Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - Bringing Characters to Life

Yeah, they will and they can. Let's talk about the armor we have right now, light, medium, and heavy. Each one of those allows for different ports. So I was going to have Gage speak about item ports, but generally what it means is you can put on more stuff, if you wanted to talk about that for a bit.

Oh sure, and also this goes heavy into design too, which is kind of outside of our team. A lot of what we'll do is implement what design wants to do with these clothing or armors and then we kind of make that happen. So like you said with item ports, or even maybe speed variations. In this one it says speed, so if you have certain armors, obviously you're not going to run as fast, or maybe it'll be an enhanced armor, maybe you could run faster. Especially with clothing. But yeah, so absolutely. Clothing will affect you. How drastic that will be, I think, is still in the works. It's up for debate. We test it out.

Yeah, there's nothing that stops you from essentially having your clothes have stats, letting you put other things on top of your clothes.

Which is currently in the game. How far we take that, though, is still being proven.

I would treat it as a classic alpha, a 0.1 kind of thing. We've talked about DNA many times, and questions like that or features like that. And I think the challenge is there's a lot of work that goes into that, not just on the art side, but also on the technical side, on the optimization side. How heavy is it to run something like that? There's network issues now where somebody goes across. I don't want to talk about that too much because that's just explaining some of the issues we have to work through, but it comes down to: do we as a company, providing for the backers and fans and players, wait for all that to come out so we can roll it out as one big thing, or do we get some easy wins out of the way and say, you know what, this isn't the final that we want it to be, but it's enough that we can start fulfilling and playing, and also learning for ourselves. If we were to roll out the final iteration, there would maybe be a lot of problems we could have caught early on. So releasing those early is better.

Definitely an advantage in terms of seeing some problems early that we solve now. Like the neck seam, we went over this a little bit in the interviews. The neck seam problem, while we could have solved it later, finding it now allowed us to then solve problems on the female as well. And then the techniques to solve that will be carried over, and now we know what to do. So going forward, when we have more assets, more aliens maybe, we know how to solve this problem.

I was just going to say, it's a lot easier to fix problems on the base level. When we release the full product and you have a large amount of stuff, we're going to be like, I don't know where to put things, I don't know what's causing this issue. But when we start off with a small package, you can start focusing on those base issues and then we just stack on top of it. So it's a smoother transition to the final product.

It's building blocks for a lot of things, everything from the items to how the items interplay, making sure that you're seeing other people's characters in the same way that you're seeing your own. We're looking at things like icons, we're looking at UI. So it's not just getting that small thing, it's a bigger set of things.

And the entitlement tech, too. We got a lot of that out of the way, which is really nice. Persistence. There's a lot of things that happen. Doing that on the small side was much better.

Right now, no, because of the way that the system is set up, the hierarchy of where items live. We could potentially build one that's specifically for armor, but it would be difficult to transition the states.

Maybe an ultra-light classification of armor?

Yeah, it depends on what the base model would be to fit under, stuff like that. I think we could potentially find a way to make it work on certain sizes. So like you're saying, light armor but no medium armor.

Undersuits maybe, because we have the Atom suit. Undersuits we could probably do pretty easily. It's just the heavy.

But it is something, I mean, I think a lot of people want that. We're just trying to figure out how to do it, how to do a lot of those rule-of-cool things. How do we do those things without having to make a ton of assets, a ton of work to support it?

Also, I understand a duster on top of the armor thing. It looks cool in our heads, but when we're making an MMO, we have to make sure that duster fits on all the armors in that category. That's when things start to get a little strange. Imagine if we had to make a duster for every single asset.

I've been working on the Titan suit. So I did spend time working on the Titan suit: the movement, requirements, the abilities, what it can do, what it can't do.

I think you've been working on some very cool stuff for our favorite adversarial alien race.

Oh, I can't say. So I have been working a lot on the Vanduul, just different variants of it, what the culture of the Vanduul is. We all know generally what they look like, but what the culture is.

With concepts, if you're a subscriber, you can go to your Subscriber Vault and you can see a variety of concepts for a lot of things, for different ships and whatnot, that don't actually ever make it into the game. A big part of the concepting phase is not just finding the things you do want, it's discovering the things that you don't want. I'll go by Jeremiah's desk and I see him working on a fat Vanduul. Again, there's no guarantee that's going to make it into the game. It's an exploration.

Sometimes when you're going through the concepting and ideation process, no's are way more important than yes's because it pushes you in a direction.

Chris is an incredibly visual person, so sometimes he needs to see something before he knows he doesn't want it. Sometimes we have to show him a thing before he goes, no, I don't want that.

For concept, I like to view it like it's not just, hey, make this suit and I just make one suit. I like to cast a wide net. I normally do, I think this is what Josh wants or this is what Chris wants. And then I tweak it a little bit further, and then I go toward Crazy Town. Normally on the third or fourth iteration, it's like, what about this crazy bug-like looking thing, right? And sometimes that's the one Josh and Chris like, and I'm like, oh really? Okay. But I like to cast a general net so that Josh and Chris would have multiple options. And if they like one idea, they'll be like, that's a really cool idea, and they'll flesh it out even further. So my job is to present options. So that's why the fat Vanduul.

For everybody in Twitch chat going, 'sick, fat Vanduul confirmed': no, that's not how concept works. What about you, Gage?

For the things that I'm working on, it's sort of on the back burner, but the cow creature from Hurston. It's not our priority, but I like to work on that whenever I get a chance. And that's funny, because it's just jiggly and full of eggs and stuff. It's not pleasant to look at.

The female model itself is done. A lot of the assets and clothes for it are already done. We're just kind of waiting to make sure that everything else that is dependent on it is ready. Like you were saying, dependencies are a big part of it. So we were talking about animations and things like that, and AI, and all these other areas that the female is going to have to be in. That's a big part of it. So on the character art team side, what we're trying to make sure is that when everything else is ready to go, we can have as much one-to-one with what the male will have. If you're buying shirts, you're buying clothes, you're buying armor, whatever it is that you're getting, you have the same equivalent for the female. So, like Gage was saying earlier, problems that we've figured out on the customizer for the male, now we're obviously going to start addressing for the female, and we already have. But yeah, we're just kind of gearing up and making sure that we're ready when it's released, that it's got a full suite of stuff with it.

Silhouettes are the biggest thing for me. You can do a lot of crazy things with different kinds of silhouettes. But we also have to consider movement, the anatomy of the body, so we can't just go crazy, right? So it's a lot of research, and trying to stay away from generic reference, like body armor, where you're just like, oh, I'm just going to do another one of those. Getting references from outside sources, like maybe nature or just some weird pattern that you've seen, as an inspiration to come up with new shapes. But for me, silhouette is the biggest driving force to come up with different ideas on the human body. And you can come up with some crazy, crazy things. And then normally when I do something crazy, I walk over to Gage's desk and apologize to him. I'm like, I'm sorry, you've got to rig this, man. You've got to skin it. So be ready.

So if I'm understanding you correctly, what you're talking about is designing armors and clothes that change the silhouette of the same static character in order to provide the appearance of variety.

Armors do a great job of that, especially when you go from, let's say, the base male to light, medium, and then you go to heavy. There's some intense shape changes that still work pretty well.

It takes some time. If it's super simple, Gage is like, eh, it's all right. The thing I really appreciate about Gage is that you rigged the Heavy Marine.

Yeah, that thing physically does not make any sense.

The first one. I remember when that asset was being passed to Gage.

This is with almost all sci-fi things. If you really think about it, no way. It's all metal moving around. How does that happen? Science. Future science, dude.

It's a good thing, though. The thing I love about Gage is he's always a go-getter type of personality, where he's just like, all right, I'll try. And then he really goes at it. And he's done a lot of successful skins and rigs for it.

And he's worked together with me on that very well. So usually I'll give back a little bit of feedback and be like, OK, we can kind of make this work, we just need a little push right here, we get some overlapping in the middle. And then it all comes together. And honestly, it's a great learning experience. Even when you work on things that shouldn't work, that's when you kind of learn the most. You make them work and you figure out ways to make them work. And you make it look good and it's just like, man, this is great.

Actually, I want to mention, on the infinite: it's infinite in the sense that there's only a certain amount of decimals you can break down per blending between characters, so a lot.

What this question is referring to is we have demonstrated on ATV, and I think in one of our presentations, the DNA blending. What we want to do is, through sliders and everything, be able to take many of our face rigs and morph between those. That is still ultimately the goal.

Absolutely. That tech is already in, and we're just kind of experimenting with a lot of different ways to implement it, how we want to implement it. For example, one problem that we encountered with DNA, or using something like DNA, is all the different kinds of face shapes you can make. Not meaning open and closed face shapes, but everybody has their own head shape, everybody has their own skull shape. So now when we're talking about things like in the Creator or in your PMA, putting on different helmets, different heads don't fit in different helmet sizes. Or if you put one hair on top of a head, it might look good, and on other ones it will clip through or look bad.

Glasses was an interesting one. They started to morph on the face.

They actually did a pretty good solution to solve that. We have a segment on the solution coming; you want visuals on the fixes. The thing that they have done to fix that allows the DNA, all the head shaping, and allows the helmets to kind of low-key adjust to the different head shapes, and allows goggles to sit properly.

DNA's going great. It has just encountered a lot of technical problems. With cost, too.

CPU cost and making it efficient is the biggest thing, probably, at the moment. Don't want to slow people down.

I think I would break the question into two sections. First, if you want to be a character artist, and second, if you want to be a concept artist. A concept artist is mostly dealing in just the visual side, so you're going to be doing stuff like potentially a 2D painting, so you're not going to need to know necessarily how it moves. You're not going to have to know as much on the 3D side. Obviously, if you do, it's really helpful, like Jeremiah does, and he can get into 3D and block stuff out, and that's great. And then if you want to be a character artist, you absolutely need to know modeling stuff. Knowing anything about animation is going to be helpful, because that's basically one of the next teams that your work will go to. So depending on the job that they're shooting for, the requirements are different.

Because there is a way to model very responsibly, versus adding a lot of polygons in areas where it doesn't need that much. For instance, you would need a lot of geo right here because there's a lot of movement right here. But putting a lot of geo, let's say here, where there's not as much movement, that would be very irresponsible. So knowing where to place polygons is very important.

That's an important skill in every aspect of game development. There was a version of the Freelancer, not the version of the Freelancer that's there now, but remember the one that had all the tiny little rivets?

Every screw was 900 polygons.

Every single rivet in the Freelancer was 900 polygons. That Freelancer had a bigger resource footprint than the Idris. Ships have come a long way. We were learning how to build ships.

That was more of an alpha ship because, just to shorten the process of what happened there, literally the concept art was taken and put into the game for alpha purposes.

We had a door that was one million polys before, a long time ago. One million polys for a single door. And there were four doors in the level. So four million polys.

Actually, to break down what we're talking about too, what Jeremiah was mentioning with the flow of polygons and geometry would be called topology. So clean topology is very important for a character artist when working with animators, but less so for a concept artist.

I don't give a crap. Because for me, at the end of the day, it's make pretty picture good.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, there's two trains of thought, right? You can either say, just like in real life, if you go to a store, you're only going to be able to buy what they have available. So in a way that's like dyeing, because you can say, oh, I'm going to pick whatever color I want it to be from what's available, or maybe I need to go somewhere else to get it. Then the other option is: I bought something and I want to paint it or change it to a different color, which becomes a little bit more complicated, because you're talking about customization of that piece, which means they're going to be changing the shader itself, which means you need a front-end UI and all that fun stuff. Or you can give them the option, which is similar to what other games have done, where it would choose a different color variant that already exists.

Like a dye pack.

You buy a dye pack and it's just blue and black, rather than you going around and flying somewhere and buying the blue and black one when you have the orange one. So color variants in general, we're pushing for a lot, because we want to add a lot of variation to the existing assets that we already have. So all the clothes, all the armor.

Like the gold executive.

Yeah, exactly. That kind of stuff is really fun. I think there's twenty variations of that suit. I think we've only released a couple. The Explorer suit, the deck crew suit. There's a bunch. There's like 20 of each. We're definitely working on that, and I think it's more on the design side: how does the player choose it?

Just to add on there so that everybody understands, it's definitely something that we're interested in, but it's not something that's on the schedule. It's not something that you're going to see in 2018. It's not something that we know precisely how we want to implement, if we want to. As anybody who's ever played an MMO before knows, cosmetic features are also one of the ways that a game can monetize and stuff. So there's a lot of options that have to be explored there. So we're not committing ourselves to any path one way or the other. But it is definitely something that I think we can all agree would add greater variety to the verse.

And it is mostly in there too. It's really just the implementation that we're figuring out. And what might be interesting to people too is, on top of just having the colors, the metrics that design wants to get from players using those colors. It's something we're still thinking about. Let's say, with all the people in the verse, how many people actually wanted the red version? How many people wanted the gold version? And then they can use those metrics to improve the player experience.

As an avid MMO player myself, the meme that's been going around for a couple of years now: endgame is always glamour. For all MMOs, it's always glamour. You beat the raid boss, but I want to look pretty with the raid armor.

From sketches to approval, it depends on what that asset actually is. I've done some which have taken maybe two, three days. I've done one actual Squadron character in eight hours before. They're like, we need it now. But it was a very simple character. It wasn't something complex. But some concepts or some costumes or some armor need some intricacy. So there's moving parts, or maybe there's a special feature on a specific part of the suit. So the longest I've probably done was maybe a month. I spent like a month fleshing out every angle of the character. So it really depends on what the asset is, but it can range from a couple hours to, I guess, a month, I would say. It depends on the level of complexity that character requires.

Plus, it's a creative endeavor. I see this more on the ship side than on the character side, since I'm more involved with the ships. But sometimes you're just lucky enough to get that right mix of concept and artists, and you're able to hit it right out of the gate. It's like lightning struck, and you're like, that's it, you hit it. And sometimes you chase this thing for weeks and weeks. Sometimes there's a ship that we thought we were going to have ready in April, and it's like, nope, push it all the way back to November or whatever, because this has just been a more difficult birth. And not because it was super complex, not because it was even particularly different than anything else. It's just that, for whatever reason, those intangibles that are part of any creative endeavor weren't quite lining up.

Yeah, it wasn't quite there yet. And sometimes that's just part of the approval process of saying, is this good? Do we like this? Yeah, but could it be better?

Yeah, I mean, I would love to have tattoos. I have tattoos, so I want to put tattoos in the game. That's a bias, sure. But I think it's a cool customization thing that a lot of people want, and it's something I know that we've been talking about. We've put them on some of our other characters. We did a test recently, too.

I was hand-drawing all the tattoos, like Tagaka for Squadron that we showed on the Christmas special.

A lot of those were hand-drawn.

Some of them I actually drew on a piece of paper and scanned them in, and then Michael was like, you know, I can make a brush that does that same texture, that looks like a pencil. And I was just like, where were you two days ago? But every single piece on the sleeve, the tattoo, none of that was photos or whatever. It was legit hand-drawn.

Yeah, so a lot of it's going to be, when we get to that, creating them. What do they look like? Where can you put them? What's the UI for that? There's a lot that goes into that. And it also goes into more customization questions in the future. At that point we're talking about basically doing decals on limbs. So is there a potential for doing damage decals? So are we talking about more design-y stuff on that? We've talked semi-recently about other things that could happen with damage. Maybe in the future we're talking about cybernetics, we're talking about replacements, we're talking about fully modifying the character's body, which goes into deeper stuff. But that's not iteration 0.1. That's much further down the line.

We were just spreading this around in our chat recently, actually.

They're still there. We haven't gotten rid of them. For a little while, we were just trying to figure out how we would do them. There were some shifts in the type of attachment, or type of skin or CGA.

Yeah, CGA to .skin. Because for a while, they were static helmets. Then they became skinned helmets because they had some parts that would connect to the undersuits, things like that. And those different item attachment types do change the things we can do with them. So if it's a .skin, for instance, we can attach to Mannequin and have animations playing, similar to how weapons work. But back then, we didn't solidify it because there were specifications that changed. We weren't 100% on what these helmets were going to do, how players were going to interact with them, what they need. So yeah, it's in flux.

There's nothing that stops us except for some time to go in and change them and add animations to the ones that already could have them, or need them, or that we want to have them. And I think you'll probably see some of that, especially on some of the more hero helmets that we're wanting to do for Squadron, for sure. And I think as we get into that, you're going to see potential for the future, but we're going to play it out in one scenario first.

I don't know. I think that's definitely more on the design side. On the art side, it would require the ability to make something age, from one texture with an overlaying texture, which you can texture blend to get that, and then probably end up baking out a specific texture that saves as that character's texture, which is totally possible. And it's something I know that Chris has talked about for a long time, aging of characters and stuff like that. So it's something that we're shooting towards. It's more, how do we do it right now? It's definitely something we're thinking about, though.

The part that scares me is not where you start and where you end. It's the transition from one asset to another. That scares me. How do we blend the two assets? Because we can literally walk past a wall and all of a sudden we just swap assets. That's doable. But then we would want the whole transition as you're getting older. So what does that look like? And that's the part that's scary for me.

It's similar to the hair. The end and the beginning are easy. It's the tween that's hard.

Exactly. And actually, there was some tech, I don't want to go too deep into this, but on the DNA side, there was a discovery that, okay, we can do something similar to that, like growing hair. But technically possible versus visually appealing, that's where, yeah.

It's always a matter of quality control.