I recently bought Forza Motorsport 2, enticed mostly by the car customisation editor allowing players to deeply personalise their vehicles before taking them online and racing against others, giving them a real sense of ownership of their unique vehicle. It’s amazing how much fun can be had simply winning new cars then painting them and adding racing stripes, decals and text. Even more fun is taking your worst prize cars, painting them beige, adding expletives on the hood then sending them to your friends via the “gift cars” option.

Anyway, I wanted to write about this to draw attention to the amazingly comprehensive character-creation editor included with the upcoming APB debuted at GDC, (the animation-related notes of which I’ll be uploading as soon as I get the time), and created by my old buddies at Realtime Worlds back in Scotland. Check out the decal editor below, which can be applied not only to vehicles but clothes and tatoos too. While I love playing with customisation editors in other people’s games, it’s a real bitch to support in your own from an animation standpoint. One of these days I’ll have to work on a simple game that simply requires specific animations for specific, un-evolving characters. Chance would be a fine thing.