There's been a lot of talk about the skin system, the paint system for the exterior of the ships. Where is that going? And will it also apply to the interior of the ship as well as the exterior?
TL;DRRoberts is unsure paint will extend to ship interiors, though materials can be swapped; older ships need retrofitting for the paint system, so wider player painting and tools are a longer-term goal.
I don't know whether it'll apply to the interior of the ship. We'll certainly have the ability to change out materials, so you'll be able to say, oh, I want this wall red or blue or whatever.
For the interior?
Yeah, I mean, it sort of depends on how it gets defined. I mean, we actually have a new character shader system that we use, that actually what we do for the character shader is we don't actually texture it traditionally. We specify which material is in which area and stuff like that. And then we have a library of materials that gets referenced by that indexing. And it allows us to have a lot higher resolution than you would normally do on a traditional character bake. So that's something that we're just wrapping up right now. And a little bit of that tech is going to be in the ships, but the ships, we've used some of the paint system, you've seen it I think on some of the Auroras and the Mustangs, where you can outline a kind of stencil of shapes that you put on it, and then you can choose, okay, that will be this color, or this will be red or blue or whatever. So ultimately that does require setting up the ships correctly with second UV sets and all the rest of the stuff. So not all of them are done this way. All the new ships are done this way, because that's also how the new damage system works, is it needs these second level UV sets and stuff that define, besides the top level texture, where the damage texture is or where the paint stuff would be. And so the newer ones are all set up to be able to take those. But we basically have to retrofit some of the old ones to work with the paint system and work with the damage system. So that's sort of an ongoing process. Obviously, we've got a lot of stuff to get done. So we've kind of made the choice to try and finish up the ships that we said we're going to make, get those done. Because we've been doing a lot of going back and redoing the Constellation. Version three of the Constellation, I think we've done at least three versions of the Hornet or whatever. So we kind of made the choice that we will only go back to fix up some of the older stuff now and then, but really focus on trying to get the newer stuff out. So the painting tech's there, but probably the point that we'll let everybody do some more painting, that's further down the road, because we've got to make sure all the ships are switched over using all the different UV sets, and then we probably need to give them a set of tools to allow them to do that. But that is a longer term goal for us. We want to do that. We talked about allowing people to have some mission building tools at some point. So that is on our plan, and actually we would like to try and do that as we go along, because it's hard for us to... We've got a lot of people working on this game and we still can't generate stuff quick enough or fast enough, and everyone out there does some pretty cool stuff. So we actually would like to try and sneak a few tools out there, because I think there's a lot of talent in the community, and it also helps us if that talent also creates some content that keeps people engaged while we're trying to finish the game.