Will we be able to customize the color of our eyes with more vibrant colors beyond just the natural ones that they currently have?

Yeah, so in the Character Customizer, as it's going to be in 3.23, you're going to have pretty much just standard eye colors, but we wanted to push it a little bit just so you can get something that feels a bit out there, feels like, oh, maybe something has happened during these 900 years in the future that we are, after all. So you can maybe make up your own backstory of why your family would look like that or something along those lines. But for the time being, we're keeping it more realistic. I think it's going to be something that we will revisit in the future to see what we want to do along the lines of contact lenses, right? Where you can really just pick any color you want. But yeah, that's a discussion for later.

I love that. Because I was talking with one of our talented graphics engineers, Nico, about eyes. And I know me and Gabriel have talked about eyes, Jacob and stuff. Right now in the character creator, the eyes do have some color and all that stuff. But this is an initial kind of prototype of the eyes. We do plan on expanding the way that the eyes currently work to make them better. And one of the things that we discussed was different iris details and stuff like that, which also leads into contacts. It's funny, when we were doing a lot of the balancing of the eye color and looking at the talent's photos, we would zoom in and we would see weird things sometimes and we would notice, oh, I think that's a contact that's actually in there. So we were really getting in there to understand how an eye works and how it renders and stuff like that. So we definitely want to improve that process, give more customization.

What about asymmetric irises first?

Yeah, so the asymmetric irises, what we were talking about was, currently you have your eyes as a single mesh, right? And then that has to draw to the screen, a draw call. If we wanted to do two separate asymmetrical colors, the simplest way to do that is to break them up into separate objects. So you could essentially apply one material to one and one material to another. The problem with that is draw calls are really important in game rendering in regards to performance. It's something that we're always trying to minimize as much as possible. So what we were talking about was, instead of having two objects that we have to render with two draw calls, is there a way to do vertex markup, or some way to determine in the 3D mesh what is left and what is right? You can actually grab a vert, you can give it a color, and with that, we can then take that data when we get the mesh and go, where is that color on what vert? Okay, this eye side is colored red, this eye side is colored blue. And now that we've encoded it, we know that we have them separated, then we can start making the shader support that. So then Nico, for example, maybe goes into the shader and starts enhancing that to take advantage of the tech artist doing the vertex coloring on the eye to differentiate what's a left eye and what's a right eye. And theoretically, with all of that, we can start doing additional asymmetrical work with the eyes, one contact, one no contact, one eye color, another eye color, without paying an additional performance cost on the draw calls. You do get a little more shader cost on the shader instructions, of course. But I think that that is worth it. And again, the draw call is a big one.

So even a blind eye, right? You can make a blind eye as well?

Now, I don't know how that looks from your first-person perspective. That would probably be for somebody else to elaborate on.