Cloud Imperium Games' space game Star Citizen is soon getting an extensive character customization feature focused on the head, but many players would like to customize their bodies as well. In the future, that may be possible.
During an episode of the Q&A livestream Star Citizen Live, the developers discussed the new character creation suite, and were asked whether they may enable body customization going forward.
At the moment, all characters including NPCs have the same bodies, one for feminine characters and one for masculine characters. No customization whatsoever under the chin is possible.
During the livestream, we heard from principal technical artist Andreas Rohr that body customization is a "super-hard" problem to solve including two different aspects.
Body shape customization in terms of blending different kinds of bodies and altering their shape is something that the developers could already do with their current DNA system, but an issue remains with what happens with the attachments.
For the head, the developers have developed runtime deformers that can scale helmets and conform beards to different face shapes to keep the art intact with no distortions. The same deformation tech applied to bodies would break in many cases.
So while deforming the body is already possible, conforming the attachments to it can't be done right now in a good way. This is one of the two big problems that need to be solved.
The other issue is changes in the length of the limbs, as they would affect all animations in the game. For instance, if you're trying to drink from a mug, longer arms or neck would cause the mug to miss your mouth.
Solving this problem would require retargeting these animations in real-time. While the game already includes inverse kinematics and procedural elements in many of its animations, doing that for the entire body and for all animations would require massive changes to the animation back end.
That being said, the developers have "all intentions" to tackle these problems. Rohr already has some ideas on how to fix the first problem, and he believes that the studio has capable animation programmers to fix the second problem.
Yet, it's going to take a lot of work, but Rohr believes it'll be worth it because everyone having the same height is not great. He also mentions that perhaps it'd be possible to start by enabling shape changes only, as it'd already provide some big gains.
He then mentioned in passing that there could possibly be balancing issues as well, as a larger character may need a larger hitbox.
Rohr actually worked for a couple of years on the DNA system to evolve it into a position where it's possible to start tackling the body customization problem. This was finished last year, but the attention of developers was diverted to other priorities focused on head customization.
Producer Jared Huckaby summarized by mentioning that different body shapes are something the developers want to do and are pursuing part-time on the side in between other priorities. We should not expect this to come soon, but it's "definitely something that is progressing, is still being investigated and the developers very much want to do."
You can watch the whole livestream below.
Lately, we certainly saw a great example of character customization, including the body, with Dragon's Dogma 2, which was just released by Capcom.
Star Citizen is a crowdfunded game in ongoing development for PC. The crowdfunding total is $673,066,319 at the moment of this writing, with 5,118,218 registered users. As usual, not all registered users are necessarily paying customers or regular players.
The game doesn't yet have a release date, but the developers have promised that a roadmap to version 1.0 (which will be the "release" version) will be published at some point this year.
A single-player campaign titled Squadron 42 coming, and CIG recently announced that it's feature-complete. Speculation points to CitizenCon in October as the possible timing for the announcement of a release date, but nothing can be said for certain.
Full disclosure: the author of this post backed Star Citizen's crowdfunding campaign.
