Recently you've been working on the loadout tier system. Was that finalized today or yesterday?
TL;DRThey've been settling how torso ports are divided (undershirts, top items, then vests and gadget ports) while building a Maya tool that mirrors the in-engine loadout system for animators and artists.
Well, we've had it for a long time, but we've been finalizing how we're going to break it up. Because like I said, as the characters grow and as the S42 structure of how we make these characters changes, the process changes and how we're going to build the loadout. So actually with what I went into before about armor versus clothing and then legs, torso, all this stuff, what we solidified is sort of how we're going to divide up the ports for torso items. Because Riggs is making this automation system in Maya that'll help animators automatically put together loadouts the same way we do our in-game loadouts. I don't want to say this is the final way we're doing it right now, but basically we have our undershirts and then everything else is considered a top item. And then on top of that, we'll do another port that would then fit, I don't know how to describe it, but vests, things like that. Let's say you have a deck crew. So we have a jumpsuit and then you put a deck crew vest on top and then that opens up another port. It's really just this growing sort of hierarchy of you attach this onto this and then we open up all these gadget ports and things like that.
Yeah, we're trying to make the Maya content creation side mirror how it works in the engine also. It's getting close. So the idea is that between character art, tech art, and animation even, we can have the same exact thing working in Maya as we do in engine. So if there's ever a problem, like something looks wrong, we can check it directly with the exact loadout in Maya versus the engine. So we can see exactly what's going on. It's mainly my main focus at the moment. It came about because the animators were having some trouble seeing certain things, right? Like when he's sitting in a ship or when he's doing whatever, you can't really tell what's going on because he's in the light armor or the medium armor or whatever. This way they'll be able to put him in this shirt, those pants, that hat, whatever. So the animators will be able to see exactly what's getting in the engine in the final thing instead of just a generic character doing their animations.
And that's not a tool that exists already?
No, it's custom. We have to make it because our loadout system is custom, right? Everything's custom. So the content creation side has to have custom tools to make it that way also. Very custom game.