Do you have any information on female characters?

Yeah, we're still working on them. I think one of the things that we're doing right now for all the assets is making them one-to-one, meaning that everything that the males have, the females have, so that when we finally release them, they're all going to be kind of equivalent. So we're not going to have a massive amount of assets for just the male, and then when the female comes on, there's like two things you can do. And we're actually very, very close to that. As we produce things, we basically make it part of our pipeline now to make it one-to-one. So it's no longer just make the male asset and then be done. We were doing that for a while and that created a really large backlog where you make a costume, you make another costume, make a costume, and all of a sudden you've got 10, 20, 30, 50 costumes and you have to go through them all to make sure that it's one-to-one. And we're actually very close to that, which is really good. But aside from that, we're just kind of waiting for a bigger character release. So we want to do a bigger release where we can bring on full character customization, and that's probably when we'll drop it.

So maybe like a patch where the majority of the content is the character stuff?

Yeah, or at least that would be where a lot of it is dropped. So it's not all going to just be trickled out. I think it would be cooler to have it released in a big chunk and let everybody play with it.

Yeah, and maybe to go just a little bit more into it and why we've gone this route and why you don't see the female player yet: in a lot of games, especially MMO games right now, the main thing they do is just scale the skeleton. I mean, you have the exact same proportions from a male to a female. And this just isn't the case in reality. And something that was dictated very clearly from Chris from the get-go was that female proportions need to be accurately represented. Now, yes, of course, everybody is proportioned a little bit differently, but there is sort of the Adam and the Eve, right? So we literally have two different skeleton rigs. We aren't just scaling a male. We could have given you a female player two years ago if we were going to put that female on the exact same skeleton with the exact same proportions as a male. The problem with that is that you get this very androgynous look where females aren't females in the game. Coupled with that, now because you're on a different skeleton with whole different proportions, think of the armor transition that you have to make. So we've got these undersuits, we've got these medium, light, heavy armors that are on the male. So now we can't just grab them and throw them on the female, because all of a sudden it's all too big. So all of that's got to get reworked, and it's not a massive amount of work, but it's enough that it takes some time. Then because we've got the two different skeletons, the way the implementation in the engine works, you map a whole bunch of animations to a given skeleton. So if we haven't yet finished everything that we are expecting to do on the male, we just start moving that over to the female. And we've got some tools that make this a lot easier for the animators, but we don't have 200 animators to sit here and constantly be reworking the female assets. So once we finish all of the male stuff, it's a matter of transferring all that over. And yes, there will be updates on the male side, but we won't be developing new features that then all of a sudden we have to go collect and apply to the female. So it's a bit of animation. It's a bit of the actual desire for us to have a differently proportioned rig. And a lot of people will say, okay, well, why don't you make that part of the character where you're actually just stretching out arms and making everybody different? This is just not something we wanted to do. We wanted to have a very clear female and a very clear male. But then metrics also come into play, and that's where things get really kind of muddy. A great example of this was we have, of course, the Idris, and within Squadron 42, we have females that sit in chairs. The Idris chairs happen to be really big. For a male that's wearing armor, it looks fine. You sit a female in it with just a BDU or a sweater and stuff, she looks like a kid sitting in a huge seat. So we have to massage all of this kind of stuff so that there is a nice one-to-one between the females and the males.

And originally we had even started, this is crazy, but we had started with something like 12 rigs. We had started with, okay, we're going to have a 150 centimeter guy... I don't even know if that's right, but there was a bunch of different sizes. There was a bunch of different lengths of arms, legs, these kind of things. And slowly we've had to try to rein Chris in a little bit where we're like, okay, well, nobody's really going to notice the two-inch difference between that guy and this guy. But in the end, we got down to at least those two. And yes, we've got good tools to support the thing, but we really need to finish the male completely first. And Josh and I were talking about this a little bit last week, where to give you guys the female player, the first thing we want to give you is the character creator. So let's make a male guy first. Then the second step of that is give you the female. And then the third step of that is give you the actual sculpting and the DNA gene splicing kind of customization. So there's kind of the staged approach that we're going to go at that with.