What's next for first- and third-person player animations? The January monthly report mentioned foot anchoring, for example.

Okay, again, there's no first and third person though, right? It's first slash third. So it's unified, and I mean, that's a great question for Steve.

Star Citizen works off a unified system, unlike, say, a traditional FPS where you may be using the same skeleton, but the animations that are being played on third person and the ones that are being played, at least on the hands, on first person are slightly different. On Star Citizen, they're exactly the same. So what we've started doing is we've started building these goal teams or feature groups. And what they're designed to do is to take sections of a feature and put together an animator with a coder, with a designer, to be able to start executing those things out. Short-term sort of things that we're working on right now, for instance, the shouldered weapon: really getting the railgun to feel like it's a ship-downing weapon. You should be able to just pull this thing out and fire it and just feel like you have just let loose all hell. We're working on that from an effect side, from an animation side, from a code standpoint. It's about feel, right? Getting everything to feel correct. We're working on, as well, things like, Sean mentioned oxygen and stuff like that. We're working on oxygen and stamina. What does it look like when I've got full stamina and I'm running up against something like a wall that I'm going to mantle up onto? Okay, well, what happens if my stamina goes down and down and down? There's a visual difference there, right? Same thing with when my stamina is basically gone and I'm just too exhausted to jump. I'm too exhausted to climb. What does that look like? As well, continuing with, we have new weapons that are constantly coming into our pipeline, and ultimately making an FPS is not just the animation that goes into it. It's the code that goes into it and all this. But ultimately, it's the feel. If it doesn't feel right, if it doesn't play well, you need to be iterating on this until it does.

You have that with the FPS side, but you also have that with the player animations for other things like getting in and out of a bed and stuff like that as well. I know that we've been doing some polish passes on the first-person animations for things like exiting a bed, sitting in a chair, and making sure that the camera's all situated and all that.

Exactly. We've also been working on things like, for instance, usables. If I'm an AI character and I'm going to be sitting here talking with you guys drinking a cup of something, we need the AI to be able to walk in, sit down in the chair properly, to be able to grab the glass, to drink from it properly, to get back out. And this is from just sitting down at a table like this, with a tray table, with food, with drink, at a bar, say in the nightclub and things like that. And also enabling the player to do those sorts of things. So we can have the player sit down at the mess hall and pick the glass up and use the glass, things like this. And we're also moving forward on things for player interaction. Picking up, aside from, say, a glass, but looting things, stealing things from the world and stuff like that.

The player interaction is kind of an interesting thing. There's a lot of little challenges in there that you wouldn't really expect. And one of the big ones is just mesh formats, for example. So a character generally is made out of skin files. So these are the ones that deform and stuff. And an interesting thing with the player interaction system is that it requires... And it's all these little niggling things that take the time. But again, once the system is in place, everything opens up, clouds open, angels sing. And I mean, it sounds like a small thing. Okay, AI, pick up a cup, great, big deal. Not going to make my game much more fun. But what it does do is it opens up the ability for us to do everything else that those AIs need to do. That just happens to be the very controlled environment that we can do this particular tech in. But then once that is in, AIs can then pick up weapons. They can do whatever and sort of inspect and these kind of things. AIs can pick up pieces of the player even, or other AIs. I mean, there's all kinds of crazy things.

Yeah, it's about limiting the delta between systems when we're first working on them. The same piece of functionality and all the tech that gets my hand, whether I'm a player or an AI, to go to this object, this object is oriented properly, for me to pick it up and use it, is the same piece of tech that's required when you go to, say, a shop, if a shopkeeper of some sort pulls a weapon out and gives it to you. It's the same tech. And that's the other thing. In the goal teams, we're also trying to get them to, instead of, say, a typical task which would be have an AI pick up a cup, it is a broader vision. So we want them to be able to pick up this and this weapon and to give you this and to put this away and stuff like that. Now that we know what that broad vision is for that, what is a singular test case that we can do to pound on the issues?

Yeah, exactly. And I think it's important always to bring that up, because I think a lot of times we do talk about these little pieces of tech and there's one implementation. Everybody's going, well, what's the big deal? AI, pick up a cup. Who cares? I mean, you could get away with that, and a lot of other games, go play Morrowind or Oblivion to that effect, and look, very little interaction between AI and the world. Hell, they even got the same voices when you start talking to different AIs. It's like, hello there. Hello there. I think it's important to realize that there's bigger needs from those systems. Though we talk about the one specific example, it's a bigger thing that we're trying to do.