Cloud Imperium Video games’ area sport Star Citizen is quickly getting an intensive character customization function targeted on the pinnacle, however many gamers wish to customise their our bodies as effectively. Sooner or later, which may be doable.
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 could 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 in any respect beneath the chin is feasible.
Throughout the livestream, we heard from principal technical artist Andreas Rohr that physique customization is a “super-hard” downside to resolve together with two completely different features.
Physique form customization when it comes to mixing completely 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 difficulty stays with what occurs with the attachments.
For the pinnacle, the builders have developed runtime deformers that may scale helmets and conform beards to completely 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 doable, conforming the attachments to it could possibly’t be finished proper now in a great way. This is among the two large issues that should be solved.
The opposite situation is adjustments within the size of the limbs, as they’d have an effect on all animations within the sport. For example, when you’re making an attempt to drink from a mug, longer arms or neck would trigger the mug to overlook your mouth.
Fixing this downside would require retargeting these animations in real-time. Whereas the sport already consists of inverse kinematics and procedural parts in a lot of its animations, doing that for the complete physique and for all animations would require large adjustments to the animation again finish.
That being stated, the builders have “all intentions” to deal with these issues. Rohr already has some concepts on how you can repair the primary downside, and he believes that the studio has succesful animation programmers to repair the second downside.
But, it will 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 doable to begin by enabling form adjustments solely, because it’d already present some large beneficial properties.
He then talked about in passing that there might presumably be balancing points as effectively, 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 doable to begin tackling the physique customization downside. 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 completely different physique shapes are one thing the builders need to do and are pursuing part-time on the aspect in between different priorities. We should always not count on this to return quickly, however it’s “positively 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.
These days, 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 whole is $673,066,319 in the mean time of this writing, with 5,118,218 registered customers. As standard, not all registered customers are essentially paying prospects or common gamers.
The sport does 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 revealed 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 doable timing for the announcement of a launch date, however nothing might be stated for sure.
Full disclosure: the writer of this submit backed Star Citizen’s crowdfunding marketing campaign.