Will backpacks be incorporated into armor and clothing in Star Citizen?

So we can talk about the visuals of them. I'm not going to talk about it from the design side. Yeah, we can have backpacks. If you have a backpack on a shirt, it's technically a jacket, as far as the zones go. If it's a backpack on a jacket, it's just part of the jacket. Unless we do the super secret Torso 2, which allows us to break some rules. That's like the bending, but we try to avoid that. The special-casing stuff just gets muddy, so we try to avoid it.

Actually, I think with how you wanted to incorporate the pants accessory zone and the shirt accessory zones, you could have a backpack zone, which basically gives them free rein, and then when something goes over it, fine, it turns off.

Yeah, so you have a shirt and it comes with a backpack. When you put a jacket on, through zone culling, it's gone. So there's a lot of room to play with things. We just have to really think about the technical requirements to then do that thing, because it's rarely ever just straightforward. Well, we have A, B, and C, and then where can we start to...

I think a lot of people think, oh, it's just a backpack, just put it on. It's not that easy. Once we have a fixed pipeline, an actual working rule set for clothing and customization, we have to stick to that design philosophy. We can't just be like, I'm going to put a unicorn horn straight through his chest because screw it, why not? Or, in real life I can put on five jackets, right? But game-wise, unless we specifically design from the very beginning with the knowledge that someone's going to put on five jackets, then I guess we could come up with something. But that wasn't the intent when we first designed the whole game. Zones.

As an example, for clothing, we have a technical checklist to go through, and it's around 40 points. It's getting big. That's for an entire character to check, for PU assets: PU clothing and all that, not armor. And the reason for that is we're trying to maintain as high quality as possible, but we have some pretty extensive modularity, and more modularity takes away quality. So we're trying to fix that by doing some really, really in-depth technical stuff. So it's a lot to learn and it's really unwieldy to use, but the result is you don't end up with, all right, all my clothes are giant puffy things that don't look good, but sure, you can swap them around.

And you'll see a lot of games do that. Whenever you see games where you switch things, they're big. You're pretty much wearing Arctic wear. It's to fit.