What can you tell us about the ability to color our hair in unnatural styles, like dyeing it pink or green? And what about being able to dye our armors? What are we thinking as far as player coloring of your character?

Yeah, so actually right after we do this, we have a meeting to discuss exactly that. I can tell you how it's done right now. And actually, I think the community found it interesting, because to a degree, we dye our armors right now. When we are creating NPCs, how we've set it up is, we've talked about the loadouts, we've talked about hierarchies of items and these kind of things. On every single armor right now, we have a thing, we call it the material variant item or something like this. And it's literally an item that gets attached and all it does is it talks to its parent item and it says, use this material variant, use this color, basically. So to a degree, what you're doing is attaching a dye item. That's exactly what you're doing. For us to expose that to the players is a real question mark. We don't know exactly if that's going to be the case, that we expose it as dyes, and the meeting is with Tony, this has to do a little bit with economy, has to do a lot with items, or are we actually just going to have separate sets of armor? This is the red one, this is the blue one, this is the purple one. Or do we have one set of armor and then just 10 or 20 different dye colors that you could attach to it? So conceptually, we can go both directions right now. It's just going to be a design decision that should be made.

It also affects a lot of the asset side. So for example, right now, you're basically purchasing stuff off the rack. So whatever vendor, just like in the real world, you go to your store and you buy whatever's on the rack. And if they don't make a blue version of that, you don't get a blue version of that. And that's just kind of how it works right now. Now maybe when you go somewhere like when you're purchasing a car, certain cars have a wide selection of colors and some have a narrow selection of colors, and again that's going to be the manufacturer. But then some car manufacturers have a massive range of colors where you are essentially kind of choosing your own color. It's definitely possible for us to provide more or less in different scenarios. When it comes to the player creating their own custom one, it gets a little more complicated, not just on the asset side, but also on the interface side. From the actual material standpoint, there's so many parameters that are being changed from the material itself. So is this a cloth? Is this a nylon? Is this a leather? Is this a polyester? Is this some fancy space fabric? All the different types of metals. So are they choosing those? If they are, are they also changing the color on that? And that's going to go through all the different materials on single things. And if we do allow that, how do you communicate that to the player? And then also, how do we set it up on the asset side so that we don't have to go through a custom setup every time to say that on your shirt, for example, if I want to change the green to a blue or green to a purple or any other color, that just on that shirt, we're changing the color. You see it in all different types of games. Some games have a dye system, which is really rudimentary, where you say, okay, I'm going to change my shoulder pads, but just this big panel is going to be white, and then it would be red or blue or whatever. Everything else stays the same. All the trim stays the same. Everything else except for the big panels. One of the advantages of providing what we would call a palette is that we can customize the whole thing. So rather than saying, yeah, you're going to customize it, but because it's so much work to set it up on the asset side to customize the entire thing, you only get that panel. Rather than doing that, if you do a palette, we can give you 20 variants, 100 variants, but every variant is different. It's not just the single panel. All the colors are different. So there's really big advantages to both ways, from an art direction standpoint: curating custom looks, making sure that manufacturers have defined looks, that they might only sell bold colors of certain types of stuff. So it really ranges.

Yeah, and to answer very similarly to the character damage stuff, the real next step of this is, yes, we do the customization of colors on our NPCs, and most important to us is that you, the players, can now use those colors. So that's what that meeting's about mostly. So that'll be the first step, that you can actually have access to the colors. But then beyond that, whether they're tinting them themselves or whatever, it's not the most pressing issue.