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Will long hair and long beards be implemented as part of the character, and will they be affected by wind and gravity?

TL;DRYes, long hair and beards are planned and should react to gravity and wind, but this first needs planet-based gravity and wind to be hooked up to hair, which isn't done yet.

Sean TracyTechnical Director of Content

Yes, actually. So we've got a couple of different hairstyles that are coming down the pipe. We haven't talked exhaustively about it for this year, but the DNA gene splicing stuff, which is going to be what part two of the character creator ATVs is. So we've come up with some solutions within there that are going to allow us to do this stuff, which is super nice. Especially to do with beards, which are usually one of the harder things to do when you're customizing and changing a face behind the scenes. But one of the trickier parts to it is we've got to deal with gravity. So gravity right now is just local to the player himself. So all the character attachments, they are affected by gravity. It's just not actually the gravity in the world. It is just kind of a fake value that sits on the character only. So we've got to receive that from the planet. We've already got the setup problem kind of fixed up for the simulation. So that's one side of it. But yeah, that's the first thing we've got to do. And then on the wind front, the wind got unified to a new system. So the CryEngine had wind before, but again, it was a Z-up kind of assumption, right, with a level plane, and wind was just an XY sort of idea, and there were little boxes that would fly through the world. So now that you're around a planet, we've got to convolve that entire system around a planet, and Marco Cabello has done that within our engine. So we've got to get the hair listening to those values, basically. There's a couple other things with that, is that short hair still has to be affected somehow by wind, because otherwise it just looks super static. So it's whether or not we actually want to get world wind for that or whether you just kind of fake it a little bit, where you've got wavy stuff going on. There's no real reason to spend a ton of performance on just simulating somebody that's got hair as short as mine or so. But the longer hair, yeah, we've got to do something with, definitely. The one thing to keep in mind, though, is that when you throw these helmets on, we still have the sort of helmet hair, which is a little more like the back of my hair here. We put the Snoopy cap on and we actually remove that hair so that it's not simulating inside the helmet. It would look a little silly. But yeah, now whether we go Fu Manchu kind of beards, that's going to be totally up to Josh and whether we want to support those. But yeah, they're going to simulate just like, as crazy as it is, this silly monocle chain and things like this. That's all going to simulate and be affected by what's going on in the world.

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Published on this date.27 Apr 2018