Any chance you could give an update on the female model(s)? What has caused them to be held up for so long after the male model was released? What are the current issues that stop the model(s) from being available in the 'Verse?asked by Solaias

So, I can blame all kinds of departments... I mean Steve will be super happy... so Steve Bender right now is in Frankfurt, you know my partner in crime there. We all have an office that is also shared so I'm going to blame Steve on this one. Would I say animations is behind, no and that's not really the problem actually, we've had...

There's a lot of hurdles.

A couple different things on the mesh that I'll let Forrest answer on the animation technology side. What we really want is a completely finished male. That doesn't mean mesh, that doesn't mean necessarily like outfits and things like that, what it means is everything to do with animation. So, we've got most of it, right. We've got a lot of first person stuff, holding weapons, we've got cover, we finally now got mantling and vaulting. So basically once mantling,vaulting, cover, locomotion, ships, what else am I missing, I'm missing something and AI sort of interactions anyways.Once those are all done for now, then we can basically just plunk a female into it. There's a technical implementation side of this where we actually have to plug a whole bunch of stuff within ManneQuin, if any of the asset names are different between the male and the female, and sometimes we've done this, that's going to cause some problems within ManneQuin. We actually want to use the exact same logic that a male does to the female cause we don't want to be fixing two different bugs first of all...

Here's the thing right, exactly we don't want to make the same mistake twice and we don't want to make the same mistake in parallel with each other...

That's it.

The one thing we are doing is we're figuring out every single thing that goes right and goes wrong and figuring out our complete process and then taking the female character and having a much smoother transition and making sure that everything works properly with everything we've learned from the male character.

Exactly. Then that way a female implementation is easy, it doesn't take us nearly as much time because a lot of it is, 'oh, how did we do the male. Ok, let's do it the same'. So, that's what's going to solve all our problems for that. The other thing that this gives us a huge benefit for is the Vanduul, it's going to be the exact same process. So, once that male is completely locked down for the Squadron 42 aspect of it, vaulting, mantling and all the animation... then females, you know, it's not done but we got all the assets, it's just a matter of plugging it in.

Yeah, we're still doing some polish to the actual female herself, the body, you know we want to make sure that that's correct...

Should we talk about her 4K nether region texture...

Never outsource...

So, that was interesting...

Never outsource characters.

Yeah, if you outsource characters, just be prepared to get stuff back you might not be expecting.

You never know what you're going to get.

They don't want me to talk about it but a 4K nether region I think you can figure out what that means. 4K texture for that... just don't get it.

Then there's obviously the rigs and everything you've got to solve but the female model is coming along and I'm personally very excited to have it. We've already had some clothing made for it, we want to get that and I think that's going to fall under the customization too. We had to figure out how the players are going to be able to customize themselves with all their items and stuff, and the male had a series of clothes already so we were able to tackle that challenge and figure it out and now we can move onto the female. So, super excited that is coming very soon.

Right, and just to give you a full, sort of, look on this...the females we've already got them locomoting around, we've got a bunch within Squadron 42 that are specific to Squadron 42 so they all work. It's just a matter of you not having seen them within the persistent universe yet because when we give them to you, we want to have customization as you said, we want to have all the same outfits as the male. We basically don't want to take anything away from the female, right.

Then there's the whole, we have all our heads, right. So we've been solving, you have your body then you have these head scans, how do the head scans fit on the body, match it with the topology, the skin tone...

You've got to match up the skin tone.

Which is a whole...which is a challenge. So, there's just a lot of things we got to do one step at a time to make sure we don't make the same mistake twice. It's as efficient as possible.

Yeah, when they come online they'll be fully featured so we won't just kind of build them out slowly, they'll just be...

Yeah, exactly.