I'm wondering if there will be customizable character helmets or body armor in the PU? Would it be possible, perhaps in the near future, that we could buy 'alien' looking or perhaps some 'mecha' looking armor, helmets etc... perhaps each part with their own perks and / or disadvantages?asked by Daimon 2

So. Let me tell you. Boy, is there customization in the PU, because we have spent the last 3 months concentrating on making sure that the characters have a good amount of customization for the PU. And you will absolutely be able to change your helmet, get new helmets, and I don't know what the limitations are on alien races and stuff, but I think it's pretty safe to say that that's going to be a big aspect of the game.

Yeah, and it's a really large task too. Like, the concept itself is pretty simple, being able to swap in my helmet and stuff, but it's remarkably difficultFS: to make everything work, to swap out different areas of the character, to make it always not look weird is the hardest thing.

Cause you give someone full customization, man, I'm going to turn this shirt to bright pink, make my plants bright blue, but there's a lot of...

What's wrong with pink? My socks are pink.

Nothing's wrong with pink, you can have a design to be pink, but then we have to come up with a bunch of limitations too, what you can and cannot... tech limitations, because there's always a constant give and take. Because if you want this thing, then you get less character on screen, and you want more of this and then you have to take away from certain areas, so what you try to do is you try to find out what's the best balance of, I want to give you everything you want, but you're going to have to lose a little bit of something in some area, because there's only so much memory out there. And I know optimization...

That's the most difficult thing, is the memory. Obviously the more objects you have that get loaded up into the game takes a certain amount of memory, the amount of textures that are required to take that into the game requires a certain amount of memory, but, we've definitely spent a lot of attention to that, and we want to have the biggest PU character experience that you could possibly have with this game, cause like everything else we try to make everything as good as technically possible with the day and age that we're in. So we do a lot of tricks. We're starting to pool, what we call pooling, our materials and textures so, we get everything in a library, and then everything is pooling from these libraries, that way we can have hundreds and hundreds of objects instead of being restricted to dozens or only a hundred. So the game can exponentially grow in size over the months and the years, and we should be able to still support it and it should still run.

Yeah, we're developing the tech, too.

Right now. Literally right now we have a programmer upstairs (Hi Oka) that's helping us write the stuff, and then also we have a great graphics director, Ali Brown, who also has considerably helped us getting this system in place. Does all the hard parts.

And we're learning it too, so as time goes on in the next few years, we're going to get better at understanding it, at utilizing it, and at optimizing it, ourselves as artists, just because we're learning a new tool essentially, so what's the best way to use this tool. It's something that'll just grow over time.

Absolutely, and it's headed in the right direction so... I'm excited.

I think that when it's released there'll be a decent amount of customization, and then obviously through, as the game evolves, it'll really start to, the Universe will end up populating itself.

And we put a lot of effort to making sure that our objects are almost dynamic in a way, so as we make better textures, as we make better materials , the objects aren't kind of just baked and static, they also get better over time. So, we don't plan on the game just, you know, throwing it away in a year. We want to evolve and continue for years to come, so it was very important that the art evolved with the game, and the time, that way when new games come out we still are competitive with the same asset that we made today.

That's a really good point, how we can always change things, because of the system we're developing. We can always grow.

Do you get an alien hat? I don't know. I'll make you one if you don't... We'll make you an alien hat. Or alien head, like a mask. Are there halloween parties in the 'Verse? What if you were to... how cool would that be, you put on like a Vanduul costume.

DudeFS: Then you have those little things you put on, the overalls.

I want one at Christmas parties.

What Christmas party?

Halloween parties, Christmas party...

Bad Christmas sweatshirtsOA: All of a sudden the Universe is snowing in the vacuum of space. I love it.