Gabriel Hector · Systems Designer, Core Gameplay Design Team

So a separate strand of hair, I think, is not going to be possible. So what we're doing with the hair dye, and maybe Forrest can correct me if I'm wrong here, but it is essentially a randomization. So we're not letting you pick that, oh, I want this part to be this other shade. But we do allow the player to obviously do some pretty funky stuff with the hair. But it won't be that in-depth at this point, no.

Forrest Stephan · Principal Technical Artist

I was actually going to pass it over to Andre, maybe about the masking and stuff like that and the way that we can control the location and all that stuff.

Andre · Lead Artist, Hair

Yeah. I was at CitizenCon and I showed a hair half-dyed. So this might have caused a bit of confusion. So I did mention at CitizenCon that what we were showing is the tools that we have. So just like you said before, a little disclaimer: can we do it? Do we have the technology to do it? Yes. But I can immediately ask you guys here, there's an amount of problems that comes up with trying to get just a specific part of the hair painted, which would be like, would we allow the players to paint directly on the hair, like we do with the sculpting by pulling parts? Would they be able to say, I just want my dye over here, and that would just go to the hair and get assigned to your character? Or would we have preset masks that we say like half-way or patterns or whatever? Or would we allow the players to upload their own masks to do their dye thing? So all this, technology-wise, tool-wise, it is possible, but it's not just doable out of nowhere. There's a lot of implications with this, which is all the textures that would need to be added to the game and everything that happens in an MMO with everyone running around and all the memory that we would occupy and all that. So all these questions need to be answered before we come up with a system that would allow people to customize the dye even further for now. And looking back six months at where we were and where we are now in terms of hair, I think everyone in the community should be really happy with having the dye like that, being able to actually have a gradient that goes up and down, choosing the color that you want and having it work the way it is. It's already such a great progress over the last six months. So we never know what time is going to bring. We have the tools to do bespoke characters like this. Imagine if there was an NPC that was very specific in his hairstyle, we wanted to do something crazy about his hair. Yeah, why not? Because I could paint a mask for him specifically for that. But it's just not something that is doable in a very short time to add for the players and say, listen, guys, you can now do whatever you want to do with the dye. So, yeah, not in our agenda right now. Who knows in the future, basically.

Gabriel Hector · Systems Designer, Core Gameplay Design Team

Yeah, and it also compounds into a UX problem where when you get too many features in there, it's going to be really hard to make that a good user experience to just try and make your own character: here's like a billion different things. But of course it's more of a technical question at this point.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I think you underestimate some people, Gabe. There are people who spend five hours just in the character creators alone.

Gabriel Hector · Systems Designer, Core Gameplay Design Team

I know, and that's really what we tried to make here, something that you can spend a lot of time in, but not because it's hard to use. This UI should be sleek and nice, and I think the UI team has done an awesome job of making it so, really.