Back to search

What about south of the neck? Is the character creator going to expand to the body? I know we talk a lot about the player metrics and that they have to be certain sizes, but is that going to stop us from being able to do muscle tone changes, so I can be a soft-bodied person at the same age versus a ripped person?

TL;DRExtending the customizer to body shapes is something they want and are looking at, but the many character assets make it technically hard, it isn't working yet, and nothing is promised.

Sean TracyTechnical Director of Content

Yeah, and conceptually, right? And Andreas is very keen to do this. And he's pretty confident that he can get there. Keen and confident. That's why I adore him for that, because I have my own reservations about it. I'm not sure. It's a technical and a bit of a visual thing, too. We have about 1,500 character items right now. When we did the facial attachments, there were like 50. Not a big deal to go over the facial attachments and put in the markup for the facial customization and the runtime deformers needed. A little different story on 1,500 to 2,000 assets. And that's what's getting harder and harder, by the way, about doing systems within Star Citizen and for the game: the sheer breadth of content that you sometimes have to update makes a very real impact on the feature. Like, are we going to do it this way? Because, holy, that's a lot of updates that we've got to make across it.

Calix ReneauSenior Systems Designer

It's easy to balloon from there. You're just talking about character assets for what they're wearing. You're not even talking about what has to change about their animations, what has to change about anything regarding the seats and the ladders.

Sean TracyTechnical Director of Content

That's true. So I don't expect we'll do anything with the heights, but absolutely the body shapes, we do want this. It's just there is a technical challenge within it, and there are different ones than the face brought, but I have lots of confidence in Andreas and Ivo and those guys over in Frankfurt. And they are absolutely looking at it, but we can't promise it at all, because we don't have it working yet. But we'd like to. And if we get there, it'll use a very similar system with the runtime deformers. It'll be quite interesting, I think, once we get there.

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