Star Citizen Live: Ask the Devs - AI for U and I

15 December 202301:09:371,817 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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hi everybody welcome to another episode of uh which which show is this Star Citizen live uh I'm your host Jared hucke we're back uh we've been off for for a couple weeks uh last week was the um UK Manchester office Christmas party um where where everybody was gathered to answer uh trivia questions Pub qu style and drink um a not in significant amount of alcohol um just want to say that as far as the the pub quiz contest more than 50 teams it's a big office uh and yours truly uh came in third not my best not not not my best outing but well well so much Beyond uh what Dave and his team did uh what place did you get in Dave it
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was in it yeah there was a four in it uh at the front so that just uh I want say Aaron if you're watching and I know you are um reading the place of every single team for like 15 minutes was amazing and just watching Dave's team sit there waiting for them to hear their team's name and it just never came for like 15 minutes it was it was amazing a master stroke Aaron and I loved it um and then before that uh we were at bar citizen Dublin uh which was fantastic great a chance to meet the the folks out there and then before that bar C Us in Milan uh a a tremendous um just uh yes so we're back we're back for our last show of the year uh and joining us uh on this week's show um that's was one heck of an
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intro um not a good one just in length uh we have members from our esteemed AI teams uh joining us on the show this week we have uh well let's let you introduce yourselves Fran tell everybody who you are and what you do hi I'm Franchesco Ruchi and I'm the director in cig and and what studio are you in I'm in the Frankfurt office how is it over there it's pretty good I mean everybody comes over you know they really love it they love the studio I think you know Andrew I'm not sure have you ever been here or youo you being it's a nice Studio we have a nice view you know Frankfurt it's uh it's lovely you guys cold but do you guys have your holiday party what is it did you guys have your holiday party oh yeah same day as the UK Studio we had like we gathered here in
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the studio it was quite nice we you know we made a Christmas tree together you know so I put like a very nice decoration on top of the tree during the evening yeah and uh yeah it was chill was really nice uh Andrew the the camera was switching over to you for some reason uh so you go next who are you and what do you do Andrew hi I'm Andrew Davis I'm lead of the AI feature team and I'm based in Manchester and I'm very jealous of your third place team ranking in the Christmas quiz is because our team also came third we came bottom third bottom three I think we were literally the third from the bottom and I feel robbed because I know we did really well on some questions and uh I think I think it was we were harshly marked by one of the other teams so I
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was very proud of our team name as well I was um which was proper boss because we've been working on some boss fights on the AI so uh and it's also a um SC saying which I I love because Liverpool's near you uh all right and then finally last but not least Diego tell everybody who you are and what you do so I'm the AI programmer focusing on the fly combat and I'm also based in Manchester and for the quiz we didn't do too well well I didn't do too well because he was all about British culture questions and I didn't know much about it but I got Ferrera rer so that's good what hey hey I mean come on I'm I'm American I'm I'm a proud of the American educ ation system somehow I made it through what was your team name uh vehicle Renegades that see that's why you guys
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struggled uh our team was quiz Roberts's win commander and that's why we excelled as well as we did both shout out to the studio experience team the first place team uh was the studio experience team the the the folks who basically make it possible for us to work uh uh it make the office a wonderful place to be uh their team came in first um so congratulations everybody they have a little cup that they now have to carry around and we'll take our chance at winning it next year all right so that was a very very long intro uh we're going to jump into it so this week's show we have a number of different formats for this show here on this week's show it's one of our ask the devs things so so now that we're done with the part where I just chat and talk to them uh we're now putting your questions directly to our developers so we put up a thread up on Spectrum where we collected your questions let you vote on
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the ones you want to see answered most uh and then Fran Diego and Andrew went through uh collectively and pulled uh the questions that they felt they could answer uh best and most accurately at this point in our development uh so we're going to jump into those additionally if you're watching live on Twitch you can submit questions live by prefacing the question with the word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets that's going to help me to pull it out from all the other detritus uh that goes on in twitch chat um you you know who you are V all right so jumping into the question right now he's a good he's a good person I don't know why I picked on him it's just thing I do uh so first question uh you had to know this was going to come this is one of those perennial uh AI questions that come in there uh server
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FPS everybody knows that AI performance is directly and and and inextricably linked in many ways to server FPS uh this question is simply What minimum server FPS is required for the AI to function as intended I mean maybe I can I can start there I think obviously as we said several times yes it is it is very correlated the uh the server FPS server performance without AI uh functions right now uh just because basically imagine like you you are playing a game at that FPS is like the type of refresh rate of the knowledge of the eye or the decision making that day do right so if we play at three frame per second then obviously for the eyes kind of about SL show right and in addition to that what I think
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sometimes we don't always make clear is that we don't want to bug down when when the server is is low in in performance we obviously don't want to do more calculation try to get up because that would make it even more slow right so we have a lot of our systems are are spread over a certain amount of frame calculation for example but finder is a very expensive you know uh calculation that usually I does and obviously we don't want to do one full path calculation for every single I every frame that would just you know be too much so usually binder on games is made as time lies what we say so you know it goes through a request and goes through multiple frames to return you something so the less the frames the longer it also takes to do some of the stuff right so this why and just also to be clear not all
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the issues that you guys see is live sometimes always ready to FPS performance some are some are not yeah sometimes your work just sucks exactly right sometimes you have just bugs as well on our side and you we we work hard to fix those so obviously the one that are uh right now usually the engine works pretty bad under five frame per second we have other issues with admission uh system and stuff like this when it goes under five frame per second uh we don't see very big problems where is around well I think obviously more than 10 would be you know the ideal let's say to have something decent uh over eight nine frame per second usually the I can can function decently uh between five and you know and eight it's
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start to struggle a bit because again all those requests just pile up a bit more right so the it's not just about the frame rate but it's also because this creates this kind of slow response to other systems right for example rast of perception or uh environment analysis uh again path finding once once again so basically we are working towards changing a little bit of some of these patterns so that we can support better fps in the new in the New Year especially we're going to focus on some of those improvements so that we are going to be less reliant on on uh extremely good server performance but obviously I think there's there are two par initiatives in the engine right or in the company that is one is trying to figure out how to make this faster
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overall right because it's not just than high issue if the server goes at five FR per second this is going to cause multiple issues on lots of systems right the guy sees problems with the elevators or problem with spawning that takes much longer because obviously even spawning takes longer if the frame rate is very low and there is like too much work happening in the background um so basically we have these two initiative right like one that is like making sure the server goes as fast as possible and the other one is making sure that our systems can cope with as best as possible with low frame rate having different ideas and it's not necessarily uh important to share them more right now but U this is more what i is but on additional note I think some stuff that me entry especially I've been working on in the last weeks was also to fix some
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of those bags that are basically giving you this impression of not responding but doesn't mean necessar they're really not responding right so myself I know I was looking at one B with entry you know we fix two three situations like this where maybe the behavior gets into this kind of strange Loop what was and I think you know most of you guys are fighting with FPS have seen those that is like you're fighting with some and then some of the I might just look at you and not shoot at you but they would aim at you in some situations right one that I fixed maybe Andre you can share the one that you fixed but for example one that I was looking at was this uh situation where we we were updating not correctly our attention Target so they were thinking they were searching for somebody they killed somebody they thought that that their attention T that moment was dead but then they were targeting you so they
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thought that you were dead and they were starting to investigate and and those are type of things that we fix all the time right and we want to make it better uh overall so I don't know Andre just yeah one of ones I was looking at recently was that um we have certain reaction animations that play um before they attack you and uh we had this uh in the scripting language we were we were it was receiving a Val and waiting for that value to go up but because of the specific requirements of the multiplayer system when you're online that the there could be a a lot number of frames before um it next checks this this value this alertness level value and it was going up and not then recognizing it had gone up so it was forever waiting for this
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value not to go up and uh that was causing sometimes these characters to just get stuck in a state where they were and we like oh I'm going to respond no um nothing's gone nothing's changed um so that was that was that took a while to to track down because I think we we're kind of narrowing down more and more cases where like smaller and smaller issues um that we don't see regularly and that's a really good thing that we we kind of able to focus more in on those little bugs that that happen like oh these sometimes it was one in 10 now it's one in 100 W it's it it's smaller and smaller but but we're improving the gam playay each time yeah and bringing up all the improvements we've done for squid as well into bu also allows us to stress test those Behavior a bit in slightly different
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environment right with more targets more scenarios where you have I know defend Mission with you know friendly characters that you need to not you know to to save while the enemies around and so on and so on so I think like obviously uh we also find Sometimes some of those um different scenarios you know that that we can stress us more yeah um no it's it's cool and and when I make a joke about sometimes their work sucks be sure to switch back to my camera so they can see that I'm joking because otherwise it just sound like a jerk no no but I think it is kind of interesting sometimes your work does suck I know all those things um hope you kind of what you like you know gave like a nice overview of this no it's
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yes honestly it was a better answer than than than uh I I originally expected from the question because you went into different use cases and no it's great you you covered you covered like three there were while you were going I was thinking of like three different follow-ups and then you just hit the follow-up and I'm like oh okay I don't have to do that it's one of the reasons I love having you on the show Fran um you very much uh let's talk about as far as like the big AI topics that people have that you know obviously there's there's always the the server frame rate one because we we've done enough of these shows that people know how linked it is the other one is is also AI blades uh uh B basically you know we're building a massively multiplayer online Universe here and not everybody can always bring their friends uh where they want to be uh as these
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ships get bigger and they have more turrets and stuff like this the idea of inserting AI blades into the computer as like a into the ship as a component so that turrets can be automated and stuff has been one of those oldest uh uh dreams we've had uh about these larger m multi Cru ships um what if any progress do we have on that is has there been any progress on AI blades um what can you tell us at this point um I can say this one yeah I I think um the technology is already there because I know a lot of people um you know they they make the question is it a concept is it already working we've got the technology there we're currently using that in game at the moment for some Capital ships and
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even for um the uh turrets that you see in the bunkers or outside the stations um we essentially have these AI module that communicates with uh various items in the game like the fly controller and um they can pass inputs to it same with the tets in terms of bringing it to the players I think Franchesco you probably can answer that better I mean yeah I think we have even some atcs actually using the IM module uh in Star season since quite a while I think because basically I think the idea is that we have this like as everything in the spaceships uh world right where you have items attached to other items we do have the special item that Wei module that is kind of uh a plate what you know what what the lore is a plate yeah basically you can't execute exactly logic right they can run specific Logic for um for
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the operation that you needs to perform and I think right now basically I think yes we we're gonna we're going to wrap up these things a bit better and I think majority of the work obviously is how we want to expose it to the to the players how you can buy them you know you can take them and attach them to the to the to your ship uh so it's a lot more now about um how the player interaction the player Loop is going to be on the blades but basically on the high side we did we did have enough progress in the in the past years basically that to to have that pretty much ready uh to have all the basic functionality to to to support that to support that functionality on our side um so obviously yeah again our feature needs to be wrapped around a lot of themes not just the the eye
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functionality you know and uh and that's where we are at right now but yeah anyi modu you know again bright blades that control a turret blades that can control the bading uh seats blades that can control you know you can as everything that we do right this we run uh just you know our substantial behaviors that means that we can apply traits we can apply skill levels to those so we can buy you know a good blade a bad blade you know and the SS can confuse what a good blade means or what a bad blade means or you know good a good turret blade that is maybe hitting more often because you made more money I don't know or like you know a pilot one that is different personalities of that blades right so that he can also do so special maneuver and that cost more or the one
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that that just you know is a bit more uh conservative and a bit more you know uh just that you know can can can help you piling your ship maybe you know you're not even going to fight that much uh and then you can just want to have something that you can control and keep commands to autopilot somewhere and this is what we can be yeah the opportunities are the opportunities for this are are varied I there are many like L if you've watched any Star Citizen content Creator live stream or YouTube video over the last 11 years you've seen you know you know discussions of of what AI blades could allow folks to do even just the simplest idea of being able to jump into a hammerhead by yourself and just you know have four blades run in the the turrets and just be like hey if anything's hostile destroy it that's all I want just wait until it's hostile but the
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second I Mark something hostile just please like Target that crap and blow it up just the just the simplest kind of modules can can add a lot of longevity and and variety to the to the game and then of course like you talk about you know the different variations you know some are good some are some are bad some have different traits some are more aggressive some are more defensive uh stuff like this there's even like like storytelling possibilities with like the mission system like like we we you developed like imagine the best AI blade ever was was actually manufactured 50 years ago in the history and they don't make them anymore but there's still several of them buried out Across the Universe and they can be you know you know found and and revamped and then you know so so it's not even necessarily you have to spend more money to have the better stuff you can go find and discover the better stuff like the the opportunities are are endless and we've been talking about this for a long time
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it's it's one of the things that I'm most excited about is as starts is and continues into 2024 and Beyond and this is not me saying that AI blades are coming next year you've gotten all the what's coming next year from me yesterday uh there's more but that's all I'm willing to talk about yesterday uh but when this stuff comes online it'll be another fundamental change to to uh space combat in the Precision universe so I think we're all very excited for when that can come um let's just hit some of our big gosh let's hit some of our altimer here we we've got server FPS we've got AI blades uh creatures let's hit creatures um everybody is awaiting the day to go into a a ice cave on on on E or whatever and find a big giant Boreal stalker there to rip their their their their
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arms off or even just you know the space cows uh that we that we showed at uh at citizen G or in the star engine video uh what progress if any can you tell us about uh the uh the state of AI creatures is this something near far where are we what can you tell us I I'm you said you were excited for blad so I'm I'm my and my team are very excited uh for um working on creatures uh we've already started um quite a lot we've we've got some work that we've already developed for squadron 42 that we're uh bringing forward and we're expanding on uh different range of creatures with lots of different attributes that I can't really talk about too much yet but um we're definitely starting with the
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Quasi quasi gra um so that's that's been a fun one seeing that move at the moment we've got it it's jiggling up and down so we've got to solve that issue but that's yeah it's definitely something that we're working on right now and we're excited to be working on which one see what we what we saw in the in the demo there is is an actual quasi Grace or moving around the the planet is you know is it's really like the work that we've started one that you guys have seen uh live like well like in the video from czen con that it's you know an actual creat that we're working on yeah I I I I think it's safe to say without me getting in trouble We There are multiple creatures currently in development we we showed the star whell and we we've shown the the Quasi grass is that what I just call space cow is it
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quasi graer quasi graer something this something like that I feel like it had a different name at some point um yeah I'm I'm with Nam so but you know we've shown those but there's actually a host of different creatures uh both aggressive and not uh that are currently in development and um um when I talked yesterday about things that we we're waiting for you we'll let you guys discover on your own that's that's probably one of those I think unless something changes we probably won't do a big feature on it I think that's one of those things like I I I would rather leave that for people to discover when that when it goes in so uh we we can cover it we we can look back at it later and whatever but some things people often ask why we cover certain things in ic and why we don't like we didn't like we didn't cover the f8 thing we wanted
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to let you guys discover that when it happened we didn't we didn't cover playground before because again we wanted to let you guys discover that as was happening I feel like creatures probably be one of this I think I think I like the idea of you of people just Lo logging in one day and what the hell there's a space cow there or something like that so I I we'll see it's no promise but uh I think I'd rather wait on that than cover it in ic immediately um all right next question on your list here uh replication layer there's a lot of talk a lot of excitement a lot of hype about the replication layer work that's going on uh folks who follow the the PTU the evocati the previe channel know that they're doing a whole bunch of testing for that now uh 322 uh which went out yesterday went out yesterday right yeah which went out yesterday um
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has a lot of the underlying uh stuff for replication layer inside it which is why in certain when you when you turn on certain debug stuff you'll see replication layer off and what not like this so it the work's going in even now um does that work affect Ai and if it does how does it make it easier does it make it diff more difficult uh is this a good thing for you a terrible thing for you talk to us about how replication layer affects your work if any oh maybe I can I can start and then you guys just interrupt me any time so I think basically yes it does impact us um as everything that we do basically every character High character especially humans right are very much Sim we we do share a lot of stuff with the player so we have we have a lot of
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things in common the difference of AI is that obviously you want to have ai or in general you have right now especially you have ai out authoritative on a server right so what it means is the server mesh we come into different stages first of all you know we still have like you know the the split between the obligation layer and uh dgs and then you have clients right so what it means is that usually uh the first step that you will get is basically that everything change every change that you know the entities that I I control that will apply are similar to other players so they will write their own data their obligation layer clients will read it from their obligation layer directly so that is the biggest change that we will get and in general all the applications that you get all the improvements you get from from the actor
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code and the actor team we get it also in a way for free because you know uh anything that the eye can do is or the player can do but pretty much the they want the eye to do it so everything that they make as a change from the player perspective also automatically applies to the eye um what I think it will be more interesting uh in the new year and the new in the new changes with the replication layer is when we will have multiple servers and when you know the way this can be expanded in a way but let's start just with the basics of the multiple servers right similar to what we saw in in uh citizen con with the demo from poll you will have characters that move across different servers right and the this is the big difference between I caus and NPC and player caus right that player characters
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authoritative on your client you guys play your brain is the context that always keeps consistency between what you want to do and what you see the player doing it right but on the eyes side when we move one character from one server to another and his authority change the big difference is that you don't only want to replicate the effects of what the guys are are doing but you also want to replicate their context of their decision making because if I'm fighting with you yes I could restart the behavior but that means like you know as a first step you would just you might just select another character you might see a bit of discrepancy from what they're trying to do when they when they switch server and the main issue is that you as a player you will not understand or you should not understand when you switch server you should be irrelevant right so we want to have that type of
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experience as seemless as possible like everything is their citizen um so this would be the biggest impact that we have right so we'll have a lot of servers AI that might cross server at any given moment whatever they're doing and that needs to basically keep the consistency between what they decide to do and what they're actually doing on the multiple servers right so the server to server obviously you know it's U it's it's a big change that we want to do I don't know Diego or Andrew if you want to add anything there one thing I would say is we we've been working on this recently um one of the challenges we've got is as things are now not all on the same server that they've got to be replicated and not only if well that's server meshing but also when you're coming back from the replication layer say if say if you're if that server's
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gone down or um that it's gone out of scope and you're coming back from it you've got to restore them to the correct state so that any AI that go up and see um a character on that server and then interact with that that they're still getting the correct information to make decisions about what Behavior they want to do um and so we've just been working on that that very particular thing for um a thing called the observable state which allows us to say whether a character is dead or unconscious and um we we found that um because we've now split it up and it's coming back from the replication now it's not always uh getting this information updated so you have a you have a an object that's basically in an unknown State and then um we get bugs because because it's not being um because that information is wrong so
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that's something we've been working on fixing to make sure that that process is all done correctly and and and the the information is there whether it's for server meshing or for the the replication layer yeah I'm imagining hearing you guys talk about this the idea you kill somebody and their state becomes dead you pick up their body and you carry them over and as you cross to another section replication later brings them over but now they're back alive it's like might perceive them alive you know because the other thing is like that you need to make the stay consistent right so for example that could be even that you die you re you get revived but then your state you know the I might think that you're actually still dead you know or something like this and then what will happen is like again there are some situations where you might perceive it as they not responding maybe it's just like a back
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by the fact that maybe the state it's it's correcting one side of the game you know the components but maybe they get propagated correctly from the initialization order or for example in this case who owns that knowledge at that State right so we are trying to split it so that you know we get better at the events and we can read the states better and we can propagate the events of the states much better so that things are always consistent so um there's a question in the chat as a follow up to the last question uh S3 Rog four uh will we be able to hunt creatures and sell them alive or or parts of them you know this isn't for you guys s S3 Rog four you and me be be nice to the animals just just when you get them when you you see them just just
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be nice and see if you can pet them and if you can't pet them go to Spectrum and write an angry thread and say disco told me to do this because I should be able to pet them uh uh and I think they should be able to pet them but be nice just be nice and maybe sometime later you know when we're all bored maybe but be nice sorry uh especially at the whales save the space whales swear there's some people like all they want to do is is go whaling like I tune into a YouTube video oh my gosh I want hunt the space whales and and and and sell their blood I'm like just be be nice to the whales just be nice at least in the game we can always respond now now eventually you know when
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space well versus Space well yes they should be able to fight like Let Let them fight Godzilla style but um we're just we're way off the track now um what other question you have here you have a question here about will AI have advantages over players like using night vision we're not going to do that one that that's a trick question they want they every time we do a show with somebody they try to bring up night vision we know I made it I I I yelled at the guy at the chair the last time we were here with night vision I got crap for that afterwards but they know they know they know they know just leave it at that I said I would stop harping on night vision they know I promise I got you uh next question AI are clearly
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becoming smarter and responding to more situations but will they start communicating with each other about their actions warning each other of threats even if their friendly AI even if the friendly AI is outside of their vocal audio distance like would they use radios stuff what you got um I I could I could start again we we we've I don't know why I sit up on my seat like that every time but um yeah we've been making quite a lot of strides recently uh joining up with lots of teams the audio and dialogue teams to kind of um get more consistent usage of the wild lines across um both Squadron 42 to and inar citizen um and very specifically on the the point to do with radios we we have quite quite a few of those scenarios within um some of the levels in Squadron 42 but they're mainly
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um scripted where where if you if there's kind of stealth levels where if you um if you get detected by them or if a body get if you kill someone silently do a self takedown and then they discover the body and you haven't you haven't hidden it somewhere then they'll radio on to their leader and that changes the flow of the level from much more from stealth to a much more combat based level um we we so they've been very scripted so far we have had quite a few discussions about making that much more um systemic and generic but we haven't U really we haven't got too far on that but um the definitely definitely some uh great benefits to doing that because one thing for example is that um if you know who your squadmates are you
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you you can um you know who to call out for when for example somebody's gone down um you you will notice if they're missing if if you're they're walking around a level and that that the response doesn't come back that kind of stuff and get that more systemic behavior from some of the stealth sections as well and I'd like to see that more in St as well so yeah it also becomes important with the uh organization system as as the organization reputation system gets further developed in Star Citizen uh we talked about that a lot with with pyro like a lot of the you know they are going to be NPC you know people at Rough and Ready and stuff like this and and you know as you kill them or attack them and stuff your reputation with them starts to go down and they become more aggressive and
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stuff so there there there should of course be opportunities where you can you know assault one in private and you know nobody finds out but there should also be situations where you know they get off a radio message before you kill them and you know you take the necessary rep hit and stuff like that so there's all kinds of implementations for that radio uh transmission ability as far as the Pu goes that wouldn't necessarily be necessary in Squadron but that's I think in general like the communication we do have the communication just uh like in terms of feature right because I think right now if they find a dead body right they would go investigate they will call out like you know even if it's not by radio they will still call out the other ones and that calling out is the one that you know basically allow them the other guys to be uh attracted by the fact that something happened yeah or for
00:34:06
example we do have you know hearing Friendly Fire and stuff like this and these things also propagate correctly through the audio propagation that I think we maybe spoke about at certain point you know but we do have like the basically the audio perception on the eyes side now does respect the the audio propagation I don't I don't know Jared if you remember if it's already in season right now or not but is definitely like one of the things that would carry on will bring in the in the next releases and it's like we can really say like you know this the rooms you close the door the audio doesn't propagate there you know so the guys you can kill somebody in a you know one enemy in a room that is closed and maybe even if he screams or something like this if the environment is you know doesn't allow audio to to propagate then the other ones won't be alerted and if you know the door is open they might hear it and so on and so on so I think
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this is actually um really interesting you know in terms of the type of uh mechanics and you opportunities that that he opens up for the players yeah uh Captain Ro R reld reld reld I don't know uh says won't uh rest and relax and others have CCTV recordings that they can watch later I mean in the fiction of the of the verse yes but it's a question of resources and development do you want you want do we want to spend our time creating a internal CCTV system than a place where NPCs are standing looking at it and watching it and reviewing it or would we rather you know get all the other things we need NPC's doing you know working better uh but you know radio communication like what we're talking about you know can simulate those kinds
00:35:39
of things and stuff so I I I think we've addressed the need there's a need to be able to communicate beyond what can immediately be seen or heard uh in certain situations but you know when the time comes but but the yeah there are like these things that you're describing J is correct right that you want to simulate some of those things you know not necessary like in the type of details but they give you the impression that you have exactly you don't actually build a CCTV system and have NPCs there watching monitors and you know perception qualities you know what are they seeing stuff like that but but there are ways to to give you that that type of feeling that you know the game play will will resembl that yeah uh what's next will there be a system for NPCs dropping their guns and
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surrendering if they are in a situation where they clearly cannot win uh surely they would value their lives right that's the question what you got who wants to go first go go ahead Andrew yeah this is something that we've we've already worked on um for squadron um definitely surrendering um we we definitely need a little bit more polish on on all of the the states that has got got for them so civilians people without weapons should immediately run away and cower and hide um and then if if if if they're a a combat a combatant then they should and they run out of ammo then they will um look first look for other ammo if there's if there's any available and
00:37:16
after that they should run away and hide until there's basically no com combatants left in the the current current fight situation and when that happens then they they can go into this um this uh surrender Behavior where you'll either be able to do another stealth take down or restrain them um one of the things that we have we haven't actually got that uh that flow some of that flow in uh sism because with the AI at the moment you have infinite ammo um and that the reason for that is because um we we've got the option to not have infinite ammo but it does require rebalancing quite a lot of the missions to put in ammo crates so that they've got the right amount of of ammo to be able to to do that but it's definitely something the load outs as
00:38:05
well for the existing so that's that's the the process that we will go through right I think there's also like the fact that obviously when they draw they will drop the weapons if they surrender as the you know not sure what ask the question but you know what what was mentioned and basically I think what they will also do is like if you let them stay there surrender then you give you know you go far away enough then the might also try to find back some guns and you know start fighting yeah start fighting again yeah don't leave themed exactly so if you leave you know if they are enemies and you leave them you know just in the surrender State and you don't do you don't restrain them as you said and then the other NPCs can also unrestrained them if they find them restrained can try to revive them so this is all the flow that we do have but you don't yet all see that in Star citiz and per
00:38:56
se interesting to see when it's going to be there and you guys will will enjoy and will give us feedback all right nope no sorry I was just trying to cough coughing fit in the middle of your your thing I was just trying not to distract you so I was trying to C not cough ah it's all right if I have to go make it listening to Fran all right I'm good almost yeah I'm good okay I can talk at it is is this a demonstration of our the AI Reviving Behavior gonna come in somebody go to J no just m pen M pan I wasn't even I'm I'm just sitting here and all of a
00:39:45
sudden it's like the the whole respiratory system's like nope all right at least it brought more color to my face nav mesh let's talk about nav mesh when nav mesh was first introduced uh uh I'm just reading the question here it felt like lwh hanging fruit would be to add patrolling AI at the surface entrance to existing bunker sites uh but this never happened does planetary nav mesh not apply to existing asset or Mission locations um I think this a combination of stuff right so I think yes it does apply to all the locations so the way it works right now and we're finishing to to extend the last bit that we are missing but basically whenever you go on a planet it will just gener in a mesh uh on on specific restraint there are some
00:40:35
constraints right now and this is what we are trying to remove that it will generate across the whole the full surface of the planet but the issues this is the combination with the behaviors so what you need to build this Outpost with the for example the guards uh guard behaviors security behaviors you need to have the information about what does it mean patrolling for example so what this usually works is this is this pipeline that we are finishing to enforce and you know the the structure that we want to build for for the new Outpost and from there we apply to the old ones as well is that we want to have all this information ped on this also connects with the population manager that we want to build you know how we populate the environment automatically based on what can be done and so on and so on but the idea is like when you want to have a guard right the guards can have uh for example right now the
00:41:23
Securities can have multiple things that they can do could guard allc they could Patrol they could you know uh react in specific ways and so on and so on to do so it requires to be spone and request for designer to explain what what we want from the guards otherwise they will try to see if they find a uh patrolling part that is similar to what you guys see is in the ugf when the enemies they kind of run a sort of similar uh guard behaviors uh they try to find a patrolling part in the ugf and they go around or if they don't find it they try to move around here and there this is what you usually see and I think the moving random is the one that I personally hate the most because obviously it doesn't really sell what they're trying to do right it's the one that my my my classic sentence is if they trying to do some random stuff
00:42:12
that's what they will sell they will say that they're doing random stuff is not going to be really interesting um and this I think why why you guys feel that some of the situations don't have this guard patrolling it's just because basically the the Barb is not yet outo to sell the right experience right some of the old ones but the N is there you can fight with those guys and you know they they they will fight with you and so on and so on um obviously we are aware of some of the um problems that are there that you guys have are experiencing some situations for example we have been looking at on polishing some of the experience right now when you go on some specific Outpost where there are neutral faction where you can kill them there are like you know some Edge uh cases on on what's and what's not right now for example what does he mean when you when you can kill from a
00:43:02
mission perspective somebody that is neutral or they are a guy supposed to still react to you go on with their lives because they know there are some criminals around them and well Bounty Huns are going to come and just kill them because that's the Bounty they want right so if unless you bother the other ones they you know the guys don't get bothered these all stuff that we are iterating and with SAR CM being a in development game you know and constantly updated games sometime you get partial version of that one right and there are still a little bit of uh of things that they're not very nice from our perspective either right but I think it's nice that you guys can start to experience what we want to have uh eventually okay but yeah I think basically like you can have we can have it from Tech perspective that's what you will all have um we've been improving a lot of the navigation links as well uh
00:43:52
right now for example we been uh getting the full support for uh ladders the new ladder systems that the actor team has also been working on so that we can fully have yeah eyes using ladders using IR loocks uh you know and all these additional things that allow the eye for example to leave an outpost and go on the planet as well right this is exactly the reason why we wanted to have the planet navigation mes going in the same structure of the regular exported Nesh because then all these other systems work out of the box you can do all this stuff right you can land a ship and have people Le ship I um you included this why does Miss Babbage have NPC reactions to weapons and
00:44:39
violence you put this in yeah yeah I put that on is the is the Hologram right yeah yeah basically this the funny bar because those things are actually Runing behaviors right so sometimes if you select basically I think it's going to be interesting like to explain a bit how these things works right we have what we call call a master graft and the master graft is basically the flow of behaviors or activities so for example when we are when we have an MPC that that moves around and sit on a ship then he knows how to run Diego's Behavior right when when he fights when he sees an enemy he knows that he say oh I'm on a ship I'm I'm sitting you know on a on a pading ship so if I see an enemy that's how I fight if I'm on the ground that's how I fight and in every of those states he knows to which you know what are the things that are interesting you know for
00:45:27
him to react to so there are special masterr for specific situation like this one where you don't want them to react because they're not real characters but if you just me set up those and you set them up as regular characters then they will also react to those sort of things right and in addition to that I think what we had I think you some of you guys had like some really nice Reddit post on this one as well that were like the reacting for example to a m pen and getting scared or reacting to the multi tool and getting scared right is because obviously some of these things maybe you know we have a fix on the soron branch and didn't get it into Star season in time because you know we didn't we didn't no this uh the right time when you know before it gets released when it's in PTU and so on and so on and I think obviously there is these things that we want to expect such that designers can Define exactly what is
00:46:16
threatening right because in theory maybe the multitool can be threatening you could damage you right if you use it with specific modes should they know it should they not react when you have you know I don't know uh just a m pen in their hands yeah probably should not freak out if you just aim at them with a M pen uh but maybe they should have you know um if you have the multi-tool enable with the with the cutting uh the cutting tool then that one should be dangerous for other characters and should be worried but like should it be worried if you're just carrying a gun lowered well that might depends on jurisdiction right so there are some levels of polishing that we still we're still working on it because I would imagine like if you're ire with the gun lower well it's kind of accepted there but if you go around your babage with the gun lowered is still not accepted it
00:47:03
should still be scary for people to see you uh you know having a a gun uh in your hands yeah at the same time though now I'm now I'm Des I desperately want to go and Pitch to the mission team some bad actor that hacks miss the miss Babbage program and turns her into a Terminator EXA that's and has her attacking people and going wild like a rogue like a rogue AI you know attacking people the siege of new babage where it's just everybody versus a malevolent uh uh Anna I know she'd be holographic weapon and that's why she's scared because she's running away from something that only can damage Holograms yeah I know Anna would be down we'll
00:47:52
see we'll see how badly the mission team laughs at me they don't laugh at nice it's nice to add those question you heard from my perspective because it's kind of Interest like if I when when I was just playing games before joining the industry these are type of things that I would really be interesting in uh interested in knowing why that why they happen right and now behind the scene things work I don't know yeah well AI is I think we've I think we've talked about this before there there's you know obviously there are a lot of buzzwords around Star Citizen stuff Fidelity and and and and and whatever but uh uh uh immersion is is one of those forever ones you know it it immersion forms everything we try to do regardless of what it is but whereas immersion is this sensation that's built by everything
00:48:39
around you it's built by the quality of the art it's built by the the the Fidelity of the VFX and stuff like this AI is one of those is is is I don't know it's got this special place in this because every we can accept we've all played video games going back to the N64 to the Super Nintendo to the Atari 2600 like VAR various levels of graphics and stuff we we can suspend our disbelief easy with bad Graphics or stuff like this but when characters behave the way we don't expect them to that's one that's one of the biggest things that pull us out of it it's it's just it's always interesting to me that of everything that contributes to an immersion and everything does Pro there's probably nothing that does so so more that's
00:49:27
that's more critical to a true sense of immersion than the AI how do you how do you we're we're nearing the time we've got some time for some more questions but how do you guys deal with that responsibility am I right am I talking out of my ass right now if I'm like no it's not important am I right and if it is how do you deal with that that pressure in your work I think I think this this I think you definitely are right and I think there's a lot of of things there one is that we are bringing together lots of different game systems so we have we're we're working with with all of those things we're working with the graphics we're working with animation we're working with the effects are working with the sound design and all of those things so that so it's it's a Nexus point for a lot of other people's Tech to to all make it work um but also you're right that that
00:50:17
you can notice uh things in gameplay a lot um where when you don't forgive somebody not doing the right thing a lot more than um in on a lot of systems and I think a big part of that is kind of telegraphing what the the AI is doing in the right way um making understandable choices and and that's one of the things we've seen with the um the issues with AI is not reacting um in uh the bugs that we've been fixing recently is that not necessarily they they were doing they were doing they thought they were doing the right Behavior because it wasn't understandable and readable to the player that that it looks wrong wrong and it immediate looks wrong no matter how clever that behavior might be um and so that's that's definitely something that we we've been working on
00:51:05
a lot and one of the areas where we we're kind of focusing on is um you you you code your your AI for a kind of very um known situation and then designers and and level artists and all of these people come up with wonderful ways to test testing things and situ situations you hadn't um imagined when You' first started writing the code and so one of the things we've been working on a lot is adding in lots of fallback cases so oh what if I don't have a nav mesh in this particular situation what should I do instead what if I um what if I have no target but there's this person who's shooting at me in front of me um and they can react to kind of maybe not
00:51:55
necessarily bugs but other little other little mishaps in a much more sensible readable way that's understandable to the player and that that gives that much more um uh that you're not going to notice much and you get you're going to sometimes think that they're they they sometimes we go the opposite way and they then they seem to be too efficient and they can they can be uh attacking the player too often and oh no they know too much youve got to dial it back back again again so it's uh yeah it's a it's a delicate balancing Balancing Act what he's saying Andrew there about being them too efficient that's something that we were when we were making the fly AI I was playing with yogi the player experience theme and you know we were learning how we were
00:52:42
playing against each other and I came up with a prototype right and the first prototype that I made I think my AI just destroyed them all uh it was too good um and it's those things that is sometimes a hidden Miss and we keep playing to making sure that it actually feels uh good uh not not as good as being a killing machine but you know good enough that it's a good challenge Yogi is not that good though but they killed him or they killed you I mean we can't we can say he not here right we can say we can say it clearly right yeah he he knows I mean there's no there's no secrets between us and Yogi Yogi is bad but don't say that to him okay no no I mean we we keep it for for us only yeah three and J Bic that's that's just
00:53:31
where he stays just putting teams on do not disturb right now did you get already a mess no I'm not here I'm not here but I think like in addition to that I think like basically one important thing is I think we do we do feel the pressure of trying to give this experience to the players right and I think we do want I think what's what's hard in development and I think this is where the the you know the the realties sometimes comes into place that you need to choose between sometime focusing on the long-term goal or the shortterm goal right so you know that some bikes might be also things that you might fix later because you you know you have it planned and obviously from the way we develop the game and the way we share in the game is that you often can see much more than what players would usually see in in a normal development flow right that
00:54:21
is like you you do it close doors for so long that you only see uh when things are are working well um so from us I think there's also know sometimes the frustration of saying like I wish you know I could have just cleaned up this a bit better or been focusing more on uh this other bag or this other experience that the entry was saying or you know the balancing that die is also talking about right and and I think obviously we do have the the the great advantage on the other side that is how you guys can experience stuff that is not finished and we can get much earlier some of the feedback and yes some stuff might already be in uh planned but some other stuff might actually be really good to get that feedback right and the type of of um yeah of of changes that can you know we can push based on stuff that we might have not considered you know so I
00:55:09
think the advantage the disadvantage as well but it's definitely good to have this this opportunity from our perspective as well okay uh we got five minutes there there are three more questions I want to squeeze in if if you don't mind going a few minutes long uh I'm asking you live on screen so you can't say no without sound like a jerk um the first question uh comes from Rand print in the chat will we ever see NPCs writing trams ever again yes um we do have that functionality in we need to bring it to Star season as well we need to make sure that all you know the the setup is correct for the TRS that we have but basically the NPCs can understand uh transits they can understand to wait for the transit to arrive drive and they can
00:55:57
use it to travel from to location that are that are existing or another approach that we want to use for the transit is also as a sort of somean closets when publish needs to come in and out of the environment we can use them to stream in and out NPCs out of the environment and the all the basic Tech is there basically yes yeah uh second question this goes a bit to the balancing so obviously we talked about you know making NPCs too capable not that that's all there like in the moment and stuff there's a couple questions this list I'm just going to combine them into one that has to do with NPC's being able to use technology things like radar scanning and stuff like that what how how do you uh what What's the pro what's the process What's the progress for that can or do AI use scanners to see through walls or radar to detect
00:56:48
ships from far away do they have access to the same technologies that the players do does and and if so how the hell do you balance that that so in terms of uh radar I can speak for the ships but yes the AI just uses the radar component as you know the one that the playist uses in the ship uh so um yeah just got those you know depending on the ship that you the AI is flying you have those radar capabilities based on the balance of that ship I want to use the same on FPS as well because I think you know they will be Cactus obviously the balance is through the trades that we we've spoken about and the the you know uh the fact that they do have like their load outs or you know the these these items first of all so
00:57:36
for example if we keep an FPS Cactus with the with the radar you can also decide from the sign perspective if they want them to use it or not first of all obviously the ship is a bit special because ship versus ship you have to use the rer but basically the the perception system from the eye can be extended on the different senses as we call it the radar is one cense and the behavior has already specific notes that allow them for example to Ping through the Rader and the other thing that we want to do is to react to be pinked uh and also in that case basically depends first you will react if you're pinked if you do have a radar that notifies you of being pinked and we can also say like maybe there are some easier missions or you know with the balance of the of the game play Flow
00:58:23
that we want that we can say that okay but those guys should not react to be pinked but it should be able to Pink So that you can also have an experience where we can also use the ey to train because this is the other part of of game mechanics that is important right you want to use the ey to also teach mechanics to the play so you can say okay now we make you a mission where the I can ping you but you know you're safe to Ping yourself so they can still kind of learn that that mechanics and they as the player we use the exact same item so the I can say want to being very quick you know I want to being very long so they can be detected and we can absolutely control this one and what this does it just updates your perception so that I can basically uh know the snapshot of your position from that we don't really cheat on the ey perception right so we have the Vision Audio uh you know radar sense and and
00:59:12
and pinging uh updates basically I think there are several levels of that as well with the AI that one of the levels is oh well they'll just know that they've been pinged and um so they'll suddenly they'll change alertness state and maybe go hunt for you and another one and the the higher up level is that they will be able to kind of pinpoint where you are and immediately go to you like oh I've been detected uh last question and then I'm going to do one more thing after that because it's my show and it's the last one of the year uh last question and you you put this in here so it's your fault um friend you were at citizen gone uh as they were wait as we were waiting to start the first day um a not insignificant amount of people uh in the
01:00:00
audience decided to stand up on their chairs and toos uh you've been doing this for a while now with start citizen how does that make you feel when you when when you see that is this something you can laugh at is this something that drives you crazy I know I know I think it's the joke that we need to take right uh on our way but also I know that the community is always you know very supportive with that and stuff like this and I think as we explained I think the the same the chair is kind of fun one because well similar to the SL reaction in some situation is that there are bugs that people perceive as one bug but often those are caused by a lot of different issues that you know you might fix one and then it works and then there's another issue that comes in
01:00:47
right it can be setup issues it could be um you know a change on the server mesh that we just made and now the the value of the of the chair that you should be sitting in it doesn't get restored correctly and this is where you know you see it majority the time that we see right now right is is due to the streaming in and out that when they restore they don't connect correctly for different reasons to the last known usables that were attached to and this could be maybe because get stream out in the in the way of attaching to the usable so it's just a touch you know it didn't get store that value in and we need to reproduce that one and make sure that that one doesn't happen again and so on and so on I even had a s moment some code that was actually meant to rep patch all the situations so you would not see it but my take is at this point
01:01:37
in time for the project it's more important that we figure out and we found all those bugs and all those edge cases compared to hi them just to you know show necessary always the good experience and obviously yes we want to have you the good experience but want to be the real experience right because if we hide right now a bug it might buy us back later on in a really hard way because we didn't you know fix it properly at this time so I think we chapos is chapos becomes this big flag hey there's something here that that you need to address you could turn it off actually it's also fun that I think people also connect a lot this standing on the share with the toos but they're not necessarily connected sometimes I think the toos I see it you know we still have some situations where you see it moving from Far T posing you know because there are some issues and we have you know for example right now we
01:02:24
were looking with know some of the guys in the tech team Andrea as well he was looking at some situation where the lightweight update was called in the wrong moment you know we we're investigating that and I think this is where we see dep it means something is not updating on the character animation side right for different reason it might be you know they get stuck in some State on the you know the manin side that doesn't update or there's some animation wrong set up or the the actor things you know the actor code things there not updating or the high is playing wrong animation so you might see thees in this situation but not necessar connected with the standing you know so you see sometime standing and they just look their M Glass because they're just iing and so yeah and you wouldn't want to change it like Chad is sitting here saying well you could just change the default thing to be sitting and but that would hide the problem and wouldn't find
01:03:13
the that's what I'm saying it's the standing on chairs of the toot is the big flag that tells you there's something needs to be fixed so if you hide it by changing the default to be something that is less conspicuous then these bugs just persist and they just and I think there is one thing that is also important really because is that internally in our builds this is not that simple to reproduce like it's really hard for our QA guys to actually make guys standing on the chair internally this is why it's so important for us to also have it live as a um as a final effect because if we don't find it find it there uh it's it's it's really hard to reproduce it internally as well I think some some of this combination is low FP yes with the streaming in you know is is is really like stressing out the servers and the code so that you
01:04:01
know we can figure out when things are still broken in some some situations okay uh well that's it for the questions guys congratulations thank you for doing this uh Before I Let You Go I want to pitch you on one thing I I want to pitch you something so we talk about all these AI attributes I wasn't playing this this just came up during the show you know you know the good bad lazy whatever like this I mean obviously you know occasionally you want to sprinkle like a like a Red Baron just a super Ace who pops up every once in a while and can just obliterate everybody I want to pitch you the opposite end of the red barar and I want to pitch you the the the guy or gal who completely lied on their resume who has no business being there who's never picked up a P4 before just the random mercenary who's like I shouldn't be here I I I I I I answered a job at I I don't
01:04:50
I don't want to fight anybody I don't want to hurt anybody just basically the the the the the my producer Dave of people who would just stand there like I don't know what's going on as an attribute I think it's a really good idea you go go and hide in the uh in the engine room or something so i' i' send this suggestion to Zach right now yeah do you want to call that TR yeah uh you just call it David David you just call it David if you need his last name I'll let you know but it's just just just the absolute just I I don't want to do any of this it's just I don't know what's going on why is this happening to me I'm not even supposed to be here today just it should it should be rare you know just
01:05:37
like the Red Baron's going to be rare it should be like the rarest thing because it's going to look like a mistake but you know it's like no the mistake was you being there you being involved I'm just it's a it's a destroy David week did I tell you did you look at the card or Crush David it's a crush David we have a schedule we have a card for this week it's Crush David he didn't realize this was Crush David week uh thanks guys um thank you so much for taking the time out of the end of your uh week uh to be here uh enjoy your your holidays and uh yeah thanks everybody thanks guys um Everybody well I'm saying goodbye to you and then I want to say goodbye to so so switch to let them wave let them wave bye everybody bye guys happy holiday all right no we're not raing yet I was just hi
01:06:27
everybody uh it's me again uh this is the end of the year it's our last show for 20 uh what year is um that's why I have to make fun of you because my flaws are just out there for everybody to see um I just want to say thank you um uh the Evergreen team we never really identifi it the Evergreen team is the small team of of people who make the weekly recurring uh content for you we're not the the the fancy trailer people or whatever we're the people who make ISC and and for you [Music] um we're going on we're going on nine years now when we come back next year doing this stuff and it's just it's I just realizing as we're going in I got I
01:07:15
got the next 11 days off which is awesome and then I go to Disney World for like 17 days like i' got have like a month where I don't think about this place and think about the job and all stuff so be true vacation coming up but as I'm preparing for that this is my last day right now I just just makes me I just wanted to take a minute here and say I'm just really grateful that you guys let us do this uh that you guys tune in uh when you do um that you uh it's the only place in the world that would do weekly recurring behind the scenes uh uh docu content on Thursdays and then um whatever the heck this is on Fridays um so I'm just really grateful for the place and I'm really grateful for you for checking out and um yeah this is uh this is my way of saying uh this is it for me this is my last
01:08:08
show of 2023 just just I'm freaking him out I'm sorry if he freaked you out I'm just I was fre out thanks for watching Everybody H maybe this will be my last show after somebody watch that um we're going to do a raid uh you can start the raid now folks we're going to do a raid I believe it's of the people's radio uh let's see what what did they write for me the people's radio provides players with news and music Across the verse you can even propose your own Creations to be published on that V radio so uh uh uh yeah you can check that out and uh we'll see you uh we're back like January 25th so we'll be back uh I'm G to enjoy my month I hope you guys enjoy your month too so take care uh for Dave and Tom and Pete and will
01:08:55
and other Dave and Alex and mercy and Casey and Luke uh Charlotte uh I'm Jared thanks for watching the stuff that we put out everybody and we'll see you next week next year just go for

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