With the social module pending, the question of the Character Creator is on many a mind. Can you speak to the intentions of how robust it will be in regards to a player's ethnicity, hair styles, colors and physique?asked by Traz Ion, of Ion Industries

So, the character creator is something that is fairly high priority for us but it won't be around for awhile because we have to resolve some issues with how we do the character heads. We have these very, very, very fancy heads, you can see a little bit of them in the game now but we'll be showing some sort of next step up stuff at CitizenCon.The concept is we've already sort of taken a bunch of scans of different people, male and female, of different ethnicities and the concept is you'll be able to morph or blend between different face types, to create the face that you want when we're ready to do that. There's some behind the scenes technical stuff that we have to do, we have to move from pre-baked animation conversation stuff to sort of run time interpolation stuff which we are working on. We have an incredibly talented animation Senior Engineer called ?Ivo Herzog? who is in our German office and he actually is the guy who wrote CryAnimation in the first place. So, that's actually his next task right after he finishes the ragdoll zero-g stuff we're working on right now. Once we get that running we'll be able to blend between the heads.So, the initial stage for customizing your character will probably just let you pick one of, I think we have right now 8 male, 8 female heads. You'll be able to pick one of these heads types. We're working to put a process in place for clothes and stuff like that so you can sort of decide what clothes you're going to wear. Right now, of course, all you can do in social module is you can be just one of the 6 characters that will be with the FPS. Light, medium, heavy marine. Light, medium, heavy outlaw.Longer term we want you to dress up in the clothes, the outfits you want to so we're just finishing off our character pipeline in terms of some of the new tech we're getting in place. The shader tech I was talking about, the process and then we're going to just try to ramp it up to generate a bunch of clothes, doing our last tweaks on our base male, base female meshes. Then hopefully we'll have a whole pipeline for clothes. This is not with this social and will probably be a few months before you see that but when we get around to activating the shops, certainly before the end of this year there will hopefully be clothes and stuff you can customize your character in. Not too long after that you will be able to customize the head. We're not sure about body type because if we do too significant of a difference in body type we would need a different skeleton so we have one standard player skeleton which I think you've seen all our updates where we've changed every one of these skeletons, seven times now. For lots of good reasons but it's a massive retarget whenever you change them so the concept is we're going to have one base male skeleton and one base female for players. We will have some specific skeletons for other characters, NPC characters, so like in SQ42, certain characters will not be the standard sizing and then on top of that we can change some level of the appearance so you can have someone who's slightly fatter or slightly thinner but not necessarily changing the general proportions or bone proportions. That's the real issue with the skeleton, if you suddenly start the length of the legs or length of the arms then you have to retarget all of the animations and we have thousands, and thousands and thousands of animations. We don't just have running around FPS combat stuff, we have all these sort of living in the universe animations. Getting in and out of your ship, sitting down at the table, taking a nap in your bunk bed in your ship. All these sort of things... dancing, which people are quite fond of doing right now in social, all those kind of things. So, that's why we can't have players decide now I'm going to have a small character, a medium sized, or tall character, for that skeleton reason. We'll do some height differentiation based on the head because that can give you.... and we'll do some body size differentiation but not general sort of proportion differentiation, that'll be more reserved for NPCs. So, I hope that answers that question. I didn't answer the bit about... ethnicities I did – hairstyles, colours and physiques so you will be able to pick different hairstyles and you'll be able to pick different skin colours, etc. Physique was what I was sort of talking about, like body type. There you go Traz Ion, of Ion Industries I hoped that helped answer your question.