Any updates on the new FPS animations?

It depends on what animation. We're always updating them. So yes, the locomotion sets have been in there for a while, I think. One of the big refactors that we're doing, and this is super behind the scenes, is that we're changing our animation pipeline. I hate to just throw out the word pipeline because it's so nebulous, but we're changing the tools that we use to actually export these animations. Doing that requires a ton of work. The problem with it is that we've got something on the order of 3,500 animations across the project. That includes ships, characters, anything that moves in the game. So whenever we do a change like this, we have to make sure that we support all the legacy assets. Basically we've got to batch export all these things. It requires a lot of tools work that is, again, a very unsexy thing to be working on, because you've done your job right when you have exactly what you started with, which seems very strange. But you are then on the new pipeline, which is quite nice. And again, this is all about scalability. You get those animations done in the first place; they took you two and a half years to do. The hope is that as you improve your pipeline, it takes you half the time. Then you take another half off that. Then you take another half off that. As long as you can scale a lot going forward, then it's a good thing. And that's the idea with the FPS animation. So we've been converting this over to another pipeline.

And having said that, one of the things that Steven's actually working on today is we have a whole state for the hunch. People have probably noticed this: in the hangars, when you walk under a ship, they wanted to have a whole movement state. But it makes no sense for this thing to be an entire movement state in itself. Most of our animations are split up between sort of a full-body or an upper-body kind of animation, and we author them very differently. So when you go walking around the hangar and you walk under a ship, your guy hunches like this. What's actually happening behind the scenes is you're going from a normal relaxed walk locomotion to the relaxed hunch locomotion. But a locomotion set takes about 96 assets for the full body. And with the hunch, you don't walk that much differently than you do when you're just walking relaxed. So why is the hunch a whole separate motion set, when it could just be an upper-body additive? What I mean by an upper-body additive: you take exactly what your relaxed walk is and then you add one layer on top of that that says, oh, hunch a little bit. So rather than initiating a whole other set of 96 assets that you've got to stream in or keep up to date, we're just going to put in an upper-body additive. So the state still exists, but you're actually reusing what the relaxed no-weapon set would be. So that's one thing. The other thing he's working on is a bunch of the grab animations. Somebody put a placeholder grab animation in at some point in the project and it's just stayed there forever. So anytime you go pick up a weapon, there's something really, really strange happening right now. So he's going to fix that up today with the new pipeline.