Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - Characters and Content

Well, maybe I'll give it to Josh in terms of what he wants. That's generally how this has to go: yeah, I could come up with a bunch of answers and a bunch of tech and a bunch of things that we could do or whatever, but ultimately it's, definitely on the art direction side and even design direction, what do they want to do with it? So, not to put them in the firing line, but maybe you can define sort of things you'd like.

It goes back to a conversation we've talked about before, which is the whole Death of a Spaceman thing. And I think that relates to that in a way because it's basically talking about the degradation of a character or character assets, so aging, dying, all that kind of stuff. When you go through that process as a character, you obviously want to communicate to the player that something is happening. So whether you're getting older, you're getting beaten up, you're taking damage, whatever that is, there's some sort of a visual that's going to happen there. We do want to share that stuff. As far as the specifics of certain types of cuts, certain types of gunshots, or whatever the scarring is, that's a high bar of what we want. It'll probably come in earlier versions, but we'll have to communicate it to the players in some way. So there will be, but as far as the fidelity of what that is, it's going to be...

To an extent, a lot of games use UI health meters and stuff like that. But a lot of Star Citizen is about that diegetic approach. It's one thing to have a UI to just tell you the condition of something, but if there's a way to visually show it in our universe... So if you take off your helmet and therefore you don't have your UI, there's some other way for you to see the damage and stuff. A lot of games attempt that to varying scopes, but I think Star Citizen is very much about putting as much of that information diegetically in the universe as possible.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it actually makes it rewarding. That's the thing. I was joking about everybody being sadists and stuff like this, but normally what you want to do, you want to be able to shoot at a character and you want to see some sort of reaction. And then additionally, I've always liked the idea, and this is something we've talked about, and it kind of gets covered in Death of a Spaceman to a degree, of some level of life-changing event for your character, meaning something absolutely egregious has happened, minus death. Not just dying, but you were standing on a grenade or you got hit by a landmine or something like this. And having some kind of life-changing event that actually marks your character in some sort of way, whether that's you took a shot in the head or something like this. You didn't die, but on your next respawn, you've got a heck of a scar or something like this.

Or limbs, like amputations or mechanical limbs and stuff like that.

Exactly. And I think that'd be super interesting. Technically, doing these kind of things, like showing decals on the characters, has its own little technical challenge. It's a little bit different than dealing with the ships. But doing dirt, doing decals and that kind of stuff on the characters, yes, we can do. The real thing that you want, though, and what Josh alluded to, is the degradation, the wear, the tear, and the actual damage directly on the armor itself. I'm sure they've noticed that we have a really pretty robust damage system on the ships. Now, the trick is we can't just copy-paste that to the characters, and that would be incredible, but the problem is that fundamentally we're dealing with two very different mesh types, and actually what comes into play is the physics of that impact, because you should understand that on a character, when you shoot a character, you're not actually hitting the render mesh at all. We have a skeleton that has a bunch of bounds on it, and you might have seen it in various RTVs with the various debug views. There's a whole set of boxes basically that represent every one of the joints, every one of the bones that are in there, and you impact those. Problem is, the render mesh itself knows nothing about that. Now, on the ships, it's actually part and parcel with the object that you're seeing. It's actually the same thing. So physics and the render mesh are connected with the ships, but on the characters, it's two very different things. So to come up with a system that works very similarly will take some doing, definitely. I know that Chris is really keen to get holes and wear and those actual impacts showing up on the armor, but you've got to think of some problems that come with that. So all of a sudden what we've talked about with zone culling, that becomes a problem, because if you make a hole in the top one and you've culled out the zone on the bottom, all of a sudden you've got literally a hole through the character. Which maybe sounds kind of cool, but actually would look pretty weird. So that's a problem. I could start listing out all kinds of different little issues within that. The zone culling is one of them. And then additionally, do you show it on the body? And would the body disintegrate like the ship would? Probably not. We're going to have blood or something like that on the body. So there's a lot of different problems that come out of that. And what we do about it, I can't tell you 100%, but at the very least, the thing that we've got to get working is that the impacts on different areas of your armor will react differently. Right now, it's actually pretty unsophisticated, to be totally direct with you guys. We don't change the material on the skeleton. The skeleton, the human, and you might have noticed this, I've just set it up very simply: if you hit center mass right now, you're going to get a metal impact sort of effect. And that's because I've set the torso bones and the physics of the torso, all the way down to the hips, I believe, to be metal so that it reacts like metal. But now if you hit the head, if you hit the arms or you hit the legs, you're going to get blood. You're going to get this flesh sort of appeal. So first things first, we've got to get the skeleton changing physically to what's actually attached to you. So to talk a little bit about the cloth talk that we did, some of the stuff that we're looking at for the cloth and collisions with the cloth, that's going to cover all of that. There's a lot of steps there anyways, but first things first, we'll get the impact with the skeleton looking different. So great, we'll have good impacts on the characters, and then from there we'll want some sort of visual.

Probably not, to give you the short [answer]. Over armor. We can create items that allow that look. It just gets incredibly complicated to take an asset and put it over all the other stuff. A lot of the cloth tech you're talking about, yes, we could do it. It would be very complicated. The sim would be very intense. It would be a very intense look, and I don't think it would actually look like what people think it would look like.

Everybody thinks it looks like the Desert Nomad. But that's a very crafted...

Custom look. So we can create all kinds of stuff that's like the Nomad, that's like the Legacy Light Outlaw, that have that kind of look. Yeah, we can make that and that's not a problem. But as far as creating and saying, hey, I want to put this jacket on, then I want to put my armor on, and then I want to put my duster back on, that creates a million different types of permutations of: oh, I had different arms on this time, I had a different chest piece on this time, I have a different helmet on this time, I have different legs on, because all that's going to be interacting with that duster, for example. So to be able to do all those combinations is just a lot of setup work and asset work. And we can really get that same look much easier by just saying, you want a duster? Cool, here's a duster. Right now we have core, arms, legs, head. What if we give you a core that also includes the arms and it is a duster? So we can get you the exact same look and it's going to have the more curated, crafted look like you're talking about, but it's going to alleviate all our asset concerns, all our extra concerns, and at the end it'll look better.

But there may be specific armor sets or types that come with cloaks or armors baked in.

And it's not impossible for us to add components to an armor. So let's say something that's more straight up would be any of the Odyssey stuff or, I think it's the Pioneer, which would be the Explorer armor. That's kind of just a standard spacefaring armor. We could do a component that has a cape. We'll just make a cape, and it can be something you can put on that, and then there'll be an attachment that goes on that. That kind of stuff we can easily do, and that's more of something as we progress further into the character customization, which is not just the initial layer, but also the components inside of those layers. More accessories.

Yeah, so actually right after we do this, we have a meeting to discuss exactly that. I can tell you how it's done right now. And actually, I think the community found it interesting, because to a degree, we dye our armors right now. When we are creating NPCs, how we've set it up is, we've talked about the loadouts, we've talked about hierarchies of items and these kind of things. On every single armor right now, we have a thing, we call it the material variant item or something like this. And it's literally an item that gets attached and all it does is it talks to its parent item and it says, use this material variant, use this color, basically. So to a degree, what you're doing is attaching a dye item. That's exactly what you're doing. For us to expose that to the players is a real question mark. We don't know exactly if that's going to be the case, that we expose it as dyes, and the meeting is with Tony, this has to do a little bit with economy, has to do a lot with items, or are we actually just going to have separate sets of armor? This is the red one, this is the blue one, this is the purple one. Or do we have one set of armor and then just 10 or 20 different dye colors that you could attach to it? So conceptually, we can go both directions right now. It's just going to be a design decision that should be made.

It also affects a lot of the asset side. So for example, right now, you're basically purchasing stuff off the rack. So whatever vendor, just like in the real world, you go to your store and you buy whatever's on the rack. And if they don't make a blue version of that, you don't get a blue version of that. And that's just kind of how it works right now. Now maybe when you go somewhere like when you're purchasing a car, certain cars have a wide selection of colors and some have a narrow selection of colors, and again that's going to be the manufacturer. But then some car manufacturers have a massive range of colors where you are essentially kind of choosing your own color. It's definitely possible for us to provide more or less in different scenarios. When it comes to the player creating their own custom one, it gets a little more complicated, not just on the asset side, but also on the interface side. From the actual material standpoint, there's so many parameters that are being changed from the material itself. So is this a cloth? Is this a nylon? Is this a leather? Is this a polyester? Is this some fancy space fabric? All the different types of metals. So are they choosing those? If they are, are they also changing the color on that? And that's going to go through all the different materials on single things. And if we do allow that, how do you communicate that to the player? And then also, how do we set it up on the asset side so that we don't have to go through a custom setup every time to say that on your shirt, for example, if I want to change the green to a blue or green to a purple or any other color, that just on that shirt, we're changing the color. You see it in all different types of games. Some games have a dye system, which is really rudimentary, where you say, okay, I'm going to change my shoulder pads, but just this big panel is going to be white, and then it would be red or blue or whatever. Everything else stays the same. All the trim stays the same. Everything else except for the big panels. One of the advantages of providing what we would call a palette is that we can customize the whole thing. So rather than saying, yeah, you're going to customize it, but because it's so much work to set it up on the asset side to customize the entire thing, you only get that panel. Rather than doing that, if you do a palette, we can give you 20 variants, 100 variants, but every variant is different. It's not just the single panel. All the colors are different. So there's really big advantages to both ways, from an art direction standpoint: curating custom looks, making sure that manufacturers have defined looks, that they might only sell bold colors of certain types of stuff. So it really ranges.

Yeah, and to answer very similarly to the character damage stuff, the real next step of this is, yes, we do the customization of colors on our NPCs, and most important to us is that you, the players, can now use those colors. So that's what that meeting's about mostly. So that'll be the first step, that you can actually have access to the colors. But then beyond that, whether they're tinting them themselves or whatever, it's not the most pressing issue.

Sure. I would hope so. But I guess I don't understand the question. Do they mean...

In World of Warcraft, for instance, you can't identify a person. If you strip your orc and his orc and his orc of their armor, you'd be hard-pressed to tell who was who without the name floating on their head, because there's only eight variations of orc. They're saying, would the character customization be unique enough that you could see somebody without a name and go...

We've got a couple more polys to deal with. We've got a lot more, to use the buzzword, fidelity on our characters than some of those other titles that you mentioned, which means that, yeah, sure, of course you're going to be able to recognize them. Again, we've got these AAA actors within Squadron 42, and they're pretty recognizable. So if you can imagine that you'll be able to push your character to quite that level, yeah, you're definitely going to be able to recognize the difference between your buddies. That's a pretty important part of it.

When DNA comes out and you're no longer choosing one of nine heads, I think that's going to be where you really start to see that more.

And Ivo touched on it in his talk, which hopefully goes out pretty soon here: some of the things that you use to recognize certain people, we had kind of taken away from the players a little bit in this early customizer so that we could fit all the hairs, all the helmets, and everything like that, by unifying the scalp and the neck. There's a profile difference, but the reason why, like you say, in another game you would strip them of all their armor and everything and they look pretty much the same is exactly that problem, because they've unified to some description so that they can fit all the different assets on it. So being able to have different scalp shapes, different neck shapes, different faces, dramatic differences, will make it easy to identify from a distance. And I think Ivo's talk spans almost 10 minutes discussing that. So I think that will be a pretty important and valuable thing.

No. That's an assumption. That's a very dangerous assumption to make. And trust me, it's not just the community that makes that assumption. It's developers too. IK is not a magic wand. It's a magic three wands. It's limbs. No, it doesn't really solve that so much. It makes it a little easier to deal with, but generally you still have the problem of metrics. That's the real problem: how big do you go? How small do you go? And actually, the two are separate. One is the body shape, let's call it, and the second is the height. So one requires the skeleton to scale, one doesn't. That's one of the big points. And you'll notice it from playing games like Red Dead Redemption or anything: take a look around. Mostly everybody's about the same height. It's hard to notice when people have got hats or helmets or whatever on. You don't notice the difference in height as dramatically, and again, Ivo talks I think a little bit about this, maybe not on the body. You'll notice the body shape differences before you'll notice the height differences. And again, we've already got the two different heights of skeleton. We've got our female, we've got the male. There's a difference in height between the two of them. But the body shape stuff is going to be more valuable, I think, right out of the gate, and causes way less problems than scaling the skeleton. The minute we scale the skeleton, animations need to be retargeted at runtime. That's a problem. Usually, you can't just uniformly scale a skeleton. In most of the MMOs that are online right now, it's a uniform scaling kind of thing where for your height everything changes at once. And usually what people do, they make them super tall and then they'll kind of pull the body shape in so it's a thin, tall kind of guy or whatever. We rely so much on metrics, being a first person universe and having these really intimate interactions with buttons and cockpits and flight controls and whatever else. That metric needs to be really rigid. So where I'm going with that is that, yeah, body shapes, we're going to do that, for sure. But height differences, you kind of want to avoid that. And we'll have to bring some tech online to be able to do it without having to retarget a whole bunch of different animations to make it possible.

I think what you'll see, obviously this is down the road, is like other games: when they start introducing characters of other sizes, they're of other genders, or they're of other species. So that's where you'll see your hybridization.

I mean, look at the stuff that kicks up right now from the PTU: the head position in the ships. It's always, oh, my head's too low, oh, my head's too low. So now start scaling that skeleton. Depending on whether you scale your skeleton up, you've got it way too high. Or if you made them super small, you've made them way too low. The other thing that doesn't do well with a first-person kind of game is min-maxing. If I ever go play Star Marine, I'm going to be a female character at the very smallest I could possibly be, to reduce my hitboxes and everything. Then I'm just a smaller target to hit. I can carry everything the same. I can do everything the same. But now all of a sudden I've got an advantage because I've min-maxed. That doesn't lend itself well to a really cool-looking universe; it lends itself to a lot of midgets running around. If you go into PvP, I think Guild Wars is a good example right now. Everybody's tiny, and it's just harder to click on them or whatever else. So, yeah, I think it's a dangerous road to start going down and it will have tendrils that just connect into everything. And right, mantling will be a big problem, too. I've got all kinds of problems with it, because Steve went, yeah, we need skeleton scaling, whatever. I'm like, yeah, super awesome. That'd be great. So what are we going to do about cover? Cover is hard enough with the female being a different height. So you get behind something, think a box, and you've got to go up and over and look down. This is a real problem, and we fixed it for the female. But if you think you're at a wall or a railing or something like that that you're ducked behind for cover and you've got to shoot down, your trajectory or your angle of attack is going to be so different depending on your height. So if you want a really good one, you'd be a super tall guy, because then when you pop up over that box, you can shoot almost straight down from up high. But again, if you're tiny, you're only going to have a really shallow kind of angle across that. And our metrics are important. Also, if you're too tall and we put you behind cover and your head's sticking out, well, it's not very good cover, is it?

I think a lot of people would say those are trade-offs. You just listed an advantage tall people would have and an advantage that short people would have.

But we can't balance around that because we have no control. I think you'd also see the pros and cons as heavily weighted to the cons. There are pros.

But we always make that balance. Is it worth the amount of work? Is it worth the effort that that's going to take? And sometimes we lose that battle, because sometimes the stuff we'll do is a lot of work, and sometimes it seems like a really small win, and hopefully those get big later. But those are real hard decisions that have to be made, which is, is it worth it?

Because we just gave a big no to height and stuff.

That's not a solid no. All my no's are no right now, but if I come up with some sort of idea, or my team comes up with an idea, or Ivo makes some magic happen, or Steve has a crazy idea, then I reserve the right to say yes.

I don't think we can actually talk about what we're doing with it right now because there's an implement...

I'd say it's in development. It's still in development. We're confirming that the Titan suit is in development. Yes, it is. We talked about it briefly before a couple times, I think, or it has been mentioned before. We said last time that the turn radius was messed a couple times. So we went back to the drawing board and kind of reworked it. It's still kind of being finalized on how that will work. We have a much stronger idea of that, but it hasn't progressed too much past the concept stage, because we started to put our other non-concept resources on things that you've seen recently like hair, like shading, like skin. So a lot of the improvements you saw at CitizenCon.

Yeah, I'm personally really keen to get to the Titan because, as I've talked about before, I feel like it's a layer of gameplay that's actually missing within our game right now, very directly. Right now, an infantryman has very little chance against a ship. A ship is never second-guessing whether he wants to land on that pad or not. I think you need something basically between that infantryman and a ship. And you need something that is able to hold ground in the open; it's a design requirement that it can basically hold the landing pad. Whether or not it's going to win against a Constellation, probably not. But the whole point is to make them second guess. They can't just sit there and camp the pad, basically. And really, it's coming down to some different design requirements. For me, it needs to be able to do that, so it needs to be able to make ships second guess. But then additionally, it needs to also be, quote unquote, a kind of shock troop on the interiors. But there's got to be give and take with that. It can't move that quickly in the interiors. You need to be able to outmaneuver it. It's got to have weak spots on the back or the sides, or places it can't go. And I feel like that layer is generally just not there, so I'm really keen to get to it. But it's really important, the actual concept and design of the thing, because it's actually going to do a lot more than just combat. That's what we really want out of this. And I'm not sure how much we should talk about the frame kind of thing... No. So we'll leave it at that. But yeah, we really want to get to this.

And just in case we buried the lead there, assuming everybody knows what we're talking about, the Titan suit is a mech.

No, it's not a mech. I'm going to explain this for everybody. A mech has a cockpit. You sit in it, there's a seat; you don't put your legs in, you're sitting down in something. A battle suit is like Iron Man, is like an exoskeleton. It's basically a suit that you put on. Hence, battle suit versus Gundam.

And just before anybody gets crazy, that is way, way out. That's not anything that's coming anytime soon.

Yes, there will. Most of the time, there will be one-to-one parity on assets, on what they can have. But there will be custom ones per gender.

I want to explain this female-male thing a little bit, because, no, that doesn't really mean that there'll be a mankini at all. What we're going to have is one-to-one items between the male and female. And that's actually a critical component for that female to ship. Imagine if we shipped a game that didn't have all the stuff that a male could do for the female. I don't think that would be OK. So we're not going to do that. It needs to be one-to-one. And that means all the armor that exists for a male will exist for a female. If you own the CDS medium armor for your male, it's actually the same item. We've unified the item so that if you load this item, depending on what skeleton you're on, it's just going to look different. So technically you own it for a male, you own it for a female. There's not two separate purchases that you have to make. Now, about the unique items. When you get a unique item, there were two ideas that we kind of floated, and initially it was like, okay, let's think of a really nice cocktail dress for a female. What if a male owned that cocktail dress? What do we do? Now, we're not going to spend a lot of effort in making mankinis or man versions of dresses or whatever, but the first idea that we came up with was just have a male equivalent of that. If it's a nice cocktail dress, it would be a nice cocktail suit. Something like this. So that's one idea, and that might be the case. But it might actually be the case that there is just a totally unique item, that there is no equivalent for it. At the very least, we'll make sure that, of course, there's not more of those female items than there are male ones. They should have their own special items. But just because we say that we'll have these unique female and male items doesn't mean those ones are shareable. On the basics, if you own a blue shirt, you want a male blue shirt and a female blue shirt. But if you own, I guess, a cocktail dress, that'll just be the cocktail dress and the male can't put that on.

And it's important to say that when the female model does get introduced in Star Citizen, these items, if we end up making them, are not there in the first initial drop. We're talking about that one-to-one parity when the model does get introduced.

Yeah, that has to be there. Josh and I have made that very clear to production and to everybody that that is critical, that that is one-to-one. And on the combat side, anything that has gameplay implications.

It's not just on the asset side, it's on a lot of things.

Switching styles, I think, yeah. As far as cutting and grooming, I don't know if we'll go that in-depth, to be honest.

Yeah, but Chris has been watching videos of RDR.

That's true. That may change. But currently, it's selection.

Yeah, it was a great email from him. He was like, I figured out how they're doing it. They're doing this, this, this. I'm like, oh, cool, that's awesome. That's good for them. Sky's the limit for us on that kind of stuff. It's what Chris will want out of it in the end. But you've got to think of time. Again, is it worth it? In your space combat FPS game, is it worth it that the beard is growing at half a millimeter every hour? I don't know. And it might be for the community indeed. For sure we're going to have different styles.

Definitely styles.

But whether you have to go get yourself shaved and stuff like this, I don't know. I couldn't answer. But we could. It's just, again, is it worth it? I don't know. And sometimes that's not up to me to decide. It's up to the likes of Josh or Chris or something like this.

We have had very in-depth, long conversations about that and it's definitely something we want to get to. For me, from just the general sci-fi experience, introducing other alien species is obviously a big deal to break away from the mold of just being a pure human game. But even altered humans, something where they are still human as a species but they've changed, is something that I think we need to break up the landscape of what you see. So whether it's skin colors that are not in the normal ethnicity range of what we see now, maybe they are, to use John Carter, on a red planet and their skin turns red over time from the atmosphere, or, I think if you drink or inhale lots of copper, your skin can turn blue.

I'm thinking of a person who grew up on Hurston their entire life, and whose parents grew up on Hurston their entire life, and whose grandparents grew up on Hurston. Is their skin texture different than what we would think of a human?

That would be the plan. And as far as the pointed ears, the more specific physiological things, all that would really take is either us finding an actor with pointed ears and putting that into the DNA pool, or it takes us changing and sculpting that actor or some actors to add that to the DNA pool.

It's totally possible. And I want to talk a little bit more about this because I think we have some cool ideas here that I talked about a little bit in an interview a little while ago. This is something that I'm keen to work on with Josh as well as with David Haddock. So we've been looking into this. And actually, just literally this week, I have a huge document from Andreas Rohr, who also did one of the talks there with Ivo on the gene splicing stuff, which has been a real close thing to my heart anyway. So how that whole system works, as Ivo described, is that we have this proto mesh and we have a bunch of different heads that are within it, so we have a little gene pool. What I'd really like to do with this is phenotype a gene pool per starting location. If you think of this in relation to this wide gene pool, we've got a bit of a problem, because we've got hundreds of heads within this gene pool. And to expose those hundreds of heads to you in a creator is not very intuitive. There's a lot to go through, and there's some redundancies here and there. What I'd like is to restrict it down to just a subset of people from Hurston, and then we do all the visuals that Josh is talking about. So let's say your starting location is Hurston or your starting location is ArcCorp. I'd like that gene pool to be kind of phenotyped for that particular area. Now, I'm not talking as on the nose as a lot of other games go, to reference Elder Scrolls, for example, and not saying this is a bad way to go. It's a very overt and obvious way to go. If you're Redguard, you're African-American. If you're Nord, you're a Northern European Caucasian. That is super on-the-nose stuff. What I'd prefer is to put some subtlety into this, which is reality, how it actually works. Because to be a phenotyped American or a phenotyped Italian or even a Canadian for that matter, there's going to be subtleties within that. Now, generally, we all kind of look similar-ish. But you might have a gene pool that's a little heavily weighted to one side versus the other. So then on average, when you're blending those particular guys or those particular textures, I hope that the subtleties will show, so that you will have an idea that, oh, all these NPCs, everybody is coming from this particular gene pool, so they all kind of look one way. And then all these other guys on ArcCorp, and all those players that have started on ArcCorp, kind of look another way. So I don't know if this will be as obvious as I want it to be, but I think it mimics reality a little cooler. And it also makes character creation a little more interesting, because you are sourcing from a different gene pool depending on where you start. And of course you are, because like you said, if you grew up in Hurston, your father grew up in Hurston, you're going to have a certain phenotype, a certain haplogroup, whatever we would call it. I think that would be an interesting way to try it. But it won't be quite as overt, I would say, as some other games really treat it. This general kind of, oh, Hurston people kind of look like this: they've got a strong brow, they've got high cheeks, whatever it is. I'm just making up stuff. But that would be really cool. And I know when we first brought this idea to David Haddock, he returned a document that had some insane-level stuff. It's really cool, super creative, but here's the flip side. As we've talked about with gene splicing and DNA, we've talked about human ranges and how we keep it within a human range, because you're always sourcing from a human. So we'd have to come up with sculpts or these kind of things to source from guys that had some weird things, like the big ridges in the head or white eyes or whatever it is. So I don't know. I think it's a neat approach. It's something that hasn't, to my knowledge, been done exactly like that before. And I'd love to see what the results could be. And it doesn't actually require a huge amount of extra work. It's a data management problem. We've just got to juggle our gene pools around. It's going to be very weird, like playing God a little bit: oh, yeah, who evolved together? This guy, this guy, this guy. It'll be fun.

Using the existing picture, the fidelity is just not there. It doesn't get there. I think everybody that's played the game can see that when you zoom in on pretty much anything in our game, it holds up. The webcam stuff that we've seen before, even for those games that I've seen, never has really looked amazing. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it just doesn't work.

The thing is, I'm not sure we're actually answering the question. I've actually had this conversation, I think even on RTV before, about actual face textures and why I don't want to do that. I think Chris wants something like that. But the 2D image of your face is not enough to use something to structure the face, the one that you've got in there, and blend different heads to achieve that shape. That's not beyond the realm of possibility. The problem is we can't just do it off one image. It's impossible. We have no idea of 3D space with the one image. So at the minimum, we would need you to do a face-on shot and then a profile shot. And then we might be able to do something, but we would have to reconcile all the points between the two images, and then from the points, drive a whole bunch of blend shapes to get to that position and go from there.

Choosing from the existing pool.

And choose from the existing pool the right heads to get to the right place, to get the right thing.

There's nothing that stops us from doing that kind of stuff. It's more of a creative, high-level direction of, do they really exist in our game? Is there a reason for that? I think there's been a lot of lore that the lore team have done about why androids or robots do or don't exist. From an asset standpoint, it's just kind of creating its own. Whether we put it on the existing rig or not is a big choice, and then it basically becomes its own species.

Cyborgs, though. Cyborgs are a different thing altogether.

We can do cyborgs. We already started with Battaglia. Cyborgs are totally fine. There's already one out there. There's one cyborg in the first round. Hopefully that's a nice little sneak peek of what we can do and what we want to do.

What you guys saw in Squadron, in that trailer and the talks, is all about us trying to push it as far as we can. Right now, I think we'll probably have to take some steps back to get it into Star Citizen just because of the performance. But the goal of all that R&D and pushing that as far as we can is to see what the best level is that we can possibly get into Star Citizen. So I think it will definitely change. What the players see right now will for sure change, because our entire pipeline is changing. So I would imagine that most of the styles that they see in the game now won't be there in a year or two years, because they will be replaced with a new iteration that will look better. As far as it being affected by physics, yes, I think there will be components of that that will for sure be affected by physics. Like, the mohawk should be blowing over, depending on how much product you have. So yeah, we definitely want to push it. Part of the reason that the players aren't seeing new hairstyles go into the game right now is because we are figuring out how we're going to do it in the future. And that's us not wanting to burn time creating content that we're going to replace.

On the hair front, exactly as Josh said, we're pushing that visual bar big time. Right now, we've just got to rein in the performance slightly, and we'll probably be in pretty good shape. We've got to establish these two kinds of pipes, where we've got one for our really AAA high-end T0 heads, and then we've got another one for gene-splicing DNA, because both have kind of different requirements.