Cloud Imperium Video games’ house sport Star Citizen is quickly getting an intensive character customization function targeted on the pinnacle, however many gamers want to customise their our bodies as properly. Sooner or later, which may be doable.
Throughout an episode of the Q&A livestream Star Citizen Stay, the builders mentioned the brand new character creation suite, and have been requested whether or not they could allow physique customization going ahead.
For the time being, all characters together with NPCs have the identical our bodies, one for female characters and one for masculine characters. No customization in anyway beneath the chin is feasible.
Throughout 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 facets.
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 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 doable, conforming the attachments to it could possibly’t be completed proper now in a great way. This is among the two large issues that have to be solved.
The opposite challenge is adjustments within the size of the limbs, as they might have an effect on all animations within the sport. As an example, when 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 a lot of its animations, doing that for all the 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’ll take lots of work, however Rohr believes it will be value it as a result of everybody having the identical top is just not nice. He additionally mentions that maybe it would be doable to begin by enabling form adjustments solely, because it’d already present some large features.
He then talked about in passing that there may presumably be balancing points as properly, as a bigger character may 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 doable to begin 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 wish to do and are pursuing part-time on the facet in between different priorities. We should always not count on this to come back quickly, however it’s “positively one thing that’s progressing, remains to be being investigated and the builders very a lot wish to do.”
You may watch the entire livestream beneath.
These days, we definitely noticed a terrific 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 common, 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) might be printed in some unspecified time in the future this 12 months.
A single-player marketing campaign titled Squadron 42 coming, and CIG not too long ago 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 may be mentioned for sure.
Full disclosure: the writer of this publish backed Star Citizen’s crowdfunding marketing campaign.