We've been told that having variable character heights won't be a feature of Star Citizen. :( What about character width? Are there other ways that CIG plans on allowing us to enhance/diminish the sense of physical presence for our characters?asked by GODWIN

Yeah, this is a really good question, and on the character height we're looking at different things, whether you're wearing high-heels or boots or something like this, of course we want the height to change a little bit, but again it's, it's a bit of a tricky thing without changing the skeleton itself. Now, on character width, and having some targets for you know a fatter guy or a thin guy, the CryEngine used to have, and blame Crytek for this one, used to have the ability to have thin / fat variations, this was something way back in Crysis 1.

Vert colors.

Exactly. So, there used to be a, I think it was eight different channels of Vert colors, and in our character editor we could actually select each one of those channels, and for example, the upper arm would be the blue channel, the lower arm would be the green channel, the midriff would be the red channel, so you would just select that particular channel, and you had two variants, so you had a really fat mesh, a normal guy, and then a really thin mesh, and you could just have a slider that actually deformed between them, that would adjust, but, again, and blame character artists at Crytek, more specifically.

Definitely blame those character artists, those [BEEP] [BEEP].

Basically [BEEP] [BEEP] what happened was that the way we controlled that was through vertex colors, the problem for the character artists was they want to use the vertex colors for vertex colors. They want to actually be able to do the art with the vertex colors rather than using them just as a mask, so that sort of functionality was removed from the engine a little while ago. Now. What're we working on to actually do that? With our character customizer that we're working on right now, what I want is the ability to have little control points basically that you will control whether it's symmetrical or not, different areas of the mesh, so the midriff, the chest, the shoulders, the arms, the triceps, all these sorts of areas and we're trying a whole bunch of different control points around the character to see how much we want to expose, and how much we don't want to. So we could go to town on this, we could have 100's of different control points, but I mean at what point is it too much right? So you will have the ability to adjust your character, adjust your characters body, to what degree, I can't really say yet, because well, we're trying a whole bunch of it, and sooner rather than later you guys will see it.

Yeah, we're also working on animations for these sorts of things, so the animations that you see right now for your characters in say the persistent universe are the base locomotion set, and what we're planning on doing, and we're actively working on this right now, is creating variants based off of that, so we'll have, depending upon what your character is like, maybe he's a little bit more macho, or something like that, you'll be able to customize that portion of your character too, as certain variations in animation sort of give you that, what, that kind of personalized feeling for who your guy is.

Right, right, cause you might want to have a different attitude, you might stand different....

Yeah, exactly. I always stand like this. [leans seductively]

I just stand like this [manly pose] but I'm not flexing, I'm not flexing...

Oh, damn. You've been working out.

mmMMmm. Little bit.

Alright. So.

Not really, actually, I haven't been working out at all. I don't think I've worked out in [BEEP] three years. Oh, whoa, PG. beep beep.

Beep beep, beep beep. I walk 3.2 miles every day to work. And then 3.2 miles back.

Are you serious?

Yeah. And then 3.2 miles back.

I must walk at least 500 yards. 200 to my car, then 200 from the parking lot into the office.