You mentioned 'when that's fully implemented', so that's not fully implemented now [weapon attachments adjusting to clothing layers]?
TL;DRAttachment adjustment to clothing layers exists but isn't fully reliable yet, and the team says some clipping will always remain, especially in zero-G, because cloth simulation runs locally.
Yeah, because we do have it. It's just that with the immense variation we have, it's not 100% functional. You can play with it enough that you'll notice it start to fall apart every now and then, which is why we're honing it, and we're still building out the whole design spec as we see more clothes need different specifications. But if you ever see a cape clip a gun, send it to Corey.
No, but I think it always will. Because I think the hardest thing about our game is EVA.
Zero-G sim.
Yeah, zero-G sim is just the beast. It's a nightmare for simulation. Anything that's simulated, right? Because I've seen some people on Twitch doing ICC missions, and it's out in space, and they're all flying around, and they'd be wearing the Sand Nomad. And that thing is just all over the weapons. It is kind of annoying, but I hope the backers will understand there will always be some sort of clipping. We can't simulate real life yet. We can't have things collide on every single part correctly. You'll have to forgive us, but there will be some things that will clip.
It's always a matter of give and take too, because there are things that you can do when you're the only player in the universe. You're playing a single-player game, everything is local on your machine, that's it. But when you're talking about a massively multiplayer environment, where now that simulation has to be sent to everyone else in the area...
I'll stop you there. So actually, simulation happens locally per machine. So it's not that the simulation would be sent. Just before we get the comments on it. Simulation wouldn't be sent to other machines. Basically, it tells other people's machines, oh, they're wearing this, and then it would sim locally on their machine.
So the same simulation would have to happen on every computer.
So it could be flapping right on one person's computer, and it could flap a little differently on another.
Because it's simulating just here. They get the movement of the character, and then the sim is calculated locally.
Position, network; the actual simulation, local.
But single player versus multiplayer is also relevant, because in a single-player game, let's say you're playing Arkham or something, that cape is designed specifically for that environment on that character, and you can put years of polish into an asset. Versus we now have all these characters running around, and it can alter draw calls per scene. It's not like you can completely hone in.
Yeah, so Watch Dogs is a really good example. The main character has really good cloth on him. But if you notice, okay, his jacket goes so far down his legs. Most other NPC character assets have a similar length, because they're reusing everything they develop for the main character everywhere they possibly can. If you're going to spend that much time to make it that good, you want to use it everywhere you can. For us, every asset is the hero asset. It's a balance to get.
And that brings up something interesting with zero-G too, because another reason it's such an issue is that in most games you have your set of animations, and you can test your sim against all those animations and make sure, okay, it may not be perfect, but it works within this animation set. I'm doing all these actions and it doesn't clip. But then you go into zero-G and it's like, I'm diagonal with one arm this way, going 10 miles an hour that way, and it's just upside down.
And I've seen a lot of games where they bake in certain animations for the cloth and stuff like that. So even though it looks like, oh, this has a sim on it, it's not really a sim, it's that animation. It's doing the same loop of that motion, which is cheaper to a certain extent. But it's always the same. And since that character or that asset will only be in a fixed number of levels and fights and will do a set range of actions, they can do that. And normally that number is a lot smaller than what our game has. So they can afford to do that.