Will we be able to edit body type, height, weight, scars and cybernetics in the character customizer? Talk to us about the future of the character customizer.

All right. So it's a great question. And all of the topics that they brought up there have been brought up by Chris. So the short answer is, yeah. When? Wow. There's a lot of pieces to that. So one of the things that is coming sooner than it is later is scars. And the feature and the technology of it is blood, sweat and tears is what we call it, right? So the characters can bleed, so they can sweat, so that they can cry. And what that does bring you is some decal support for the characters. And that's what's actually really critical to have scars and things like that. So the tech enables this, but that starts getting into design discussions like, okay, when does a scar get made, right? Does a scar last forever? How long does it last? How does Death of a Spaceman work into scars, blood, sweat, tears, these kind of things? So I think there's a lot of great conversations to come for that, but it will be completely enabled. So we're going to be able to put a character in, just put the scar on them, looks great. But as far as that being a dynamic thing that happens when a player is playing, again, we've got to have design discussions to see exactly how that would work out, but the tech would absolutely allow it. So that's just on scars.

The body question is a bit of a bigger question. It's already been a mandate that Chris has put forward that he wants to be able to have custom bodies. Now, I'm not going to talk about the height adjustment because the height adjustment is a different problem than the, I call it thin-fat variations. So thin-fat variations have been around for ages and ages. And the old way of doing it is you literally have a thin one, you have a fat one and you kind of blend in between all of them, right? As you guys know, we have a really, really sophisticated system in DNA within the face. What I'd like to develop and what we are beginning to develop now is DNA for the body. So DNA for the body would give us basically all the same abilities that we have within the face, giving a massive amount of ranges of body types that you could blend in between depending on different controllers or whatever you'd want to do. So that's where Chris wants to take this. Now, there's so many challenges, guys, because it's not just about doing the body. I think a lot of people think about the customization, they see a guy standing there in an outfit, and they're like, cool, that should just work. I agree, but that amalgamation of a character is like 12 assets, all independent, right? If I were to restart this game again, I would make every body the exact same topology, every shirt on top of it the exact same topology so that we could do those blending kind of things. But that's why we've got to utilize something like DNA and a wrap deformer on top of it to be able to do that. So you guys are aware, when we mark up a hair or we mark up sunglasses, toques, or anything around the face, it takes some time. It's a lot like skinning. We have to mark up the vertices to say how much or how little do you move, how do you move, whether it's elastic, whether it's rigid. It takes some time. We would have to do that then with every single body asset. And just to give you some idea, we are nearing 1,200 body type assets within the PU. It might even be higher. That's the last I checked. 1,200 assets. So we're talking a lot of stuff over many, many years. And they're all in different states of, where's the mesh? LODs, face orders, it's tricky. So the things that go on the face to make DNA work, we know the vert order of every single one of those faces, and we know the vert order of the attachment so we can move it. But if we have all these assets on top of a body, we don't know that. So basically, we have to make a proto body, like we have the proto head, which is the mass average. Then we have to mark up every single asset that would go on top of it to move appropriately within all those ranges. So it's just a lot of work. So I think the first step, but it's a question a little bit later, first step is gonna be something like StarWear, right? And then we need to be able to look at the body adjustment.

The other place that we are able to use this is on new types of bodies. And what do I mean by new type of body? Well, I mean things like a quasi grazer. I mean bodies like a worm. I mean bodies that don't have many attachments yet, we can start doing some stuff with those. So having, we like to call them DNA creatures, makes a lot of sense. But there's a ton of challenges. Ivo Herzeg has taken a huge look at it on our animation programming tech. He's already looked into this and we've started the investigations into it. So that's body.

And I realize it's a very long-winded answer, but that's a lot of questions in one. So we've gone over scars, we've gone over bodies. What was the other? Oh, cybernetics. Cybernetics is much easier. We actually have characters that use cybernetics already. There's something at Bataglia within the PU, and there may or may not be some within Squadron as well that we've used that. To do it on a character is pretty straightforward for us. It actually relies on the underpinnings of StarWear to work really well. Because StarWear will be able to adapt to different arms, different lengths of arms. There's a whole bunch of stuff that will come with those attachments. So I think that's shortly to come. There's no tech stopping us now from the cybernetics of it. But the question then begets, can you take it off? What happens to FPS gameplay when you take your right arm off? Right? There's some questions to be answered within...

It could be just cosmetic, but that would not be a very Star Citizen approach.

Yeah, but how ridiculous would characters look running around? Like, okay, yes, you can put a gun in your left hand, but right now, all of our animations very much expect that you're holding that weapon like this, so they're just running around like this? Like, come on. That's not really going to work out. Could we do it with NPCs? 100%, right? No problem. And I think you'll see a lot of that in the coming year for NPCs actually using that kind of stuff because it's there and we do a lot of it. So that is cybernetics.