of it is dropped. So it's not all going to just be trickled out. I think it would be cooler to have it released in a big chunk and let everybody play with it.

Yeah, and maybe to go just a little bit more into it and why we've gone this route and why you don't see the female player yet: in a lot of games, especially MMO games right now, the main thing they do is just scale the skeleton. I mean, you have the exact same proportions from a male to a female. And this just isn't the case in reality. And something that was dictated very clearly from Chris from the get-go was that female proportions need to be accurately represented. Now, yes, of course, everybody is proportioned a little bit differently, but there is sort of the Adam and the Eve, right? So we literally have two different skeleton rigs. We aren't just scaling a male. We could have given you a female player two years ago if we were going to put that female on the exact same skeleton with the exact same proportions as a male. The problem with that is that you get this very androgynous look where females aren't females in the game. Coupled with that, now because you're on a different skeleton with whole different proportions, think of the armor transition that you have to make. So we've got these undersuits, we've got these medium, light, heavy armors that are on the male. So now we can't just grab them and throw them on the female, because all of a sudden it's all too big. So all of that's got to get reworked, and it's not a massive amount of work, but it's enough that it takes some time. Then because we've got the two different skeletons, the way the implementation in the engine works, you map a whole bunch of animations to a given skeleton. So if we haven't yet finished everything that we are expecting to do on the male, we just start moving that over to the female. And we've got some tools that make this a lot easier for the animators, but we don't have 200 animators to sit here and constantly be reworking the female assets. So once we finish all of the male stuff, it's a matter of transferring all that over. And yes, there will be updates on the male side, but we won't be developing new features that then all of a sudden we have to go collect and apply to the female. So it's a bit of animation. It's a bit of the actual desire for us to have a differently proportioned rig. And a lot of people will say, okay, well, why don't you make that part of the character where you're actually just stretching out arms and making everybody different? This is just not something we wanted to do. We wanted to have a very clear female and a very clear male. But then metrics also come into play, and that's where things get really kind of muddy. A great example of this was we have, of course, the Idris, and within Squadron 42, we have females that sit in chairs. The Idris chairs happen to be really big. For a male that's wearing armor, it looks fine. You sit a female in it with just a BDU or a sweater and stuff, she looks like a kid sitting in a huge seat. So we have to massage all of this kind of stuff so that there is a nice one-to-one between the females and the males.

And originally we had even started, this is crazy, but we had started with something like 12 rigs. We had started with, okay, we're going to have a 150 centimeter guy... I don't even know if that's right, but there was a bunch of different sizes. There was a bunch of different lengths of arms, legs, these kind of things. And slowly we've had to try to rein Chris in a little bit where we're like, okay, well, nobody's really going to notice the two-inch difference between that guy and this guy. But in the end, we got down to at least those two. And yes, we've got good tools to support the thing, but we really need to finish the male completely first. And Josh and I were talking about this a little bit last week, where to give you guys the female player, the first thing we want to give you is the character creator. So let's make a male guy first. Then the second step of that is give you the female. And then the third step of that is give you the actual sculpting and the DNA gene splicing kind of customization. So there's kind of the staged approach that we're going to go at that with.

Oh, absolutely. We have pictures of it, and thanks, Josh helped me a lot on these Faceware marketing images. So I had gone and recruited a couple guys, and I'm like, I need somebody with glasses. I need somebody that's got long hair. I need somebody that's got a beard. So yes, it absolutely works with glasses. Now, it's not perfect. I have seen it go wrong. And was it your glasses?

It's actually my glasses, they're the thicker black ones.

And it's because you have light eyebrow hair and dark glasses, so there have been times where it picks up the top of this. So we've talked to Faceware about this, and a lot of that is on their tracking side. But yes, it works with glasses, works with beards.

Mark McCall was doing it, Mark wears glasses.

Probably not sunglasses.

No, it can't work, it just won't pick up your eyeballs. That's the whole thing. But beards like Jared's are a little bit trickier too, because what it can't see is the lips. And if it can't see the lips, that's when it loses a face. And so people are aware too, when you do a performance capture with an actor, and this is generally where this tech comes from, you get them to shave if you can. I mean, there was a neat thing with Mark Hamill where we couldn't get him to shave when we were doing that thing just because of some other movie. So some people can't, but we have to adjust that accordingly. But yes, it works with beards, glasses. It's going to sound weird the way I say this, but it works with smaller children as well. My daughter is six years old. Put her in front of that, it picked her up, no problem. I was actually pretty impressed with that working so well. And it was fun for her to pull faces.

So do we need to get beard rigging in so we can get beard tech?

Yes, and actually, that's one of the things that's really slowing us down on the gene splicing thing, is facial hair, big time. Because we have to adjust the skin weight at runtime, and that's just something that we've never really had to do before, and it's not easy. If you know how to reapply dual quaternion skinning in real time, then we'd be good.

This is a question for me. We are currently working on updating the ship matrix right now. John Crewe, head of the ship design team in the UK, is dedicating a considerable portion of his time to making sure that we have all the latest information on all 106 of our ships and variants that have been announced. Kaitlyn, me and John Crewe have been living lists for the last couple of weeks. Our intention is to have this for you in the next month or two. So we're full steam ahead. It's a lot of data entry and a lot of double checking and triple checking. And sometimes you think you have it and then you look at it like, well, wait, this doesn't make sense. Why is this one bigger than this one? This ship should be more powerful. So you have to go through it. It's a lot of error correcting.

Do we have a tool for that? I mean, it sounds to me like... oh, sorry. I'm doing my job all of a sudden.

That's part of what we're doing. We're developing the tool. We need to know the full breadth of everything that has to go in there. We're still building the base matrix. And then we have a spreadsheet, and then we have a tool that'll basically go...

I'd hate to see somebody manually copy it.

But we still need to make sure it's one-to-one, all the options are available. Just yesterday, we were having a big conversation on missile rack sizes and how the sizes should apply to missile racks and not missiles. So we're changing that up. So you're going to see the sizes of missile racks as opposed to the sizes of the missiles.

Two stages of sizes?

Yeah, basically. Like many things in Star Citizen, it's getting complicated and very in-depth. But we are actively at work.

Yeah, it's still in development. Whenever I fly with it in game right now, I can definitely tell that there's some turbulence that's being applied to it. It does feel different than in space flight. I don't work on IFCS directly, so I can't comment about the directions that we're planning on taking it, but it's definitely in development. Actually, John is in Germany right now talking with the physics guy, John Pritchett. I mean, one of the reasons why he's there is to work on AI, but another reason is to get the big physics guys together and figure out how to better integrate IFCS into the physics engine. And so a lot of that is turbulence and things like this. But right now it does do some turbulence simulation.

At Gamescom, when we did the Gamescom show floor livestreams, our three backer guests were three of the very first Star Citizens that got to play with the new 3.0 model. That's a lot of what they're referring to. And we had that whole day before we went live to practice. And they remarked considerably throughout the day: it looks similar because that's what IFCS is supposed to do. IFCS is supposed to compensate for things like the turbulence and everything. But it felt different. It's like, no, this is different. I'm having to use twitch maneuvers, twitch actions more often. So there was a distinct difference in the way that it handled. If it looked similar, that was by design at that time, because that's what IFCS is doing. Now, we talked earlier about something that might be interesting: to see what happens when IFCS is firing all the different thrusters. How different is that going to be when those thrusters start to be damaged and then the turbulence and the rain and the snow start affecting you?

Especially once you start trying to react and move. It's not going to move like it would if it was just in space. There's going to be some different reactions. So yes, it will be different.

Sure, and weather and wind. So they had asked a little bit about IFCS and wind and these kind of things, and you had mentioned it pretty well. So if you're sitting up in space, you can see the IFCS working. Basically, if you take a look at all the 30-some-odd thrusters that are sitting around the ship, they're all adjusting. They're making it so that you're always stable. When you get into atmosphere, all of a sudden, because gravity is pulling down on it, you'll see all the bottom thrusters are sitting there pounding out thrust so that you're not actually falling down in gravity. If you shut off IFCS, all of a sudden, you're going to hit the ground. So I think some of the things that we have to do is, one, I don't know if it's being affected by the unified wind that is on the planets now. The planetary guys had to work on a brand new wind simulation. We had to get rid of all the stuff that was in CryEngine before, because obviously it assumed a 2D plane, right? And the problem is we had to, Marco calls it, spherize the wind, or basically get it to convolve around a sphere so that it still has a direction, but it's not a direction in world space, it's a direction on the zone instead. So as soon as we have wind strong enough that it will overtake the strength of the IFCS, that's when you'll really see it. But I'm sure you can get that effect just like you said. If you hop out of your ship or somebody has damaged any of your thrusters or anything, you're going to get that feeling. And again, it's more of a feeling thing rather than an actual visual effect.

And of course, it's a good time to add the standard disclaimer there. 3.0 is the very first iteration of this. Like any other system in Star Citizen, it is very likely to continue to iterate, not just with your feedback, but with our own feedback and as additional features and systems come online.

It's what we want. I mean, that's the whole reason this thing's still in alpha. We need the feedback. We want to know what the players like, what they don't like, and what they think should change. And then, if Chris agrees, then they'll happen.

Yeah, sure. That's the biggest thing we're looking at right now. So there's a lot of work going on between Chris Bolte, I've talked about him a little bit before, as well as Carsten, some of the core engine guys in Frankfurt, as well as the Faceware engineers. One of the things is they haven't implemented it into a game that would be going multiplayer in this exact way. So one of the biggest problems with it was the amount of threads that Faceware actually kicks up. It's a lot of threads that we can't actually manage directly.

They're hardware threads. They're not managed by our job system.

Our job system, exactly. So one of the biggest things that we're doing is giving them an interface to our job system so that we can control those threads instead of them just spinning up exactly as they want. Now, we showed it in the demo with about 12 players, so we were actually pretty happy with the overall performance. What we didn't like was the scaling of said performance. It's not about the consistent level of performance, because if we were always running at 60 hertz and everything was going well, then no problem. What we really needed to do was load balance, and that's really what the job manager is about. How much stuff is happening in the world at that one time? And what should we be dropping off the job system to get that performance back? So I can imagine that people would not be very happy with saying, oh, well, I'm running at 20 FPS, I can't shoot this guy, but my face looks good. That's not going to fly, of course. So that's one of the biggest things that we're doing. So there is overhead to it. It's not a massive amount, and it really, really depends right now on the frame rate that you're capturing at. So we really want a 60 hertz capture, but that costs us one and a half, two milliseconds right now, which is not a huge amount. But if you're looking at a 60 hertz game, you're talking about having 16 milliseconds for the whole thing. So if we've already taken one-eighth of that, right? That's a lot of frame time.

A lot of gameplay programmers are very sad.

That's it, exactly. Saying, oh, two milliseconds is nothing. But for a feature like that, we still know that this feature is going to cost performance, and that's why it's always going to be an optional thing for the players. I can't imagine that a hardcore player is going to care what his face looks like. He's not really going to be worrying about it. So those are going to be options that are, of course, presented to the player, should you want to enable that stuff, just like high-end graphics effects. Again, a hardcore player really doesn't care that he's got shadows in the fog versus having 60 hertz. So it's not massive, but there is a performance draw to it. And nothing comes free. I mean, that's kind of the thing.

You mentioned the load balancer. What an important feature that's never seen, because by design, you're not supposed to see it.

Well, and to be honest, just to explain it, even me at my level, I have a hard time grasping exactly what's going on with it at all times. Even talking to Christopher Bolte, some days he'll just go off on a tangent and I'm like, I have no idea. So it's really quite complex what goes on there. And yeah, it is interesting if you can ever get them... But I mean, everybody's eyes will be crossed at the end of it for sure, because it's been a big thing of his for a long time.

I'm going to make the artists deal with it.

I think a lot of it is going to be handcrafted. I think there will be a procedural element to it, but I think a lot of that's going to be helping create variants of those initial handcrafted versions. We'll be able to do things where we can swap out maybe different heads or different arms or different tails or different appendages or whatever that is. But just like we're doing with our landing zones, our landing zones are also handcrafted. So I think that the creatures or fauna, whatever you want to call them, the wildlife should be the same. So it's going to be handcrafted, a lot of it. And part of it is I don't want it to look like Spore. Spore has some really cool tech in it, but it has some really bad looking creatures in it too, to be frank, right? It's obviously a game where the players are making them, right? But whenever you procedurally generate stuff, you're going to have stuff that's going to look bad versus weird or versus distinct. Something can look distinct and maybe not look great, or it can look weird and not be appealing.

I think another thing as far as procedural tech goes is without artist input, a lot of times you just get a homogenous look. And it's just all kind of centered around the mean. You just get this group look, and yeah, there's some variations, but nothing has a lot of character. It's not compelling.

Exactly. And that's kind of what I was saying with the landing zones too. If we have a landing zone that's very specific, we can use other properties like Star Wars, which is probably the most iconic for a lot of people, where you've got Hoth, and Hoth has Tauntauns and other things that are going to be on it. It's got Wampas, right? And then you've got Endor, and it's got its own kind of thing. And then you've got Tatooine, it's got its own thing. And we want that. We don't want to just say, let's just randomly generate things on each one of these planets and just see what happens there.

And I think a lot of that comes down to the workflows of creating those things. So the reason that's not really even something that most people would consider as possible is because usually the amount of time that it takes to make one of these things, it takes a while. So if you can work on tools, you can work on systems for the asset creation, for the content development, you can usually scale the power of having the handcrafted input. If you can put auto-rigging systems in place, if you can put really simple interfaces to animation and these kind of things, have good behavior systems from Subsumption, you can scale up that content pretty well. But we won't go the full procedural route, because ultimately we have our directors here for a reason and they need to have the input on those specific creatures, and we won't end up with a T-Rex with alligator legs and whatever else.

Well, I got some funny stories from this, definitely, even when we were doing the screenshots. But I guess QA at Gamescom had some of the same problems. So somebody was chewing gum, and they had asked the Faceware representatives that we had there, what's wrong with the guy's face? He's just sitting there animating. And they're like, well, you're chewing gum. And the guy looks like he's chewing gum.

I had that when Forrest was working on the helmet lights. It was enabled, and he was eating a snack while he was working. I was like, what's going on with this guy's face? And he was like, oh, yeah, the guy's chewing. I was like, you're chewing.

So the answer is it does what your face is going to do. I mean, sometimes when you bring your hand up to scratch it or whatever, it'll lose the calibration, or lose the tracking anyways, for those few seconds. But basically, Gamescom was a really good thing, to get QA in front of it that hadn't really been specifically trained on it, because then we saw all the player-facing stuff that we absolutely need to put in, because they got in there and they can't just open the console and know, oh, here's all the CVars to adjust it and everything. So one of the big player-facing things is, yeah, pause. Stop capturing for a minute, I'm going to scream or I don't know. Maybe when it pauses, put it into an idle animation.

Yeah, it's essentially a mute. Basically it's a hit button.

But there's other options that we're talking about too. One, do I want to be sending? I could enable, disable that separately. Two, do I want to be receiving? That's something that will probably default to on, because most games will usually default their VoIP or those kind of systems to on at the first run, because you'll be walking around in the 'verse and you see a guy reacting, it's like, oh, what's that? I want to go enable that. But you don't necessarily want to enable the webcam capture right out of the gate. Because if somebody doesn't know about it... and we had this experience when somebody was kicking up their editor, their webcam was turning on, and they freaked out. They're like, who's watching me work? And I told them, I just want to see their faces, they're hitting different bugs, and I want to see the reaction as they work. That wasn't at all what it is. So we don't send the video data, of course. We just have these little tiny bits of data.

It's something we're definitely thinking about, but right now we're not really planning to implement that. Part of it is the fidelity aspect, especially when you get into things like black eyes and bruising and cuts and stuff like that. You need to make it look good, especially with the quality of our assets. If we come up with a solution that's not going to look good, I don't think we're going to implement it. Otherwise, it's a lot of time invested into something that's maybe not worth it. When it comes to damage states on armor, it's definitely something worth thinking about. I know even the audio team is able to recognize something that's cloth versus something that's leather and metal. But as far as being able to put a bullet hole through something, that's significant asset and geo changes.

Also performance issues. So for the ships, for instance, we have these things called damage maps, which allow us to use shader tech to get really cool procedural damage applied to the hull. So you can see holes, you can see burns and stuff, but it's incredibly expensive. And to a certain point, it's fine. You put it on the ship, so it's okay. But if all the characters, all the items, all these things in the world have it, we're going to just kill our performance. So putting it on every single armor piece is probably overkill. So we need to figure out some kind of happy medium for these things. Maybe that's just... we have this thing called a wear and dirt shader that we can use. So as something becomes damaged, it can look maybe more burnt out.

I was just going to say that's something we're playing with now. We're actually getting adjustments to that later to add additional features to it. And so that would be wear and dirt and age, which are the three that we're going to start looking at, because those are all separate. And that can be a good, I wouldn't say substitute, but at least while we progress and see if it's something we really want to advance into, it'll work in kind of the same way.

Yeah, and that's actually how all of our assets are made now. The way I usually say it is they're on the showroom floor. So they're going to be super shiny, super pristine, no flaws in them. That's kind of how we build most of them. They can either get dirt, which is walking around in dirt or dust or soil or whatever like that, and that will accumulate dust on it or a dirty effect. Wear is essentially chips, or being used, or being dinged or banged up against something. That's what that is. And then age... sorry, just to go back, wear also usually shows materials underneath the layer. So think of car paint: if you chip off your car paint, it's metal or fiberglass or something like that underneath. So that is essentially what damage is. And then age is a separate element to that, which is, again going back to a car, if you leave a car out in the sun for a couple of years and it just gets sun bleached, it changes the color of it, but it still affects the same material. So all of our assets are already built to do that. But when it comes to the additional elements like burning or things like that, that's something we're not totally into right now.

And to that point, I'll say from a game code perspective, I've already worked on something called degradation, which is maybe not going in 3.0, but there's already been a significant amount of work towards it, where we can have things age over time and that will not only impact the way they look, but it'll also impact their behavior. So if you have a power plant and you use it a lot over hours of gameplay, it's going to be a less performant power plant than the new one that you bought. And if it takes some damage, it also performs less. It'll actually age faster if you overheat it and stuff like that. It's an active place in development that we're working on, and I think post 3.0 it's going to see a lot more attention.

It's important. Exactly what's happening here is that it's bringing the game code and the art together. On Josh's side, it is a single material. What's cool is it's all shader effects that they actually apply. It's not a whole separate material, it's all just parameters within a shader. So what these have got to tie into on the game code side is those parameters. So he's got to drive them from some sort of persistent game code function that's saying, how long has this thing lasted in the universe? All these sort of rule sets that go into that. So that's step one before we even consider doing damage on the characters, because we want to at least implement what we've done the art for already. And if we can get awesome stuff like UV2 shader damage on the character, that's great. But like Chad had described, that's a render target for every single one.

And essentially, as soon as you add a second UV set, it's almost doubling the cost of your character. So that's why we want to get the wear and dirt in first, because you already have that. And because it's all, like Sean was saying, in parameters, it's the same cost as the default character, so there's no difference in performance.

We want as many people to be able to gather in one place as possible. If the choice is between 20 people, I'm just pulling a number, with damage shaders that can gather, or 40 people with just the wear and tear, we're going to choose the 40.

Yeah, and that's a real thing we think about all the time. Every time we want to add a new piece of something on the character, or we want to add another attachment to the character, that's performance. So how do we maximize the amount of stuff that we can put on, increase the visual fidelity, the customization, all that kind of stuff, but also have as many players in as possible?

And workflow. Workflow is key. And again, because it's in one material parameter, it takes way less time to author that and then take advantage of it from the gameplay side. But we've got a lot in Star Citizen that we've not yet taken full advantage of, and it just takes time.

I think going back really briefly, it is cool because all of it is gameplay elements. Wear and age can all affect your items independently, too.

Yeah, it's a visual read on a gameplay element, which to me is always the most important thing. And we're using that on our outposts already. And to make it even better, what we want is different types of dirt and wear depending on if you've been on Daymar for a certain amount of time; then you're going to have more of the yellow sand stuff versus being on a snowy planet or something like that.

I think it's also going to add a really cool element to character customization, which I don't think a lot of other games have done, which is persistence with your item. So like you were saying, Jango to Boba: those items on Boba Fett are way more worn and they're way more aged too. It's two separate things. He's had that for a really long time. And so you'll be able to see players who have had stuff in the game for a long time, and it'll be a different look than even somebody who just purchased it from a shop, which will be super cool.

All right, so yes, I love mechs. Mechs is a big thing. Titan is kind of a mech-ish sort of thing. It's more of a battle suit kind of structure. But you've got to know how this last one went. So Josh specifically concepted a 3D concept, a proper high-poly model, and we gave it to the riggers, and we put it all together, and it was like 120 different pistons and things like this, all runtime rigging. It was very, very cool, except for when it held the weapons. So, of course, Steve, the animation director, had some input on this, because we want it to look a certain way when you're in the Titan suit and you're holding these weapons. And the way this 3D concept worked was the weapons went at the end of the arms. So then you would hold them forward, right? So it would look cool, and it could be down with your elbows down like this or even out a little bit. But the design currently is that it can carry ship size one or sometimes size two, I'm not even sure if that's a thing. But even a ship size one weapon... and so everybody knows, most of the ship size one weapons are like a meter and a half, two meters long. They're real big. So the issue here is a hallway will easily defeat a Titan. You will end up with the guns out in front of you, and I think we measured it was like 15 feet of distance from the back of the Titan to the front. He couldn't turn in the hallways. It just did not work with the metrics of the game.

Yeah, the turning radius of having any weapon out and then spinning around, the radius of that was massive.

And people have obvious answers, I'm sure, where they're like, oh, okay, well, just mount them on the shoulders and all that. Yeah, totally. But we've got other stuff to do, too. So we had a small sprint around that. We spent a little bit of time. We figured out a bunch of things. And so we'll revisit it again when we need it. But yeah, it is an important asset. We will be doing it. It's just the first design implementation happened exactly as you would expect.

But it did bring up a lot of really good design questions, which is like, okay, if we want this look, if we want this size and this feel, where can the suit go? Can it go into rooms? Can it fit into a ship? Is it supposed to fit into a ship? Is it cargo in a ship or does it just walk in? Those are all questions that were kind of thought of, but it wasn't until you saw, this is what it should look like on a guy, and now you put it next to other elements, and you're like, okay, we need to maybe adjust things.

It's an iterative thing, and you don't see these things until you get it in situ. I don't think the concept necessarily is going to change that much. It's actually quite cool, and already the ideas that Josh has come up with, trying to reduce that size so that we can actually move around in our hallways and ships and these kind of things, are really good. And it is interesting... I don't know how much we've talked about it, but there's a frame... Well, it is in the future, and we can talk a little bit about it, but I don't know. Do you want to?

We don't have to. I think we save it for a special reveal later.

Let's save it for a special reveal. So it's cool, though, anyways. And it's big. It's tall. It was cool to see it next to the Vanduul as well, with the human right next to it, because you would jump in the game and have the Titans in front of you, and it was pretty intimidating, actually. And that's the idea. It's meant to be intimidating. It's a shock trooper.

Well, we talked a little bit about the dirt and wear stuff, so that's a visual tell. Maybe it'll have something to do with degradation, so there'll be a gameplay element to that. I'm sure visibility would play a big part in that. A lot of these are conjectures. Could something like snow slow down character movement? Sure. I mean, we have different zero-G kind of movement, so I don't see why snow couldn't slow it down.

I mean, we have different movement for the different gravities on the planets. So if anything, we could just start with it being some kind of gravity modifier on the movement.

And I mean, some of the obvious things that we'll do are probably things with the gas component anyway. So what the mix of the atmosphere is, if it's a storm that carries with it some kind of noxious gas, or whether there are real hazards within that storm, is yet to be seen. Let's get you guys flying around the planets first and then we'll see how much harder we need to make it for you.

They're probably talking about our suborbital catch and release thing. If you're caught in the planet's gravity and you eject, there's no way for you to survive at the moment. So we know nothing's in 3.0 for that. We've stated there are no parachutes or anything in 3.0. But does anybody know about the plan for later patches?

I haven't heard, but I'm not on the player team, so I'm not as plugged into the future designs for that team.

Yeah, superhero landing and jetpacks.

They've asked about some parachute stuff on the environments, but those are for sitting on the ground and going in the wind. So I'm not sure if we have ideas for parachutes and those kind of things. But you have a thruster pack, a jetpack maybe, but then again, that's not even close to strong enough to stop you from falling at 187 miles an hour.

I think the thing that it's safe to commit to is that we won't leave it [like that].

No, definitely not. And again, considering games like Crysis 1 had a parachute in it, it wouldn't be a dramatic departure to put one in. But again, it's just a priority thing, but I bet you that'll become a much higher priority the minute you guys are jumping out of ships and splatting on the ground. So you show us how important it is. Well, yeah, don't jump out of a perfectly good ship. But yeah, Steve has mentioned this a million times. He even did a bunch of the motion capture for the Crysis 1 stuff, where there's a bunch of skydiving rolls and these kind of things that he wants to do. Again, it's just a matter of priority. And again, everything we add on the animation side delays the female, so we want to keep doing that.

I'm going to avoid the ETA, but there is a feature team around it right now that's working on it. And again, our plans are very staged in the approach. Stage one is not going to be a Black Desert or a GTA-level sculpting and this kind of stuff. The first step literally is just to get you guys to select the items that you want your character to represent. So that means, I think we said, nine faces, a couple hairstyles, a couple eye colors. Because what we have to solve with that, and there's nothing super complex, but we have to do it, is we have to write all this to your persistency. And we have to also figure out how many different character slots you have on an account, because there's been talk of that. Is a ship package a character slot, or do multiple ship packages give you multiple character slots?

It's just to meet up with all the future work, right?

Those fundamentals are so important to address before you're molding your guys' nostrils and these kind of things. We have to get the proper persistency in place. So I really, really hope that this is very soon, but it depends on how well this feature team goes. We, of course, have a goal to get this out to you as soon as possible, even in just the simple selection set of hair, eyes, face, and just selection of a bunch of different ones. Once we have that, female comes next, hopefully. If the female doesn't come, then we go straight to sculpting. But yeah, so first step that, then females, and then sculpting.