The developers discuss the new character pipeline for 2.6: the naked male base model, modular Star Marine armour mix-and-match with light, medium and heavy gameplay trade-offs, head tiers, scanned heads and hair fit, and skin tones. They also cover texturing, zone culling and damage states, and how CryEngine has diverged.
LOVES it. It is an exciting asset and it's more than just what it looks like. What Sean didn't talk about was the zone culling technique. Now they can implement the items properly via item 2.0 with the new character.
One of the big focuses is 2.6 which is Star Marine and the PU for what the character can wear and making armour modular. Right now you can buy light, med, heavy, but want players to swap out individual pieces.
It was a Tier 1. Some of the heads have multiple versions depending on where you see them. The Marine suits are not tiered, same with clothing. Tier's are exclusively for heads.
It's a thing they can do, but isn't something being worked on. You have to figure out how it fits underneath the clothing and the animations associated with that. If they want to do something like that, it has to look good and not be something pulled out of thin air.
Travelling and going to different places is how Josh gets the creative juices flowing and is a way he draws inspiration. Collaborating is also a great way to figure out new ideas by bouncing things off each other.
They have some really cool ideas that they don't want to go into it yet because they are not ready to be spoken about, but there are some cool ideas of why they are important.
Everyday there is a new challenge. It's difficult to schedule around as things constantly change. A good example is they are up against is: The fit of the hair across all the different heads. There is about 120 different heads that have been scanned. Everyone's head shape is different so you can't just copy and paste.
They are different than the ships. It's a blend shader technique. It's a set of tile textures via the layering system, but it's not quite as simple as having a couple of preset materials and masking them out for piece. You have to have a bunch of draw calls per piece and finding the balance is a challenge.
What they'd loved to do is have what the ships damage system is and port that over for the character, but it's a lot more complex for characters. The mesh is different for characters than ships.
It depends because it changes a lot. When Sean was still working with CryTek he was proud of the first demo Chris put out with the Bengal. Currently he is proud of the Gamescom demo and the CitizenCon demo from last year with the landing demo. Overall it's more the team in general and what they're able to accomplish.
It's immensely different. Some things are the same, but in other areas it's completely different with all the new tech that's been built like 64-bit (floating point unit) and shading techniques.