OE: Do any of the alien races have gear humans can use/friendlier races that have shops with clothes for both races?
ST: That’s a good question and it’s up to design to answer and I’ve not seen anything written in stone for it. At the moment, no they don’t share any clothing. The aliens don’t share anything with humans the real big problem with that is one of scale a good example is the Vanduul who are about 8 feet tall, and he wouldn’t want to share with a human anyways, but if he would the stuff wouldn’t fit and wouldn’t look right.
We don’t want to do any of the hand wavey it just magically fits on the dude and all of a sudden you have human sized Vanduul armor it’s not really going to be like that. Now whether or not aliens sell human clothing in their shops, I think that’ll completely depend on the economy. If they have a lot of humans there they are going to want to sell human things in that shop. Right now we don’t necessarily have a shop run by aliens so I can’t really tell you if they’ll sell human clothes but they could.
EKD: and repurposing, look at the Scythe and the Glaive, we got access to alien technology and repurposed it for human use.
ST: Right but it was very specifically authored.
EKD: you got it, so it’s not out of the region for possibilities but also going into character customization and how these guys have done such a great job setting up our tech and our characters it doesn’t hand wavey magically work like that, in reality how would I make this work on this character and it’s the same sort of process here.
OE: In terms of the female rig can you give us a bit of an update about it?
ST: Sure, and not even to give just an update but actually more of an explanation of where’s the time going here; people are like “oh, can’t you just whip up a female model and get that in game and be done?” and what is sometimes lost in communication I think is that we have a completely separate rig for the female and I’m glad that you asked this in this way because it is an update on the female rig.
So we’ve had the female rig online and the skeleton and everything for actually quite some time and we’ve had that working within Squadron 42 as that’s an absolute requirement – we have lots of females within Squadron 42, tonnes of female characters within Squadron 42. So those had to work a long time ago and they have been working for quite some time.
Where the difficulty comes is in implementing a player character as a female because when you implement an AI, as any character for that matter, he doesn’t have to do as much as a player does; if anything half as much as a player does in terms of animation sets, logic – he doesn’t need to be dynamically updating his loadout, he doesn’t decide to do these certain things. There’s a lot of things the AI don’t do that the player has to do.
Additionally you have to solve things like the camera offset, weapon offset, weapons have to fit in female hands nicely, it has to look the same from a first person perspective and then on top of all of that you’ve got to think about gameplay balance within the two. So hitboxes, ugh hitboxes, I hate saying hitboxes, the Physics of the skeleton that gets impacted need to be the same or at least balanced between the two sexes as we don’t want anyone min-maxing. I don’t want anyone selecting a female just for the sake of a less big target for example.
So we’ve had the rig online for quite some time now and what we’ve wanted to do was finalise our male set completely because conceptually you don’t actually want to re-author 6000 animations for the female. But to be fair because we have a separate skeleton for the female we want to feminise a lot of those motions but there’s so many motions that don’t necessarily have to be feminised because a female won’t necessarily aim down the gun sights differently than a male does for example. But, you know in walking we have different walk gaits so that should look different.
So what we wanted to do is bring the male completely finalised; everything is done so we never have to go back and keep re-working. And once we’re really done with the male we’ll run those animations through some tools onto our female, we’ll feminise a few of them which make sense to feminise and then we’ll release it. It’s not far off by any stretch of the imagination, we’ve already been showing it quite a bit and again it’s been in Squadron 42 for a while.