In the last Frankfurt studio update there was a character walking in circles, with slight footstep adjustments as the circle stretched out. It seems like an awful lot of work to make a character look natural. Why do we go to that level of granularity in these animations?

Well, if we think about the universe that we're building and the level of detail and the vision ultimately that Chris has kind of set forth and kind of ingrained in everyone's head, and now the directors and leads are taking this to where we believe it should be, there is this level of detail in this expansive universe that is incredibly important to us, for numerous reasons. When it comes to animation though, to get to your point, when it comes to animation and AI, it's fairly simple and fairly easy to give an AI a brain and say, hey, you're hungry, you should go to the kitchen and eat, right? There's going to be obstacles in his way, there's going to be other AI, there's going to be new things that are there, whatever. And he needs to navigate to that place and do that thing. So it's incredibly easy to go, okay, cool, go. But you don't want them to look like AI. I don't want him to go straight and abruptly turn left and then abruptly turn right and then go straight again and so on. So we really want the nuances to where it feels realistic. And with that, then characters need to have realistic weight. If you look at just a simple thing on the footsteps and the moving and turning, and I think two ATVs ago I did a fairly in-depth one on what our lead animation programmer Ivo had been working on. When you just see those characters turning in circles in different velocities and so on, the reality is that is a lot of under-the-hood code and a tremendous amount of animation assets that get pulled together. We want characters at any velocity, at any angle, with any condition to look and feel realistic. So if two guys are walking down the hall and they're going to pass each other, they're going to move around away from each other intelligently, right? Maybe even after ranking, if you think about it, if somebody's got a higher rank, maybe he doesn't move out of the way and the other guy moves around him. Or even based off that, he has certain conditions: is he saluting? Is he saying something? Maybe they're friends as they're passing each other. So then procedurally, they're going to do something to where they greet each other. We take all this attention to detail on the animation side to really make sure that there is this perceived illusion that the world is alive. The moment you have something where somebody's not going to move properly like a human, you lose that. You lose that completely. It's incredibly cool, though. I mean, yeah, I've been an animation director in the past, but to see what the guys are doing and what they're able to pull off. Some of the stuff, I go back a year ago or so where some of the programmers were like, no, this is not possible. We shouldn't do it this way. We can't do it this way. A couple of months later, they go, oh my God, I figured it out. Here we go. I did this. This is amazing. We get our own epiphanies as we go through things in order to tackle them and take it to the next level.