We've been told that the depth of the character builder will be iterative, starting from just a few facial choices, to eventually having a more robust builder. A first person perspective game usually places a lot of value on the identity of self, and so, it would seem the SC character builder should eventually be extremely important. What plans, hopes do you foresee for the longer term intentions? Will the SC builder bring the fidelity of character both in aesthetics as well as customization that we've seen in our ships?asked by Traz Ion, of Ion Industries

So, customizing your face and the ever growing technology. I think in the very beginning probably in the Alpha phase when you'll start to get to choose it. You'll probably just choose between a variation of heads. After that I believe it's going to be, we're choosing heads, we're starting to maybe move some of the geometry around and creating more customized face. There's a lot of potential for major customization since our characters share the same topology and the same UV space.We've actually done a few tests in here which turn out to make these horrible monsters but sometimes hilariously funny and decent looking characters by taking the texture of one character that was scanned, putting it on like, we'll take Gary Oldman's face and put it on like Webster's, the female head and it's just this crazy amalgamations of characters.It's fun but I think we're starting to realize, the tech that we have, we're going to be able to create quite a lot of variety, maybe quicker than we originally expected. Especially by reusing a lot of the maps and maybe start to adjust with like skin tone and customization of hair and eyes and all that kind of stuff. So, I think at first, it's definitely going to start simple but like the rest of our game, it grows over time. So, we definitely have goals to make it extremely customizable in much, much different... and easily implementable in the future.

That sounds awesome. I know I've seen some of these missteps, they're kind of like weird faces or eyebrows that have mouths on them and all that fun stuff. I've had a few nightmares based on some of the images from them messing around with the characters and trying different things or things just kind of like getting buggy. So, it can be pretty entertaining but I've definitely walked by a few desks and almost spilled my coffee when I've seen what's on the screen.

A few people actually are putting together a page of all the terrible things that have happened. Like when we repathed someone's tongue onto Gary Oldman's face, so it was the shape of his face but this really nice detailed tongue texture going up the side with teeth. We were like, 'what the heck is happening'. It looked like burned flesh and I was like, 'oh my gosh'.

I've seen that page, it's crazy.

You've seen the page?

Yeah, I think, The Things We've Seen', that's the title of the page.

The Things We Have Seen.

Yeah, yeah.

Especially when animation, it's crazy or something's not done properly and then all of the sudden someone's face just shoots out to the side and you're like, 'woah'. This is interesting.

Excellent.