Will characters bruise or visually bleed, and which other damage states can we expect visually? We do such destructive work on our spaceships, but we are not our spaceships; we are the players flying them. So where are we going with that for our players, if anywhere?

Well, maybe I'll give it to Josh in terms of what he wants. That's generally how this has to go: yeah, I could come up with a bunch of answers and a bunch of tech and a bunch of things that we could do or whatever, but ultimately it's, definitely on the art direction side and even design direction, what do they want to do with it? So, not to put them in the firing line, but maybe you can define sort of things you'd like.

It goes back to a conversation we've talked about before, which is the whole Death of a Spaceman thing. And I think that relates to that in a way because it's basically talking about the degradation of a character or character assets, so aging, dying, all that kind of stuff. When you go through that process as a character, you obviously want to communicate to the player that something is happening. So whether you're getting older, you're getting beaten up, you're taking damage, whatever that is, there's some sort of a visual that's going to happen there. We do want to share that stuff. As far as the specifics of certain types of cuts, certain types of gunshots, or whatever the scarring is, that's a high bar of what we want. It'll probably come in earlier versions, but we'll have to communicate it to the players in some way. So there will be, but as far as the fidelity of what that is, it's going to be...

To an extent, a lot of games use UI health meters and stuff like that. But a lot of Star Citizen is about that diegetic approach. It's one thing to have a UI to just tell you the condition of something, but if there's a way to visually show it in our universe... So if you take off your helmet and therefore you don't have your UI, there's some other way for you to see the damage and stuff. A lot of games attempt that to varying scopes, but I think Star Citizen is very much about putting as much of that information diegetically in the universe as possible.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it actually makes it rewarding. That's the thing. I was joking about everybody being sadists and stuff like this, but normally what you want to do, you want to be able to shoot at a character and you want to see some sort of reaction. And then additionally, I've always liked the idea, and this is something we've talked about, and it kind of gets covered in Death of a Spaceman to a degree, of some level of life-changing event for your character, meaning something absolutely egregious has happened, minus death. Not just dying, but you were standing on a grenade or you got hit by a landmine or something like this. And having some kind of life-changing event that actually marks your character in some sort of way, whether that's you took a shot in the head or something like this. You didn't die, but on your next respawn, you've got a heck of a scar or something like this.

Or limbs, like amputations or mechanical limbs and stuff like that.

Exactly. And I think that'd be super interesting. Technically, doing these kind of things, like showing decals on the characters, has its own little technical challenge. It's a little bit different than dealing with the ships. But doing dirt, doing decals and that kind of stuff on the characters, yes, we can do. The real thing that you want, though, and what Josh alluded to, is the degradation, the wear, the tear, and the actual damage directly on the armor itself. I'm sure they've noticed that we have a really pretty robust damage system on the ships. Now, the trick is we can't just copy-paste that to the characters, and that would be incredible, but the problem is that fundamentally we're dealing with two very different mesh types, and actually what comes into play is the physics of that impact, because you should understand that on a character, when you shoot a character, you're not actually hitting the render mesh at all. We have a skeleton that has a bunch of bounds on it, and you might have seen it in various RTVs with the various debug views. There's a whole set of boxes basically that represent every one of the joints, every one of the bones that are in there, and you impact those. Problem is, the render mesh itself knows nothing about that. Now, on the ships, it's actually part and parcel with the object that you're seeing. It's actually the same thing. So physics and the render mesh are connected with the ships, but on the characters, it's two very different things. So to come up with a system that works very similarly will take some doing, definitely. I know that Chris is really keen to get holes and wear and those actual impacts showing up on the armor, but you've got to think of some problems that come with that. So all of a sudden what we've talked about with zone culling, that becomes a problem, because if you make a hole in the top one and you've culled out the zone on the bottom, all of a sudden you've got literally a hole through the character. Which maybe sounds kind of cool, but actually would look pretty weird. So that's a problem. I could start listing out all kinds of different little issues within that. The zone culling is one of them. And then additionally, do you show it on the body? And would the body disintegrate like the ship would? Probably not. We're going to have blood or something like that on the body. So there's a lot of different problems that come out of that. And what we do about it, I can't tell you 100%, but at the very least, the thing that we've got to get working is that the impacts on different areas of your armor will react differently. Right now, it's actually pretty unsophisticated, to be totally direct with you guys. We don't change the material on the skeleton. The skeleton, the human, and you might have noticed this, I've just set it up very simply: if you hit center mass right now, you're going to get a metal impact sort of effect. And that's because I've set the torso bones and the physics of the torso, all the way down to the hips, I believe, to be metal so that it reacts like metal. But now if you hit the head, if you hit the arms or you hit the legs, you're going to get blood. You're going to get this flesh sort of appeal. So first things first, we've got to get the skeleton changing physically to what's actually attached to you. So to talk a little bit about the cloth talk that we did, some of the stuff that we're looking at for the cloth and collisions with the cloth, that's going to cover all of that. There's a lot of steps there anyways, but first things first, we'll get the impact with the skeleton looking different. So great, we'll have good impacts on the characters, and then from there we'll want some sort of visual.