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Heterochromia: tell us what it is and whether we're doing it.

TL;DRHeterochromia means different-coloured eyes; it isn't planned for this quarter, but the character system could support it fairly easily by adding a second set of eyes and culling one, depending on demand.

Calix ReneauSenior Systems Designer

It's about having different colored eyes. As far as the asset side of it, I don't see a reason we couldn't support it. I don't think that we do, and I haven't heard of any plans to do so. How do you feel about this, Sean?

Sean TracyTechnical Director of Content

I love the word. Again, I'm just like, different eye colors.

Calix ReneauSenior Systems Designer

It's a pretty rare condition in the world.

Spencer JohnsonAssociate Gameplay Engineer

It's way more common in animals like dogs and stuff. We already support asymmetry, so it would just be like locking one eye and then...

Calix ReneauSenior Systems Designer

Yeah, I mean, actually, the helmet thing was a big part of that asymmetry decision, because we supported manipulating your face directly asymmetrically. And that was problematic, because even if you end up with a non-homunculus character, when the helmet morphs to match your face, the asymmetry in the helmet becomes really apparent and problematic.

Sean TracyTechnical Director of Content

That's a really polite way to put it. It looks awful. You have a Slaver helmet that looks like a face, and then you have half of it looking like it was melted.

Calix ReneauSenior Systems Designer

On the material side, which is what supporting heterochromia would need, I don't know if we have anything coming down the pipe for being able to do any manipulations of material at that scale. That would be very similar to how you would handle alterations to eyebrows, makeup, flesh tones.

Sean TracyTechnical Director of Content

So we did build this into the character system from the get-go as an option, because I thought eventually we would want this. And actually what I thought eventually we would want would be holographic upgrades and things like that that you would put on one eye, or a contact lens on one eye or something like that. That's your AR lens or robot eye or something. But within the item ports of the character, it's actually split up into left and right eye. We use one of them right now. That's all. And it has the two eyes in it. So the easiest way to do it is actually just to add another set of eyes, and then we zone cull one or the other. So there's actually four eyes, but we're zone culling the opposite ones. And that totally works right now. We can do it. So I think depending on how much people want it, yeah, sure. It's not a nightmarish add, but it's not planned for this quarter.

Jared HuckabyHost, Community

I want to be able to make Cable from X-Force.

Calix ReneauSenior Systems Designer

Right. No, that's exactly it. Things like scarification and having any sort of post-manipulation, things like having augmentations or prosthetics, those would all be handled on the asset side at this point. Same as adding a hair, which is a weird way to do it, I'll admit. If you're adding the extra eye in or you're adding a scar or something, it doesn't initially make sense that you would attach that to a person, but that would probably be how.

Sean TracyTechnical Director of Content

And then the color is somehow attached to the person, which is fun, too.

Calix ReneauSenior Systems Designer

That's the sort of abstraction you have to get your head around in order to manipulate it correctly.

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Published on this date.5 Apr 2019