CitizenCon 2948 - Panel: By Design

16 October 201801:00:261,795 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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Please welcome Persistent Universe game director Tony Zurovec. I had to give some real thought about what it was that I wanted to discuss while I was out here. Um, in the end, rather than going into a lot of intricate detail about uh one particular feature and running the risk that a lot of you guys here uh might not find that one topic very interesting, uh I decided to go broad and touch on a number of different things while at the same time going deep enough that hopefully you guys will hear some things that you haven't yet, you know, heard before. Um, ultimately, uh the hope is that you'll come away with a more comprehensive understanding of what we view as the the next tier of priorities for Star Citizen's persistent
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universe. So, as many of you have previously heard, um our long-term objective is for a fully systemic world. And what this means is that we want a dynamic logical environment with a completely consistent set of rules um that can intelligently adapt to whatever players throw at it to ensure that the level of challenge is always going to be appropriate. Um, this is really important for a number of reasons and one of the biggest ones is that we want to give uh players total freedom. So, this causes a lot of problems for a game designer though uh because it means that we can't really assume anything uh
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and at times certain elements of the game can become extremely unbalanced. So, for example, every player might simultaneously decide that they want to live the life of a pirate and start attacking cargo freighters that are ferrying platinum uh you know, from a refinery to a production facility. So, if everything were to remain static, if the game couldn't appropriately compensate, uh it wouldn't feel like a real world and it definitely wouldn't feel very fun. What you really expect instead would be a lot of changes as players started to go that route. Those cargo freighters should demand higher fees to travel into such a dangerous area. The price for an armed escort should go through the roof, which should have of course entice a lot more players and NPCs into going out and
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actually serving as security. So miners should react to these elevated prices of course by trying to find and produce more platinum and in the end this is really just basic supply and demand economics and the effects that it generates serve as counterweights to the pressure that the players exert. They're essentially attempts by the system to compensate for these imbalances that occasionally take hold. And so this algorithmic content of course can sometimes feel a bit formulaic if you take it too far when that's all there is to a game. And that's why we're layering on a lot of custom handcrafted content onto that systemic backdrop. Unique characters, specific challenges, and a lot of very intricately detailed areas that artists are spending many
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many months, you know, crafting. So setting up an algorithmic system like this means that we need to be able to objectively evaluate an item's value. And this has been a real problem for us in the past because the original ship and item prices were pretty arbitrary. They were really just best guesses that you know were made at the time. Starting with 3.3, however, we moved to a model that allows us to much more precisely define what's required to produce an item including everything from the type and quantity of materials, the amount of labor that's going to be involved, the production the production technology, the factory capacity, the amount of time that will be required. And these pricing changes are going to ripple through the entire production pipeline. And this is crucially important to us
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because the price of one item that basically this is a really important step forward because it gives us clarity with regards to how dozens of other variables within the system need to react and thus it enables some of the much more complicated equations that we need to enact to accomplish this, you know, to be realized. Here we have a chart that I had Jake Melee, one of our Austin designers, create right in the right in the last few days before this. And what it essentially illustrates is a price breakdown of the Freelancer ship. And this is a work in progress and the values will inevitably evolve, but it should give you a pretty good sense of how we're measuring and evaluating these things. So, looking at this, you can see for example that the relative percentage
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of the Freelancer's price that's caused by the shield generator in blue towards the bottom, that's that's not arbitrary. The size and strength of that shield generator were determined by the same equations that would be used to calculate shield generators used in other ships. And it's that that consistency, that objectivity, that's really important to us. And what this means is that if something like the price of a commodity used in the production of that shield generator or maybe what a unit of labor costs at the factory where they're produced, if that changes, we'll be able to precisely calculate what that means for the price of both shield generators, Freelancers, and anything else that uses, you know, those elements within its production. And this is basically just another view of that same pricing model showing off the half dozen ships being compared.
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The proposed price you can see at the far left and you'll start to see some of these rippling into the game here relatively soon. This more objective way of looking at ships and items is also really beneficial when we're trying to ascertain what kind of capabilities we want to bestow upon a new item because it allows us to easily visualize where there may be gaps in the offerings that would make a lot of sense to fill. And there are some additional benefits to the systemic approach. At the top of the list, I would say is the fact that it's intuitive. You basically just tend to expect if there's a shortage in something that prices are going to rise and that if there's a surplus that prices are going to fall. You won't typically have enough
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information at your disposal to know exactly how a change in one you know how a change in price in one thing or another will ripple through the economy, but at a macro level you should be able to intelligently infer quite a bit. And this actually leads to another major positive which is that systemic systems tend to reward very clever game play. Basically behavioral changes tend to without trying to go too deep into this, behavioral changes tend to often lag behind an economy which in turn leads to boom and bust cycles. And this happens in the real world all the time. If you think about copper for instance, if worldwide demand for copper were to jump dramatically tomorrow then mining companies would add an extra shift in order to be able to compensate to allow them to ramp up production. And
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if demand were to still outstrip supply then they might think about bringing on more workers, but that could take months before they actually get these guys hired up and trained. And if a demand was exceptionally robust, they might even consider searching for new mines, constructing new refineries and things of that sort. But at that point you're really talking about many years before that additional production capacity would actually come online. And the reverse of course is true as well. Over capacity tends to lead to prolonged down cycles in prices. And these natural swings in prices they can make life very difficult for the unprepared, but clever players are going to see tons of opportunity. So, if you're a minor focused on copper and the price tanks, you've got lots of
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different options. You could always of course change to a different occupation, take up you know bounty hunting or you know something you know something completely different. You might cut back on what you're willing to pay combat escorts or eliminate them entirely on the presumption that since the or you'd be carrying is fetching less pirates would likely be less attractive and you're less drawn to you. Or you might try to focus on increasing your efficiency by turning your attention to higher quality mines so that you could basically attain more value, realize more value with fewer trips which basically means less fuel, less time, less crew cost if you actually have that etc. etc. Another option, one of my favorites would actually be speculation. You could always continue to extract whatever
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material you're focused upon, but rather than actually selling it into the open market, you might just go and rent additional cargo storage space and store it. There is a cost and there's a risk to that though in that that storage space doesn't come free. And so you're basically making an investment on the presumption that prices are going to bounce back within some sort of you know reasonable period of time. But in the end these are all just you know alternative ways by which you know different players will choose to deal with you know the inevitable modulation of prices that you get you know with with economies that tend to behave fairly realistically. Now on occasion I'll make reference to a variety of different types of NPCs for specific you know types in particular and so I thought that it might make a
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little bit of sense for now and in the future to basically give you guys a little bit of background on what I'm talking about when I refer to these. Um simulated NPCs are really at the heart of the background economy. They're extremely simple entities that are endowed with just very basic personality traits that help to dictate their behavior. They're never going to be directly seen and their purpose is to allow the economy to intelligently flow and react to the different imbalances that it's you know that it's going to see. They'll directly fuel things like factory labor and help to determine what missions are available where and for what price. They'll also dictate the actual number of NPCs that you'll see at a given landing zone and their occupations. Um their actions are also going to
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provide inputs to the so-called probability volumes that you're so that what you see in a given area is truly representative of what you should be seeing if you could actually you know delve down into this little virtualized world. Um probabilistic NPCs are much closer to the actual much closer to the actual game. They're handled on the back end and basically the NPCs that they represent they're not technically NPCs at all. They're really are just probabilities. Um this functionality is actually been in the game since 3.0 but as of right now designers still dictate their contents by hand. And as noted above this is actually going to change when simulated NPCs start to come online. this this entire concept is basically a large optimization that allows us to
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track key elements at the level of detail needed without impacting anything that any player could actually ever see. Virtual NPCs which shall sometimes refer to as spoofed these are actually going to come online next year and they're particularly interesting for a number of different reasons. Um I'm going to go into more detail about these a little bit later in the presentation, and so we'll come back to that. Um the last type of NPC, of course, are real NPCs that you actually see within the game. Um these are the non-player characters uh that, you know, uh for all practical purposes, could just as easily be another player. They're fully simulated, they're quite expensive, and it's for this reason that all of these other types of NPCs actually exist. It would be exorbitantly expensive, computationally expensive,
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which ultimately to you guys means that you'd see, you know, frame rates take a hit, we'd have, you know, much higher server costs if we actually trying to do this. Uh if we were actually trying to uh simulate everything in completely realistic fashion. Um and again, as I'll get to in a little bit, uh there actually some negatives that even if we were going about doing things uh to that level of detail and really were willing to, you know, try to, you know, fully emulate, you know, every single entity. There actually some significant negatives to that. So, another thing that I wanted to touch on is the dynamic mission system. And this is actually one of the more important pieces of gameplay tech that's going to do that's going to debut next year. Um but before I get into that, it would
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make sense to talk a bit about where we currently stand and some of the limitations that we currently face. So, right now, um all of the mission content that we have within the game is completely static. Uh there's no way for the designers to control uh how many of a given mission is available at a given location or the price or anything of that sort. There's also no way for them to automatically customize those missions based upon the current state of the economy. Now, the designers have, you know, valiant- valiantly attempted to circumvent some of these limitations as best they could, but the reality is that they've just been missing a critical piece of the puzzle. And so, the dynamic mission system is intended to change all that to provide a direct link to the economy so that things can be
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algorithmically customized as appropriate without requiring any sort of special effort on the part of the designer. And before I get too far into this system though, I want to define one more term that's going to occasionally pop up and that you have probably heard quite a few times just in various, you know, chats on the website. Um, environmental mission scenarios are created via subsumption very much like normal missions. One key difference though is that they often don't have explicit objectives that you're intended to accomplish. They're used to basically create the worlds that should just be going on around you, um, but which we don't actually construct unless you're there to actually see it. Uh, these scenarios are instantiation instantiated via probability volumes
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which are basically regions of space that define the likelihood of encountering different things. And it's within these volumes that the probabilistic NPCs I mentioned earlier that I mentioned earlier exist if you really want to, you know, if you really want to call it that. as a player makes their way through a probability volume, uh, it queries a library of mission content to determine, uh, what the player should see and then it actually creates it. And so, for the quantum mechanically inclined amongst you, this is basically like you're flying around the universe collapsing the wave function wherever you go. That's where the probabilities basically, you know, coalesce into reality and you can actually see it. That's where we take things, you know, out of, you know, the land of probabilities which which we do because it's so much more efficient, you
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know, like I was saying earlier, and we at that point we actually create real NPCs on a real server which you can interact with. Uh so, a volume might indicate uh that there's a certain chance of encountering a cargo freighter and a slightly smaller chance of encountering a pirate. So, as you fly around that area then, you'll occasionally see a cargo freighter and a bit less frequently a pirate. And I mentioned earlier that there were some significant negatives uh even if we were to try to simulate everything at a you know at a at a at a complete level. So, one of the benefits of this approach that we're doing, besides being a really effective optimization, is that it allows us to highlight to highlight what I'd call the interesting moments. If you think about how large space is and how infrequently you actually run
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into things, um the odds that you'd ever run into a cargo freighter right as a pirate was closing on them or just as the pirate had disabled them and had docked uh docked to their ship and was just about to be you know uh begin a breaching operation, the odds of you coming upon that at that particular moment would be infinitesimally small. But, it it's actually those moments that are sometimes, you know, the most interesting from a game play's perspective. And so, what we get with this system, besides all the optimization, is really um just a natural predisposition towards a higher than normal, you know, frequency of that type of thing happening. So, getting back on track a little bit, the dynamic mission service serves as an intermediary between the game servers and the uh the universe uh economy
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service, uh periodically querying the simulated universe and then using that information to uh to modify all sorts of things that the players will directly see and experience. And this means that missions will start being offered only at locations where they're actually needed, where there's a legitimate function that the economy has determined needs to be performed and that the prices offered will be justified by what's currently happening within the world. So, the dynamic mission system is also going to allow for a lot more intelligent customization of missions, which in turn is going to equate to a lot more variety. And this won't just be the case for the missions that you explicitly accept, it also carry over to environmental mission scenarios. So, right now when a probability volume instantiates one of these environment environmental mission scenarios, the
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content is totally fixed. There's no way to customize anything based upon the current situation at that particular moment. Um with this system though, we'll be able to start doing things like dictating the type and quantity of cargo, whether a cargo freighter should have escorts, uh a ship's current level of damage, and all sorts of other things uh based upon what makes sense in that area. this This I mean, this is probably kind of an esoteric concept, but to give you a better understanding of why this is a really powerful concept, um I'll go into a quick and very simple uh example. So, imagine that there is an asteroid field with a lot of very valuable resources and a distant refinery, and thus there's a lot of back and forth activity. There's basically uh mining ships that are heading, you know, from the refinery
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out to the asteroid field, extracting value, and then heading back with, you know, with a full cargo hold. So, between there's those two locations there are also a lot of pirates. So, there are a lot of things that you can or that you should be able to infer about this scenario, all of which the dynamic mission system is going to help automatically resolve. So, if you were to fly between the asteroid field and the refinery, you'd of course expect to occasionally encounter a miner, sometimes encounter a pirate, and sometimes both. However, if you ran into a miner heading towards the asteroid field, you'd expect that their cargo hold would actually be empty. Uh they were heading there to just go stock up. Similarly, if a miner were heading back towards the refinery, you'd expect that their cargo hold would not only be full, but that it would be
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loaded up with whatever commodities were present within that asteroid field. And pirates obviously would logically focus on those miners that had something of value, such that you'd expect miners on the way to the asteroid field to typically be in a completely undamaged state. When they were basically heading in that direction, they had nothing of value. Um and those that were heading back to the refinery that you encountered would sometimes be much worse off, which would effectively reflect the fact that they may have already tangled with some pirates and just managed to get away. And so, if you ran into a scenario where a pirate ship had disabled a freighter, uh docked with it, and it was getting ready to already breaching, you'd also expect that the freighter must therefore have cargo, uh be returning from the field, or else the pirate would have
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logically you know, you know, tangled with it, you know, with a completely different ship. So, the dynamic mission system is going to allow us to customize a lot of this content automatically, uh so that the things you see are, you know, completely logical in nature without the designers having to uh do any do any uh special work. So, one more big one to hit here, which is mission mission spoofing. That's another major feature that the dynamic the dynamic mission system is going to expose. I've spoken a good bit about how a lot of stuff doesn't really become real, uh it doesn't start getting simulated by the game servers where it's really expensive, until there's actually a player around to see it. Prior to that, things are kept in a much more efficient state. But, there's one big problem with this approach, and that's the fact that
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some NPCs, uh even the ones that aren't near a player, have a legitimate need to exist in something more than just probabilistic form at significant distances from players. And that's because of the service beacon. So, the dynamic mission system is going to query the probability volumes to determine the frequency and specifics of service beacon requests. This would equate to MPCs that are asking you for a service. In other words, this may they you may be getting a call from a guy that's far away, and we don't want you once again go to all the effort of creating him until it's really necessary. Um and so what the system will do is effectively spoof those offers. It will create a little virtual MPC. It That MPC will be able to fire commands through the normal communication network, and
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what you'll see will look and feel just like a request from any other player. It's only at the point that the beacon was actually accepted, when a player agreed to provide the service uh that the MPC was requesting, that the system would actually transform this spoof this lightweight MPC into a real NPC with which you could actually uh interact. And this might seem like a lot of effort, and it is, but it it's really necessary because the reality is that most of the service beacons that uh are going to, you know, get dispatched throughout the system will never be answered by a player. They may effectively be canceled by an NPC that decides to take it. Um and so what we don't want to have is for every player to have, you know, 10 service beacons getting fired off and be creating all of, you know, uh creating all those characters, creating all those ships,
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executing all that logic when there's no one around to actually see it. Uh so there's one other thing here that I wanted to talk about, which is the focused NPC generation. And basically this applies to players uh Well, it applies to two different things. The first thing is actually uh players with a large price on their head are inevitably going to attract bounty hunters, and they're not all going to be players. These NPCs are handled a bit differently because they have actual purpose, and when they finally run into you, it's not going to be a random encounter, and thus they're not particularly good candidates for the, you know, the normal random probabilistic distribution within a probability volume. So you can think of them a bit as ghost NPCs that quietly track you around the universe following any breadcrumbs you're leaving and doing their very best to find you. Once the system has determined that
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they've succeeded, they'd arrive on the scene, finally get converted into a real NPC, and engage you just as a player might. Uh this focused NPC generation also plays a role in the creation of NPC service providers. And this is to some degree uh the mirror image of what I discussed a moment ago, but this time it involves the creation of an NPC in response to your requesting a service. Um in such cases, the dynamic mission service will query the probability volumes to determine whether an NPC would respond, and if so, they'd be instantiated and directed towards your location. So, this is effectively uh what would happen when you're requesting combat assistance or you're requesting passenger transport or you're asking, you know, to be refueled or repaired, and no players take the call, you know, so at that point, what the
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system is going to do is effectively query all of the NPCs that would theoretically exist within that area and determine whether or not any of them would actually be interested, and if so, it's at that moment that they actually, you know, become real. Uh so, the next thing up is the law and order system. Uh we're going to be making a lot of changes to law and order system over the next year, but before getting into that, um it probably makes sense to give a quick recap of where we currently stand. So, at the moment, we currently have the concept of a global criminal reputation, which is a bit like a rolling history uh of your of your criminal actions. It can't be altered except via time and the actions that you that you do. Um we also have a wanted level, and it increases whenever a crime is committed within range of of an operational comm array, and it can be removed by hacking
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a terminal or by getting killed by AI security or a bounty hunter. And lastly, uh if a bounty hunter uh takes out such a criminal, uh uh you immediately get paid. So, there are a number of problems with this system, and we'll get into a little bit of detail. So, the new law system is going to revolve around the concept of these hierarchical jurisdictions. And a jurisdiction is basically just an area that defines its own set of laws or which adds or extends the laws of its parents. So, you might think of the UEE as the federal government, Crusader might be considered a state, and Port Olisar could be considered a city. Uh the laws of the UEE would certainly be within, you know, in force within Port Olisar, but Port Olisar might go a bit farther and prohibit the possession
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of certain substances within its jurisdiction. And each of these jurisdictions are going to maintain their own criminal database, and it will be accessible to all law enforcement, all AI security, and bounty hunters that are registered within that jurisdiction. And here's a here's a list of some of the uh some of the some of the crimes that we've been debating. Um theft would of course just be taking something that uh doesn't belong to you. Manslaughter, killing without malice. Um a good example of that would be a bounty hunter that's in the process, they're in close proximity to a bounty, you know, that they're actually after, and they inadvertently kill, you know, kill someone else. In that case, you can kind of infer that they probably didn't do it intentionally, and thus the penalty should be a lot less than something intentional like murder. Um but it might
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involve something like, you know, temporary ejection from the Bounty Hunters Guild, etc. And this is, you know, intended to discourage bounty hunters from getting too careless, you know, when they basically been authorized to go after people, you know, within these secure zones. Next up would be illegal mining, and that would really just equate to extracting resources from a parcel of a planetary body or moon uh that you don't own, that it belongs to another player, or perhaps it belongs to the government and it's not been you know, opened up for for public mining. Um illicit cargo, that would involve transportation or possession of a material that's deemed illegal, uh maybe an addictive drug or a volatile compound that requires a special license to transport. Um smuggling would involve uh the transportation of intentionally hidden goods that are either stolen or
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illicit. Um murder would of course be one of the more obvious ones. It just involves, you know, the outright killing, you know, of a player within a secure zone for for uh for no no justified reason. Um false ID would basically equate to you using a kit that allows you to throw off a false signature so that when you're actually scanned by others, you can basically uh you know, uh give them a sense that you might be law-abiding. Um quantum interdiction and dampening, those would relate to the illegal creation of a field intended to uh inhibit quantum travel, which of course is a tactic that's going to be very popular with pirates looking to snare their prey. And each of the laws within these jurisdictions will be able to be associated with a penalty, and this can be anything from uh as minor as a fine that might elevate to a bounty if you
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don't pay it on time. Um it could result in bounties, and there are two different, you know, bounties. There's the dead or dead or alive variety, and then there's capture. Capture would typically apply to some of the less serious crimes, you know, smuggling to where you didn't weren't actually, you know, causing bodily injury to someone. Um prison duration, you know, uh how much time you're actually going to uh serve as a result of this. Banishment, you could be restricted from going into a particular city or zone for some period of time. Now, the law system uh relies upon security forces being able to ascertain whether an individual has a criminal record, and this will be handled by various forms of scanning. So, the quickest and simplest type of scan is for ships, and it's somewhat akin to basically running a license plate. Um, the the next up would be the FPS
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variant and this requires you to be in close proximity to another character and to have a view of the character's face. Um, security forces can of course do more than just try and identify a known criminal. They can also try to detect crimes that are still in progress. Uh, to that end ships will be able to be scanned for more than just, you know, the license plate. Uh, a deeper, more time-consuming scan and one that requires a bit more player skill can return the quantity and type of cargo on board. And this will also be of value to pirates who want to basically know whether or not a freighter has anything that's, you know, interesting before they actually, you know, move in to engage. Um, upon verification of the presence of illicit cargo bounty a bounty would be automatically issued if it didn't already exist and the security officer would then be cleared to engage as
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appropriate. Um, and then there would be a still deeper, you know, more time-consuming, more, you know, more skill-requiring uh, scan that would allow you to, you know, effectively detect smuggled cargo. Um, there will be few MPCs and probably few players that are actually going to master that and thus in general uh, smuggling will typically be a relatively safe uh, you know, a relatively safe occupation except in the most secure zones. Um, all these scans are of course detectable by the target um, with more skillful scanners uh, less likely to be noticed. As with the current system uh, security forces respond via environmental mission scenarios and thus encounters with them are purely by chance based upon the density of security in that area. And these forces aren't immediately hostile. It's a It's It's similar to just running into a cop while you're
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driving on the streets. Uh, so unless you actually get scanned they don't really know your identity. Um, once they verify once security has verified that you're a known criminal then everything changes. You get a pursuit rating and all of a sudden security is not summoned to that area merely, you know, uh, incidentally as a result of the probability volume. Now it actually directs additional security traffic towards you. And so, the way to basically, you know, get them off your tail is to evade them for a significant period of time, at which point your pursuit rating will gradually go down and the density of, you know, directed MPCs will basically, you know, gradually dissipate. The last thing I wanted to go into on the law and order system is prisons and they're going to, you know, effectively serve as additional deterrent to
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committing crimes within lawful areas. And I can't get into go into too much detail here since we're still working out the details of exactly what type of gameplay you would experience while confined and I'm sure we'll start out, you know, fairly modestly and then gradually ramp up the ambition. We definitely want to have some interesting characters and missions within the prisons which could in turn open up some interesting doors on the outside. Manual labor to reduce your prison sentence, pennants for being bad, is also pretty high on our list. Players with a bounty on their head that are captured or killed would be immediately transported to prison and the duration of their sentence would depend upon the number and severity of offenses. We're also going to wind up introducing some anti-theft devices because right now it's far too easy to basically steal these, you know, enormously expensive,
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you know, ships that represent a tremendous store of value. So we'll likely implement things along the lines of a security pad that, you know, would either require a significant amount of time or some hacking skill for you to bypass or a physical key that resides on your body, which basically means someone can't actually start your ship unless they at the very least first take you out and then search your body. We're also going to make it substantially more difficult for you to you know, fly these stolen ships throughout the system and by that I mean players will with stolen ships are going to become much less able to frequent a bunch of the shops that provide refueling repair services. So, they're therefore going to have to head out to the criminal areas, the lawless areas in order to take care
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of a lot of those types of basic operations. And of course, the prices out there are going to be more expensive and there's also just the the added hassle of making the journey. So, after talking so much about law and order system, I I think it probably only makes sense to give you guys a little bit of a sense as to where we're heading with bounty hunting. One of the first few things you're going to notice once the dynamic mission system starts to come online will be the directed NPC bounty hunters. And I spoke about this a bit earlier in the in the dynamic mission system section. But these bounty hunters won't be dependent upon a probability volume to spawn them and their capabilities and frequency are going to increase as the price you know, on your head grows. Many jurisdictions will have a resident bounty hunting guild and there are a lot of benefits to registration. There are also going to be some costs.
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Some will require certain level of reputation in order for you to join. Some will require a recurring membership fee and others may require you to to maintain a certain quota of bounties. One of the largest benefits to registering is that you'll gain access to a mobiGlass bounty hunting application that can show you wealth of information about that jurisdiction's criminals including their their names, crimes, bounties, total reward being offered and most importantly their last known position and ship. And this information is updated in real time so that once you're registered as a bounty hunter anything that detects the presence of a known felon within that area will be automatically broadcast to you. And this all kind of goes towards you know, in the direction of making life you know, more difficult for people that are going
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out and committing these crimes and then basically trying to wander you know, around through secure systems. One of the nicer aspects of the new system is basically that it's going to eliminate the need to manually accept individual bounties. Now you're just going to automatically be registered. You're going to automatically have knowledge of any bounties that are uh known by that jurisdiction. It's also going to improve navigation. There will be no more clumsy going to the star map and trying to basically pick, you know, whatever zone or region is closest to the last known location of uh yeah of your target. Um One of one of my favorite features is actually quantum uh trail tracking. And that's not just a feature for bounty hunters. Um but they're certainly going to use it a lot. Whenever a player jumps from one location to another, they're going to leave a trail that with the right equipment um you'll be able to see. And
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this means that if your bounty or whoever you're chasing manages to jump away, you'll be able to follow them. The so the the quality of the bounty the the quality of the tracking equipment and the size of the ship uh is going to dictate how long this trail can be detected. So you'll need to be fairly close on the heels of your prey if you want to have a chance uh at actually following. Another change that will involve what we're calling virtuals against spoofed NPC bounties. And this is similar to the ghost concept that I mentioned before. Except in this particular case, the spoofed NPCs are your targets. And so you can think of it as you're registered as a bounty hunter. Of course you'll be tracking the players, but we're also going to have a lot of NPCs, you know, that we again we don't want to truly have driving around, flying ships, doing all of this expensive stuff unless
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there's a player to see them. And so these you can think of them as just little point-like entities that can move from location to location occasionally tripping the security alarms so that you can actually follow them. And they'll generate everything just as a player would in terms of they go to a system, then you may wind up, you know, seeing them trip, you know, a facial ID camera at a particular area. And if you get there quickly enough, there would actually be a good chance that they'd be in that location. Um if it turns out that they're not in that area, then you may see a quantum trail that's been left by this little virtual entity. And so effectively, it's going to allow you to start truly hunting people. Right now, as soon as you kill someone with a bounty on your head, you get paid. This is going to change so that payment is withheld until you've delivered proof of death to the appropriate security office. Um capture bounties are going to work similarly, but with one key difference.
00:36:51
Um if an NPC is disabled, they'll simply surrender and follow you. With the idea being that you'd take them to the designated prison, at which point you'd be paid. Um it's slightly different for a player because it wouldn't be very fun if another player captured you to basically sit on their ship for who knows how long, and there's no guarantee that they'd take you straight to the prison. Um so if you actually wind up submitting another player, at that moment they're simply teleported to prison. You wind up getting a proxy NPC to fill their place. That proxy NPC will behave just like, you know, a normal NPC that you captured, and you'd march him back to go collect your money. Um bounty hunters won't, of course, be simply confined to space. Um there will be FPS bounty hunters, uh both players and uh NPCs, wandering around the cities. And so every time,
00:37:39
you know, if you're if you if you're actually moving through a city, you've got a price on your head, and people start, you know, coming up to you and basically, you know, focusing on you a little bit too long, it may be a you know, it it may be a sign that they're actually, you know, running running your ID, and they may have, you know, they may be authorized to engage you as soon as they get verification. Also wanted to talk uh a little bit about salvage. Salvage revolves around the extraction of bits of value from a ship. Um and there are three distinct uh methods of salvage. Uh the first one is uh component extraction, and that simply involves the removal of components uh from the ship. This may require bypassing a security system to gain access uh to the module, or cutting the items from their fixed housings. Um these components will often be small
00:38:27
enough to be carried and thus significant value, power generators, uh shield generators, batteries, and things of that sort uh can be gleaned, you know, from these ships with enough trips. Data extraction involves uh transferring electronic data from the ship to another medium. Uh some forms of data can only be copied if the original is destroyed enabling only a single instance of that data. Some data may require decryption before it's accessible. Uh some tamper-proof systems may limit how many you know, attempts you can actually make at decrypting it, you know, etc. etc. Um there are many different types of data that will be you know, that can be found on a ship and I'll detail uh a bit more of those in a few few slides from now. Uh the last and most visual method of salvage is hull scraping which essentially entails uh using a salvage beam to vaporize the outer hull of a ship and collect that material in
00:39:15
storage canisters. This is very similar to mining uh except the materials extracted can occasionally be in purified form. And so I included a video, it's from a couple years ago um just to kind of illustrate the concept. And basically this is just the damage texture which is very you know, the same basic tech that we're going to use to extract it. So you could think of it as uh salvage uh salvage for the hull scraping would be equivalent to this combined with the mining arm and tractor beam that you see in mining right now uh to where you're literally just ripping the exterior hull and therefore different ships will have different materials uh and therefore you know, different quantities of value that you can pull from this in this fashion. And the last thing I wanted to touch on today is actually discovery. And this is one
00:40:04
of my favorite occupations and involves the acquisition of what I would call locational information. Uh these packets of information can be procured via various methods. They can be actively sought out via scanning. Uh a long-range scan from orbit might indicate that some valuable commodities are present in a given parcel of land, but with a good amount of uncertainty as to the quantity. Information can also be obtained by chance. You might simply be flying around in deep space and come upon a previously undiscovered asteroid field. Perhaps, you know, that's what pulls you out of, you know, your quantum travel. You can also engage in analysis, say for example by inspecting a parcel of land up close and personal so that you attain a level of certainty you wouldn't be able to achieve from a long range scan. And so you can think of discovery in some sense as the grease that allows
00:40:52
other occupations to function and or focus. Salvage ships need to know where there's something worth salvaging and a lot of miners will want to focus on the actual process of process of extracting value rather than the process, the very different skill set that will be required in terms of finding those materials. There are a lot of different types of locational information and some of those allow for successive deeper layers of discovery, sometimes increasing the value dramatically and other times rendering the find completely worthless. A chunk of metal determined to be a wrecked or derelict ship that was found via a long range scan might have a very small amount of value, but not nearly as much as if you actually took the time and ventured closer and verified the type of the ship and its current state, whether it had already been stripped down, in which case it would have no value, whether it was operational, in which
00:41:39
case the value would be worth quite a bit more. Similarly, the discovery of a previously unknown asteroid field or comet wouldn't be worth a lot, although verification that they contained valuable resources that are currently in high demand could make their value skyrocket. A planetary body or moon has millions of parcels of land and close inspection of a parcel enough to verify that something of value is present would also result in the creation of a bit of information. And lastly, a stable ultra inter system wormhole that allowed a lot of travel time to be saved, uh would often find a willing market. There are other things, geysers, nebula, etc. that will be very of interest to scientists, uh tourists, you know, tourist NPCs, things of that sort. And these packets of information that you collect are stored within a dedicated MobiGlas uh application and
00:42:28
allow you to share that information with other players and organizations. And it's important to note that the value of information degrades over time. So, if you were to find, say, uh a rich deposit of gold on the surface of a planet, uh and, you know, gold was currently at a very high market value, then that, you know, very recent information would have, you know, a lot of value. If, on the other hand, you sat on it for, you know, a week or 2 weeks, um at that point, it's not worth very much at all because you don't know whether or not that gold has, you know, since been extracted, whether it's actually still there. So, you can periodically go back and refresh your knowledge, travel to a location, and verify that no one actually found that remote location in the mountains, um where you'd found that gold, and thus your find is still intact. At that point, it's now current
00:43:16
information again, and its value once again reflect that. So, uh information can be sold to info brokers, which is one of the primary ways by which players that engage in discovery will actually make money. Um they'll buy and sell based upon the current market value, which will be, again, dictated by supply and demand. So, if the price of aluminum is in the tank, you wouldn't be able to make much selling the location of a ship that had a lot of aluminum on sole. Um and so, information in this sense is very much a commodity, and its value is going to ebb and flow with, you know, with other things in the economy. Um and once an info broker has actually purchased this information, it's going to be freely available for other players and NPCs to bid on like they would with, you know, with any other asset. So, that's basically it. I'm sorry it went a little bit long. Um I did Say again? You still got 10 minutes,
00:44:05
man. Wow. I thought it went I thought it went long. Well, what we could do is we could basically So, what we have right here is Jake Mealy and Rob Brininger, two of the Austin designers. As I mentioned earlier, Mealy is practically single-handedly responsible for all of the vast changes and uh uh the the much more efficient, you know, algorithmic content that's being layered onto the pricing models that we're utilizing. And so, these guys could answer any questions in any level of detail that you may have in that area. Yeah, that's that's called payback. The ultimate parry. Uh so, if we do have a few minutes,
00:44:52
we we I you know, we we can answer a few questions. If anybody's got anything. Sure. With the prison, are you looking at online time or offline time? Can I be a bad guy, go to prison, log out, log in my alt until my prison guy serves his time? Are you seeing your vision of that? Uh I I I would I would lean towards thinking that it's probably just constant time. Um but you know, again, the the the prison itself is still in the relatively early stages. There will be a lot of iteration, like I said, we'll we'll like we do with a lot of things, we'll start out relatively um uh relatively minimalistically and then we'll gradually expand out. Some of the bigger questions that we're facing in terms of the prison stuff is uh how how do we how do we make it fun? Exactly
00:45:39
what type of gunning gameplay are you engaged in there? Because it really is it's a confined space. And we know that we want to have the potential to meet interesting characters. Uh it'd be almost like uh if you go back, you know, a year, year and a half ago to where we had Area 18 and you were confined to that space. And so, imagine that space and you've got, you know, you know, you've got gangs in there. You can actually, you know, associate yourself with one of them and then that relationship translates to, you know, when you actually get released to the outside. And there would of course be the potential to actually escape from prison. And so, there's a lot of potential that would really just be doing uh the same stuff that we're doing in a lot of other places. I mean, you build up, you know, a personal reputation with other characters within the game already. Um this one is again, it's and it's it's something that uh we don't expect the average player to be getting locked away for long periods of time cuz we don't expect the average
00:46:25
player to be committing, you know, lots of crimes in secure zones. And Um that's a core of the uh NPC technology. That's it. Would that be helpful for, I guess, in two specific cases, uh being a bounty merchantman uh seller? That's it. Going to a planet and wanting to sell your wares, would NPCs become aware of your presence? Uh you So, you're talking about whether if you had like a price on your head and you're basically you know, uh moving into Yeah, if you're selling goods as a bounty merchantman owner, that's it. You land on a planet, uh that's it. Would the NPCs just start to hear that there's a merchantman in town? Yeah, well, yeah, that that's basically exactly. It's like it's a what what you would wind up having is these these probability volumes that I mentioned, you know, earlier. They effectively, you know, give us uh
00:47:13
a mathematical description of what you would potentially see. Um and like I said, so we are actually or we will be, you know, simulating these things, you know, in in more precise detail like these little point entities. But once we get over to the game side, what we don't want to wind up doing is having to compare, for example, the location of an individual ship with, you know, a million or 10 million different NPCs and trying to like, you know, infer stuff there. And so, the probability volumes are really a preprocessing step that's performed in real time that takes this background information and makes it easily uh digestible for the game so that, for example, you you This has been happening, you know, for quite a while within the game already to where every time you jump, uh what we're basically doing is casting your path through the universe and
00:48:01
plotting your course through all these probability volumes and figuring out where you would actually, you know, run into a particular entity. And this is all dictated right now, like I said, specifically by the designers going in and you know, hand-setting this stuff. And so the next step is basically hooking that stuff up to the back in the economy so that we can start to feed real-time information to these volumes so that the quantity of pirates, it ebbs and flows based upon what's actually happening. Sure. With regards to the salvage mechanic, you mentioned that you at some point in time you would be able to get possibly components off some of these salvaged ships. Uh do you foresee the ability to get military grade certain components of military grade is the first question and and thereby being able to update your your own ships by interchanging some of
00:48:50
the salvage components. And then what will the will there also be the opportunity You kind of touched on it, but will there be the opportunity to salvage nearly fully operational ships that are, you know, uh through some Yeah, well the the the opposite of salvage, of course, is repair. And so it's it's very possible you disable another player, you take out their engines, you you know, take out the crew. Well, now you need to repair the engine before you can go on your way. Or you find a you know, a derelict ship and you basically you know, perform enough repairs, you repair its hull, you basically replace its you know, its batteries, you give it you know, a you know, a a new you know, power module, etc. And now it actually becomes operational again. And one of the reasons I should just point out, one of the reasons why component extraction is you know, so high on the list is because it allows us to let players extract a
00:49:39
significant amount of value before we actually have to deal with the more complicated issues like imagine you have an Idris and you've got these big enormous you know, you know, batteries and you want to actually extract that entire thing. Well, that just becomes you know, a user interface and a logistical nightmare. Whereas components, these nice little small easily, you know, you know, carriable things, it's a very simple way for us to allow you to go onto a ship, uh you know, bypass the security systems, cut off these things, and extract, maybe not all, but significant chunks of the value in this manner. Data is the same way. So, you can have ships that basically have uh the location stored in them, just like I was mentioning on Discovery. You can have a ship that has within its database that you can extract that you can salvage the location of a comet. Now, you go verify the comet and actually, you know, see what its current state is. Um the whole
00:50:26
scraping is just another way to basically pull a good chunk of the value of, you know, its whole plating and stuff off. And so, the reason why those three are at the top of the list is they're the most straightforward and quickest ones to implement, and we want to get, you know, the the basics of some of these things running as quickly as possible so that we can start to iterate on them and basically broaden the number of things that players can do within the game. I'm good. Uh with the uh discovery location data, do those locations exist temporarily as long as the player has the data, or are these locations that are permanently, like, new places to explore, discover, people can come back? Yeah, they're they're actually dynamically created, but as long as you retain knowledge of them, um the uh they would basically continue to exist. In other words, I'm flying, you know, uh from point A to point B, or I'm
00:51:16
I'm doing a scan, and I actually locate uh you know, a new asteroid field. That asteroid field wasn't necessarily, you know, always there. Um it was created, you know, you know, uh randomly. But now that you know about it, and you can think about this logically as being All these things wouldn't be static in the real world, right? These things are moving. So, once you find it, well, I know where it's at as long as I keep pretty close, you know, tabs on it. But if I ever just forget about it entirely, you know what? There's asteroids coming and going through the solar system, moving around, and you know, all the time. It's like there's no certainty that you're ever really going to be able to find it. Plus, there's always the question mark of did another NPC, you know, or player find it that you don't know about, basically, you know, mine it into nothingness? And so, there are a lot of reasons why this thing may eventually
00:52:04
not be there. But, as long as you retain knowledge, as long as you go back and periodically refresh it, then you can keep it, you know, in perpetuity. Thank you. Tony, Chris mentioned it a little bit in the opening statement about survival Uh I know we've talked about this a lot over the years, but what's the current state of thought in that? Say you get shot down and no common equipment on a moon or a planet, you know, Well, that that actually plays right into that dynamic mission system and, you know, in the probability of items I was mentioning before to where in essence what you'd wind up doing, you get shot down over a moon, and what you do right now is you basically fire up your service beacon, and you basically,
00:52:51
you know, set it to, you know, 100, you know, 100 credits, and basically, you ask somebody for help. The The problem is that if you're off in some distant moon or whatever the case may be, there may not be a player around you, or maybe the players that are on the same server as you are too far away, or maybe they're engaged in other missions. And so, what we want to do, you know, is basically allow NPCs to start to participate. And so, if you're on that moon and you need transport, and you basically, you know, throw the, you know, throw that request for assistance out there, and no players assist, what the dynamic mission system would then do is query all of the nearby, you know, probability of items and determine whether or not any NPCs would actually be interested in helping you. Um and that would depend, you know, largely upon, again, what they're doing. It's like, you know, is maybe your price is too low, so you're not interested in
00:53:38
them. But, if you get the price to the right point, you will eventually pull one of those guys in there. And this again is it's it's a capability it's a capability we don't have right now because there's no easy or effective way for the designers to tap into it. And that that's why we've got a lot riding on this thing and we are we're so anxious to basically get it in as quickly as possible. mechanic any deeper have we thought about that, you know, going into the fact that you don't have any water, food, you know, such and such, so and so? Yeah. Well, we've got the thirst thirst and hunger is actually on you know one of the things on the list that we've got slated to to deal with next year. And this would be the same thing for you know for all the NPCs to where you'll actually start to get you'll need to basically you know you know you'll need to basically you
00:54:26
know drink, you'll need to eat, you'll need to do all of that or else you'll very gradually because we don't want to make it too annoying start to suffer you know various deleterious effects. Sir? Question about civilian NPCs. How many on your back end database how many variables and arrays are you maintaining just to keep that dynamic information stored so that you can calculate those probability At any given time the spoof ones are actually going to be fairly minimal because they're not really created except as necessary. In other words, most of the time so the eventual idea is to be simulating you know 10 or 20 million of these of these so-called you know the the the simulated NPCs but they're very very lightweight. Don't need to be updated you know if it's
00:55:14
when you're talking about that simulation you're not doing 60 times a second. You're not doing two times a second. You're updating these guys you know once every 5 minutes or so because they it's not as if these simulated NPCs change their occupation on a second you know on a second by second basis or anything like that. And so what you wind up having is a big repository of these characters that periodically re-evaluate decide do I want want working at this factory or is there something more attractive? Well, if I leave the factory and I decide to become a miner, what am I actually doing? Oh, well, the if he's doing a miner, then all of a sudden there's a demand for more fuel in that area. And if he's not working at the factory, that means all of a sudden that, you know, the rates for, you know, factory workers, you know, you've got one less, you know, NPC that will actually be available to supply that, which means the cost of things that depend upon labor, you know, in general would go up. I mean, one NPC would never really matter. Um
00:56:02
but, you know, you get the point. Um I mentioned also uh earlier that um these simulated NPCs would have a direct impact on the things like the number of NPCs, the occupations that you see uh within the game. And by this I mean, so if we're simulating, say, 100,000, you know, distinct uh NPCs, simulated NPCs on the back end, then this may translate into 100,000 divided by, you know, 1,000. Um so, you wind up with, well, that's 100 NPCs, you know, uh that you'd actually see walking around. And there would be all of your normal, you know, your normal persistent characters, your bartenders, your shopkeepers that are actually very specific characters that have, you know, particular lines of dialogue recorded for them. And then there's all of the you know, the so-called background characters. There's the the window shoppers and the tourists
00:56:49
and the blue-collar workers and, you know, and all of those sorts of guys. Uh the you know, the the vagrants, the you know, the the the criminal, you know, elements, etc. that we can basically, you know, in uh create at will to basically, you know, fill up the you know, fill up the populace. And the other interesting thing is we can kind of bend that uh however we see fit so that if, for example, uh you've got a mining colony and therefore there's a lot of blue-collar workers and there's not much in the way of advanced, you know, production capabilities or anything like that. Um and all of a sudden the asteroid field that's near that area winds up getting depleted, then all of a sudden there's very little ore being brought in then being utilized, etc. And so, what you would logically expect is lower per capita income, less employment, more crime, and what you wind up seeing over time would
00:57:38
therefore be more of these simulated NPCs shifting their occupation from employed blue collar worker to, you know, criminal, you know, to criminal element, etc. etc. etc. All the way in the back. I have a question just in general about automated vehicles. You could apply the same AI logic to vehicles and ships, and rather than have a simulated human piloting the ship, you have an AI representing, you know, an autonomous ship piloting the ship. Yeah, that well, that's that's an that's an interesting one and I I actually cut it because I was trying, you know, trying to not get too crazy on the time and they're they're already giving me the sign here. They're I had a whole I had a whole section on multi-crew, which we now have we've talked about multi-crew for a long time and we've never gone into precise detail about exactly what that
00:58:27
meant and how are you going to interface, you know, with it, how are you going to hire guys, how are you going to dictate what, you know, what they did, etc. We now we have enough clarity at this point where we can talk, you know, pretty precisely about that, but that's that's really that that's an hour-long talk in and of itself. I and and what you mentioned there is one of the one of the optimizations just, you know, to end on is if you have a crew and you think about, you know, imagine you've got an Idris and it's got 100 characters on it, it's exceedingly inefficient if you've got engineers down in the if you've got, you know, engineers that you've hired down in the engineering section and there's no other players down there to actually see them, you don't really want them to be pathfinding, animating, doing all of this very computationally expensive stuff. It's incredibly wasteful and then
00:59:14
you think about well, you can have lots of players with lots of ships with lots of extra crew, and so everywhere we're always thinking about ways that we can, you know, give give you the illusion that it's doing more than than what it is or where where we're looking for ways to optimize so that we're getting all of the beneficial end effects, maybe in some cases even more. Like I mentioned earlier, without you know, with all of the the rampant waste that would come from just blindly from just blindly doing some of the stuff. One of the things we've been looking at is basically a couple of different levels of basically tapping down on the NPC functionality so that you would still get all of the behavioral benefits of having an engineer down in the engineering section, he would still repair things at the rate of speed that he normally would. He could still be injured if
01:00:02
there was damage done to that part of the ship, but we were able but we're able to basically turn off some of those high fidelity you know, animations, path find stuff like that that are really only of benefit if a player's there. As long as they perform as they would if you were watching them you know, in another way there's no reason to do all the extra work. Woo!

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