What work and tech is being implemented for character damage states? Will armor have real-time damage? Will our characters themselves have any visible damage shaders: black eyes, bruising, anything like that?

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.