Cloud Imperium Video games’ area sport Star Citizen is quickly getting an intensive character customization characteristic centered on the pinnacle, however many gamers want to customise their our bodies as nicely. Sooner or later, that could 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 meanwhile, all characters together with NPCs have the identical our bodies, one for female characters and one for masculine characters. No customization by any means below 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 facets.
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 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 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 might probably’t be executed proper now in a great way. This is without doubt one of the two huge issues that have to be solved.
The opposite difficulty is modifications within the size of the limbs, as they’d have an effect on all animations within the sport. As an example, in the event you’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 parts in lots of its animations, doing that for your entire physique and for all animations would require large modifications to the animation again finish.
That being mentioned, the builders have “all intentions” to sort out these issues. Rohr already has some concepts on repair the primary drawback, and he believes that the studio has succesful animation programmers to repair the second drawback.
But, it should take plenty of work, however Rohr believes it will be value it as a result of everybody having the identical peak isn’t nice. He additionally mentions that maybe it would be doable to begin by enabling form modifications solely, because it’d already present some huge beneficial properties.
He then talked about in passing that there might presumably be balancing points as nicely, 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 drawback. This was completed final yr, 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 aspect in between different priorities. We should always not count on this to return quickly, nevertheless it’s “positively one thing that’s progressing, continues to be being investigated and the builders very a lot wish to do.”
You possibly can watch the entire livestream under.
Currently, 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 growth for PC. The crowdfunding complete 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) can be revealed in some unspecified time in the future this yr.
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 mentioned for sure.
Full disclosure: the creator of this put up backed Star Citizen’s crowdfunding marketing campaign.