Star Citizen: Quantum, Quasar, and Virtual AI

24 May 202100:40:021,390 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

00:00:00
[Music] hi i'm tony zurvik and i'm the director of persistent universe for star citizen today i'm going to give you an update on how some of the backend architecture and systemic functionality is coming along what sort of progress we've made over the past year what's on the horizon and how all of this is going to impact your gameplay experience in order to give you a more comprehensive understanding of the long-term direction and what all of this will ultimately mean i'm going to cover areas that are in various stages of development and will sometimes resort to illustrative examples so that the underlying concept can be made more clear first a quick review quantum is a simulation of the game universe and its purpose is to allow things the price of goods at a given shop the amount of piracy near a landing zone or what
00:00:48
missions are being offered to evolve and change over time in logical and realistic ways it does this by simulating hundreds of thousands of lightweight npcs called quanta whose ai logic is focused on just those aspects needed to produce the required information based upon a small list of attributes each quantum makes its own decisions using the same resources shops and jobs as players the simulation will need to calculate many millions of decisions per minute and thus the ai behavior of quant is focused on the most economically impactful details which lets quantum focus all of its processing power on just those things that truly matter every quanta possesses its own unique set of attributes that influence how well it performs and how it perceives opportunities the initial implementation of attributes will have two main categories proficiencies and traits
00:01:36
proficiencies act like a multiplier on how well quantum perform a given task different jobs will require different proficiencies and higher proficiencies will equate to superior execution traits describe what kind of jobs a quantum prefers to do by modifying their perceived value of the job each job will have a specific alignment and when a qantas traits match up with jobs alignment they will perceive the payout of that job to be higher to illustrate the concept let's take two jobs on either end of the aggression scale and suppose for now that they pay out the same now let's create a quanta with an average aggression rating this quanta is no closer to the aggression alignment of factory worker than they are to security so it's no surprise that for this quantum the payoff for both jobs looks the same however as we decrease the aggression rating of this quanta we can see that the perceived amount of money for both
00:02:23
jobs changes again the actual pay hasn't changed at all only the perceived value from that qantas point of view it's still possible for the quantity to choose security but in this case security would need to pay four times as much if we change this quantus aggression trait to be very high the opposite happens now the aggressive security job looks like it pays much more and the peaceful factory worker jobs appear to pay much less of course jobs have more than a single trade to distinguish themselves suppose we take another aggressive job pirate with just one dimension the pirate job would look just as lucrative to this quanta as a security job we can differentiate between these two jobs by adding the morality trait and putting both of these aggressive jobs on the proper place on that scale now that all jobs have a unique combination of trade alignments we can watch the perceived payout for all three
00:03:10
of these jobs change even though in this case all jobs actually pay the exact same amount we're currently experimenting with four different traits but expect to add at least a few more over time to help ensure that quanta do not congregate around the highest paying job at any given moment and instead just like a real population of individuals all perform their own unique mental calculus to determine what looks most appealing to them and in effect gives us the nice distribution of workers that we want the quantum simulation that we ran at the last citizencon was implemented in typescript a relatively slow language that limited us to less than 10 000 quanta all of that logic has since been rewritten in c-sharp and a lot of time and effort invested into optimizing the threading and resource locking which wound up increasing performance by more than two orders of magnitude stanton is one of the more complex solar systems and will require about fifty to
00:03:58
a hundred thousand quanta in order to achieve the required fidelity which means we've got a lot of extra headroom without any additional performance tuning to support upcoming solar systems like pyro much like a real economy quantum produces a tremendous amount of data and there are countless ways to adjust the simulation finding a combination that produces the desired results is difficult and in order to solve this problem we created odin a plug-in for the python-based jupyter lab environment odin is a powerful web-based tool that allows for real-time data interpretation of the game's dynamic and complex economy based on the actions of both players in the live game and quanta here i'm using odin to simultaneously show all of the graphs related to the economy of aluminum where it's mined refined manufactured and sold around the stanton system it's a bit overwhelming so i'm going to
00:04:46
refine the search by adding the word buying to the graph explorer before seeing the actual graphs we can preview which ones are searches identified which is very useful in more complicated search scenarios in this case though we've already whittled things down to a manageable size so i'm going to jump to the actual graphs everything looks pretty healthy you can see the cyclical nature of commodity prices a sign that we're on the right track and getting the economic modulation we want all of these graphs are updated from the simulation in real time and we can zoom in on particular time periods of interest which is invaluable when trying to figure out exactly why the availability of a critical resource dried up or the price of something went through the roof with such a complex system it's often difficult to predict what sort of information we might want to inspect and odin was therefore designed to be extremely flexible and adaptive one particularly powerful data analysis
00:05:34
tool that we developed allows us to view the flow of goods and services from a high-level perspective we call it the la zaygraph and it can dynamically target economic flows and animate transitions so that we can visually see how things change over time here i've selected a number of different product nodes and you can see all the economic relationships for those items laid out on the graph the graph allows us to switch between several key flows like the volume of goods the flow of uec and even the value density of specific routes in the universe the nodes are ordered by greatest to least economic activity and changes over time will reorder them we can thus detect important shifts in the economy simply by observing how the nodes adjust their position this tool can inspect both real-time and historical data so we can step back in time and see the progression of factors that caused a problem to develop
00:06:22
and what could be done to remedy it when inspecting a segment of time you can see elements of the economy phasing in and out depending upon whether or not they were relevant during that period often we'll want to dig into a particular material to investigate how that material flows throughout the with the laser graph we can choose a material like aluminum and then all of the items that metal is used to construct which immediately gives us an intuitive view of the relationships between manufacturing recipes and system-wide logistics from a bird's eye view here it looks like most of the raw aluminum in the economy is being funneled into items that are being sold in shops on crusader and art corp after a while though the shops at crusader run short of inventory and stop selling such goods and all the sales moved to hearst in an artboard as new materials recipes and items are added to an increasingly complex universe
00:07:09
and player behaviors shift we'll frequently run into such problems and analytical tools like the lasergraph will be invaluable in helping us to quickly identify such issues and determining what needs to be done to restore balance player actions are fed back into quantum so that it can factor that data into the simulation and odin can evaluate that information just as easily as it can that drive from quanta it's fully linked into the law system for example and can thus generate a heat map showing where players are committing specific crimes if there's too much pvp in an area that's supposed to be secure we might add more security place additional turrets or increase the penalties levied by the law system to be clear odin's analytical and statistical capabilities will be of extensive benefit to the quantum simulation too as they'll allow it to better understand how to adjust various dials and levers
00:07:56
to allow for a dynamic universe where things logically ebb and flow and everything functions as part of a larger more complex machine quanta focused on transporting goods for example will demand a price premium based upon how much risk they'll be exposed to on their route and odin can sort all of the possible paths they might take by risk fuel consumption or whatever other metric they wish to consider so that they can decide whether they're interested in the job and if so what sort of payment they would require here's a bar graph showing where all these felons are spending their time and another one showing how they're spending their money odin can identify the most popular mining sites as well as what materials are being extracted from those locations it knows what sort of ships players are flying how many players are on board and what sort of ships they're squaring off
00:08:43
against odin has complete knowledge of the mission system which allows it to map player positions against the missions they've accepted in one shot then we can get a sense of which missions players find most interesting so that we can focus on creating more of that type of content and where those missions are taking them so that we can understand sections of the solar system that are underutilized one of the most interesting graphs we've created is this one that measures mission design quality each circle represents a mission and larger circles indicate that more players have done that particular mission the x-axis details the percentage of players that successfully completed the mission out of all of the players who completed it and the y-axis denotes the percentage of players that finish the mission even if they failed it this exposes all sorts of interesting insights to us low positions on the graph for example indicate that most players are getting a
00:09:30
result other than success or failure they're either abandoning the mission or disconnecting neither of which is good positions on the far left mean that most of the players that undertook that mission failed it the lower left quadrant signifies missions that are abandoned frequently and fail when they aren't which likely points to a problem missions near the lower right have a high success rate but are frequently abandoned possibly indicating that they're too easy or boring the most interesting missions are in the upper middle they're frequently played through to the end but aren't always successful these are the missions that are both engaging and difficult we use information like this to tune the simulation but also to give us basic feedback on what sort of missions players find most appealing and where problems reside the refining gameplay that was released late last year made use of a couple of new back-end services
00:10:18
the job service is more general purpose and will also be a key component in the implementation of a number of other upcoming features including everything from cargo loading and unloading to repair refuel and restocking services the refining service provides game servers with the ability to retrieve a refiner's available processing capacity and a price quote for a given quantity of material with the specified speed and quality options these new services exemplify the way the development nowadays often proceeds which is to ensure that all of the linkage to and from the data source is properly abstracted from the start such that once quantum can provide the necessary data we can flip a switch to activate it previously when quanta traveled to a planet or a moon to minor resource they picked a random location on the surface this meant that quantum wasn't yet capable of generating the spatial fidelity we needed so that we could
00:11:05
properly determine exactly where npcs should and shouldn't be found the resource service that we completed last year however provides quantum with an api that not only gives it access to this information but also enables those amounts to be modified so that as players in quantum mining area it will gradually be depleted to demonstrate i've brought up a planet now i'm going to highlight the location of all the gold ore players in quanta of course would not have this information and to represent that fact i'm going to place a shadow over everything you can see a single quant exploration ship approaching the planet from the right as it travels across the surface it will unveil the quantity and location of that ore visually represented by removing the shadow and then broadcast that information to other quantum within its organization it has discovered a huge vein of
00:11:52
valuable ore and quantum minors have now started arriving in mass to extract it they're focusing predominantly on those areas where the concentration is known to be highest although they'll also consider things like the amount of risk in a given area perhaps caused by a player or mpc organization fighting to control that region i'm running this at an accelerated rate and you can see that the amount of ore at that first large site is declining rapidly the explorer has now discovered a second field of gold ore near the equator and because the original deposit has now been mined so extensively what remains is more time consuming and difficult to extract and is thus relatively less attractive the quantity figured this out and most of them have started to focus their attention on the newer site taken together these new features allow quantum to generate a lot more detailed information which will in turn result in a better and more realistic gameplay experience
00:12:39
quantum will know where exactly on the surface of a planet npcs might be found and what they should be doing you'll understand the value of knowledge and factor its acquisition sharing and sale into its calculations including what any information you eventually attempt to sell would be worth quantum has now been pretty thoroughly integrated into our back-end architecture and the service will be built and shipped with all future releases of the game which took a considerable amount of time and effort given how different some of its tools and technologies were versus what we had already set up and configured there is still a tremendous amount of work to do on the simulation side but we are getting close to the point at which portions of its simulated data will be an improvement over the algorithmic logic embedded into various services we're going to do a bit more testing before we enable it to start injecting that data into the live game though and even then we're going to start very small and limit the focus to a few
00:13:25
select areas so that we can work out any problems the first couple of commodities for which quantum will gain the ability to dictate the price will be fuel and repair materials we're also going to allow it to control the amount of piracy and possibly transport freighters and security in a few test locations but keep in mind that until more of the data behind the curtains is exposed the modulation may at times seem a bit arbitrary we're going to be more aggressive with service beacons and will soon move most of that responsibility the type of beacon being offered the location the reward and the difficulty to quantum our primary focus right now is less on getting a lot of data moving back and forth and more on getting all the technological plumbing working properly in order to properly calculate fuel prices for example quantum needs to have a concept of fuel what type of ships quanta are using and fuel efficiency none of which it previously had
00:14:13
in order to gauge the demand for repair services ships in the simulation need a concept of damage which didn't previously exist there's often a lot of service work involved in allowing new types of data to flow between quantum and the game with icash now largely complete we've been able to shift some resources around within the last month have now doubled the number of engineers working on the systemic functionality as a result we're now in the early stages of a number of critical new services including everything from the air traffic control service that's required for server meshing to the mpc scheduler that will enable dynamic populations to the virtual ai service that is necessary for the next major feature i'm going to discuss star citizen's ai architecture is broken up into three distinct levels the high fidelity characters that you see in the game execute subsumption
00:15:00
logic on a server and this is far and away the most computationally expensive of the three types of ai it's got a similar sense think act cycle as the other ai but because you can see the npcs as they execute their tasks there's often little to no potential for cheating or simplification something as simple as sitting in a chair requires a lot of item searching animation raycasting collision detection and more this is a problem because in star citizen we're trying to simulate entire solar systems and we can't afford to execute this kind of expensive logic for tens of thousands of characters that players can't even see so we do what many games do and temporarily suspend any ai that's not in proximity to a player this creates another roadblock though because you can't effectively simulate an economy when portions of it are constantly being shut down and restarted and it's the fundamental reason why quantum exists merging these two ai extremes
00:15:47
subsumption and quantum solves our basic problem npcs look and act exactly as you'd expect when you can see them and the universe's economic wheels always remain in motion there's one major flaw however with this solution the heavyweight subsumption npcs that you can see and interact with don't execute any ai logic when you're not around and thus they're severely limited in what they can do and when they can do it solving this issue is the responsibility of a middle tier systemic logic that i call virtual ai virtual ai allows virtual npcs vmpcs for short to seamlessly transition back and forth between the fully realized and physical world of subsumption and a far more efficient intangible backend ether where they retain the ability to interface with elements of the systemic architecture just like a player this technology is going to unleash a lot of new and exciting gameplay but it's going to take more than a few
00:16:34
sentences to properly explain what i'm talking about so let's walk through it all in more detail this is the stanton solar system you can see the four planets arcorp hurst and microtech and crusader i'm going to zoom into the crusader planetary area and you can see its three moons yella daymar and selin and the space station port olisar you can imagine looking at that station hundreds of npcs going about their lives this is how you think of the universe always in motion always changing always real regardless of whether you're actually looking at it or not as i mentioned though that's an illusion we can't afford it when you're not looking the server deactivates and unloads a lot of unnecessary baggage but a wide assortment of backend services retain knowledge of everything that really matters and provide an active interface to those systems npc's outside of landing zones are treated differently
00:17:23
quantum accumulates statistical information for where npcs should reside and what they should be doing from its which allows us to determine how often you should see a pirate or what a freighter you run into you should have in its cargo hold these areas are called probability volumes and the important thing to note is that the npcs they create are ephemeral they pop into existence for a brief moment so that the area you're viewing looks like what quantum says it should and once they're sufficiently far from any players are completely and forever destroyed i'm going to add a player here which you can see off the left as they pass by damar they're in range of a probability volume that eventually decides they should encounter a pirate so a pirate is created and engages the player and after a bit the player decides that they're outmatched and decides to run once they're sufficiently far from that npc it's destroyed it doesn't persist in any fashion and you'll never see them again
00:18:11
the player continues traveling to port olisar and the translucent green wireframe indicates that the area isn't loaded on the server and thus the subsumption ai isn't active i'm going to add a vmpc in a moment but first let's quickly recap what makes them so different vmpcs always execute some form of ai logic regardless of whether or not they are in proximity to a player virtual ai is extremely lightweight and computationally efficient stripping out all of the expense related to visuals and unnecessary details yet retains the full ability to interact with the game in the ways that truly matter virtual ai executes within a back-end service and can thus easily be scaled and doesn't put any load on the servers the mpcs can seamlessly transition back and forth from lightweight back-end driven ai entities to full-blown subsumption-driven npcs and are thus indistinguishable from an
00:18:58
npc that really did execute expensive subsumption logic all the time lastly bmpcs gradually build up their own unique histories as they live out their lives they evolve okay so back to the example once the player gets close enough to port olisar that area is streamed into existence loaded onto a server and the npc is initialized to resume whatever they should be doing at that time of day now i'm going to introduce a vmc pirate near the player and they're going to immediately attack after a few moments the vnpc comes out ahead in this battle and the player is killed because their crime was committed in range of an act of comrade it's recorded in their character history along with the time and location of the felony an upcoming tracking app will allow you to access information like this if you've registered with the local authorities so that the digital footprints players and vmpcs leave behind can be tracked
00:19:46
this vmpc's name is dragon and since they're now wanted in this jurisdiction the comrade has a fixed real-time marker to his position with the only player in this area dead the server now streams port olosar and the kamaray out but as i previously noted vmpcs aren't destroyed like a regular npc created from a probability volume and their logic isn't suspended like an npc at a landing zone instead vnpcs simply transition from their physicalized state where authority over their actions is controlled by substantial logic executing on a server to their native ethereal state where their virtual ai executes on the back end dragon now begins to exit the area and the kamaree continues to track his position until he passes out of range at which point the real-time information converts to a last known position report he's decided that he needs money and he's a bit risk-averse so he elects to head all the way out to yellow where
00:20:33
there are quite a few transport freighters carrying valuable ore and little in the way of security okay dragon has arrived at yellow's asteroid field and has now crossed back into range of another act of comrade so his real-time position is now once again being reported as indicated by both the character history and the tracking marker there aren't any players in this area unless none of this is streamed onto a server everything you're seeing is a result of a variety of different services communicating with one another vmpcs trigger probability volumes just like players and yellows shows that there's quite a bit of freighter traffic in this area so dragon won't have to wait very long before he generates an encounter there's one dragon just caused the creation of a freighter which itself becomes a vmpc so that it can react to what's happening via its own virtual ai dragon now engages the freighter he starts firing on it
00:21:20
he's still within range of an active comrade and thus this latest crime is added to his character history he's now wanted for both murder and piracy and the bounty on him just jumped from six to ten thousand uec increasing the size of their rap sheet and the price in their head is one of the simplest forms of vmpc evolution and over time we'll look to add additional ways for bmpcs to grow and increase their influence from recruiting followers in an attempt to become a shipping magnet or a crime boss to offering their own missions the captain of that freighter isn't going to surrender so easily he's broadcast a combat assist service beacon that players can choose to accept and he's offered a 3000 uec reward for his protection unfortunately for him he's pretty heavily outmatched and he's quickly destroyed causing the service beacon to expire before anyone can come to his aid bits of information like this are fed back to quantum and insufficient quantity will cause
00:22:07
all sorts of things to change how much security patrol missions that area pay what transports that have to travel through that area will demand as a risk premium and how much a ship in distress will offer for someone to come to their aid the freighter's destruction has left some debris and possibly a few items of value so if a player had already been in route they might arrive to find the aftermath another murder has now been attributed to dragon and the bounty on him just once again jumped this time from 10 to 14 000 uec he took a bit of damage from that encounter and is eventually going to need some repairs a harder working pirate might look to plunder a few more freighters before heading back but dragon's personality attributes indicate that once he's got enough cash to cover the basics he's more interested in drinking and gambling than piracy so he leaves the area and once again the real-time location tracking ceases once he's out of range the comrade
00:22:54
he's heading back to port olisar which is the closest location that has everything he wants a fence to sell his stolen goods shops to repair and restock his ship and a bar where he can spend the remainder of his cash the comrade near port olisar has been disabled which means that dragon's position isn't updated upon approach the area remains devoid of any players and thus it's still not streamed into memory dragon can therefore remain in his ethereal state and avoid a lot of computational expense related to maneuvering his ship but he still needs to interface with the air traffic control service to request a landing pad and transition from his ship to the station services like this are always fully operational and accessible to vmpcs that landing request is logged to his history though so while the disabled kamaray would make it a bit harder for a bounty hunter to track him there are lots of other ways by which locational information on a character can be
00:23:42
obtained dragon needed to refuel and repair his ship and you can see those actions reflected in his history as he interfaces with the shop service that controls those operations when a vmpc transitions to a landing zone that's streamed in the virtual ai service that drives their logic temporarily seeds control of the character to the npc scheduler that specifies who resides at what location this is the same foundation upon which the dynamic populations feature will be built except that it will be quantum instead of the virtual ai service dictating the changes in the population the end result is that if a vmpc is assigned to a landing zone and you're at that location you can run into them like any other npc dragon is now hanging out in local bar which was added to port olisar for the purposes of this demo if you were to walk into the bar at this moment he'd be physicalized with the rest of the environment and you'd
00:24:29
actually see him there dragon eventually gets his fill of entertainment or maybe just runs out of money either way it's back to work and he'll be jetting back to yellow to try and prey on more unprotected cargo ships so he contacts air traffic patrol to get clearance to leave the area and departs the same player that dragon first encountered and killed is looking to exact some revenge though and claim the big bounty on dragon's head they've surmised that there might be a pattern to dragon's movement and think that he might head back out to yella so they position themselves between port aldazar where they know that dragon just left and yela and activate a quantum interdiction field dragon still in his lightweight ethereal form initiates a quantum jump from portal certain yellow and just like a player routes that movement through the probability volume service that is responsible for interdictions once he gets within range the player's
00:25:16
interdiction bubble his jump is interrupted and he transitions from executing virtual ai on the back end to a full-blown subsumption driven ai executing logic on a server so that the two of them can battle it out if the player once again gets the worst of it they might decide to change up their tactics a bit and wait to see if dragon soon returns to port olisar where they could try to sneak up on him on foot the ultimate objective for star citizen has always been a dynamic and evolving historically however our mission content has always been static we've had no ability to modify it after we pushed a version out the door missions have also been confined to a single server each of which was thus its own little island cut off and oblivious to whatever was happening elsewhere environmental data that applies to all of the servers what items the shop offers for sale how many freighters or
00:26:04
pirates are in a given region of space or what missions are available to landing zone couldn't be altered by the instance mission logic that executes on individual servers since we didn't yet have a means of coordinating those efforts the end result has been a universe that often feels static and fails to offer sufficient variety dynamic events are a special type of mission intended to help remedy this they are modular chunks of configurable content that might involve anything from throwing a simple wrench into the wheels of the systemic economy to a prison break that stresses the law system to a full-blown invasion of a solar system dynamic events are global in nature they affect the entire array of servers they do this via extensions to the mission language that allow them to declare what logic runs in parallel on every server and what executes on the back end while at the same time gaining the ability to query and modify
00:26:52
a lot of global data this allows us to keep the critical elements of these scenarios synchronized across all the servers while retaining the flexibility for every server to have its own unique state conceptually the servers control the battle and the back end manages the war the xeno threat mission that we released in the first quarter was a dynamic event it was triggered manually although quantum will eventually gain the ability to automatically activate these scenarios when conditions weren't if for example the amount of piracy in an area gets out of control quantum might search through the mission library to find a dynamic event compatible with an elevated amount of piracy and then customize and instantiate that scenario so that a lot of handcrafted content unique character dialogue challenges rewards can be blended into the universe we're aiming for the best of both worlds in a systemic universe that provides a
00:27:41
logically consistent background environment with the ability to overlay content and storylines that writers designers and many others have spent a lot of time creating this is quasar a new tool that lets us manage dynamic events in the live game it's linked to the same star map as quantum and has access to much of the same information i'm looking through the library of available events and as i select each one you can see the input parameters that can be used to customize that particular scenario we've got quite a few of these at different stages of development with fleet week nine tails and infiltrator being the next few in the pipeline i'm going to walk you through a simple dynamic event called quasar demo that will show off a few of the systemic hooks we've linked into the mission system but first i need to specify the inputs the first thing that it requires is the location and i'm going to select port
00:28:28
olisar by simply clicking on the star map the next couple of variables require a ship type i'm going to specify interest for the defender input and call us black for attackers if quantum were to programmatically trigger an event like this and fill in variables like these with something that made contextual sense so for example we'd be looking at what sort of ships were in the area where the event would be activated to determine what it could consider the next variable relates to difficulty which in this particular case has simply been configured to dictate the speed at which enemies will appear the last input enemies remaining indicates how many enemies must be destroyed in aggregate across all of the servers in order for the war phase to be completed and the victory phase to be activated i'm going to set this to 10. with everything configured i can now activate the event quasar communicates this request to the
00:29:16
dynamic mission service which then initializes the back-end logic allocates the global variables sets up the phase conditionals informs all of the servers to start any instance logic the event might contain and quite a bit more i'm now going to flip over to quasar's active tab so that we can check the event's real-time data you can see that there's currently just a single event active but we could just as easily activate multiple and give each of them a different set of inputs dynamic events organize changes to back in data in coordinated chunks of logic called phases and the phases that have been created for this event can be seen at the top right they're all inactive now hence the red color and will turn green if their conditional evaluates to true at which point their embedded logic would execute the events global variables are shown below that and it's in this area that you can see the enemy's remaining variable for which we previously
00:30:03
specified an input value of 10. lower still are the functions for this event that have been marked external and which allow us to manually or programmatically call functions to customize aspects of the event after it's already been launched the list of items that a shop offers to buy or sell has always been static phases though can include shop modifiers which open the door to dynamically changing all sorts of shop related information to test this i'm going to bring up a client window so that we can see what portal sr's admin office is currently buying i've minimized the inventory for this test so i'm only expecting to see a couple of items that's the full list right there just hydrogen and processed food the modify shop phase has been set up to activate when the back-end variable called current phase has a value of one so i'm going to set it to that the phase just turned green meaning that
00:30:52
it's enabled and any changes to the backend data have now been applied it applied a shop modifier to crank up the demand for food at port olisar so let's see what's happening to the price it was stable for a long time with just some minor fluctuations now though it's gone through the roof the direct result of all that increased demand so players and quanta would be incentivized by higher prices to help correct this imbalance in the economy this phase also had a shop modifier add a new item for purchase and you can see that quantum already knows about it i'm going to flip back to the client though so that we can verify that this really did affect the inventory within the game sure enough the shop is now looking to purchase a new item medical supplies manual control over the economy like this is not intended to be a substitute for quantum systemically derived adjustments
00:31:39
but simply gives us the ability to occasionally nudge the system in a particular direction to add some interest or layer a compatible story onto the background environment or an existing trend quantum will then take these influences factor them into the simulation and output how everything changes in response so that all of the rough edges are smoothed while we're looking at prices i want to show off another new feature that will go at the door within the next few months as designers gain the ability to write mission logic that can properly affect systemic change temporary price imbalances will become more common and we wanted to have a way for the system to actively reach out and inform you rather than relying upon you constantly having to check in on an area to discover that there's an opportunity if we wait just a bit longer the admin office is going to reach a point where it's so desperate for food that it's going to start reaching out looking for ways to obtain more supply
00:32:28
it will do this by sending a message that will be recorded in a special area of your journal reserve for price alerts which is basically a precursor to being able to create and post missions you can see the message there indicating that the port officer admin office needs food and what they're willing to pay for it this feature gives designers the ability to dictate at a systemic level how shops will respond to inventory gluts and shortages and this functionality will soon be extended to things other than commodities an area suffering from too much piracy for example might offer to pay mercenaries to come to their aid this is fundamentally different than the brute force tactics we currently rely upon to create missions and dictate when they're available and is far more flexible and powerful what you're really seeing here are the first signs of the dynamic mission system starting to flicker to life and once it hits false stride it's going to transform the
00:33:15
gameplay experience next let's take a look at how dynamic events allow encounter probabilities and interdiction frequencies to be adjusted this is the probability volume around port olisar you can see the piracy the red curve and security the blue are inversely related all things being equal if you increase the amount of security you'll get less piracy and vice versa security tends to congregate closer to landing facilities and dissipate as you get farther out and thus piracy tends to gradually increase with distance the likelihood of an encounter is represented by the height of the curve at that distance notice that the chances of running into a freighter the green curve is pretty much constant because once the ship has decided to make the journey to or from port olisar it's committed they've already decided whether or not the risk is worth the reward of
00:34:01
traveling the full route i'm now going to activate the lockdown phase of this event which is going to crank up the amount of piracy in the selected area and overwhelm security the red curve piracy now has a much larger average height according to an increased encounter probability and because pirates now greatly outnumber security the curve pushes in closer to the landing zone the criminals are emboldened because there's no longer sufficient security to deter them the blue curve security looks identical although quantum will over time start adjusting the economic levers to gradually increase the amount of security to combat the threat by offering greater rewards increased piracy has had an immediate impact though on freighter traffic which has dropped precipitously this means that the local economy will start to seize up they won't be able to import food medicine fuel or whatever else they need and they
00:34:49
won't be able to export whatever goods and services they produce all of these knock-on effects are only possible because designers will now be able to nudge the economic gears in proper systemic fashion let's test one of these knock-on effects now that we've adjusted the encounter probabilities let's see what that does to quantum travel in the area i'm going to once again bring up a game client this time so that we can watch an avenger titan jumping to portolasar this is a short jump and the chances of interdiction would typically be very slim now that we've injected a much larger pirate presence around that location however that's no longer the case we got ejected from our jump as soon as we got within range of those elevated pirate probabilities which means that getting to port olisar just got a lot more difficult and time consuming and will remain that way until the threat is addressed we're now to the point where we can
00:35:36
allow programmatic modification of these data structures and quantum will soon start adjusting these automatically so that all sorts of things within the universe start to ebb and flow what all of this really means is that even when you know that you can buy medical supplies dirt cheap at one location and sell them for a hefty profit at another we can finally start to adjust some of the systemic elements to justify the disparity in short if you wanted to take advantage of portal source elevated prices right now you'd have to fly the last mile at conventional speeds and we'll probably see quite a bit of combat that's going to drive up how long it takes you to make the run you're probably going to burn quite a bit more ammo and require more repairs than it would otherwise be the case and you might want to think about recruiting some armed escorts to help you through the dangerous areas once the risk abates once players in quanta have dispatched enough of the pirates so that travel within this area
00:36:23
returns to normal you'll be able to much more easily deliver medical supplies to portals are but of course that increase in supply will quickly shrink the price differential now let's take a look at how each server can host part of a larger event while the things that really matter can remain synchronized i'm going to enable the war phase by calling the start war function that's going to create some staged battles involving the ship types we selected earlier around port alzar the area that we previously selected i brought up a couple of different client windows each of which represents a different server as each cutlass is destroyed on either server the shared variable called enemies remaining is decremented once that variable reaches zero the war phase will automatically terminate and the victory phase will be activated that's it the counter just hit zero and
00:37:20
you can see the change in active phases over in quasar that last phase victory kicked off some fireworks around port olisar and just like any other phase change that will automatically be synchronized across all of the servers just to make sure that things are back to normal i'm going to check port olisar's admin office and see what's happening with the inventory in prices they're no longer looking to purchase medical supplies and with the pirate threat eliminated players in quantic can once again quickly and safely reach portolasar as a result the cost of food has started to fall off a cliff and will soon return to something close to its pre-crisis levels i've covered a lot of ground today quantum has matured considerably since you last saw it the performance issues have been resolved it's been made compatible with our backend infrastructure and it's now
00:38:07
communicating with numerous gameplay lots of new analytical tools and functionality have been added and increased fidelity in areas like quanta attributes and the spatial positioning of resources have allowed us to improve the accuracy of its output we're now in early stage testing to allow quantum to start pushing the first few bits of simulated data out the door and start impacting the game and we expect to go live with these efforts later this year the first stones in the virtual ai foundation were laid long ago but it's only been within the past couple of as engineering resources rolled off of some other major initiatives that the implementation efforts really started to take off this technology will allow vmpcs the freedom to operate and evolve independently of player actions and open up all sorts of new gameplay possibilities bounty hunter v2 will be the first feature to exploit virtual ai but it's really just the tip of the iceberg
00:38:53
insofar as what we eventually plan to do with it some of the virtual ai tech foundation will beget other important features like the ability to dynamically adjust the size and composition of the populations at landing zones dynamic events are the culmination of several major technological components coming together from the dynamic mission service to quasar and are already a reality we ship the first one xenothread in the first quarter and have a number of others at various stages of development for release later this year and next many of these initial releases will serve as testing boards for new features from shop and probability volume modifiers to spawn closets and the dynamic generation of that meshes dynamic events give us the ability to modify the universe in dramatic or subtle fashion whenever we want and to seamlessly blend those changes into the quantum simulation so that everything looks and feels natural
00:39:41
all of this will ultimately mean a more interesting realistic and exciting universe for you to explore and i hope that this presentation has given you a good sense of what we've been doing over the past year and what those efforts will mean for the game in the coming one until next time

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.