Give me a real brief rundown of what white box is.

So white box is getting the fundamental geometry in. Depending on the concept and depending on the concept artist, it could simply be taking the concept mesh, doing a very rough re-topo or recreation of it, putting the absolute bare-bones functionality in, so you'll grab a seat from another ship, grab a dashboard from another ship, and get that ship functioning. Because you don't care that the concept has this style of seat, you care that the ship functions. We'll take the main geometry, we'll start splitting it up in the places that it needs to split up. So the idea for white box is that you have all that base setup in there done by design. So design, in an ideal world, which doesn't always happen, can just be hands-off, and art can just sit there and iterate on that file, and a fully functional vehicle is maintained at all times, it's just the art progresses. It doesn't always happen, and there's always a level of backwards and forwards between design, art, tech art. But that white box is really taking that concept and giving it an in-game presence that can be tested, because at the end of the day, when we do a concept, we can only check for so much and we have to assume some things will work. Especially for ground vehicles, you can't do a full suspension test in a bit of 2D art. You need to get that vehicle in-game and run it over rough terrain, because the clearance might not be enough, the axles might not be wide enough.

White box is almost a validation of the concept and the place where we address all those issues that weren't found during the concept.

Yes. Certainly we've changed the process over the years and we run into a lot less of them now. A lot of the older ships never had that level of concept done to them.

Yeah, they didn't have the metrics.

Yeah, there were no metrics. It was, does this look cool?

We have a whole suite of metrics now that we can just give to the concept artist and say, okay, here's all your chair heights, seat heights, toilet heights. Here's where the sink should be. Here's all that sort of stuff. Here's where the button should be.

If you're getting out of a bed, you need this much space on the floor. And if you've got beds on each side of the corridor, you need to account for both people getting out of bed at the same time and not clipping into each other. So that's why ships over time, especially from concepts, can grow in different dimensions. Why have they just made this ship randomly wider? It's 99.9% going to be that it doesn't work with our animation system.

It's one of those things. In a real-world submarine, you can have these super tight corridors, because human beings can put their arms up like this and scoot past each other in a hurry. But in a video game setting, when you're in a hurry and you're just running and you hit each other, things often have to cheat a little wider than they normally would in real life. And white box is the phase where we get to figure that out.

Our character models... If you were going to make a collision mesh for me here, I'm not a big cylinder, I'm a sort of squished cylinder, so if I turn sideways, two of me can go like that down a path. But in reality, our collision is a capsule, so it's really something with rounded edges, because if I spin around on the spot, my shoulders fill up that entire void. Having that is a lot simpler to calculate than having a more complex shape. So we can't have, like you say, the submarine example of two people going sideways past each other. We need to have a wider corridor that can fit two people going shoulder to shoulder.

I think we learned that lesson on the Valkyrie, when it turned out the doorways weren't wide enough to fit two people through if they're wearing the largest armor, so we widened them slightly.

And then, because the Valkyrie had those troop bays in it, we ended up with this sort of conga line.