Following up on something Chris mentioned about being able to blend male and female heads [rather than only four male or four female heads]: is there an update?

Yeah, it's the second one [the longer-term soon]. And it's less about whether we want to do it or not. It's more that this whole system is a data management problem. So right now, if you blended a male and female, because of the positional differences of the origin joint or neck joint that we actually align, when you blend a male to a female right now, it's really creepy. The face melts into the female. But what's super creepy is it keeps animating. So it's like a melted talking face. So there's some great images, and anytime somebody comes on a studio tour, ask to see the page of the things we've seen, because there's great images on it, and we are happy to show them under NDA only. So right now they melt. The reason they melt is that the offset is different. Again, the female's about four inches shorter than the male. The origin position is totally different. So we don't do the blend necessarily relative to just that origin, but that's what we could do to do that work. What it would mean, though, is either taking all the data from the female proto rig right now and adding that to the male, and then taking all the male ones and adding that to the proto rig there. But the issue I have with that is what I talked about in ATV, the performance wins that we got from this whole system. And to reiterate, this is massive. All the heads in that one proto file are cheaper than any single one face was before. So we now have all the faces for the same cost that a single face was before. The difference there is incredible. I don't want to make that much worse. I don't want to take away that benefit that we have, because as you add more heads into that, that gets bigger and bigger. And if we take all the female ones and add them to the same place, now that means every character that loads has to load the same pool of memory. But if you're only rendering males, you're only going to have, I think it's something like 60 or 70 megs at this point. If you're only rendering females, it's only about 20, 30 megs, because we've got a couple less of those. But combining them together, you'd always have the same block of memory, which would be easier to manage, but it's going to be more than you necessarily need to use.

You have to make that choice between, are we going to add 20, 30, 40 more female heads to this, or are we going to use that space to put the male heads that already exist in that same space?

That's correct. And that's why I say it's a data management problem, because, for example, I'd really like to get a Squadron proto rig so that only the ones that are Squadron-related are loading in that proto rig. So it's a way of us managing that data in an interesting way, but it does take some work. So, yeah, further out. But again, if there becomes a lot of gameplay relevance to doing it, like if we do the sins of the father thing, or if we want you guys to pick your parents, like the GTA kind of approach, then yeah, that'll become more important. But at this point, it's not really a massive requirement. And I think you guys will get super far just with the hybrids already. I think that's going to make a big, big difference to the way that you guys interface with it.

Yeah, I think as a matter of priority it's more important to get more female heads in.

And where I always get to is just, I want a reason to do it. I don't like doing things for the sake of doing things. I'd rather have a goal or an end goal or a reason to actually do that tech, rather than just doing tech for the sake of tech.