Are there any new animations or physics effects that you have been working on and the challenges that you have encountered?asked by Tranton

There's so much.

Right, there's so much to do with animations and physics together...

Where to begin.

It's a system that is completely interwoven. Evo Hertzig does a lot of work on this particular system, as well as a gentleman by the name of Chris Rahm. What we've been working on constantly is the zero G driven ragdoll kind of technology. This is pretty unique to our game and the driven ragdoll itself isn't unique but the transition between animated character to driven ragdoll back and forth, back and forth and going within physics grids and things like this. There's a lot of problems, and a lot of challenges that that brings. It might not be super obvious to the players, that we are working on things within there.

Right.

From what they see, "Oh, yeah it all works." There's little things that we want to fix within that. So, the other sort of portion of this, that's been very tricky actually to be working on, is the skeleton extension portion of this; has a little bit to do with the new item port system. What happens with the new item port system? You start as a base skeleton, then you add let's say a head or helmet. That skeleton actually extends.

Right.

So we have a skeleton within the head that has a shared root. That actually extends as the base skeleton. We then deal with that as a normal character. So, what's tricky about that is that we've got to figure out a way, we've worked on it quite a bit last week before Evo went on holidays, to rebuild that physics skeleton without completely rebuilding it...

Right.

It's one of the things that takes the longest time on the CPU. That is to then be synchronized to all the players.

Right.

So yeah, that's kinda what we're working on within there. We want that driven ragdoll to be affected. We want, as we add different skeleton extensions on, to extend the skeleton physically as well.

Yeah. It's just so much to think about. I mean...

Absolutely.

You're in one physics environment then when you enter a ship, you enter another physics environment, right? Then what happens if you're ragdolling from one physics environment into the next physics environment. Then have you turning back into your regular animation.

Exactly.

There's just so much to think about.

The relative space of that moves so often. We have a World Space, the Local Grid Space, the Zone Space. So yeah, there's a lot of transitioning between different, we call them partitioning grids.

Right, it's just so cool though.