Many thanks for this great question and for remembering our little presentation back in 2018 - always happy to see people care about our characters, their animation and deformation quality - and cloth simulation in particular.
The vcloth (vertex cloth) simulation tech is a great example of priorities shifting over the course of production - which is perfectly normal in game development. In the case of vcloth, the successful roll-out of the feature depends on three main pillars:
- The basic cloth solver needs to be implemented by our physics team, needs to have all the core features like tweakable dynamics parameters, collision, self-collision etc. and needs to run fast enough so it can be applied to a reasonable number of characters simultaneously. Apart from that it also needs to be robust and 'stable' in the sense of not 'exploding' due to the extreme accelerations that can often occur from one frame to the next in the context of games. Lastly, it needs to support the needs of the (tech) art and content centric teams and give them full control over how the cloth behaves and its look and feel, under all the drastically different conditions you'll end up seeing it in, from fps fights to slow-paced hero cinematic close-ups.
- An efficient pipeline between DCC (digital content creation) applications such as Maya and our engine needs to be established, as well as tools on the DCC side that allow efficient setup and markup of the simulation assets. The sheer number of assets in our game requires these solutions to be scalable since once the tech comes online, most existing assets (that are deemed worth it) will need to be moved over, i.e. all current assets that use the old 'pendulum sim' system, and then some. Good tools and pipelines glue everything together, it's where our productivity lies.
- Lastly, the assets themselves need to be there and need to be suitable for simulation in terms of how they were built and their structure. If you model, say some trousers that are rather baggy you'll find that they end up looking pretty bad and unnaturally stiff/rigid in the game if they 'don't have sim' because the solver and pipeline aren't ready yet. But if you need the outfit for an upcoming release you'll likely concept and model them with a tighter fit so the deformation/movement will match the expected behavior in motion. However, once the vcloth tech does come online you'll obviously want assets that allow it to shine and look super cool. You'll want cloaks and trenchcoats and cool leather jackets and all kinds of dynamic attachments - you'll want players to want to take off their armor in the landing zones cause it looks 10x cooler and more individualistic. But it's a all dependency on the solver and pipeline being fully ready.
At CitCon 2018 we were at a point where they were only about halfway there but initial results already looked so excitingly cool and promising that we wanted to share them with you. What happened then is simply game development.
The same physics wizards that can give us fancy cloth solvers for cool looking assets are also the folks that implement some core features of our engine which are the foundations for actual gameplay. They work i.e. on physics grids and spatial query acceleration structures which keep track of where objects are in space and whether they collide, are hit by projectiles etc. They are a core component of all AI path-finding logic without which all AI, both NPC ships and agents, would not have any awareness of their environment whatsoever - nothing that could even trigger a behavior/action in the first place. They would just 'T-pose', even outside of server perf being an issue, and I guess nobody wants this. So in this case progress on some of the most fundamental systems our games are built upon, was prioritized over the cool shiny stuff, for more than two years.
As much as the visual tech nerd in me that hand-optimized the config.sys and autoexec.bat files on his DOS-PC in the 90s in order to see the fancy additional effects this enabled in the early Wing Commander games - as much as this part of me would have loved to bring you vcloth on characters by now - the other part of me that wants to see our game come together and Chris' vision realized, is fully convinced that this was exactly the right thing to do. And to be clear - we've obviously already tried to clone our physics peeps in order to speed up the process, but it didn't quite work out, sadly.
That being said, work on 'vcloth' has been picked up again and will continue, gameplay-related physics-duties permitting. It's a highly complex technical challenge and we look forward to sharing more visual/tangible progress with you at some point. Bear in mind that not all the teams that take part in this initiative are currently represented on the public roadmap yet, which is due to change though.
