Inside Cloud Imperium Games & Moon Collider

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] hi everyone welcome uh to another edition of inside Cloud Imperium uh for today's uh show or addition we're going to uh take you behind the scenes and what we're doing in AI in Star Citizen like everything else in Star Citizen we're going to try and push the boundaries of um what we can do and what's been done before so we've actually partnered with with a uh a new uh middleware company um and their middleware is called Kera hi I'm Sandy Gardner and I'm here with Matt Mike and Ben three guys from Moon collider um and

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   these three I'm actually sitting with three very smart people all three of you are from Cambridge originally we originally met University we were all studying various different courses there I was doing physics uh yeah I was doing maths and uh Matt was doing computer science yeah I was actually doing programming as part of the course whereas I think these guys spent most of their time programming instead of doing their course but I think the first Contact I had with uh moon clider was through Matthew Jack who's uh you know the main uh founder of principle of it along with uh uh Mike Bell um and he' reached out to me over email he' basically said you know I I used to work at krych and I was the one of the primary AI uh programmers there and helped develop the the cry AI system and you know now I've gotone independent I'm

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   building my own middleware for AI that's going to be sort of The Next Step the Next Generation I still do Consulting for citech I know the engine really well and uh I love what you're doing and is there a way maybe we could talk because I'm pretty excited by Star Citizen I'd love to help out and you know I was like okay that's great because you know anyone that has cry engine experience is obviously a big Plus for us and someone that actually programmed uh a large part of the AI system already in Cay engine was obviously someone that we were like very interested in kythera is uh middleware which runs with multiple engines we chose cry engine partly because um it's such a fantastic showcase um especially for AI characters there's a certain amount of roleplay initially you know um we kind of decide how we would want a wingman or a pilot to um behave or a certain race you know

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   if we're looking at the vanal we think about you know what's involved in that process now you know we kind of played out a little bit different species the different attitudes the different types of pilots and all that stuff yeah yeah we kind of get an over overarching idea of you know what makes a vandal of Vandal when they're in a shift when they're flying around how would they attack you that kind of thing uh and what what you know what makes uee them kind of more regimented militaristic type formation kind of thing that's a big part of it I think is getting personality across because 90% of the time you're going to be seeing not a pilot you're going to be seeing him in a ship so the ship in a sense becomes his Avatar it's his it's how you see him in the world so to real really get a sense of Personality we need to make the ship have a a personality you know the ship needs to

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   move in a unique way for each wingman for each person for each race when a when a Thruster fires on a an AI ship it it's actually a Thruster firing it's it's part of the physical world that the ship is in and it will affect the way that the ship functions this kind of game has uh so many different aspects um so I think if you're an AI programmer for instance it's incredibly fascinating and interesting because it's solving a lot of problems um on a lot of different levels it's it's like a much it's a much more complicated task it's like doing a dive off the top and a triple cork screw whatever and you know it's a difficulty of 10 not a difficulty of three or four and and some people like to do that and luckily I think the moon collider folks are those people as an astrophysicist I was working on simulations of the universe so running large simulations

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   and supercomputers around the world trying to understand how the structure and how Galaxy's formed so I've gone very much from working on one type of virtual Universe to a very different kind of virtual Universe with Star Citizen one of the big things about kythera is that it's Dynamic what is dynamic navigation so Dynamic navigation is a feature for the first person combat where AIS will react to the world changing so if you got a a ship Landing in a hanger then um the characters know to Route around it instead of walking straight through where the ship now is whenever stuff changes it's recomputed on the Fly um and we try and bring that Dynamic approach to everything we do we don't want the AI to be too controlled we want it to be to react sensibly to the player so we can't designers can't

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   specify every single thing this AI will do we just give it these are your objectives do them in an intelligent way and react to the player itself we we draw these these things out we come up with them so that uh we can have sort of distinct Maneuvers distinct looks to each of the different species and the different types of Pilots capabilities and all that stuff so you really get a sense that all of the different AI across the the whole game are a real people that their actual characters piloting ships and walking about and doing all sorts of things um and not just a product of you know some computer program that's ticking away in the background um one another key system there is just uh the avoidance when dog fighting is basically about uh shooting at other ships and getting close enough to shoot them then uh pretty quickly what you end up with is ships colliding

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   which is good fun but the avoidance isn't interesting feature and it's one that we hope people don't notice you notice when it goes wrong when as Matt said ships glide to each other but it's actually quite complicated to make sure that ships avoid each other all the time and and we've also got things like moving asteroids and things other other bits of the environment that are moving around we have to avoid those as well yeah with star Sy with such a dynamic large world you can't hardcode all the things you have to avoid so we needed this system which automatically would work out how a ship should turn to avoid something and make sure yeah cion don't happen we needed a new AI for Star Citizen because it's doing so many things that say cry engine actually doesn't do it I mean because cry engine is specifically a first-person engine for running around firsters combat and

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   it can handle some other cases but in Star Citizen we have travel uh you know between planets we fly around in space we have dog fighting in space so we need very sophisticated um sort of space-based AI or flight AI but we also need the meta AI which is kind of what does that NPC do during the day you know is he you know he a pirate he gets up in the morning brushes his teeth goes to work grading some innocent Traders and then after he's gotten his Otten gains he goes and fences them and then goes to the bar and has some drinks and celebration and goes to bed and what is that pirates's life goal what's he trying to do is he trying to build a pirate empire or is he just wants to be a solo operator and so there's these different levels of IIA that go from sort of the basic sort of tactical okay how do I get around a corner or how do I navigate to somewhere to like what am I doing today or what am I doing this week or what am I doing this year they're the guys that have really written the bulk

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    of the system that we're actually using it's just really being up to us to uh to run with designs ideas internally and work with the um kythera guys to uh to actually get the end product into the game Star Citizen uh really has a unique set of challenges and I think a lot of people might have dreamt of one or two of them but putting them all together is pretty bold um and I think it's really only because of the the backers funding that uh that that's possible I think uh with a publisher model um it would be very hard to achieve um but I think with uh the support of the backers we can really get there for us that's a fantastic opportunity because there are

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    so many different features that we might Implement for different games different genres um and they've really all come together in this one project so it's very exciting all right I hope everyone enjoyed the uh look inside what we're doing on the AI in Star Citizen so we'll catch you next time on inside Cloud Imperium games well everybody look Jason's here with me to talk about Ai and moon collider so how you doing good good so you've been working with moon collider for about a year now right yes now what um what's so special about what they're doing that's like different than any any other kind of AI um it's very Dynamic and that it will adjust to situations that change such as in the demo videos how you saw where the crates fell and the characters uh moving actually changed where they were moving

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    and changed where they walked to use different things for cover so it'll give itself a new hierarchy all the time based on to what's going on in the scene mhm that's pretty cool and that's also it's going on in space as well like I saw the bit where they'll avoid each other like there'll be a collision situation that they'll be able to avoid and yeah that's pretty amazing so how has it been working with those guys oh a lot of fun I mean they really know their stuff and they're experts and we get lots of cool AI features out of it so I think the fans are going to really like playing that now I believe dog fighting is going to have some of the AI stuff implemented is that correct yes um the current plan is it will have where you can fight AI but we won't have a mix of AI and multiple players together right because that's something still to be

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    done over the course of the years of development on this project I mean those guys are really really amazing though and so now have you been over there to visit them or I know they've come over here we've met with at GDC and office visit I haven't been there yet but I I really I'm looking forward to a trip to the UK sometime maybe in the summer when it's a little warmer that's a good idea but no so you uh you've been working with them a year now and and you've they they've come from cryc or they started their own company and they've got um their own technology called CA right CA yes CA and that's going that's developing that as a middleware product as well MH so we're getting some benefit here because we're helping them develop this and they're going to be able to use ca for other things yeah so it's like a a nice mutually beneficial Arrangement a symbiotic relationship but we get it first uhhuh and it's nobody else has had

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    it and so what other the types of AI do we have we have obviously the flying in the ships AI what other kind of AI can the people expect from from uh from our game now in the future they'll see the character-based AI with characters on planet side and such moving around but then they'll also get to see it in the firstperson shooter aspects like with boarding actions and such where you have like squad-based AI with uh uh uh mult characters uh in combat and reacting in a realistic manner during the Ship boarding will there be crowd AI or AI Planet Side and stuff they'll be handling that kind of stuff too yeah that's amazing you don't really realize that there's a lot of artificial intelligence in every game and the better that is the more we can make it less like computerized pattern oriented the more realistic or the more fun it is

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    I mean everybody's played the the original Nintendo the where you just got the pattern down you know right and we always figured out how to do that kind of stuff in these kind of situations this is an AI that is changing and it's going to adapt to how you're playing the game so it might not be so simple to get through all those puzzles or we even have it where as like the economy of a planet changes the characters who you might see on the planet and the different jobs they're doing will change based on the changes to that economy so then you'll see you might have a different AI or uh controlling that car uh because they're they have completely different profession or the economy of the planet is going up or down that's very cool now Rob I see you shaking your head over there you've been having a lot of thinking about that right oh very very very much so it's but that that kind of stuff is going to be really cool

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    right as the economy changes the I mean you that makes you want to go back as a player to planets later on or as things change in the verse right to find out what's going on it kind of keeps the game fresh because every time you land on a planet it might not be the same exact thing