How far do you plan to go with customizable body types? Fat, skinny, tall, short? [The community has latched onto the IK Steve Bender mentioned for ship cockpits as a way to allow different-sized characters.]

No. That's an assumption. That's a very dangerous assumption to make. And trust me, it's not just the community that makes that assumption. It's developers too. IK is not a magic wand. It's a magic three wands. It's limbs. No, it doesn't really solve that so much. It makes it a little easier to deal with, but generally you still have the problem of metrics. That's the real problem: how big do you go? How small do you go? And actually, the two are separate. One is the body shape, let's call it, and the second is the height. So one requires the skeleton to scale, one doesn't. That's one of the big points. And you'll notice it from playing games like Red Dead Redemption or anything: take a look around. Mostly everybody's about the same height. It's hard to notice when people have got hats or helmets or whatever on. You don't notice the difference in height as dramatically, and again, Ivo talks I think a little bit about this, maybe not on the body. You'll notice the body shape differences before you'll notice the height differences. And again, we've already got the two different heights of skeleton. We've got our female, we've got the male. There's a difference in height between the two of them. But the body shape stuff is going to be more valuable, I think, right out of the gate, and causes way less problems than scaling the skeleton. The minute we scale the skeleton, animations need to be retargeted at runtime. That's a problem. Usually, you can't just uniformly scale a skeleton. In most of the MMOs that are online right now, it's a uniform scaling kind of thing where for your height everything changes at once. And usually what people do, they make them super tall and then they'll kind of pull the body shape in so it's a thin, tall kind of guy or whatever. We rely so much on metrics, being a first person universe and having these really intimate interactions with buttons and cockpits and flight controls and whatever else. That metric needs to be really rigid. So where I'm going with that is that, yeah, body shapes, we're going to do that, for sure. But height differences, you kind of want to avoid that. And we'll have to bring some tech online to be able to do it without having to retarget a whole bunch of different animations to make it possible.

I think what you'll see, obviously this is down the road, is like other games: when they start introducing characters of other sizes, they're of other genders, or they're of other species. So that's where you'll see your hybridization.

I mean, look at the stuff that kicks up right now from the PTU: the head position in the ships. It's always, oh, my head's too low, oh, my head's too low. So now start scaling that skeleton. Depending on whether you scale your skeleton up, you've got it way too high. Or if you made them super small, you've made them way too low. The other thing that doesn't do well with a first-person kind of game is min-maxing. If I ever go play Star Marine, I'm going to be a female character at the very smallest I could possibly be, to reduce my hitboxes and everything. Then I'm just a smaller target to hit. I can carry everything the same. I can do everything the same. But now all of a sudden I've got an advantage because I've min-maxed. That doesn't lend itself well to a really cool-looking universe; it lends itself to a lot of midgets running around. If you go into PvP, I think Guild Wars is a good example right now. Everybody's tiny, and it's just harder to click on them or whatever else. So, yeah, I think it's a dangerous road to start going down and it will have tendrils that just connect into everything. And right, mantling will be a big problem, too. I've got all kinds of problems with it, because Steve went, yeah, we need skeleton scaling, whatever. I'm like, yeah, super awesome. That'd be great. So what are we going to do about cover? Cover is hard enough with the female being a different height. So you get behind something, think a box, and you've got to go up and over and look down. This is a real problem, and we fixed it for the female. But if you think you're at a wall or a railing or something like that that you're ducked behind for cover and you've got to shoot down, your trajectory or your angle of attack is going to be so different depending on your height. So if you want a really good one, you'd be a super tall guy, because then when you pop up over that box, you can shoot almost straight down from up high. But again, if you're tiny, you're only going to have a really shallow kind of angle across that. And our metrics are important. Also, if you're too tall and we put you behind cover and your head's sticking out, well, it's not very good cover, is it?

I think a lot of people would say those are trade-offs. You just listed an advantage tall people would have and an advantage that short people would have.

But we can't balance around that because we have no control. I think you'd also see the pros and cons as heavily weighted to the cons. There are pros.

But we always make that balance. Is it worth the amount of work? Is it worth the effort that that's going to take? And sometimes we lose that battle, because sometimes the stuff we'll do is a lot of work, and sometimes it seems like a really small win, and hopefully those get big later. But those are real hard decisions that have to be made, which is, is it worth it?

Because we just gave a big no to height and stuff.

That's not a solid no. All my no's are no right now, but if I come up with some sort of idea, or my team comes up with an idea, or Ivo makes some magic happen, or Steve has a crazy idea, then I reserve the right to say yes.