Cloud Imperium Video games’ area recreation Star Citizen is quickly getting an in depth character customization characteristic centered on the top, however many gamers want to customise their our bodies as nicely. 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 had been requested whether or not they could allow physique customization going ahead.
In the meanwhile, all characters together with NPCs have the identical our bodies, one for female characters and one for masculine characters. No customization in anyway underneath 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 elements.
Physique form customization when it comes to mixing totally different sorts of our bodies and altering their form is one thing that the builders may already do with their present DNA system, however a problem stays with what occurs with the attachments.
For the top, 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 could possibly’t be executed proper now in a great way. This is among the two huge issues that must be solved.
The opposite subject is adjustments within the size of the limbs, as they’d have an effect on all animations within the recreation. As an illustration, if you happen to’re making an attempt 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 consists of inverse kinematics and procedural components in a lot of its animations, doing that for the whole physique and for all animations would require large adjustments to the animation again finish.
That being mentioned, the builders have “all intentions” to sort out these issues. Rohr already has some concepts on tips on how to repair the primary drawback, and he believes that the studio has succesful animation programmers to repair the second drawback.
But, it should take a variety of work, however Rohr believes it’s going to be price it as a result of everybody having the identical top just isn’t nice. He additionally mentions that maybe it might be potential to begin by enabling form adjustments solely, because it’d already present some huge positive aspects.
He then talked about in passing that there may probably be balancing points as nicely, as a bigger character might have a bigger hitbox.
Rohr really labored for a few years on the DNA system to evolve it right into a place the place it is potential to begin tackling the physique customization drawback. This was completed final 12 months, however the consideration of builders was diverted to different priorities centered on head customization.
Producer Jared Huckaby summarized by mentioning that totally different physique shapes are one thing the builders wish to do and are pursuing part-time on the facet in between different priorities. We should always not anticipate this to return quickly, but it surely’s “positively one thing that’s progressing, remains to be being investigated and the builders very a lot wish to do.”
You possibly can watch the entire livestream beneath.
Recently, we actually noticed an excellent instance of character customization, together with the physique, with Dragon’s Dogma 2, which was simply launched by Capcom.
Star Citizen is a crowdfunded recreation 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 ordinary, 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) will probably be printed sooner or later this 12 months.
A single-player marketing campaign titled Squadron 42 coming, and CIG 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 mentioned for sure.
Full disclosure: the creator of this publish backed Star Citizen’s crowdfunding marketing campaign.
