Why are the male and female player models so different in terms of bugs and feature support?

Ah, yes, so I mentioned it a little bit, the player heights. The reason we have different heights between male and female is we have different rigs. We have identical human rigs, but they are different heights and they've got different controllers, different offsets, all these different things. So that means that their assets actually get skinned independently. We also have different geometry in some cases. We take parity pretty seriously. We've made sure that when an armor goes out, it's got both versions. And we don't go over the top with, okay, the female version's massively different than the male version. It's darn close. I hope that most of the time you can still tell that there is a difference, but there is and it gets skinned separately. So it's dealt with as a separate asset. And commonly what happens is that somebody just messes up one of them or they're in a rush or we're trying to get a whole boatload of assets done at one time. And either the male one gets missed and the female one goes in or the female one gets missed and the male one goes in. So it happens. But we are really trying to keep parity in place as much as possible. So the reason those break down is just because they're two separate assets, completely different. In terms of design and the data on the design side, they're identical. So we have one, it's called a record, a data record. We have one record, and then depending on what skeleton that record goes onto, it will go down a different path of geometry in that record. So for example, we just set a tag, it says female, and we have other tags like hanging. If it's on a hanger, it looks like the hanging version. If it's in a locker, it looks like the locker version. So it goes through this little tree of subgeometries, we call them. That's why it happens. But we do take it pretty seriously, so most of the time that something like that comes up, we absolutely try to do it. Another big reason is some legacy assets, for sure, that just weren't created for a female in the first place before we actually started taking this seriously. Because if people remember, we didn't always have a female player, right?

The team has been pretty good about this when it gets pointed out and brought up. You mentioned how many assets there are in the game to track. Every single time one has come across my path, I've been able to message like Armando and been like, dude, this shirt's only worked on the male model for the last like six years. Can you help me out here? And it's not a high priority thing, but it doesn't make it any less important. He's always been really good. Shout out to Armando and everybody on the tech art team. They always find a place to squeeze it in between tasks whenever they can. You can't make the priority call above almost anything else, but there's always going to be those downtime moments between tasks and whatever. Whenever they can, they always squeeze it in.

Yeah. And not to use the dirty word, but tech debt, right? That is what it is. That's exactly it. That's unfortunately what you're seeing there, a bit of debt that's accrued because of decisions or priorities.