Star Citizen Live: Dynamic Events

29 January 202101:01:061,843 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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Hi everybody. Welcome to Star Citizen Live Dynamic Events with Tony Zurobec. I'm your host Jared Huckaby and if you've never seen Star Citizen Live before it's where we take about an hour out of the end of our week and check in with developers, see what they're doing, talk about the things that they're working on. Sometimes we watch them make something live. Today we have a gentleman who's probably no stranger to most Star Citizens but we're going to take the time to introduce him anyway. Meet Tony Zurobec. Tony, how you doing man? Hi, how's it going? Tony Zurobec director of Persistent Universe. All right, so the director of Persistent Universe. We're going to just going to jump right into this. The last time we saw you was CitizenCon 2949 years right? I checked in with our data solutions teams we've gained over 500,000 citizens
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since then so somebody watching right now has no idea who you are. So take a few moments before we jump into this tell them who you are, what the director of persistent or what what your position does, some of the things you work on. I'm going to get out of your way. I have a I put I I have a lot of focus on what I'd say is like the you know the the the simulation of the world getting all the systemic elements operational AI and mission architecture back-end services that provide a lot of information to the game servers also you know a lot of a lot of you know you know some some of the occupational stuff we're working on you know some advanced bounty hunting you know functionality a lot of the the interfaces you know for everything from you know from shops to insurance to you
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know to cargo loading just it's it's really a wide variety of things all over the map. Those the systemic services that like the day-to-day operation of the persistent life in the persistent universe kind of thing. Yeah I mean there there's you know there's multiple aspects of that. Historically, it's been you know all you know a lot of you know focus on the persistent stuff. That's now starting to shift over you know to to a new group that's basically going to take it and run with that. And we're going to basically affect a you know a handover or a transition and we're basically taking some of those you know some of those existing resources and we're going to re-task them with helping to add some additional bandwidth into some of these we've been wanting to flush out for an extended period of time, but there were always you know so
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many other higher priorities. And we think just you know as of pretty recently like within the you know the last you know literally you know month or so we've finally eliminated enough of the bottlenecks on the back end side to where we can you know you know pretty confidently support you know you know you know at at least 20,000 players you know concurrently. Might be higher. It's difficult to say until you actually get you know until you actually you know stress test some of these things, but we we ran into some problems at the Fleet Week the 2020 Fleet Week and we took you know we took the lessons we learned there. It was it was kind of unfortunate timing in that particular case because we knew that we weren't going to be able to support you know more of
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you know dramatically more players than we had in the near-term past when we launched that event. And we didn't you know really think that was you know going to be a problem because we had you know for the you know for the previous you know year we had it in our development schedule to deliver you know the final bits of I cache and to basically scale a number you know the loadout service the variable service you know all you know to to cache all the login credentials all this type of stuff that were supposed to you know to alleviate to mitigate a lot of these bottlenecks. And unfortunately, that that last Fleet Week event proved to be so popular that, you know, we wound up, you know, during probably about twice the number of concurrent users that we actually expected. And so, what that did is it it caused us to it caused us to re-prioritize some
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things so that we could get select pieces of that, you know, of that functionality out sooner. And many of those things are now operational. And so, while there's still definitely plenty more to do, we we think that we've got a decent amount of head room given where we you know, given what given where we think the the the the community involvement is going to be for the next few quarters. You know, and then longer term we've obviously got you know, some some some major you know, some major initiatives you know, still on the horizon. You know, like server meshing, which is where we're actually looking to you know, distribute the workload across as many servers as is necessary so that we can start to scale up the actual number of players within a given you know, you know, instance or shard of the game. Yeah.
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All right. So, you you you just mentioned you know, knowing where players are going to be for the next couple a couple quarters. That brings us to the topic of this particular show, which is dynamic events. Now, dynamic events is a phrase that our community has heard several times whispers here and there over the last year almost 2 years ago back to back when we were we were doing it as timed events in some of the monthly reports stuff. Let's just start things off with a primer here. What is a dynamic event? So, you have to give a a little bit of explanation first like the long-term objective for Star Citizen has always been a dynamic evolving universe. Most of our existing content to date though has been
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inherently static. So, missions are offered at a given price at a particular location because a designer dictated it not because something within the economic pipeline actually required that work be done. if you're you know, refueling, reloading, or repairing a ship, that doesn't actually increase the demand and thus the price for the associated commodities and components at refineries or shops. Similarly, the the likelihood of running into a pirate on a given route doesn't waver regardless of whether a lot of unarmed cargo transports carrying valuable materials start traveling that path. So, Quantum, which is the simulation that I showed off at the last CitizenCon, that's the primary method by which we're going to address this and it simulates the effect of a vast amount of AI and it then feeds
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those results, you know, to the game and then factors player actions back into the simulation. So, you wind up with this very logical ebb and flow that you'd expect and that creates a lot of temporary opportunities for people to exploit and in general it just makes the game feel far more interesting to play. So, dynamic events are different. You can think of them uh You can you can think of them a a bit as designer-driven short stories that can be layered on top of Quantum's systemic background and they can be triggered manually or automatically when certain conditions are met. So, if the system decides that war has broken out in an area or we or we just decide that uh we want to liven things up a little, then designers and writers can inject a lot of
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precisely curated content into the game and the impact of those modifications will then be blended into the simulation. That's really the you you said there's there's two ways to trigger them. Either we we can set up we can set up situations, criterias in which the the players meet them and the system automatically goes, "Oh, yeah, trigger this particular event that's been designed." Or we can trigger them manually. Uh it Just describe to me the difference there. What what why would we use one over the other for a particular situation? Well, it it it's actually similar to a a a lot of what we've done with the normal development cycle, which is on the one hand, we're putting out a live product. And so, we have to build, you know, we have to have something that the community can play right now. But at the same time, we're planning for the
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future. And so, if if you think about shops as an example. If all that a shop was going to do was basically offer a certain number of items for sale at a particular price, then the effort that we've expended to get us to here, you know, was you know, was was dramatically over-engineered. And it's been the you know, it's been that you know, it's been that way for you know, for the last 2 and 1/2 years. And it's only now that you're starting to bring in Quantum and have Quantum start to dictate some of this information, these services within cache this information. They're also responsible for basically receiving callbacks from the individual shops and then feeding, you know, you know, on occasion um some of those transactional events back to the mission instances that are running on some of these servers that you start to see why we made some of the
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choices we did back then. In In other words, it's kind of like before you can get around to building the skyscraper, you have to lay the foundation. And so, we've said this so many times in the past. Um and we're starting to get to the point now to where we're starting to exploit you know, some of these underlying pieces. I mean, Quantum's another perfect example in that regard in that we have these so-called probability volumes that dictate what sort of stuff you can encounter in a given, you know, area of space. And then we have shops and we have, you know, service beacons. And we have all these, you know, you know, different systems. But right now, designers go in and you know, even even missions, you know, what missions are available where and for what amount of money and you know, what level of risk you know, you're going to incur
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when you actually accept them. That's all fixed right now. The designers are able to set up these data structures, but what we haven't previously been able to do is provide the real-time dynamic inputs that would allow us to make these things you know, ebb and flow. In other words, if there's currently a lot of pirates in an area, then having something delivered to that area should logically cost more. There's you know, there's a greater risk you know, to you and your ship and you know, and all that type of stuff. But, designers haven't had the tools to be able to automatically feed that type of real-time information into these mission archetypes that they're setting up. And we're just now getting across a wide range of areas into doing some of that and you know, there is an update that I'll be giving within you
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know, roughly the next few months, um, that will basically, uh, explain what we've been working on in so far as not just quantum, but also some, uh, related, you know, back-end technologies to help, uh, to help generate this, you know, this algorithmic, uh, this systemically derived, you know, information and then feed it into the game. And in a few cases, we've actually, you know, we'll actually be able to demonstrate, you know, real actual working examples as opposed to, you know, just being theory. I I always hate to do too many, you know, uh, you know, repeated theory talks. And so, one of the things we we debated doing this presentation a little bit earlier, but it still would have been in the vein of, you know, it's coming, it's coming. And so, I intentionally wanted to hold it back a few extra months so
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that we could demonstrate some of this stuff live and actually show some of these pieces of tech and functionality coming to, you know, coming to fruition. I do want to add uh on top of that just for the community. Uh this this uh update that Tony's talking about that will come We're not going to say when. We Let's be real. We don't have a great history of saying, "Hey, we're going to have this video out then." Uh but we're we're working on it and we're and and and from what I've already seen, it's pretty awesome. Tyler's in my chat right now like, "Tell people it's awesome." It is awesome. Uh Yeah, well there's there's there It's kind of like a It's kind of like a release to where there are certain things you want to demonstrate and, you know, there's always a little bit of uncertainty, you know, with respect to, you know, development schedules. Um and and so and so it's it's difficult to say
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precisely, um but we are already deep into testing multiple facets of what we're aiming to deliver, so it it's coming. Just in our long history of saying, "Hey, we're going to have a special video out at this point talking about this thing." We our track record's not so good here. So, uh just hang tight. All right. So, right now on the PTU, there's uh there there there's a there's a dynamic event, our first dynamic event, called Xenothreat, that's currently being tested now. Um without spoiling the event, we obviously don't want to break it down and be like, "Hey, phase one is this." You know, we don't want to go into that much detail on it. But tell us what Xenothreat is. Uh what are and what are what we're hoping to accomplish? There There were two primary things on our mind when thinking about this event
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and, you know, we started, you know, discussing this internally probably almost a year ago, you know, back in you know, first quarter 2020, uh what we wanted to achieve. Um and the other thing that we wanted, besides, you know, it being fun, uh was that it wouldn't cause us to deviate too much from the natural trajectory of the development effort. In other words, it couldn't be too disruptive. We wanted to take the things that, you know, logically followed in terms of the effort, and look for ways that we could, you know, exploit and, you know, reveal, you know, these to players and basically improve, you know, the overall gameplay experience. And in certain cases, of course, a little bit more effort here, uh, you know, pushing something else back to free up some bandwidth so that we could, you know, polish something, you know, a little sooner than it would otherwise be the case. You know, that that that always happens. And so,
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one of the primary things that we wanted to do was get all of the the mission and back-end infrastructure operational. And this is, uh, it's, you know, for example, there's back-end tools now, and I'll cover this, you know, in the upcoming, you know, presentation, to activate and monitor and deactivate missions. And that's, again, if if you look at XenoThreat, the the the the amount of work that's gone into allowing this, you know, event to basically be, uh, you know, to be activated is far larger than what you're able to see right now. What I mean by that is it it exposes an entirely different way for designers to start to set these things up. Um, they're able to, for example, within the, you know, uh, when when they're crafting the
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mission archetype logic, they can now declare these, you know, these these static instance variables that are managed by the back-end. And they also have the concept of phases, which are conditionals that can be associated with these variables that are managed by the back-end. And the significance of this is that we can is that we can coordinate, uh, mission logic across all the different servers. And that's how XenoThreat fundamentally works, which is we have four phases in this mission. There's the initial, the introductory phase, where we're kind of like, you know, giving, you know, the we're we're hinting that, you know, something's to come, we're doing some foreshadowing. There's the actual, you know, Javelin restocking, you phase, then there is, you know, the climactic battle scene, and then there's
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the conclusion. And all of these, you know, are really the representative and what what this event allowed us to do, you know, most most most importantly, was to test and refine and get all this, you know, stuff out and working in the real world. Like, you know, so now you've actually got a dynamic mission service, and you actually have the concept of, you know, the these, you know, the these global variables in the mission and the designers are able to communicate with them through, you know, through subsumption task archetypes, and we're able to do these conditional evalu- you know, evaluations. We're able to basically have the back end synchronize however many servers we have, keep them all in lockstep. Um and then there there's all sorts of, you know, fine-tuning that goes on to where, well, if you've got a particular server and it's in, say, phase two and they're restocking, they've got the Javelin in port, and then oh, and the designers can actually
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set it up to do things, and they are, things like the number of Javelins that are successfully restocked in phase two can then serve as an input to phase three such that the frequency of support you get from the UEA from the UEE Navy depends upon how successful you were in defending those ships in that earlier phase. And again, it's it's it's what what what matters less is the specifics of what we're doing, you know, right this moment with that, and more what we're allowing the designers to do in the future, how we're basically unblocking them to, you know, to do lots more uh cool stuff. Um another big big focus for this particular event, a a major one, was from the beginning we knew that we wanted to put a lot of emphasis, you know, for the first time, on the capital
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ship battles. So, there were a litany of changes that we needed to make in order to enable this, and at the at the very top of the list was how the AI responded to the threat of torpedoes. So, originally and, you know, I say uh this was still true as of about 4 months ago when we we we when we finally got to the major, you know, the major push in that regard. Originally, neither turrets nor ships tasked with defending a capital ship paid them any heed. And that meant that it was way too easy to take these capital ships out in the early days. It was literally trivial. It was no fun at all. And so, we spent, you know, over a month fine-tuning various systems so that countermeasures would be launched and worked as expected. Turrets would prioritize major incoming threats like a torpedo over most other things. Players would be rewarded for, you know,
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coordinating their attacks with one another. Like, you're much, you know, you tend to be much more successful if three players launch torpedoes at the same time. And then, you know, and and and and we built in uh into the logic this the, you know, this sense to where it's it's not like, you know, it's Target's proper target selection. Well, it it What we didn't want to do is make it is make it too robotic, too precise, uh not because you might not have that a thousand years in future, but simply because it's not fun. And so, what we wanted to do, you know, if if if targets perfectly and if it's able to, you know, perfectly shift its its attention, it, you know, uh you know, it it's it's simply didn't deliver the, you know, the the the the gameplay feeling that we wanted. And so, again, we've spent, you know, weeks and weeks tweaking, fine-tuning this
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until we were internally pretty happy with the results. Uh another good example was the the Idris. The Idris was originally pretty suicidal in that it would happily engage the Javelin and get destroyed as long as it managed to get off its railgun. And so, its logic wound up evolving to the point where it's now much more opportunistic. It wants to use its railgun, but only when that doesn't put it in too much danger. And then, one other thing that we noticed was that uh the turret the turret targeting couldn't be so Boolean. Uh it couldn't focus 100% of its attention on on that was only slightly more attractive than another player because again, it it looked artificial and most importantly, it just wasn't very fun for the other players. We know we were getting internal reports of, you know, you you have, you know, eight turrets,
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you know, you know, active on a ship and you got, you know, and you've got 16 players and that, you know, when it was so bullying meant that at least half the players were not having, you know, we're not having any of that, you know, you know, firepower focused on them even for an instant and so they you know, they they felt, you know, you know, they felt relatively bored in terms of the danger presented to them. to be shot at. If you're if you're attacking and if you're jumping in the battle with an Idris and a Javelin, you want to be shot at. You want to feel like I'm a threat. Shoot at me. Yeah, and so there's a there's a lot more fuzziness and grain and it took time to basically work through all these details. I mean, we we sat through every, you know, every single week reviewing what, you know, how how it looked when you basically fired individual torpedoes at a ship. You know, how it looked when you fired multiple torpedoes, how it looked if you fired multiple torpedoes with a very small, you know, differential in time
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versus a large differential in time. Um, you know, how how the ship responded when it still had countermeasures available. Uh, and then another aspect of this was the support ships that basically defend these capital ships. It's the same thing to where even if you're firing upon them, if a torpedo is launched at the capital ship, they'll see that as a greater threat, break off potentially at risk to themselves and prioritize dealing with that torpedo. Um, and so there's there's multitude of these things that had to be worked through and there's of course, you know, there's there's more we could do, there's more we will do. It's by no means, you know, perfect, but, you know, it's it's it's light years, I mean, it's I hesitate to say it's light years beyond where we were, you know, when this started because some of this stuff hadn't even realistically gotten off the ground and now it's actually in you
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know, in in some of these select areas, it's actually quite mature. You mentioned a couple things I want to follow up on. Uh first off, the the the process of bringing capital ship battles to life and all the balance uh decisions and all the new technologies that were required to bring up. That's actually the topic of next week's ISC. So, you know, we we we we got a lot of that. Yeah, some of it you just heard from Tony, but you will dive into more detail in next week's ISC. I wanted to talk to you about other things you touched on. You mentioned some shared information between servers. Yeah, and and that's something relatively new. Uh that that that's a that's a new aspect of the game. This is literally the first demonstration of the you know, of this tech. There's more to come. Like another thing that we're working on working on the back of inside is like right now we have the ability to
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when when the designers, you know, craft this mission logic, all of that logic previously, all the logic, all the data was basically stored on the server. So, if you have 200 servers, you had 200 different instances. And so, what you're now seeing is like the you know, the first example of us allowing the designers to split it into It's kind of like a a client-server architecture, but for you know, but for mission logic, to where they can dictate this logic runs on the individual server instance and it's got its own local variables, and it can interface with variables and it can interface with functions that are also executed on the back end. And so, what this allows us to do is you know, like I was saying earlier, is like you can have an individual mission instance of this XenoThreat on a given server, and you can register that you did or did not successfully defend this Javelin. You know, do you Did you
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sufficiently restock it and it left and you were victorious? Or did it suffer so much damage that it had to run away? And so, we actually tally the number of you know, uh successful restockings, and then like I said earlier, that directly impacts um how how quickly that Javelin is going to come support you, assuming you need it in those later stages. And again, the important point there is it's it's just it's representative. You know, what we've done now is work out, you know, the you know, the the details of the tech, put it into wide operations. You can kind of think of Xenothreat as the first use case, and it focused our efforts to get all of, you know, to get all this stuff working. And there is a lot more that you'll be seeing, you know, in the you know, in in both the near and farther term.
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Um dynamic events um dynamic events are something that there's going to be continual focus on uh for the foreseeable future. Um for example, you know, the the next fleet week is actually going to be running off of, you know, you know, off of these, you know, the these these same fundamental principles. Um we've got another dynamic event which we're referring to as Nine Tails Lockdown, and it introduces you it it's not live yet, but we're already, you know, well into testing uh you know, the so-called shop modifiers. We can now have mission logic affected at a global scale, um and and we've resolved all of the coordination between the different servers and issues like that. So, you can now apply shop modifiers. You can apply probability volume you know,
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volume modifiers. You can uh you can basically lock down areas of space, you know, inhibit quantum travel within them. Um what will be coming in the not too distant future will be things like, you know, population control, uh you know, control of the actual spawn managers, things of that sort. Uh access to areas. And you you you think about this like, what is fleet week other than at a certain time we're going to go ahead and open the doors to certain area and allow you entrance. And in the case of some of the, you know, some of these upcoming events, when those events are active, we want to create we want to basically, you know, we've decided as designers that it would be fun if we're doing a fleet week event, then we want to increase the, you you the demand for party favors and alcohol and fireworks or you know, what whatever other types
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of commodities temporarily at this location. And so for the duration of this event, we crank up the demand, the price goes higher, we broadcast that information to players, let them know, "Hey, by the way, you know, the you know, the the prices in this particular area for these particular commodities are getting out of whack. You might want to take advantage of, you know, this temporary opportunity and focus on that." And so all of this is completely new functionality. It's basically give you know, you're you're adding additional you know, you're adding additional paints to, you know, to you know, to what the designers can use to you know, to craft the you know, to craft these you know, portraits that they're making. So So yes, uh you now know what the next dynamic event is.
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Uh Well, there there there there there there's there's there's there's going there's going to be it's we're just going to be you know, keep rolling them out. We've actually we've probably got, you know, eight or 10 specific ones planned. And like I said, each one is looking to leverage stuff that's come before and then add, you know, add some new functionality. Okay. We talked a bit about how, you know, with with the dynamic events it it it now allows, you know, cross server progress and stuff like that. You know, the events on one server, you know, get tallied up with the events of another server with another server to you know, to affect the next phase. You've got the nine tails lock down where we we can where we can now affect dynamically affect the price of shops and stuff like this. Um one of the things you you touched on and
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again, I just want to follow up on something. You said no deviation from the existing you know, you know, development. Uh how important no just just be clear. It's it's not that there's no de- deviation. It's it's that you're you're trying You basically we have a we have a long-term plan of things we want to get done and it logically makes sense to do this before this other piece of tech, etc. And so, you you don't in general want to deviate too dramatically purely for the sake of an arbitrary event. In other words, if it if if not for Xeno threat, we could have done something else that would also be interesting. But, it was time in the natural course of things we we needed to basically start getting, you know, the the back-end coordination of these events. We needed to get that operation. We needed to bring the capital ships online. You know, the torpedo stuff is
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something that's been bought, you know, uh you know, that's the something that's been bothering us for a long time. So, so all of those things Now, some of those bits of tech, when we started last year, they weren't going to be addressed for another 6 months. And, you know, and so, we did re-prioritize some things. So, what I was saying earlier is is you don't want to completely upend your your your logical development schedule, but you certainly refine it, you tweak it, you basically massage things around based upon So, you're kind of like looking for the intersection of what's within you know, what's within your grasp, if not if if not absolutely all going to be there unless you actually put some focus on it. And then, once we kind of lock that down, it becomes a very uh a very good means of focusing your, you know, of focusing everyone's attention to where we know exactly how we're going to
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be using, you know, everything from, you know, everything from capital ship combat to the shop transactions that we can now have, you know, fed back into the mission logic to a vast multitude of other things. Right. Now, you hit exactly what I wanted you to hit there. That you know, these things don't detract or derail from the development. They actually focused in and bear down on things that we already intended to do. They just bring them into a more uh crystalline focus for a bit. that said there had to be some concerns. That there had there had to be that there had to be some dangers inherent. There had What were some of the things we needed to look out for while we were working? What scared us about this? The the the biggest concern from the beginning, I would say,
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was going to be performance. We knew performance was going to be an issue. It continues to be an issue. We've got a number of initiatives underway to basically improve that. And then we're also attacking it you know from a completely different angle, which is not just the per server of performance, but you know the whole server meshing you know initiative is intended to eventually allow us to distribute the workload over as many servers you know as as we need. And so that that was always something that we were aware we were aware of. We've basically tweaked and refined things. We you know the the maximum number of enemies you face. In other words, do you face 50 enemies at once or do you basically face you know a dozen and we keep replenishing them as
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you you know as you destroy them or take them out, make them flee, basically replenish them you know quicker. How many capital ships can we you know can we put you know at a time? There's been a tremendous amount of focus on optimizing everything from you know turret AI to even seemingly unrelated things like you know social AI. It's like anytime you're saving there is basically additional time that you can inject into you know into these events that are that are intended to basically draw lots of players together and have you know and have an enormous amount of AI you know active. If you think about it, I mean this is definitely this is definitely the biggest such event we've done today and we're putting more players and more AI. And you got you know tons of turrets
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operation. I mean you you have a lot of stuff happening in one area. And so it's it you know it's it's like with most things, right? Which is your your first iteration of these things is never as, you know, mature as you would like in terms of, you know, the performance. And, you you know, we're we're going to keep refining it. I think you'll see some big improvements over the course of the next And we'll go from there. All right. So, yeah, so we're about halfway through. We are talking with Tony Zurovec, big head honcho guy for the Persistent Universe and Systemic Systems. Remember, if you're watching live on Twitch right now, you can submit questions with the word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets. That's going to help Tyler and our community management team pull those out from the conversations. Remember to try to keep the questions related to the stuff we're
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talking about today. So, if you're asking about when your favorite ship's going to come out or something, that's not really the stuff we we take Tony's time with. Tony, you mentioned that that designers get to that designers can use dynamic events for all manner of things. We just showed an ISC how the the terrain modification tool will make things easier for designers to to craft and and alter the the surface of planets and stuff. Dynamic events isn't just a feature for players. It's also a tool for our developers and our designers. What are What are some of the ways that dynamic events can help our designers make better and more dynamic stuff for Star Citizen? Well, it's like I was saying earlier, what what what dynamic events really are
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is what we set up by default is what I would call like the systemic background, right? That's what Quantum is good at, which is it's it's like the real world economy. You know, things ebb and flow, things flow, but in general, you don't have, you know, major financial crises or great depressions or wars, you know, you know, on a regular basis. But, the reality, you know, you know, from a gameplay perspective is you actually want, you know, a little bit of chaos here and there. And sometimes, we, the designers, want to go in and specifically massage this like, "Oh, you know what? This area of the solar system has been kind of boring today. We're going to liven it up." And so, what these dynamic events allow us to do is basically uh to seamlessly integrate a a chunk of, you know, designer and writer-driven content into this background simulation, so that
00:32:59
how it interfaces with the, you know, the world as it, you know, as it currently exists, it's it's all logical. It's exactly what you like. In other words, for you know, for example, if we introduce a hoard of pirates at a particular location, well, those pirates, they're going to need fuel, they're going to need ammo, they're going to need, you know, ship repairs. All of a sudden, you know, um you would expect to basically, you know, see lots more missions for, you know, uh you know, escorts of transport ships, you know, you know, in that area. Um you'd see, you know, more bounties, you know, being just, you know, uh bounty service beacons being dispatched to that area. So, you have all of these other logical knock-on effects you would like, and those they get for free. But, you think about it, it's like, in XenoThreat, there's all this custom dialogue and stuff geared towards this, and you got to go, you know, you got to go record the specific lines, and, you
00:33:47
know, and trigger them up. So, so it's it's basically what I would describe as the best of both worlds, which is you know, it's it's it's it's a it's a big open world, and you can do whatever you want, and make whatever choices you want, and the game will respond logically, and if you're, you know, particularly clever, you'll occasionally, you know, ferret out, you know, some some cool opportunities. Um and then at the same time, whether we manually do it, or whether on occasion Quantum decides, "You know what? There's been so much, you know, battling in this area that we're going to go ahead and activate a compatible dynamic event that says, 'Oh, well, we, you know,'" and so, the way these things are configured is you can think of it a bit like a programming function, to where they've got certain requirements, certain inputs that have to be fed to them. And so, what the system is basically looking for is is at any given
00:34:36
time is for the you know, for the inputs in any given area, what kind of content does it have that it can match up? And so, I mentioned like dynamic events, but there's an entire There's a middle layer to this, which is So, here you know, heretofore today um you've had the the normal what I'd call the static missions. And then at the far end of the spectrum, you've got these dynamic events. And in between, you actually got what uh what I just what I've always referred to as dynamic missions. And dynamic missions uh they kind of split the difference to where they're going to be systemically generated all over the place. You you constantly see them. Um they'll look very much like right now, if you're in an area and there's a high probability of pirates, we actually create, you know, a pirate encounter mission or you create a cargo transport ship mission in
00:35:24
your conflict or whatever the case may be. Where what dynamic missions do um is basically allow us at at a at a smaller, more localized scale. Now, we're not talking about trying to coordinate this across, you know, multiple servers or anything like that. It's just that cargo ship that you run into in this area of space, what type of cargo should it have? Should it be copper? Should it be platinum? Should it be aluminum? It probably depends log- logically it would depend upon well, is it coming from you know, uh you know, from an area you know, where you know, uh where it purchases things, where that stuff is mined, refined, you know, etc. And where is it going to? And so, if it's heading one direction, if it's if the cargo transport is going uh you know, uh from the refinery to the factory, then you would expect that it's going to be loaded with goods that the
00:36:11
refinery produces. And if it if the cargo ship is headed towards the you know, the refinery, then it you know, then then it likely has raw ore that needs to be you know, processed, etc. And so, the point being, designers don't need to you know, with the with the with the dynamic mission system, they don't need to fill in things like, "Hey, for this cargo transport mission, what kind of cargo you know, does it have? Uh should it be beat up or should it be in pristine condition? Should it have fighter escorts or you know, or should it just be traveling solo?" Um you know, should it basically be you know, a derelict husk in space that you stumble upon or should it basically you know, be you know, in in in in perfectly fine pristine you know, condition? So, these all become inputs to these setups. So, the designers set up the archetypes and the system fills in the inputs and what you wind up getting is you know, an
00:36:59
exponential increase in variety because all of a sudden designers aren't trying to hard code every single specific you know, specific instance. And so, you can think of dynamic events as it's really just an evolution of that system that adds on some additional you know, back-end coordination and uh and those those those modifiers that I talked about earlier to where dynamic events really do they grant the designer the temporary capability to nudge certain things in the simulation a particular way. Uh you know, whether it you know, whether it be new items added to a shop's inventory, whether it be uh additional demand for an item at a particular shop, whether it be you know, uh you know, uh missions that are going to be offered here. Uh you know, all of those sorts of you know, sorts of things. And so, I
00:37:46
mentioned like population control, you can see uh you know, a fleet week in the future will be a dynamic event and when that event's going on, we're going to turn the dial and crank up the population, you know, we're going to wind up doubling it, you know, because you'd expect to see a lot of people coming to see that show. And then when the event dissipates, then we'll basically turn the you know, turn that dial back down, the population will you know, uh recede back to its normal levels. In other words, it's a special event that we've come in, we've added a ton of custom content, NPC conversations, all the stuff geared towards that. And so, we kind of view it as one big comprehensive designer-driven package that can be merged with all of this, you know, this back-end systemic, you know, background. I'm sorry, I got distracted. There was a ASCII art of Tyler wearing a American top hat thing. It was weird. Um
00:38:36
you you mentioned you mentioned that uh you know, there's there's the system there's there's the systemic triggers, the things that, you know, that can trigger all these things by by just meeting criteria, and then the manual triggers. Uh some of the folks in the chat are asking if the manual triggers are akin to like the old GM events that you that you would see in in uh older MMOs where where where, you know, a a design In this case, the designer as opposed to a GM can come in and just create a a one-time event that would occur. That that that's exactly it, and some of these will be one-time like the Xena threader or particular fleet week or other other ones will basically just add to our library of things you know that you know that we can activate simply because we want it to liven up the place. The The nine-tails, I don't want to go into you know the nine-tails, I
00:39:22
don't want to go into like the detail cuz you know there there's some cool stuff that we'll be introducing that players haven't you know that they haven't really seen before. So, I want to kind of you know keep you know to keep some of it under under under wraps. Um but it's it's it's very representative of some of the bits of functionality that we're introducing in there will then be exploited in more dramatic fashion in in subsequent you know dynamic events. Like one high-level example would simply be the nine-tails stuff is kind of geared towards a certain area, you know, basically being, you know, locked down as a result of aggression. Um and in the future what we're going to wind up having is if the player community doesn't beat back that particular threat, then it will grow, and all of a sudden you've got two or
00:40:09
three or four different areas locked down. In other words, you you you the player community have to respond and tamp out this fire, or else it will gradually grow. Now, it's possible, of course, depending upon how we set it up and what the current input is like, the NPC population in some cases may eventually respond sufficiently to do it. Um but but but you get the you know the the overall effect, which is this this the this one event that's geared towards locking down an area the area to be locked down is, you know, is an input and we can feed it one, we can feed it three, we can basically add a little bit of back-end logic controls, and then that and and then which ones are locked down can be replicated across all of the servers. So, the community as a whole is fighting just like they are in XenoThreat against this common threat. I just so that that that I'm just going to do I do this for clarity's sake. A
00:40:56
lot of the folks have been asking whether XenoThreat specifically is a one-time event, you play it and it's never back, or whether it may come back. Uh I know from internal conversations we're reserving our options there, whether, you know, XenoThreat's going to be a one-time thing or it's going to come back. But, we have the option though. That's That's That's the important part uh for this conversation is that we can do these one-time what limited events that occur in Star Citizen's history, and when they're done, they never return ever again, or we can do ones that are recurring, or we can do ones that build upon each one, where it's like it's like this is a one-time thing, but it leads into another event x number of months later, leads into another event x number of months later, and that's how we start adding a persistent and long-form storyline to the persistent universe. Yeah, this this one, you know, the
00:41:44
XenoThreat is basically, you know, attacking, harassing the UEE, um and you're, you know, you're there to basically help, you know, uh to help, you know, beat back, you know, some of the specific challenges to basically, you know, salvage material to restock the Javelin, defend transport ships, you know, to you know, to the same effect. All this type of stuff. Um in the future, there may very well be ones where you actually have to go into, you you know, occupied space, so it's really dangerous to get there, infiltrate bases, retrieve stuff, bring it back. And then what we'd be measuring is this Well, how much, you know, total information or assets or stolen ships that you've retrieved, etc. How many have, you know, has the community pulled back? And again, what I I I keep referring to like the community because in general these dynamic events are meant to be things that apply across the entire
00:42:33
spectrum of servers and not isolated onto a, you know, just one individual instance. Um if you're talking about just an individual server instance, then you're really talking more of, you know, like I was saying earlier with like the dynamic missions to where if if it's all on one server, then we don't need all this back-end coordination and variable maintenance and, you know, phases and all that. You can literally just run it with your normal, you know, assumption mission logic. Let's look at some of the questions from the live chat here. Uh some of these we've touched on, but we'll go ahead and ask them just for clarity's sake. Um as far as the size of dynamic events, uh are are they limited in scope until Quanta is fully on on board and up and running, or will they always just be some of them smaller, some of them massive? Uh is there is there a scale you have in mind?
00:43:21
But it's actually exactly It's it's both. It's like some of them will be really large, like XenoThreat, it puts the whole, you know, solar system, you know, you know, theoretically under threat, under threat. Others will be much more localized. That that is like our first test in like for this Nine Tails lockdown, it's much more localized as a threat to a specific landing zone. So, if you have no interest in that particular landing zone and the shops that are have been, you know, have been cut off, you know, from the world and aren't be aren't able to get the supplies that they need and therefore they're all calling out for help and the price is going through the roof what they'd pay to get medical supplies and all this other stuff, then you can, you know, then you can largely ignore it. And so, the the idea is again, it's like we're we're building a library and we'll have, you know, big, you know, invasion, you know, with a you know, fleet invasions, you know, of a solar system, smaller things, which is, you know, just a
00:44:08
particular, you know, pirate gang assaulting a particular landing zone. We'll have, you know, infiltration stuff. It's It's really again, it's like, uh, you're you're aiming to get the tools to allow the designers to basically express solutions to all of these, you know, dramatically different scenarios. Um, now, as we we we've mentioned quantum and and and quanta whatnot several times in the show. Uh, for folks who have been watching, I'm looking in the chat here that don't know what we're talking about. Uh, there is a nice hour-long about presentation available on our YouTube page, uh, from CitizenCon 2949, where Tony introduced the entire concept of quanta. We don't want to waste our remaining minutes here just regurgitating what's already been shared. That said, it has been more than a year since we've since we've heard about it, since we've heard from you.
00:44:56
Uh, I know we have that presentation coming in the next X number of months. Uh, without spoiling that, can you give us a bit of an update on how things have been progressing, whether you're happy with where where we're at right now? Yeah, it's it's it's come a long way. Um, all the you know, the TypeScript logic has been redone in C# for the AI, uh, which basically resulted in, you know, somewhere in the range of, you know, three order of magnitude increase. So, we we can basically easily simulate several million quanta, um, you know, and we can do that at, you know, at at multiples of normal speed. And that's important because we need to be able to tweak certain levers, let the simulation run for an hour, and then see how stuff kind of balanced out, and what kind of, uh, you know, what kind of limits, uh,
00:45:43
we hit on certain things. Did prices ever get too out of whack here? What is, you know, did did did the offering price for particular mission ever get, you know, completely, you know, ridiculous given these parameters that we'd set up? Um, there's been We're We're in the We're in the final stages now of starting to connect Quantum to some of the back-end services so that they're actually feeding data from the simulation to the services. The services will have long been feeding that information then to to to the actual game servers and then basically receiving it back. Like one of the one of the most recent examples here is just it's kind of related to the dynamic event shop modifier stuff which is the potential to add items, you know, add new items to a particular shop. So right now that inventory is always
00:46:33
historically been fixed and so now with the modifiers since we can add something it's the same thing you'll see in Quantum which is shops may occasionally change some of their inventory items and so it turns out that there's a little bit of work we need need to do on the game server in order to support that. there are there there's been a lot of you know a lot a lot of focus on basically getting you know extracting you know chunks of information from you know the service beacons that we demonstrated before. We were generating the events but they weren't actually making their way to the back-end. So that information will be flowing up. In other words, where you see calls for assistance, calls for combat assistance for you to come you know will in you know in the not too distant future be dictated via that Quantum simulation. Um the you know the the the the price of
00:47:22
fuel will be dictated by what you know how much of a you know how much of a load there is in that particular area. And all of these things take time because the the previous iteration we showed of Quantum as you got all these Quantum going around they they didn't they didn't have at that time any concept of fuel or you know efficiency in terms of what ship they were flying and how much fuel it consumed. They basically got transport you know for free. And so a lot of those kind of things are being wrapped up. We spent relatively recently a good bit of time um getting Quantum the service to actually ship to basically be built and ship with the game. So, we're not currently exploiting it, but it's there right alongside, you know, a you know, a litany of all these other services. So, that piece which, you know, was was a significant effort
00:48:12
is now in and done and basically what that means is we've got the we've got the basic elements of plumbing to get all this information, you know, going back and forth. And what we're focused on right now is actually, you know, you know, is is realizing some of that stuff. Star Citizen, we've got the plumbing. uh, if we plug Tony Z into the servers, would they go faster? I got I'm imagining like remember Superman 3 where the where the gal gets plugged into the servers. Uh, let's see what else we got. Um, will some of the dynamic events allow us to choose sides? If we're more into the outlaw phase, the threat has everybody on one side, right? Well, not but it's not really. I mean, you're you're you're encouraged to be on one side and yet plenty of players are
00:49:00
electing to basically, you know, they're not actually they're not able to ally, you know, with the Xeno threat, but they're certainly not being, you know, friends to, you know, to the local security forces. So, yeah, yes, we will we've actually got, you know, you know, some of that stuff like in the Nine Tails lockdown. We're starting to play with some of those concepts to where you can be the you can basically work on the side of the guys helping to keep it locked down or you can basically work on the side of the guys trying to break that blockade and basically, you know, free that free free that area. So, the the the the the fact that there isn't a a way to officially plug in with the other side in Xeno threat isn't indicative of some future design direction. It's just that's not what this one we got. Not not not at all. In fact, it's it's actually quite the opposite because as is always the case with Star Citizen, um, and
00:49:47
you know, you you saw you see this with so many things that we did with Xeno threat, right? Like with Xeno threat, we kind of started out with, okay, we're going to have big capital you know, we're going to have capital ships. So, any player with bombers, they're set. And then the concern was, wait, a lot of players don't have bombers. How are they going to contribute? What if I've got a Hornet? And so, we introduced the concept of, well, great, we'll have a lot of support, you know, light fighters supporting these ships, and you can win, you can basically make uh the the make the Idris um you know, uh retreat, and therefore attempt you know, win that battle, simply by taking out all those light fighters. But, and so, all of a sudden now, it's like regardless of which you know, whether you've got the you know, the heavy bomber, whether you've got the light fighter, you can contribute. But, that still left the problem of, well, what if you know, what if I'm not the kind of player that wants to do tons and tons of endless ship combat? What what do I get
00:50:34
to do in this Xeno Threat thing? And that's where the thing you know, that's where we started thinking, hey, let's have this whole salvage aspect to where the Javelins come in, you're basically restocking them. So, now someone's got to go out and basically get the materials. And of course, we got to have a little bit of FPS combat, you know, on that. But, then all of a sudden, that forces you in that FPS mode, so we start looking and thinking, what if what if I actually do like the ship combat, but I you know, but I want to be able to contribute to the restocking, and not be forced into that? Well, you've got transport ships going you know, going back and forth, and on occasion, you'll be asked to defend them. And if you successfully defend them, you basically wind up generating as much restocking benefit as if you were to fully salvage one of those derelict ships. And so, the the the point I'm making is is regardless of
00:51:23
what exactly you know, you want to do, what you find interesting, we try as much as possible to make sure that there's going to be you know, a sufficient diversity diversity of interesting things to do, so that you'll have a good time. And so, right at the very top of that list would be, sure, some a lot of players are going to on occasion want to be able to play the part of the bad guy. Some other players will want to you know, play the part of the good guy. And you know, some players uh like if if you think about you know, without going into too much detail on the nine-tails you know, lockdown, when you're actually trying to deliver those supplies, are you trying to simply quell to take out all of the pirates in that area, basically remove the threat, or are you basically just trying to transport goods in and basically take advantage of the sky-high prices that are temporarily being paid because no
00:52:10
one else can get through that blockade? And then if you're actually if you're one of those guys trying to transport those goods through, all of a sudden there's a real need for you to hire via service beacon, hire other people to protect you. And so you've got escort potential, you got back you know, you can basically be the guys helping to lock it down, you can be the guy helping to eliminate you know, the threat. There's many different ways to come at the you know, at at this particular situation depending upon what interests you. And that is ultimately you know, what where we're trying to go all across the game. Yeah. Uh plugins for players in different professions and that who play different ways. For people who just prefer the FPS aspects, you know, things for them to do. For the people who prefer ship combat, for the people who prefer ship shipping, stuff like that. That said, there have been a number of questions about
00:53:00
drilling down to other specific aspects. You just talked about making sure there's something for almost everybody in all these things. But on the flip side, would we ever consider because PvP is quite important for a lot of folks, you know, who play Star Citizen. Would we ever consider a PvP specific dynamic event or a dynamic event that has no combat at all? Well, the the the PvP stuff is you know, something you always I mean, if you're going to have freedom, you know, some people are going to basically you know, want to get in there you know, and muck it up you know, for other people. And so the the what the way that I would aim to address that type of stuff is basically yeah, within the rules of the system. In other words, that that was why and again, we're still in the early stages
00:53:46
of the whole prison thing. That that's why that's why we have a prison concept, which is you can be a bad guy and if you get caught, then you basically go you know you go serve your sentence. And right now, when I say the early stages, I mean like right now escaping from prison equates to walking through, you know, you know, a hole in the wall and basically assuming you actually know the escape route, then you know, then it's just a matter of time. And that's another thing that you know, we've got you know, a few quarter hours to basically do a major revision to make the entire process of escaping prison is going to be a challenge in and of itself and there's going to be multiple ways. It's like you talking about, you know, basically, you know, bribing guards. You talking about, you know, coordinating with other players. You talking about being in the other guy that's simply trying to avoid the cameras and do the whole time thing, you know, you know, setting up distractions, you know, you know, setting a fire in the utility
00:54:34
closet to basically draw the guards over so you can go over here. In other words, how how many different ways can we support uh you know, such that you know, a player can feel as if they've crafted their own particular solution to you know, to the problem. And as much as possible, you you don't try to hard code these things, right? You try to basically create uh you know, a number of different systemic elements and what will inevitably wind up happening is players will find clever ways to exploit them to you know, to you know, to to you know, to to particular effect. We're we're actually seeing this right now. It was a you know, a bit of a headache in this morning's meeting when I was talking about the xenothreat stuff when we were going through PvP and apparently, you know, some players had figured out this super clever way of very quickly, you know, sharing credits and getting out of prison, etc. And
00:55:22
it's it's always the case, right? Which is it's an ongoing battle um when you when you when you provide a bunch of these raw elements, people will find, you know, unintended ways of basically accomplishing their effect. And I personally have always loved that because that was always my favorite thing in in games was being able to craft not what I felt was my own unique solution. In other words, what I didn't want to do is expend copious amounts of time trying to figure out the one solution that the designer dictated would solve this particular puzzle. I'd rather give players a bunch of, you know, these you know, these these logical elements and they can string them together in all sorts of ways. So, I kind of reference that, you know, just you know, briefly earlier like with the prison guard, which is well, if if if
00:56:10
prison guards respond as you know, as they must to, you know, to audible events, then if you can do something that, you know, that generates a noise over here, then of course they should go to investigate. And then so a clever player would basically say, "Hey, I can I can bait the the same way that they'd go investigate a noise and all and that would become a problem for you if, you know, if you're trying to infiltrate an area, um can actually become a great means for you to temporarily distract them so that you can get through, you know, the you know, the a door to escape the prison, etc." And so, all all of this stuff, I mean, it it comes back to the same thing, which is giving players the the the the freedom to basically play the game how they want and having the system push back in logical fashion. So, if we don't want a lot of player versus player, you know,
00:56:59
stuff in this area, then we should bring logical elements of the game more, you know, more security, we you know, larger, you know, penalties in that particular area, things of that sort to, you know, to discourage it. It's still possible, but, you know, but all of a sudden, you know, you you so you I I wouldn't aim to reduce it to zero or, you know, to make it impossible because im- impossible to me is is ne- never particularly fun. I'd rather make it so that if you want to basically accept, you know, the the consequences of your actions, then more power to you. and in some places in some places those consequences will be, you know, fairly minimal. In other places, they'll be quite large. And And you see this across the law system where we've got 40 different infractions, and some things are viewed as, you know, a you know, a minor little infraction. You
00:57:46
basically pay, you know, pay a fine. Other things actually lock you into prison. And right now, like I said, it's fairly easy to escape prison. It won't be in the future. That will actually become a much more significant challenge. it's it sounds like uh the approach that we will generally take is a try to plug as many different groups and peoples and play styles into these events as possible. Try to provide something for as many play styles as we can, including PvP. Yeah. And then the PvP is just it's it's it's an it's a You always have to be sensitive to it because a small number of players can always ruin the experience for a lot of other people, and so you do have to put a you know, a significant amount That's not PvP, though. Yeah, but but again, but how are you going to deal with that? And certainly, you know, there are some aspects, you
00:58:33
to where you take, you know, administrative, you know, action. But in general, to me, if you have to take administrative action, it usually signifies that you failed at something within the game, right? It's like in the real world, if I go out and I wreak havoc, uh you know, there will be very real and obvious consequences that you, you know, quickly suffer. And it should be the same thing in a game to where you can do it, but you better be extremely, you know, clever about how you go about it, or, you know, or, you know, or or or else the system's going to respond in, you know, in a logical fashion. All right. Well, Tony, that's it. We made it to the end. You got anything else you want to you want to leave people with? Any any any final thoughts before uh Xeno threat, our first dynamic event, makes its way to the live servers sometime no, other than just if if you haven't watched, we talked about the quantum stuff. Um if uh
00:59:22
for for people that aren't familiar with it, they don't necessarily need to go back and watch that thing since we will be you know doing a you know a pretty a relatively comprehensive update. Um it won't be as singularly focused on that because there's several other areas that I want to cover in at least brief fashion everything you know virtual AI and you know and a number of other things. Um so it's probably like I said you know a few months out give or take um and we're hoping to be able to show some concrete examples of how some of this some of this technology is actually now integrated into the game. Awesome. Well, thank you so much Tony. Uh if the folks in the chat had their way you do this once a month every month for the rest of your life. Uh but I understand that you actually have a job. I ironically you know if you if we did
01:00:09
that then there would be less to discuss you wouldn't get as much done. There there would there would anyone so yeah. So thank you so much. I'll let you get back to work. Uh everybody watching thank you so much for tuning in. This has been Star Citizen Live uh Dynamic Events with Tony Zurovec. I'm Jared Huckaby. Uh tune in on Thursday of next week to check out an ISC all about how we brought those capital ship battles uh into the persistent universe and the work that went into that and what's next for them in the future and then we'll be right back here with another Star Citizen Live next Friday. So take care everybody. See you. Fighters.

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