Cloud Imperium Video games’ house sport Star Citizen is quickly getting an intensive character customization characteristic targeted on the pinnacle, however many gamers want to customise their our bodies as properly. Sooner or later, which may be potential.
Throughout an episode of the Q&A livestream Star Citizen Dwell, the builders mentioned the brand new character creation suite, and have been requested whether or not they might allow physique customization going ahead.
In the mean time, all characters together with NPCs have the identical our bodies, one for female characters and one for masculine characters. No customization by any means beneath the chin is feasible.
In the course of the livestream, we heard from principal technical artist Andreas Rohr that physique customization is a “super-hard” drawback to unravel together with two totally different features.
Physique form customization by way of mixing totally different sorts of our bodies and altering their form is one thing that the builders might already do with their present DNA system, however a problem stays with what occurs with the attachments.
For the pinnacle, the builders have developed runtime deformers that may scale helmets and conform beards to totally different face shapes to maintain the artwork intact with no distortions. The identical deformation tech utilized to our bodies would break in lots of circumstances.
So whereas deforming the physique is already potential, conforming the attachments to it will probably’t be executed proper now in a great way. This is among the two huge issues that must be solved.
The opposite concern is modifications within the size of the limbs, as they might have an effect on all animations within the sport. For example, should you’re attempting to drink from a mug, longer arms or neck would trigger the mug to overlook your mouth.
Fixing this drawback would require retargeting these animations in real-time. Whereas the sport already contains inverse kinematics and procedural parts in lots of its animations, doing that for your complete physique and for all animations would require huge modifications to the animation again finish.
That being stated, the builders have “all intentions” to deal with these issues. Rohr already has some concepts on the right way to repair the primary drawback, and he believes that the studio has succesful animation programmers to repair the second drawback.
But, it is going to take numerous work, however Rohr believes it will be value it as a result of everybody having the identical peak just isn’t nice. He additionally mentions that maybe it might be potential to start out by enabling form modifications solely, because it’d already present some huge features.
He then talked about in passing that there might presumably be balancing points as properly, as a bigger character may have a bigger hitbox.
Rohr truly labored for a few years on the DNA system to evolve it right into a place the place it is potential to start out tackling the physique customization drawback. This was completed final 12 months, however the consideration of builders was diverted to different priorities targeted on head customization.
Producer Jared Huckaby summarized by mentioning that totally different physique shapes are one thing the builders need to do and are pursuing part-time on the facet in between different priorities. We should always not anticipate this to return quickly, nevertheless it’s “undoubtedly one thing that’s progressing, remains to be being investigated and the builders very a lot need to do.”
You may watch the entire livestream under.
Recently, we definitely noticed an amazing instance of character customization, together with the physique, with Dragon’s Dogma 2, which was simply launched by Capcom.
Star Citizen is a crowdfunded sport in ongoing improvement for PC. The crowdfunding complete is $673,066,319 for the time being of this writing, with 5,118,218 registered customers. As normal, not all registered customers are essentially paying clients or common gamers.
The sport would not but have a launch date, however the builders have promised {that a} roadmap to model 1.0 (which would be the “launch” model) shall be printed in some unspecified time in the future this 12 months.
A single-player marketing campaign titled Squadron 42 coming, and CIG just lately introduced that it is feature-complete. Hypothesis factors to CitizenCon in October because the potential timing for the announcement of a launch date, however nothing may be stated for sure.
Full disclosure: the creator of this put up backed Star Citizen’s crowdfunding marketing campaign.