Helmet animations?
What if CI-G were to invent a helmet flipping jpeg?
Helmet flipping jpeg...the mind boggles at the many possible permutations of that image....but Ci¬G did show helmet putting on animations in the CitCon video thing. It looked like it would work about as well as the current eating and drinking animations... which take 30 seconds to initiate every time you press the button, 2 minutes for the server to process the information then 10 seconds watching the damned animation. For some reason, those animations are kept on the backend transaction servers...so when the servers degrade as they do or the backend services go down...as they do quite frequently... you can't buy food or water, eat or drink meaning that you slowly perish due to the now compulsory fully animated survival nonsense.
Taking 30 seconds to put your helmet on (you have to take it off to eat/drink), not to mention the time it takes the game to realise you've pressed the 'Put-my-helmet-on-quick' button would be a death sentence, it's almost fatal as it is without the silly animation... especially should you forget to put the helmet back on when and if you actually manage to eat or drink anything then leap sprightly outside to a landing pad. Believe me, I've almost choked to death a lot more than once already.
I'd love to meet the devs that added that load of meaningless piffle and give them a slap before they could even utter..."But Chris made us do it!"