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Have we considered not just saving presets and undos, but actually exposing the full combination code so that players can give it to other people, so they can be my brother or my sister?

TL;DRThe team likes the idea of exposing and sharing the combination code, but content changes between releases would break it, so it would be better once the data is more solid, with possible future-proofing.

Calix ReneauSenior Systems Designer

In addition to it being useful, I think that there's just something that's really beautiful about any time we expose the data in our game, because for once we don't have to fake it. We have so much going on in this game that we can just say, here's the actual values of it, and have that represented on screen in any number of ways. And I think that it's very easy to end up with something that's kind of beautiful and engaging just on the data side of it. In so many things, you'll have the doctors manipulating all these aspects of it, and it's all just hand-wavy. It looks nice, but it doesn't mean anything. And here, it's actually tied to something that's real. And sometimes that thing that's real is still abstracted away, like the way that we do our blending. Even just having my manipulation of the world result in actual changes to it, I always find that compelling.

Spencer JohnsonAssociate Gameplay Engineer

Especially as a programmer, when the data is written in hex, it doesn't take too much of a leap to say, oh, I can actually look at this and see what it means. This head has this much weight in the face. It doesn't take too much explaining to say, oh, okay, this is what it means. I really see what this code is doing here.

Sean TracyTechnical Director of Content

I do think it's cool. And that's why I make that matrix joke, because it really is. You're looking at it, and you're like, oh, that's head ID 9. It's blended at 20%.

Spencer JohnsonAssociate Gameplay Engineer

And so I would have totally wanted to have a copy-to-clipboard function. So you could just paste it and be like, this is my dude. You want to tweak it? You think I have too big ears? Here's the guy. Make your own ears on it.

Sean TracyTechnical Director of Content

And especially since we reset them every major release right now, I think that's a nice way to bring it back. But one big point about it is, what we're doing right now, you'll see it on the next roadmap publish, but we have a V2 planned. We've got lots of iteration to the actual UI, the actual interface. We've been talking about it a lot this week anyways, taking in the feedback from people and everything. So I don't want to go too deep into it, because I'm sure we'll do an ATV or something like that about the next iteration of it. But the whole mentality around that is simplify some of the interface a little bit, make it a little easier to get to what you want, take up a little more screen space, try to make things a little more clear. But the point being is that we're going to change some of the content that is in there. So one of the things about being able to output that string would be, between releases, if we change that content, that string is going to mean something very different all of a sudden, because our indices are going to change, the amount of heads are going to change, the hairstyles are going to change. So unless we're very additive in the way that we add the indexes, we're always going to basically clobber that data. So once we're in a state that we're actually pretty solid on our data, that would be a better time to do it.

Spencer JohnsonAssociate Gameplay Engineer

We can also have an internal mapping, too, where we try our best to future-proof it and say, if we're going to change the order of stuff, it won't break it.

Sean TracyTechnical Director of Content

Exactly. So for the next release, it knows, okay, well, if they are importing data, that ID 1 is actually ID 4 or whatever we want to do with that.

Reverse the Verse›LIVE - Facial Customization System·
Published on this date.5 Apr 2019