Where is the female avatar?

Blame Steve Bender. So there's a lot that actually goes into the female avatar. It's not just making the model and getting it in there, right? There's the whole animation system that also needs to work with these characters. So currently there is a significant amount of work going on on the animation side to make sure that that character is going to be working properly, because we do have the female model done. We're currently in the process of taking a ton of clothing that we've made for the male character and then basically refitting it and recreating it to work with the female characters. That way everything is going to be modular across the board, even though the female and the male will have different size fitting clothing to make sure it conforms to the body properly. But currently the artists are making all the female clothing. We got our female model looking absolutely fantastic. We got all the female heads running in parallel with all the male heads, and then the last thing that we really will need to get working is all the animation side stuff.

For perspective. So we have a female character. How many people will touch this character? How many in this company? And we can just talk departments, touch this one extra character to add to our game.

So on the high level, your animation discipline is significant to it. You have your tech animation discipline, to make sure that everything's working properly and technically set up correctly. Animation is responsible for the actual animation and the movement. Tech is responsible for getting it working along with animation a little bit. And then you have your tech artists on more of the art side, making sure that everything is working properly, efficiently, draw calls are correct, and making sure we can populate with plenty of characters without breaking the game. And then you have your character artists themselves. And then you have your concept art that needs to make sure that everything looks right before we go spend the weeks it takes to actually create something properly. You have your character art director, Josh Herman. You have the whole head department, which we have 3Lateral and Imaginarium and a whole group of people in-house that run that whole area. So it's a massive undertaking. And then you have people just doing the sculpting of the character and the low-poly.

And tech design touches it, doesn't it, for loadouts?

Then once the character's done and it's working, then yes, you have to get it over to tech design and then you have to figure out, okay, how do the attachments work? How do things get swapped out? How do you put this on you? We have the females in the marine outfit, right? We've got to make sure that we set up all the item attachments on all the armor pieces so it can grab everything properly, because the proportions are slightly different than the male. So we've got to make sure that when you reach for that gun, it's going to work.

And then QA.

And then once it's done with all the tech stuff, then you get it to QA, and then get all that working, and then you throw it in the game, and then absolutely nothing works. And then you evaluate. And you might have code bugs, you might have things you've got to fix because it doesn't work. Then you've got bugs.

So the reason I ask is I was on a panel, we were talking about a second character in a video game, any video game, ever. And the question was, why is there only one in there? I don't understand why there's only one in there. And somebody made just a random comment and was like, oh, it's hard. No, it's not just hard. And obviously what we're doing is hard. We've got a lot of people, so there's a lot of things you can say against that. We've got a lot of great people on it. But it is a very intricate process to do it right, to get a second character in there. And what we're doing is we're not just getting a second character in there. These guys are building entire pipelines to make this whole thing efficient and faster for future ones.

We're doing all the characters at the same time.

It's not, we're making one, and then when we're done, we'll think about doing another one.

And one thing we've learned from our experience of developing this game from scratch is it's really important to get your infrastructure in place and to prove out all of your techniques and your workflows and your methods. Because if you try to do two things in parallel before you've proven one method, you could be doing them both wrong. And we want to be as efficient as possible, so we want to make sure we get it right and then we move on to the next challenge.

A lot of great lessons learned. So that's pretty much the reason the female isn't there right now. So just to give you some details on that anyways. The female and male skeletons are two different skeletons, so conceptually completely different characters. Could be a Vanduul, could be a... So the implementation of that second skeleton, just like you're saying, though it's a female, it's just a tiny bit smaller than the male. Yeah, sure, but it is another asset. But one of the tricks is, okay, now we're going to make this female. We've got motion-captured animations too, but we've also got a lot of authored animations for the male. If you're ever going to implement a female and they can't do everything that the male can do in terms of animation, in terms of using weapons, in terms of equipping outfits, oh my goodness, the blowback would be awful. So you have to make sure you are at parity with that male. So because they're two different skeletons, all of a sudden we have to do a different animation set. So the male in Star Citizen currently has about 6,000 animations or so. Now they're not all in the PU, they're not all seen necessarily by the players at this exact moment, but they will be. And what that means is, yeah, that's 6,000 other animations now on the female, and that has to be in parity. And what Forrest was saying was you can't figure out the problems on two similar systems at the same time; rather, get one locked down. So what he means is that we're really not even finished with the male, right? We're not finished with a male human completely, where he does cover correctly, he does prone correctly, he does mantling correctly, and it's not even just doing it, it's that he does it and it looks really good and we are all happy with it. Once you're there, boom, through to the female, because then it's just a matter of transferring animation. Right now we've got a whole bunch of females within Squadron 42, and a lot of them are transferred over from the male and then feminized a bit, or they are brought in from motion capture data. Again, trying to do two at the same time without having locked down and perfected that first one is a real trick. And we could always just bail and do the easy thing, and we talked about it, we could do the very easy thing of just saying, all right, females and males, exact same size. So all of a sudden you share the rig, and you know what, you could have female avatars tomorrow if we made that concession. But females have a different proportion. This is just a reality. And I feel, and everyone in charge feels, that that's important enough to take our time with it. Have the male locked down and then transfer it all.

And for those wanting to see more about perfecting the animations, check out this week's Bug Smashers. It's just about the vaulting animations.

Oh, about the vaults. Perfect. See, and you can see that, yeah, the system's there, but it needs to be finalized, because there are things that will change to just get a little bit of polish out of it, but then you have to reapply that to a female or another character or whatever. But the cool part is, once the female's online, that means Vanduul, Xi'an, all these other races that we want to do are quite easy to bring online within those systems as well.