Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - Characters and Content

2 November 201800:58:031,554 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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[Music] everybody welcome to another episode of reverse the first live the only show that tells you everything you need to know about taking care of your cheese joining us on the show this week we're jumping right into it we have our esteemed guests from here in the Los Angeles theater to follow up on your wonderful citizencon panels and presentations we have a director of technical content mr. Shawn Tracy hi how you doing make sure your mic is working out yes we had some mic troubles that was the delay but I I figure the timer was wrong and then we had the character art director mr. Josh Sherman hello everybody so our TV if your this is your first art TV maybe your you know first of all I wanna thank you for watching us and not the Blizzcon presentations going on right now as I see half the people here are watching our TV is where we
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take so we take questions from you our star system backers and posed them directly to our developers we take questions from two places you can either submit your questions live in the chat either twitch chat where we're broadcasting now or in spectrum which is which you can find on Roberts space industries dot-com you can previs your question with the word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets it's gonna help our community management team pick it out from all the other conversation and of course we put up a thread all week where we collected questions in advance and let people vote on which ones they wanted to see answered most now before we get started before we get into this why don't we talk a little bit as we do about what you do for star system because every show is somebody's first they're not gonna know who you are somebody doesn't know who you are what you do it'll help guide the questions that come in so Shawn once you start us off who are you and what do you do what it is that you do here what is that you do you tell me
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the number of times that we have to prove ourselves it just it's so don't even need it so hard it's so hurts me like every time every time true what does this go really okay yeah what is it you really do here no I'm just teasing so technical director of content it's basically like a tech art tech animation and tools director so all the processes and pipelines that we do to get assets from the DCC tools are digital content creation tools I work on with my team as well as doing tons of different little R&D projects things like VoIP things like DNA or gene splicing and those kind of things we tend to be pretty heavily involved in would you say that most of your work is is in helping other people do their work sure it's enabling them yeah making sure yeah definitely
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enabling them and making sure that all the stuff that they're wanting to do is scalable is is not gonna take you know 20 years to make this game it's going to take some time because the content is huge but yeah it's trying to come up with tools and processes that either haven't been tried in a certain way before or just make it am able to yeah make them able to do their jobs basically and Josh what do you 4 star says character art director so basically I oversee the character art team the character concept team and then I co-own the character tech team LeSean yeah so that's basically everything from initial ideas of concepts so sometimes just blue sky ideas sometimes that's working with the design and narrative teams basically figuring out what the visuals for those
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characters look like as a concept stage then bringing it into the character art stage where we create those models and then bring it over to character tech where they get rigged Sims and ready to be put into game and that's not just player characters that's a narrative characters and the squadron 42 and starts there's a mission givers it's if it's an entity that it's supposed to be living or breathing in our game it has to go through you at some point that includes animals like the boy and stuff like that aliens well let's go ahead and jump in we're already collecting some questions from the from the from the chat from the thread that we collected throughout the week the top question what sort of question was well characters bruised or visually bleed like I don't know a lot of people wanted to know you know just
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how much we could damage our characters yes well characters bruises and which other damaged states can we expect visually well we do have some fantastic nation and demonstrates for our ships will I be able to tie up my character and beat him yeah we do okay we get some variations this question quite often anytime anytime we do a character based joke this because we do we do such fantastic destructive work on our spaceships and spaceships are obviously a huge part of star citizen but this is a first person University we are not our spaceships we are the players that are flying our spaceships yes so what can we where are we going with that for our players if anywhere well maybe I'll give it to Josh in terms of what what he he wants that's generally how this has to go is that you know yeah I could come up with a bunch of answers
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a bunch of tech and a bunch of things that we could do or whatever but ultimately it's it's it's what definitely on the art-direction side and even design direction what do they want to do with it so I mean not to not to put them in the firing line but maybe you can find the sort of those back things you communicate to the player that something is happening he's just working with you
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that stuff as far as the specifics of certain types of cuts certain types of gunshots or whatever the scarring is that's that's a high bar what we want it'll probably come in earlier as earlier versions but we'll have to communicate it to the players in some way so there will be but as far as the fidelity of what that is it's gonna be I mean to an extent a lot of games used like a UI health meters short up like that but a lot of star citizen is about that diegetic approach it's one thing to have a you either tell you the condition of something but if there's a way to visually show it in our universes a way so if you take off your helmet and therefore you don't have your UI you know there's some other way for you to see communicate yeah that the damage the stuff and we see a lot of that a lot of games attempt that I do to very scopes but I think star citizen is very much
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about about putting as much of that information diegetic lee in the universe as possible yeah absolutely and I think it makes it it actually makes it rewarding that's the thing so you know I was joking about everybody being sadists and stuff like this but normally what you want to do you want to be able to shoot at a character and you want to see some sort of reaction and then additionally I've always liked the idea and this is something we've talked about and it kind of gets covered in in death of a spaceman to a degree but I've always really liked the idea of some level of life-changing event for your character meaning you you something absolutely egregious has happened - death right like not not just dying but yeah you know you were standing on a grenade or you got hit by landmine or something else and having some kind of life-changing event that actually marks your character in some sort of way whether that's you took a shot in the head there's something like this you didn't die but you know on your next
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respawn you've got a heck of a scar or something like this you normally think that baby's limbs such amputations or mechanical limbs and stuff like that yeah exactly and I think that'd be super interesting technically the challenges to doing these kind of things like showing up decals on the characters and those kind of things have their own little technical challenge it's a little bit different than dealing with the ships but doing dirt and doing decals and that kind of stuff in the characters yes we can do the the the real thing that you want though and what Josh alluded to is the the degradation the wear the tear and the actual damage directly on the armor itself so you know I don't know I'm sure they've noticed that we have a really pretty robust damage system on the ships now the trick is we can't just copy paste that to the characters and
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that would be incredible but the problem is is that fundamentally we're dealing with two very different mesh types and actually what comes into play is the physics of that impact because you should understand that on a character you're when you shoot a character you're not actually hitting the render mesh at all we have a we have a skeleton that has a bunch of bounds on it you might have seen any various ATVs with the various debug sort of views but there's a whole set of boxes basically they're representing from one of the every one of the joints every one of the bones that are in there and you impact those problem is the render mesh itself knows nothing about that right now on the ships it's actually part and parcel with the object that you're seeing it's actually it's the same thing so physics and the render mesh are connected with the ships but on the characters is two very different things
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so to come up with a system that works very very similarly will take some doing definitely I know that Chris is really keen to get holes and wear and and and those actual impacts showing up on the armor but you've got to think of some problems that come with that so all of a sudden what we've talked about with zone culling that becomes a problem because if you make a hole in the top one and you've called out the Zone on the bottom it's invisible all of a sudden you've got a hole literally a hole through the character right which maybe sounds kind of cool but actually will look pretty weird yeah so that's that's a problem I could start listing now and all kinds of different little issues within that the zone culling is one of them and then additionally is is you know do you show it on the body and with the body like disintegrate like the ship would probably not right we're gonna have
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blood or something like that on the body so there's a lot of different problems that come out of that and what we do about it can't tell you for 100% but at the very least to think that we've gotta get working is that the impacts on different areas of your armor will react differently yeah right now it's actually pretty unsophisticated to be totally direct with you guys like we don't change the material on the skeleton the skeleton the human is actually and you might have noticed this that I've just set it up very simply that if you hit center mass right now you're gonna get like like a metal impact so another fence right and that's because I've set the torso bones and the physics of the torso and all the way down to the hips I believe it could be metal so that it reacts like metal but now if you hit the head if you hit the arms or you hit the legs you're gonna
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get a blood you're gonna get this flesh sort of appeal so first things first we've got to get the skeleton changing physically to what's actually attached to you so to talk a little bit about the cloth talk that we did some of the stuff that we're looking at for the cloth in collisions with the cloth that's gonna cover all that so I mean there's there's a lot of steps there anyways but first things first we'll get the impact with the skeleton looking different yeah I understand Jared doesn't understand but that's why Jared doesn't need to understand the only person this have the opposite doesn't so great we'll have we'll have good impacts on the characters and then from there we'll want some sort of visual going from that to making the armors and the clothing is even more
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complicated the next question is will there be clothing items or accessories that we'll be able to wear over flight suits and harbors we get this a lot dusters cloak scarves capes for me personally they'd like to see capes a cape fan to go back why not yeah probably not to give you the short over arm over armor we can create items that allow that look it just gets incredibly complicated to take an asset and put it over all the other stuff right a lot of the cloth tech you're talking about yes we could do it it would be very complicated the same would be very intense he it would be a very intense look and I don't think it would actually look like what people
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think it would look like it would everybody thinks it looks like the and the desert nomads yes but that's a very that's a very African cousin look so we can create all kinds of stuff that's like the nomads that's like the legacy like outlaw that like they have that kind of look yeah we can make that and that's not a problem but as far as creating saying hey I want to put this jacket on the one I won't put my armor on and then I would have put my duster back on that creates a million different types of permutations oh I had different arms on this time I had a different chest piece on this time I ever took a helmet on this time we have a different legs on because all that's gonna be interacting with with that with that duster for example so to be able to do all those combinations is just a lot of just setup work an asset work and we can really get that same look much easier by
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just saying you want a duster cool here's a duster that's a that is a maybe you know right now we have core arms legs head right what if we give you a core that also includes the arms and and it is a duster so we can get you the exact same look and it's gonna have the more curated crafts it look like you're talking about but it's going to it's going to alleviate all our asset concerns all our extra concerns and they at the end it'll look better so no to being able to dress however you want and then with whatever armor you want and then adding a cloak on top of that or anyone just another but there may be specific armor sets or types that come with cloaks or armors baton yeah and it's not impossible for us to add components to an armor so let's say it's
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a normal state like something that's more straight-up would be like any of the Odyssey stuff or the the we call it the I think it's the Pioneer which would be the Explorer armor right that's kind of just a standard you know spacefaring armor we could do a component that has a cape we'll just make a cape and it can be something you can put on that and then it'll be an attachment that goes on that like kind of stuff we can easily do and that's more of a something as we progress further into the character customization which is not just the initial layer but also the components in side of those layers more accessories the first two questions that came from the live chat are actually kind of similar so I'm going to link them together it's they're both about color what can you tell us about the ability
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to color our hairs and unnatural styles like dye your hair pink dye or green whatever and the second question was about our miracle and being able to dye your armors is like that what are we thinking as far as big player coloring of their of your character yeah so actually right after this or right after we do this we have a meeting actually to discuss this exactly that I can tell you how it's done right now and actually I think I think the community found it interesting actually because to a degree we we we die our armours right now when we are creating NPCs how we've set it up is that we've talked about the loadouts we've talked about hierarchies of items and these kind of things on every single armor right now we have a thing we call it the material variant item or
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something like this and it's literally an item that gets attached and all it does is it talks to its parent item and it says use this material variant use this color basically so to a degree what you're doing is attaching a dye item that's exactly what you're doing so for us to expose that to the players is a real question mark we don't know exactly if that's gonna be the case that we expose it as dyes or is it and and the meeting is with Tony this is an overall kind of has to do a little bit with economy has to do a lot with items or are we actually just gonna have separate sets of armor this is the red one that's the blue one this is the purple one or do we have one set of armor and then just 10 or 20 different dye colors that you could attach it with a knight so conceptually we can go both directions right now it's just gonna be a design
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decision that should be made it also effects a lot of that asset side so for example you know right now it is basically your purchasing stuff off the rack so whatever vendor you just like in the real world you go to your store and you buy whatever is on the rack and if they don't make a blue version of that you don't get a blue version of that and that's kind of how it works right now right you know no maybe when you go into somewhere like you're purchasing a car certain cars have a wide selection of colors and some of a narrow selection of colors and again that's gonna be a manufacturer but then some some car manufacturers have a massive range of colors that you are essentially kind of choosing your own color it's definitely possible for us to provide more or less in different scenarios when it comes to the player creating their own custom one it gets a
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little more complicated not just on the asset side but also on the interface side from the actual material standpoint there's so many parameters that are being changed from the materials it is itself so is this a cloth this is a nylon is this a leather is this a polyester is this all some fancy space very different metals yeah all the different types of metals so are they choosing those if they are are they also changing the color on that and that's going to go through you know all the different materials on single things and if we do allow that how do you communicate that to the player and then also how do we set it up on the asset side so that we don't have to go through a custom set up every time to say that on this shirt you know for your shirt for example if I want to change the green to a blue or green to a purple or anything other color that just on that
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shirt we're changing the color or you know you see it in all different types of games some games have a die system which is really rudimentary where you say okay you know I'm gonna change my shoulder pads but but just that big panels give you white and they're gonna be red or blue or whatever your logo stay the same everything else stays the same all the trim stays the same all that everything else except for the big panels change one of the advantages of providing what we would call a pallet is that we can customize it the whole time so you rather than saying yeah you're gonna customize it but because it's so much work to set it up on the asset side to customize the entire thing you only get that panel rather than doing that if you do a pallet we can say we can give you 20 variants 100 variants but every variant is different it's not just a single panel all the colors are
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different so there's really big advantages into both ways of from an art direction standpoint you know curating custom looks making sure that manufacturers has defined looks you know that they might only sell bold colors of certain types of stuff so it really ranges and that's what that mean there's a lot of considerations in this it's not it's I you always hear the the phrase from dress apart just because you can do with this okay you were more concerned with whether you could do a thing but you should do without you or but I prefer Star Trek six just because we can do a thing doesn't mean we must do a thing for the president of planets nobody quote second the same thing but um not just how we want to go about it in game but there's also economy considerations you know it's it's a lot of these a lot of these big ax memos
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sell cosmetic things yeah host launch monetization stuff so that all has to be factored in whether you know whether we you know what aspects of that we want to keep for that whatever what aspects we want to just expose for freeze like that it's it's a much larger conversation that actually touches many aspects that point you even when you're done with your thing with Tony you'll probably have to go to a number of other people sure and everybody's gonna have to have their say and stuff so we've been talking about customization of colors for spaceships customization of coats for player armors and hairs like that for a while it's yeah I think I was gonna say the word luckily but not not likely but we are we are still early in the development and those kind of things and we're getting her player getting that sure player customization out the DNA system stuff so we don't necessarily need an answer for that right now there's other more
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pressing stuff but uh it's not a thing that's gonna go away you'll be having some variation of this conversation in future our TVs as we go forward will keep asking the question we'll see if we get closer to the answer yeah and to kind of answer very similar like on the on the character damage stuff the real next steps of this is yes we do the customization of colors on our NPCs and most important to us is that you the players can now use those colors so that's that's what that beatings about mostly so that'll be first step yeah once you can actually have access to the colors but then beyond that whether they're tenting them themselves or whatever it's kind of like yeah it's not it's not the most pressing we've seen that Hualapai versions of ships pirate Avenger in the tired body has to be like hey when can I
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get ya yeah so alright next question from the thread yes it was actually the same question alright moving on will character customization be robust enough that we can create recognizable injured individuals who can be identified simply by looking at them sure I mean don't hope so but like I guess I don't understand the question it doesn't do they mean in World of Warcraft for instance you can't identify her yet if you strip that your orc at his orc and his organ is a rid of their armor you'd be hard-pressed to tell who would sue without the name floating because there's all the agents of work that won't be characterization be unique enough that you could see somebody
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without a name already go with you Josh yeah we've got to cut back Josh yeah we've got a couple more Polly's to deal with you know we've got we've got a lot more you know to use the buzzword fidelity on our characters then advance some of those other times that you mentioned which means that yeah sure of course you're gonna be able to recognize them I mean we've got again we've got these triple-a actors within squadron 42 and they're pretty recognizable um so if you can imagine that you'll be able to push your character to quite that that that level yeah you're definitely gonna be able to recognize the difference between your buddies like that's kind of it's one of the biggest that's pretty important exactly part of it when DNA comes out and you're no longer choosing one of nine heads right I think that's gonna be where you really start to see
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any more Evo touched on it within it within his talk which hopefully goes out pretty pretty soon here is that some of the things that you use to recognize certain people we had to kind of taken away from the layers a little bit in just this early customizer so that we could fit all the hairs all the helmets and everything like that by unifying the scalp and the neck there's there's a there's a profile difference but the reason why like you say with with another game you would strip them of all their armor and everything and they're just they look pretty much the same it's exactly that problem because they unify to some descriptions so that they can fit all the different assets and these kind of things on it so being able to have different scalp shapes or the next shapes different face dramatic differences will make it easy to identify from a distance and I think
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Evo's talk almost very spends ten minutes kind of discussing that so I think that'll be a pretty important and and and valuable thing yeah from the live chat here says how far do you plan to go with customizable body types fat skinny tall short what's our current thinking or intention in thinking but what are we thinking about the player shapes cuz in calling all devs this week we had we had Steve better talking about how they want to add ika do they as the ship cockpits you know to it to allow for being able to push buttons on different cockpits it's like that and the the community very obviously latched on to that is oh that could give us different size characters tuner because now the the points coming from different
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things now no no no that's an assumption that's a very dangerous assumption to make that's why and trust me that that it's not just the community that makes that is how its developers to yeah I K is not a magic wand I think you're wrong about that right right it's a Magic three ones it Slim's it no it doesn't it doesn't solve that really so much it makes it a little easier to deal with but generally you still have the problem of metrics I mean that's the real problem is is how how big do you go how small do you go and actually the the two are separate one is the the body shape let's call it and the second is the height so one requires the skeleton to scale one doesn't that's one of the big points so yeah and you'll notice it I I think it's
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actually and and from so far playing like games like Red Dead Redemption or anything it kind of take a look around mostly everybody's both the same height it's hard to notice when you people got hats or helmets or whatever those different things on but the thing you don't notice so dramatically the difference at height as you do and again Evo's talk talks I take a little bit about this but maybe don't know the body you'll notice the body shape differences before you'll notice the height differences and again you know we've already got the two different sort of heights of skeleton we've got our female we've got the male there's a difference in height between the two of them but the body shape stuff is going to be more valuable I think right out of the gate and causes way less problems then scaling the skeleton the minute we scale the skeleton animations need to be
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retargeted run time that's that's a problem usually you can't just uniformly scale the skeleton and then you know in in most of the MMOs that are online right now it's a uniform scaling kind of thing where your height is like everything changes at once right I mean and usually what people do they make them super tall and then they'll kind of pull the body shape in so it's a thin tall kind of guy or whatever we rely so much on metrics and being a first person universe and having this this really you know intimate interactions with with buttons and cockpits and-and-and and flight controls and whatever else that that metric needs to be really rigid so that's kind of that's kind of things so where I'm going with that is that yeah body shapes we're gonna do that yeah but height differences it kind of want to
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avoid that and we'll have to bring some tech online to be able to do it without having to target a whole bunch of different animations I think what you're seeing obviously this is down the road but like other games when they start introducing characters of other size there are other genders or there of other species right so that's where you'll see your height variation yeah we have so much you know with 150 spaceships all with interiors and style you know tight corn right I mean it's like the metrics you know it's one of those things where I think in a vacuum it doesn't seem like oh yeah just make the character taller or shorter we've seen other games do it whatever but we have starters as so many moving parts so so many interactive quests that you can't just look at a feature in a vacuum
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on its own you have to look at how it's going to interact with a dozen two dozen three dozen of their features and when you get to that point you go the height actually has many knock-on effect sure I mean look at look at the stuff that kicks up right now from the PTU people are you don't they the head position and the ships right you know it's always all my head's too low oh my head's too low Oh my head's too low so now start scaling that skeleton so now it's you know depending a few skills your skeleton the higher you've got it way too high or if you made them super small you've made them way too low the other thing that it doesn't do well with the first person kind of game is min maxing that's the other thing so if I ever go play star marine I'm gonna be a female character at the very smallest I could possibly be to produce my hip boxes and everything that I'm just a smaller target to hit I can carry everything the same I can do everything the same but now all of a sudden I've
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got an advantage because I've been maxed out that doesn't lend itself well to a really cool-looking universe that lends itself to a lot of midgets or anything around you know like green star citizen's gonna min/max anything they'll figure it out but but you know what I'm saying like if you go into PvP like I think Guild Wars is a good example right now everybody's tiny I mean and it's just harder to click on them or whatever else so yeah I think it's a it's a dangerous road to start going down and it it will have tendrils that just connect into everything and right mantling will be a big problem too alright sure mentally well okay it's like okay we're gonna keep well keep talking about it a little bit cuz I've got all kinds of problems with it cuz
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Steve went yeah we need skeletons game yeah that's super awesome that'd be great so what are we gonna do bug cover so think of covered cover is hard enough with the female being a different height so you get behind something and it like to take a box and you've got to go up and over and look down so you actually have there's a real problem and we fix it for the female but if you think you're at a at a wall or a railing or something like that that you're ducked behind with cover and you've got to shoot down right your angle your trajectory or your angle of attack is gonna be so different depending on your height right so if you want a really good one you'd be a super tall guy right because then when you pop up over that box you can shoot almost straight down from from from up high but again if you're tiny you're only gonna have a really shallow kind of angle across that and our metrics are important also if you're too
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tall and we put you behind cover in your head sticking out very good cover is it now I think a lot of people would say those are those are trade-offs it's you just listed an advantage tall people would have an advantage that short people would have but we can balance around that because we have no control I think you'd also see the pros and cons is heavily weighted to the cons there are pros yeah sure definitely I'm gonna sit here and spend the next 30 minutes listing out all a whole list of stuff it's usually my job but yes yeah well let's just let's just say because this is a conversation that's happened many times over the last couple of years and because of the fidelity bar that we strive to because of how realistic we want the world to be and everything is everybody everything is close to as it should be as we can have it and still
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maintain a game you can definitely if there were if there was an easy path to doing this that didn't ten other things we be pursuing it yeah sure but we always make that balance is it is it worth the amount of work is it worth the effort that that's gonna take and sometimes we lose that battle because sometimes the stuff we'll do is a lot of work and and sometimes it seems like the really small win and hopefully those get big later but like those are those are real hard decisions that have to be manages is it worth it because because we we just said we just gave a big no to well give something that's not a solid know all my knows our know right now but if I come up with some sort of idea or my team comes up with an idea or ebo we make some magic happen or steve has a
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crazy idea and then I reserve the right to say yes you make a good point what were the best things about us presentation was the whole how we didn't think there was an answer to this so we shelved it yeah we shoved that we said no you're not gonna be able to have different head shapes and then we discovered the answer later on same development yeah that's exactly it right yeah sure okay so titin suit Oh what can you tell us about the Titan suit well I'm just going to keep it there this questions a little more detailed I'm not gonna lead it I'm just gonna you are the primary instigator over the years of avenging the only reason I have to deal with sizing questions for the last three years four years because of you yeah so I'm just gonna ask as a blanket thing what if anything can you
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tell us about the Titan suit okay I don't think we can actually talk about what we're doing with it right now because there's an implement I'd say it's in development I guess still in development is it is we're confirming that the Titan suit is in develop yes it is and one of the we've talked about it briefly before a couple times I think or it's been mentioned before yeah we said last time that the turn radius was massive a couple times right that was it so we went back to the drawing board and kind of reworked it it's so kind of being finalized on how that will work we have a much stronger idea of that but it hasn't progressed too much past the concept stage anymore because we started to put our other non concept resources on things that you've seen recently like
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hair like shading like skin so a lot of the improvements you saw that's it con yes it doesn't cause yeah I'm I'm personally really keen to get to the Titan because I think as a as I've talked about before I feel like it's a layer of gameplay that's actually missing we've been are within our game right now like you know very directly that right now and infantrymen has very little chance against the ship ship never is second-guessing you know whether he wants to land on that pad or not that I that I think you need something basically between that infantrymen and a ship and you need something that is either able to hold ground in the open like it's a design requirement that it can eat it can basically hold the landing pad you know whether or not it's gonna it's gonna win against up you know consolation probably
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not but the whole point is to make them second-guess they can't just sit there and the pad basically um and and really it's coming down to the you know some some different design requirements so for me that it needs to be able to do that so it needs to be able to make ship second-guess but then additionally it needs to also be quote unquote a kind of shock troop on the interiors right but there's got to be give or take of that right it can't move that quickly in the interiors you need to be able to outmaneuver it it's got to have weak spots in it it's gotta have weak spots on the back or the side places I can't go or places it can't go but yeah generally I feel it's gonna violate those metrics and I feel like that layer is generally just not there so I'm really keen to get to it but it's really important that the actual concept and and design of the thing because it's actually gonna do a lot more than just
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combat like that's what we really want out of this yeah is and I'm not sure how much we should talk about the frame kind of thing yeah you're at the point no so we'll leave it at that with that but yeah if you really want to get to this in just in case we buried the lead there assuming everybody knows what we're talking about the title suit is a mech so what doesn't mess stop that it's not a man but I'm gonna explain this for everybody has a cockpit a mech has a cockpit you see it in it there's a seat you're not you don't put your legs you're sitting down in something how's it cockpit a battle suit just like Iron Man sure is like yeah it's like an exoskeleton it's basically a suit that you put on hence battle suit versus Gundam I just found warrior
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trigger you who worked I just wanted a trigger Shawn's hats have hit some some history with this actually you have some history with this too actually all right so and just before anybody gets crazy we're that is way way yes that's not anything that's that's coming anytime soon that's your hint for something way way way out okay we get this a lot we were talking with mentioned the female character a couple times will there be special clothes only for female and male characters yes there will there will be for the most of time there will be one-to-one parody on assets on what they can have but there will be custom ones per gender all right let's see us we got a beards we always get a
00:36:23
question about beards in your time we're talking about characters this community has a fascination with beards though they don't know why but will we be able to modify your our beards in-game like shave it off grow it back room and tie it basically they want to know switch styles switching like styles I think yeah as far as like cutting and grooming I don't know if we'll go that in Tibet be honest yeah but Express isn't good watching Chris has been watching videos it's true of RDR that's true that's true they're made that may change but currently it's so yes and hair tonic yeah no it was it no it's great email from them right yeah I mean there's a you know sky's the limit for us on that kind of stuff it's
00:37:13
it's what Chris will want out of it in the end but you got to think of time again is it worth it right in your space combat you know FPS game is it worth it that the beard is growing at at you know half a millimeter every hour right I I don't know right like it and it might be for the community indeed but yeah for sure we're gonna have different different styles definitely styles but whether you have to go you know get your shelfs shaved and stuff like this I I don't know I couldn't answer but we could we could it's just again is it worth it I don't know and sometimes that's not enough to me to decide it's up to the likes of Josh or Chris or something like this um to go back real quick just cuz I can see the twitch at going crazy about mankinis I'm gonna explain this female male thing a little bit right yeah they are there there
00:38:01
there's pictures I'm sure there's links that's Google searches there's I don't know so let me explain the male-female thing because no that doesn't really mean that there'll be a mankini at all yeah to what we're gonna have is one to one items between the male and female and that's actually a critical component for that the ship yeah imagine if we shipped a game that didn't have all the stuff that a male could do for the female I don't think that would be okay um so we're not gonna do that it needs to be one to one and that means all the armor that exists for a male will exist for a female if you own the CD s medium armor for your male it's actually the same item we've unified the items so that if you load this male item or it's re it's not a
00:38:50
male item if you load this item depending on what skeleton you're on it's just gonna look different so technically you own it right you own it for a male you own it for a female there's not two separate purchases that you have to make now about the unique items when you get a unique item there was two ideas that we kind of floated and initially it was like okay let's think of like a really nice cocktail dress for a female what if a male owned that cocktail dress what do we do now we're not gonna spend a lot of effort in making mankinis or man versions of dresses or whatever but the first idea that we came up with was just have a male equivalent of that so if it's a nice cocktail dress it would be a nice cocktail suit do you know what I mean something like this so that's one idea and that might be the case but it might actually be the case that there is just a totally unique item there is no other
00:39:38
middle-end for that there is no equivalent for at the very least we'll make sure that of course you know there's not you know more of those female items that are our remiel ones they should have their own special items but just because we say that that will have these unique female and male items doesn't mean those ones are shareable but on the basic if you own a blue shirt you want a male blue shirt and a female blue shirt but if you own I guess a cocktail dress that'll just be the cocktail dress and the male can't put that on all right and it's important to say that when when the female model does get introduced in star citizen we're time out these items if we end up making these items they're not there in the first initial drop or we're talking about that one one parody yeah when the then when the model does get introduced yes yeah that has to be there like we
00:40:26
already first both but yeah Josh and I made that very clear to production and to everybody that that that is critical that that is a one-to-one and at the yeah on the combat side motive anything a lot of the issues it's not just on that side side it's not a lot of things interesting questions and this it's a simple question I think it leads us to another to a couple other areas the question was simply any chance we can get pointed ears on our character and and and and obviously this person is a big fan of us turn a Star Trek I guess but III it leads me to thinking about humans that grow up on an alien planet and stuff like that you see that in the expanse right now it would be which means the but between the belters and stuff like how does a how far can a
00:41:16
human can typical human physiology that we know today change not just in a thousand years but maybe and you know twenty generations of that family growing up on a different planet with different environmental factors with different atmospheres and stuff have we talked about summer sections about that and it's definitely something we want to get to for me from the just a general sci-fi experience introducing other alien species is obviously a big deal to break away from the mold of just being a pure human game but even you know altered humans or something that's right they are still human as a species but they've changed is something that I think we need to break up the landscape of what you see absolutely so whether
00:42:03
it's skin colors that are not in the normal earth Missa tee range of what we see now maybe they are on you know to use John Carter or a red planet and there's in turns red and over time from the from the atmosphere or from you know I think it's if you drink or inhale lots of copper like your skin can turn blue I'm thinking of a person who grew up on Hearst in their entire life and whose parents grew up on her news grandparents grew up on her some generation is that how does that is there skin texture different than than what we would think of a human that would be the plan and as far as like the pointed ears like the more specific physiological things all that would really take is either us finding an actor with pointed ears and putting that into the DNA pool that's right or it takes us changing and sculpting that actor or some actors to add that to the
00:42:52
DNA but we scan Jared's head you could just reference Jared in his fourth head the food his ears will point them a little bit we'll choose that one we give you some things yes that had to use their big scanners to get mail actually and it's totally possible and I want to talk a little bit more about this because I think we have some cool ideas here that I talked about a little bit of you a little while ago but I want to talk about it here this is something that I'm keen to to work on with Josh as well as with David Haddix so we've been looking into this and actually just literally this week I have a huge huge document from address Rohr who also did that one of the talks there with evil on the gene splicing stuff which has been a real close thing to my heart anyway so what how that whole system works as it
00:43:40
has Evo described that we have this proto smash and we have a bunch of different heads that are within it so we have a little gene pool what my idea what what I'd really like to do with this is phenotype a gene pool / starting location so if you can think of this in in relation to this wide gene pool but we've got a bit of a problem because yeah we've got like hundreds of heads within this chamber and to expose those hundreds of heads to you and a creator is not very not very intuitive there's a little water go through there's a you know and there some redundancies here and there but what I'd like to restrict it down is just to a subset of people from person and then we do all the visuals that Josh is talking about so let's say your starting location is Hurston or your starting location as dark or I'd like that gene pool to be kind of phenotypes for that particular area now I'm not talking as on the nose
00:44:31
as as most you know but I would say a lot of other games go to reference you know elder scrolls for example and not saying this is a bad way to go it's a very overt and obvious way to go if you're red guards frickin American if you're Nord you're Northern European Caucasian right if you're that is super on the nose stuff right what I prefer is to put some subtlety into this which is reality how that it actually works because to be a phenotype tamerica nor a phenotype ditalion or phenotypes even a Canadian for that matter there's gonna be subtle T's within that now generally we all kind of look similar ish but you might have a gene pool that's a little heavily weighted to one side versus the other so then on average when you're blending those those particular guys are those
00:45:18
particular textures I hope that the subtleties will will show so that you will have an idea that oh all these NPCs everybody is coming from this particular gene pool so they all kind of look one way and then all these other guys on our Corp and everything and all those players that have started around Corp kind of look another way so I don't know if this will be as obvious as as as I want it to be but it I think it mimics reality a little right a little cool and it also makes care integration a little more interesting because you are sourcing from a different gene pool depending on where you start and of course you are because if you like you said if you grew up on Hearst and your father grew up or nursed in and you're you're gonna you're gonna have a certain phenotype is written you know haplogroup whatever we didn't you would we would call it but I think that would be an interesting way to try it
00:46:06
mm-hm so but it won't be quite as overt I would say as as as some other games really have treated you you want it to be when you see some it's like hey are you from Hurston you don't want to make that person's from Hearst in suspicion this is a general kind of like oh Hurston people kind of look like this they've got a strong brow they've got high cheap whatever whatever it is I'm just making up stuff but yeah um like that would be really cool and I know when we first bring like this idea to David haddock he returned a document that had some really good it's really cool super creative but it D here's the here's the here's a flipside is as we've talked about gene splicing and and and DNA accommodation we've talked about human ranges and how
00:46:54
we keep it within a human range because you're always sourcing from a human so we'd have to come up with sculpts or these kind of things to source from guys that had some weird things like the big ridges in the head or nipple you know you know white eyes or whatever it is right slot from the Goonies yeah so I don't know I think it's a I think it's a neat approach it's something that has an ID to my knowledge been done exactly like that before and I'd love to see what the results could be and it doesn't actually require a huge amount of extra work what it really is it's a data management problem it's like we've just got to juggle our gene pools around this is gonna be very weird yeah it's gonna be very weird like playing God a little bit it's like oh yeah who evolved all together and this guy doesn't mean this guy would be fun we just had a question coming from the live chat that's the antithesis of the
00:47:41
gene pool and everything we see a lot of games where that you could scan your faces in using an app or a web M it has there been any discussion about about using that to scan our face and it goes to because all right here's your user DNA profile based on the image using like the existing picture the fidelity is just not there but it doesn't get there I think you can see everybody that's played the game can see like when you zoom in on pretty much anything that our game like it holds up yes your webcam stuff that we've seen before even I think for those games that I've seen never as really looked amazing so that they'd always call it games with NBA one of these when I was just thinking about one of the em being they tried and it was a vase sometimes it works beautifully it works and sometimes
00:48:28
it just as my face doesn't have enough like lines to it like cheekbones I think it's kind of just round and flat so when I do it these things it just looks like this weird guy oh god Kirby if you want to know my simply google NBA face scan go to images and and you'll know you'll know what we're talking the views and opinions exposed by Sean Tracy do not represent those of games on this basis various always subsidiaries I don't think I'm getting in trouble with that I just I just direct that okay going from the thing is is I'm not sure we're actually answering the question because what what is do that here no no what is being asked for there is less because I think I want to see themselves because I've actually had this conversation I think you know an RVT before about about
00:49:16
like actual face textures and why why I don't want to do that yeah and why you know I think Chris wants something like that but the 2d image of your face is not enough now to use something to structure the face the one that you've got in there and blend different different heads to get maybe like a template image on your screen you can adjust your thing that's not beyond the realm of possibility the problem is is we can't just do it off one image it's impossible mom there is we have no idea of 3d space right with the one image so at the minimum we would need you to do a face on shot and then a profile shot and then we might be able to do something but we would have to reconcile all the points between the two images and then from the points drive a whole bunch of blend shapes to get to that position and
00:50:04
go for choosing from the existing pool and choose from the exact same pool the right heads to get the right place to get the right thing so have their own 60 camera scanning rig then they're welcome to apply at Roberts base industries or comms we're actually almost at a time yeah still character related from a live chat sure how do you approach doing robots or droids is that even a thing for star citizen I mean yeah there's there's nothing that stops us from doing that kind of stuff it's more of a creative high level direction of do they really exist in our game like is there a reason for that I think there's been a lot of lore that the lore team have done about why or why not the androids exist or don't exist or robots or do not or do
00:50:51
it exist which is kind of old time backers will remember early in his tenure episodes were Chris was not very hot on the robots running around that's fine in a minute from an asset standpoint it's just kind of creating its own whether we put it on the existing rig or not it's a big choice and then it it comes at selling specie you know cyborgs though it's high war cyborg is very different thing altogether we decide works we already started with the tabular yeah cyborgs are totally part there's already one one out that's one cyborgs in the person hopefully that's a little nice new peak to like what we can do and what we want to do and that's why your head can rotate 360 degrees oh yeah it's always my man we start telling about cyborgs and stuff and definite spaceman it's like yeah but first like with me on the first thing I want to do when I go in game is just guy shoot me here should be here just like a bunch of
00:51:40
yeah exactly should be I'm doing what we can do alright let's see hair with a very detailed hair that we that we saw prototype in it says icon I is is that going to replace all the hair in the game we've got now is that going to be affected by things like when I'm combining a couple hair questions right now because we are aspect like how how far do we see hair yeoman basically is it gonna be affected by physics is it gonna be runtime is it gonna replace everybody who's current hair cards what do we think I miss meeting yesterday so it's what you guys saw in squadron is like us trying to in that trailer and the talks is all about us trying to push it as far as we can yeah right now I think we'll probably have to take some
00:52:28
steps back to get it into star citizen just because of the performance but the the goal of all that Rd and pushing that as far as we can is to see what the best level we possibly can get into star citizen is so I think it will definitely change like what the players see right now will for sure a change because our entire pipeline is changing so I would imagine that most of the styles that they see in the game now won't be there in a year or two years because it will be replaced with a new iteration that will look better as far as it being affected by physics yes I think there will be a components of that that will first her be affected by physics characters are going on with hair like this yeah like that Mohawk should be you know blowing over depending on how much product you have I've seen I've seen socks that would stand up to her
00:53:18
so yeah we definitely want it you know we want to push it with part of the reason that the players aren't seeing new hairstyles go into the game right now is because we are figuring out how we're gonna do it in the future and that's us not wanting to burn time into creating content that we're going to replace yeah it so happens in game development sometimes you have to do that you can't avoid it but that's right but a big part of developments trying to work smarter not harder yeah it's trying to figure out when you know what you're working on right now is temporary or intermediate or adjusting placeholder while we're waiting for other systems to come online folks often ask us you know why is why is this system takes so long as this system not being prioritized right now it's because there are other systems that need to come online first yes sure sure and a lot of like I see that - it's like why aren't you fixing
00:54:06
this or this and there's I mean certain people are specialized in turn certain things so sure we could we could give some object container streaming bugs - Josh but I don't want that well yeah exactly like you know I'm very sure he could fix it but how long that would take maybe take a year maybe too often as he learns everything and so it just doesn't make sense sometimes right the person that needs to work on it or or the team even can't it can't be doing anything on the hair front exactly as Josh said we're pushing that visual bar big time right now we've just got to rein in the performance slightly and we'll probably be in pretty good shape we've you know you've got to establish these relatively - kind of pipes where we've got one for our really triple a high end t0 heads and then we got
00:54:56
another one for gene splicing DNA who because both have kind of different requirements within it well that's it you guys did it goes a lot faster yet so you know next year we'll be doing three hour over - I got to give that shout out be doing three our our TVs yes I know I know she's right it's it's a jersey it's a it's a pole it's a polo - polo Jersey you're a fancy : yeah yes and this is a come from todd'll Iseman Liesman might be getting that wrong but absolutely it might get it right representing ozma knots so it's a super cool shirt I was actually pretty excited when we got it we got it just before stead of cencon and Stephen cam had walked in and he was he was had passing
00:55:44
them out and I thought they were the citizens got shirts and like this is awesome oh my goodness usually we're just like one color and what it yeah it wasn't the citizen I'm sure they ended up being one color which is finer citizen countries were beautiful but this is really cool yeah I don't have a husband I shake Tyler got an awesome son husband not sure you can showed me his Osmond I have one I forgot to worry you haven't asked my wife thinks I'm a super nerd though because it's gonna have your name on it it's got my name on the back cool yeah yeah I had an awesome night shirt but it said will Lewis some of that ha I don't know if I can yeah yeah what stand up and show it off they say yeah but I can flex you're good mm-hmm the Busic anything on the aegis that this is cool too oh no
00:56:34
wrong side that's right that's pretty cool they shouldn't bring coffee creamers with you this week no that's Steve Sargent me too right that about does it for this week's show special thanks to Sean Tracy and Josh Sherman for taking the time to being here with us tune in next week when we'll have something which actually oh yeah I don't know yet it's there there's some things up in the air well I had a thing and then they're like oh but I work from home on Friday and I'm thinking that how are you gonna do the show if you work from home on Friday oh I didn't think about that so so I had a thing now I don't have a thing so I gotta find a
00:57:21
thing so we'll have a thing that's it I'm Jared this Sean that's Josh that was JJ behind the scenes we'll see you next week everybody you thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen squadron 42 you can subscribe to our Channel or you can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at www.uvu.edu/library

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.