CitizenCon 2951: Systemic Gameplay - Stream of Thought

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   Hi, I'm Tony Zurovec, director of Persistent Universe for Star Citizen. Today, I'm going to tell you about some of the new technology, features, and content that we're aiming to deliver over the next several quarters, and how these things are going to impact your gameplay experience. To assist in that endeavor, I brought along a few others to give you some additional perspective, including SGS assistant director Rob Runinger, senior systems designer Ben Dorsey, and over in the UK, lead designer Luke Presley. Rob, we've been able to buy and sell commodities for years, but we're now looking to try and close out the entire loop by the end of the year by allowing players to sell weapons, armor, clothing, and eventually ships back to the shops. One of your favorite aspects of this has always been what it means to treasure. Can you elaborate a bit on

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   that? I think it's huge, because now it gives me a purpose to go out and collect the stuff, because players are very meticulous. They'll go out and pick up every single gun, weapon, armor off of other players. Like, loot generation is something that the Frankfurt team is working on. Uh it means a lot for, you know, investigating lockers or just stripping down something. We talk about salvage. You know, these are all things that we're working towards the ability to buy and sell items, but most importantly, it's just carried in your inventory, right? It's It's getting rid of the stuff. It's another form of reward. So, I think it's a huge addition to the game. Sure, it also plays a big role in character advancement, right? Because you can realize the equity from items that you've purchased in the past. In other words, I I buy a particular laser rifle. Now, I decide that I want the better one. I don't have to buy that one

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   starting from scratch. I can actually sell my original one, assuming it's in pretty good shape, and I basically pick the optimal shop at which to sell it. You know, that's a you know, a shop that deals in that specific item. Then, I can actually get a pretty good price for that used item. I can then take that money and apply it and, you know, the differential towards moving up the ladder and basically getting better and better stuff. And so, just like in the real world, it's like you don't usually start from a you know, from scratch and buy, you know, buy a house and then basically, you know, have to you know, buy another one from scratch. You basically take your, you know, realized equity in your original, and you throw it into the other one, and you just pay the difference. Yeah, and that's something that we don't have in the shops right now. Everything is is in the shop on a per item basis. And items sometimes come with default loadouts on them, like a sniper rifle or a set of armor or uh ships are a great example of

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   something that comes with a default loadout of certain laser cannons and power plants and etc. So, as we go forward with selling, one of the things that we want to do is get an itemized price for every single attachment that's on an item, which includes laser scopes, magazines, uh any underbarrel attachments, right? Things like that. So, now that these have their own individual price, it's much easier for us to want to tune the economy. So, now it's this thing is more expensive or less expensive. As stats change, we can we can keep up with the the statistical improvement of the item on a per item basis. Sure, you have the macro item that consists of the child items. We change the price of the child item and the you know, the macro item, the the larger item that includes, you know, various quantities of this, its price is automatically adjusted, which is not

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   something that happens now and causes us countless problems. Yeah, and and it means that now we we have less moving parts to to worry about on a on a global basis. And from a what is a world uh have for sale in it. You know, you talked about, you know, taking something to a shop that deals in those items. That's It's kind of the concept of well, this shop deals in it and they refurbish it. They have an invested uh value in procuring those things back from people in the universe. So, we want to encourage players to go around to the different places that have the best price for it. Mostly like commodity trading, right? We want players to go here because they can buy it for the best price, go here because they can sell it for the most money. Uh same principle for selling items, right? So, this shop deals in it. You should be

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   able to go there and get more money for it. Sure, and we and we need this more, you know, sophisticated method of determining the pricing of the more complicated items that are composed of lots of child items, partially because of what it means to selling. In other words, I when I go to sell my, you know, my my pistol, I may have a custom scope on it, something for which we don't have a specific entry in our, you know, global retail products list and that says this item should, if it were new, cost this much. This winds up becoming something that where we've sure, we've got the base price of the pistol, and we've got the base price, you know, of you know, of the scope, but we don't have any sense of what the combination is. As of right now, we don't have a means of solving that. And so, this is this is why we, you know, we are going to be pursuing changing even how the shops specify their default, you know,

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   inventory. Like right now, we actually have shops They have individual items that they can sell, as opposed to where we're going is it'll be classes of items. This, you know, this particular shop deals in, you know, in in small handheld weapons and, you know, from this particular manufacturer. Now, because they actually deal in small handheld weapons, they will in fact purchase, you know, small handheld weapons from a different manufacturer. You just won't get, you know, quite as good a price because they're not as adept at repairing them and they don't have a clientele that's, you know, that's geared towards purchasing those items, etc. You If you wanted to realize, you know, the best possible price, then you would wind up taking your, you know, your your specific, you know, items to a shop that dealt in those specific things. And that's where, assuming the condition was perfect and

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   assuming that the shop had a lot of cash on hand with which to procure these deals, and so was willing to be a little bit more liberal, that's where you could potentially recoup, you know, 70, 80, you know, 85% of your original value. Whereas, if you go to someone that simply, you know, sure, they you know, they deal in small arms, but not necessarily that, you know, that particular manufacturer, not, you know, that particular caliber weapon or whatever the case may be, then maybe only get 40 or 50 cents on the dollar. Exactly. It's like when you're dealing with a car dealership. Like, if you bring them their their brand of car, they're going to pay you more for that than if you brought them something else. for them to service. Their mechanics are already familiar with it. They can do the work at cost. it. Yeah, exactly. Totally makes sense. It's It's big, and it's something that it just feels natural, right? It's how the world really works, and we want to continue to to push that forward. 3.15 is a huge update to the game

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   because of the localized inventory that's going to totally change the game. There are several aspects to this, and that starts with, I'd say, the personal inventory manager that Rich Tyrer and the actor feature team have put so much work into. They're going to cover that in a separate discussion, so we'll leave that out of, you know, out of here. Um on over on our side, we've got the vehicle loadout manager, which has been adapted to allow only allow you to modify vehicles that are in your immediate vicinity. And then, we've also added a new mobiGlas app called Knickknacks. Um Runinger, so you've spent the last couple of quarters heavily focused on this. Go ahead and walk us through what's changed, starting with the front-end menu. Yeah, so the front end, we've historically allowed players to kind of go wherever they want, right? But, as we move forward with the game and the new player experience, we want players to be invested in their home location. So, it's it's more of

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    selecting a home base, because the inventory that you have at the start of your account that's entitled, you know, through all your web purchases, through whatever, you know, subscriber flares, etc. All of this stuff is going to go to that location as it's physicalized in the world. So, now you have a home base of operations. That's your place. As we explore out throughout the universe, you may move some of that stuff to a new place as you get persistent hubs here, a new hub over there, persistent hanger, right? Uh players are going to be tangibly going up to, interacting with their their weapon rack, interacting with the stuff in their ship. And so, localized inventory is a massive change to how they've dealt with the game in up till now. Uh gone are kind of the days of this global inventory that you can go and and interact with anywhere in the

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    universe. If your stuff is at MicroTech, you need to go to MicroTech to do it. If it's in this hanger over here, you got to go to that hanger. So, we want players to feel the the pressure of prepping for a trip, right? It's It's as you go out, and this is the mission I'm going to do. This is what I need to go and do that mission. So, I want to go here, get this, get this, or maybe go to a shop here and buy that. Uh and so, the front end is going to be the the first step in kind of planting your seed uh wherever it is in the universe from the very start. So, what about the Knickknacks app? So, this this allows you to basically, in its first incarnation, to see where you've placed all of your loot throughout the entire solar system. It works on a hierarchical basis. So, you can drill down into a particular planet, see, you know, the city. At the city, you can basically see

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    what ships you have stored there. You can look within your ship and, you know, eventually see, you know, what cargo grids and, you know, what what, you know, storage closets you have within there and what items you have placed within there. You've also got a number of filters that allow you to quickly drill down through your entire inventory and find, you know, all the, you know, the laser rifles or whatever else it is that you're, you know, specifically searching for. Can you just, you know, walk through that in a little bit more detail? As we kind of go into the localized inventory, the the VMA can only act on the ships that are at that location. Uh the you kind of lose perspective of the global view, because the personal inventory manager that the actor feature team has done has removed the PMA, which was also your kind of uh global view into your personal items. So, the Knickknacks app allows you to kind of see where your stuff is distributed around the world at the individual location level. So,

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    whether it's in a ship or in a hab or in a hangar, Uh right now the locations are are basically cities or stations, pretty much any place that has a shop that sells items, that can be some place where you can store stuff. So, the the ships also have their local inventories associated with them, so you can store things in the ship. And the the NikNaks app is is good because now you if you want to find laser rifles, you've got you can search by type or or subtypes. Basically the the same things that you see in the shops, so the categories that you see in in a shop UIs. That's the same level of of interaction and and filtering that you'll have in NikNaks. We've spoken a bit about how it's going to evolve in the future and what new capabilities we would wind up adding to it. You know, trading you know, with other players is one of the things that's at the top of the list. Yeah, right right clicking on something being able to say, "Hey, open a trade

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    window with with Ben here. I want to be able to show me on the star map where this is." So, something that we want to do in the mobile glass as a whole is context ability to bounce to different apps that are are you know, contextually relevant to whatever you're currently using. So, Like saying this is in this location when that's just a string, like it's in Olisar. That's not super useful. Seeing that on a map, that tells me something. That tells me I need to go from here to here. I need to plot this location. I'm going to go through this dangerous area to get there in order to access my stuff. Or or a hyperlink on that. Yeah, and and you can also very easily discern you know, distances and stuff, which is well, this one's not here, but is it relatively close or is it really really far away? And I need to be able to obviously you know, put that into my planning. Yeah, or set a route to see how much

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    fuel I'm going to use, right? There's a lot of different reasons why these things are are kind of relevant. We want to try and preserve all those elements that CR really wants to push towards, but still give you the context switching that you're going to need. Another area that's currently under heavy development is physicalized cargo. It consists of multiple facets and will be released in stages with the first one relating to shop purchases injecting physical entities rather than what I would call render proxies into your ship. This is going to convey all sorts of benefits and advantages you know, to the gameplay experience. The first and one of the most obvious is simply the fact that now that you've got a ship that has physical entities placed within it, then when another player winds up disabling boarding your ship, they can

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    actually extract you know, that cargo from you. There's value there that they can actually take. Whereas right now, the only way to get that value is you have to you know, blow up the ship and then we basically you know, create you know, these these these cargo facsimiles that basically get blasted out into space and you have to go collect those you know, etc. And so, this starts to hint at things like you know, the fact that we're going to want to bring NPCs into defending these ships. So, all of a sudden you get this fantastic gameplay transition where I would say where you have ships doing this momentum based combat and now I can disable a ship, board it and I actually have to overcome the NPC crew and then physically grab the cargo, haul it back to my ship. At the same time you're concerned that while you're basically on

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    the ship and lugging this stuff around, that security or you know, allies of the ship that you've disabled might show up and start blasting you. And so, all of a sudden the considerations you know, just explode you know, for doing something so right now relatively basic. And it's it's one of the aspects that I really love of about this game, which is how we can add this low level gameplay mechanic and you know, in one shot it's going to totally transform so many different you know, elements of the game. And we get stuff like the Hull-C, which you know, is another hurdle beyond the physicalization of cargo. I think one of the things that that just physicalizing the cargo really does is it allows for the gameplay that CR wants where you're not blowing up ships, right? You're

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    destroying an engine, which is not a critical failure, right? Critical failures are the things that lead to these larger scale destructions, but on average you're knocking a ship out of commission. You're able to board, you're able to acquire the stuff. You're not killing everybody on the ship just cuz it it got taken down to zero health, right? Um so, the these are all things that just physicalizing the cargo allows us to do. You mentioned the Hull-C. So, the Hull-C has some unique challenges related to attaching physicalized cargo to it when you're actually you know, docked at a station or when you're you know, parked in a hangar and its wings are compressed. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, uh So, the Hull-C because it does have these two different states, now we have ATC considerations. If I have cargo on the outside of

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    my ship, my wings are exposed, now I can only go to a docking collar. I can't go to the hangar. So, the ATC needs to know to route you to these different locations. Uh showing all this cargo on the outside of a ship beyond you know, think of adding additional ships to an area and the kind of you know, slow down that you might see on a server, right? You're adding more physical objects that that that can be blown up, can be interacted with. So, there's a technical challenge that we need to overcome as well. Uh how they get on there, these these are shipping container sized objects that have a um real world weight to them. They need a tractor beam that that is large enough, probably on a Argo ship, right? So, you'll get these little transport ships going from a station's docking you know,

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    cargo bay, flying it out to the Hull-C and stay you know, think of it as a person walking in and out, but it's it's on a you know, spaceship scale. Another thing that's really bothered me for quite a while is what I'd call the lack of transactional friction. And what I mean when I say that is that it takes the exact same amount of time to load or unload one unit of cargo on your ship as it does a thousand or ten thousand. There there's no friction you know, in this process. And that's completely different from the real world where mom and pop retailers and major port facilities you know, designed to rapidly load or unload you know, cargo onto you know, some big you know, you know, freight ship are able to move you know, much much larger quantities in a much much shorter period of time. And you've got skilled dock workers that you know, you can

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    actually hire. They're trained to basically deal with special types of materials and all that sort of stuff. Where where we're eventually going with this is that shop purchases are going to inject physical cargo into a storage space and it's then up to you the player to basically move the stuff from that storage space onto your actual ship. And there are going to be I would assume that at this you know, point in time half of the people watching this are saying that sounds you know, incredibly awesome and the other half are saying this sounds incredibly tedious and it sounds like a lot of you know, force and you know, it's going to be completely you know, you know, you know, completely lacking in fun. There is there is a method to the madness. I mean, where we're going with this is we're going to make the concept of moving freight onto and off of ships not just a logistical

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    challenge, but we're actually going to make sure that you know, it's it's a fun you know, a fun experience. And this would include everything from eventually adding a service beacon so that you could recruit your friends, your org mates, you know, people you don't know to basically come and help you move cargo. We'll eventually add the ability for NPCs to be to be hired at that location and the price will fluctuate depending upon how many other players are requesting similar services. Um and you can use those you know, types of you know, you know, capabilities if you simply want to pay a certain amount, have your ship loaded or unloaded and you're going to go fly around and do something you know, completely unrelated. So, Dorsey, how is physicalized cargo going to impact the gameplay experience? I mean, in a bunch of ways. As you kind of touched on,

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    there's the whole concept of of needing to move cargo from one of those storage areas into that ship. We've actually run into a lot of problems where when you go across when you come across a derelict for instance, we have all these crates on there that you can offload in in a lot of the events that we've done. And that amount of time that it takes to do that makes it so that when you then go to sell those crates, they can't they aren't worth the time, frankly. Because it's exactly, it is so much faster to just park your ship and and click the button and have it instantly get filled and then drive over to another place and have it instantly be unloaded that we can't make those that that process pay well enough to also be balanced when you're getting 16 to 20

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    crates off of a ship and it's taking you half an hour to do that. But once you make it so that there is a much more similar timeline between those two, you can make it so that there's a much bigger reward on a crate by crate basis. And that allows us to make it so that derelicts become a lot more common and offloading stuff comes a lot more common. There's also just some really great benefits in that we can make missions reward you by putting cargo out there. Doesn't have to be that the UEC reward of a mission is is the only reward. This mission gives you 5,000 every single time. No, there's a ship that gets blown up or you blow up or disable a ship and especially disable a ship and then you can board it and take that cargo off. For pirates, that becomes then the goal. Like blowing up a ship now becomes almost a failure. You

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    don't want to. You want to disable it. You want to be able to get on it and then you want to take that cargo off. And of course, the crew is going to be fighting you the entire way there. They're going to have their their people try and fight off your boarding parties. You suddenly transition to into an FPS map by doing so, which is this really great transition that just doesn't really happen in a lot of games, and that's amazing. And even just from a a pure like gameplay system standpoint of of carrying that crate, that is a very powerful state for the player to be in and that they are vulnerable. You can't be shooting a gun and carrying a crate at the same time. That's actually my one of my favorite, you know, things about this entire process is the fact that we're finally going to reward the player and basically provide this differential in the challenges, you

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    know, to where we've long had, you know, blow the ship up, the ship basically ejects some cargo, you you know, you tractor beam it up, and now you basically got your reward. But what it's missing is that that that transition from FPS moment from ship-based momentum-based, you know, combat to where, you know, you're shooting your big guns at these things, etc. And now you're sneaking around corners, and you may or may not try to be stealthy, and you're basically trying to extract the cargo out, and the crew's basically, you know, coming out of the security areas of the ship and patrolling for you and trying to, you know, stop you. got friends trying to protect each other, too, while the other people are trying to move stuff, right? And tractor beams are based on weight, so it may take multiple people to actually move a heavier box. And CIG wants the the gameplay experience to be less ships blowing up, more this ship got disabled, the engines go out, and unless there's a

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    critical failure, the ship doesn't explode. So the opportunity to board a ship will be more common as we move forward. Well, there's one other thing I wanted to talk about in this area, and that's you've you've heard me you know, talk about this, you know, often, which is eventually I want the whole transport occupation to kind of revolve around what I call like a hub and spoke model, to where you've basically got, you know, big port facilities that are specifically designed to provide the the quantity of inventory and the, you know, and and and all of the infrastructure to quickly get that stuff on and off certain ships. Um as opposed to small mom-and-pop retailers that are really just intended to deal in a very small number of items. And one of the more significant problems we have in the game because we don't yet have, you

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    know, that level of realism is related to we've got a we've got a small, you know, we've got a small mom-and-pop retailer, and we need to have a decent amount of inventory so that it can satisfy demand across potentially a hundred different players all grabbing theoretically, you know, one or two or three items. But what happens in the real game right now because there are none of these limitations, there's none of this transactional friction is is one big ship comes up, and it purchases all 300 of them because because it takes absolutely no time to do that. It then flies to a destination, and it immediately sells it, and it collects, you know, only the slimmest of profit margins, but because there was no no loading time, there was no unloading time, they can still turn around and make a fairly, you know, good return on the amount of invested time, you know,

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    they put into it. And turning all of this cargo into physicalized entities and basically adding these logistical challenges to where you have to move stuff on, move it off, you know, you have to be more careful with volatile cargo, bigger, you know, crates will require, you know, Argos to move them or cranes or forklifts or whatever the case may be. All of this is ultimately going to push players into being more selective about where, for whatever they're trying to do, what types of shops and stuff they're going to visit. And what you're going to get is just like in the real world where you'll have supertankers bringing oil from across the ocean and basically parking it at some sort of port facility for offloading, and that will then be transported by, you know, whether it's pipelines, by rail, you know, by those types of things to

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    to distribution outlets. And from there it'll be picked up by trucks and transported to the local gas station. And from the gas station, that's where you, the end consumer, can expect to buy six or 12 gallons of gas. But in the real world, you can't, you know, drive your truck up to, you know, a port refinery, you know, on the coast and basically, you know, request, you know, five or 10 gallons of fuel. It's like they they only deal in minimum quantities of 10 or 100,000 or 500,000, you know, barrels of fuel. And this will be the same thing that we're going to eventually, you know, support on our side to where if you've got one of these big, you know, whole sea ships and stuff, there will be specific locations where, you know, we're we're trying we're we're we're really basically pushing you to do your business. It doesn't mean that you can't go and park in a small place. It's like I can have a

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    supertanker, and I can go I can go park on the side though, right? Cuz you do have the docking collar restriction on on the whole sea type ship, right? And but I think this is what the going to the per box model will actually do for us because we can just make those small mom-and-pop shops only have the smaller volumes of of commodities, right? You you talked about how if you can only upload unload and offload one box at a time, I'm not going to do a caterpillar there. Like there's nothing stopping you, but there's something stopping That's the thing. If I have if I if if my if if my ship holds 10,000 units of inventory, and I don't have any of the automated stuff and this you don't have enough dockworkers. I can't hire at this place, there literally aren't a hundred NPCs or 500 NPCs that I can hire for any amount of money. They're they're literally just not there. Then you're going to have to do it yourself, or

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    you're going to have to request some friends to help you. And it's simply too tedious. It's not that you it's not that we literally prevent you from basically going there and extracting the material, it's that it's simply not going to be worth your time. You're going to have to invest so much time and effort into doing that that all of a sudden you would need an astronomically high profit margin. And long before the profit margins on that particular, you know, commodity or material get that high, someone else with a smaller, more efficient ship that can more, you know, effectively, you know, be loaded with a smaller quantity of stuff and navigate to somewhere, you know, to another small location to basically sell it, they'll wind up, you know, taking, you know, taking that material from that location. Which means for a cat like one of those bigger ships, like one of the whole series or something, you're going to

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    want to by just that nature go to a place that has a cargo elevator that can give you 20 giant crates at the same time. Yeah, that's that's that's what I mean. Because that's where you'll make that profit margin. infrastructure, like some places you'll have an elevator that basically gives you easy access to 10 crates at a time. And and a bigger facility will have 50, and a bigger one still will have 200. And this one will allow you to basically hire up to four NPCs, and one NPC can move, you know, 10 crates per hour. But you're going to be in competition with, you know, with that smaller NPCs with everybody else, so the price can get fairly high. And this other place will have up to 500 or 1,000 workers that you can hire. So it may still take, you know, it may take hours, but you have, you know, but that's only because you're, you know, loading 10, you know, 10,000 or 100,000 SCU of cargo, you know, in into your hold.

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    Another very interesting aspect of this is going to be that you're going to have relatively clearly delineated transport routes, supply routes within the system. And this provides us an awesome opportunity to more precisely tailor what types of challenges you should run into when you're basically moving a big freighter ship from point A to point B as opposed to this other location. In other words, if you think about, you know, pirates are trying to, you know, abscond, you know, they're basically trying to disable your ship and, you know, and and plunder it, take, you know, whatever valuable materials, you know, you have on board. But the types of ships that would be required to extract, you know, all of the fuel off off of a big massive freighter are clearly dramatically different than the

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    ships that would be needed to effectively and efficiently, you know, plunder a far smaller ship that deals in a totally different, you know, type of item or totally different, you know, and more limited quantity of items. And so we'll be able to more more accurately tailor the gameplay experience so that you get the kinds of challenges you would expect. Well, and I think by nature it just it'll it'll allow it to naturally separate, right? You because it's not worth it over here, and we can we can make those inventory volumes smaller to match the the type of people that we want frequenting those stores, I'm just not going to waste my time. As a as a large-scale shipper, I'm going to go to the bigger places I can handle that can get me in and out faster, that I can hire more people, where there's going to be other people there that I can potentially hire, like the service

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    beacon. It doesn't matter if I'm out in the middle of nowhere because nobody's there to come and help you. specialists. It's it's it's only at these select ports where they actually have trained dockworkers skilled in, you know, in in moving volatile cargo. And if you go to a place where you don't have it, and you have, you know, Joe, you know, you Joe average, you know, NPC try to do it, then you may wind up, you know, suffering the consequences of, oh, you lost your cargo, it was blown up, your ship was destroyed, you have to go to insure, you know, reclaim, you know, etc. etc. All because you basically tried to um you know, use a facility that was not appropriate for, you know, for the types of actions you were trying to do. tailored to it, right? So it's I think it'll be a good change for the game. The key point from my perspective though is as much as possible, we don't want to

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    initially make it black and white, right? Which is it's not that you literally, as the owner of a whole sea, you're not able to buy fuel here. It's more that you can buy it there, but it's going to, you know, if you're buying more than 10 or 20 units of it, it's going to be, you know, you're going to basically have to deal with the repercussions of trying to get all of that stuff onto here, and it's going to take a tremendous amount of time, and you're going to wind up having to pay an exorbitant premium because you're basically going to be depleting them of their entire, you know, inventory supply, etc. So it's really just, you know, the the the logistical challenges that you would face trying to exploit, you know, non-optimal locations for the unloading or, you know, for the loading or unloading of your cargo would simply not be worth it. I I think another good point is that as you as you push the inventory to its

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    limits, your bid ask spread is going to actually be going down as you you know, price per unit of the cargo is is going to diminish as you get closer and closer to the inventory limits. So, it's going to encourage you to go to places with those larger scale inventories so that you can keep your your profit margin as high as possible. We completed the basic foundation for reputation late last year and that followed that up in the first quarter with the release of the Delphi mobiGlas app that allows you to see exactly how different NPCs and organizations feel about you. This is a critical system within the game because it's the key mechanism by which you'll unlock more challenging and lucrative opportunities and gain access to organizations and areas that will bestow various benefits.

39. 00:30:42

    We're still missing a few key pieces of the puzzle though and can't yet fully exploit this system. So, over on the mission side, only the bounty hunting services give you a nice gradation of challenges at the moment offering you more interesting missions as you gain reputation with them. Can you go into a little bit of detail about why this is? It essentially whenever we want to make a new mission or even just a very small variant on a mission, it it requires an entirely new record, a new new chunk of data that we have to put into the system and that takes time to build out any kind of a ladder is is a an awful amount of time honestly. Some things that we want to do is just kind of make it so that some of that is more systemic and a little bit faster and by doing that we will be able to kind of explode wide making it so that we make one mission, one template and

40. 00:31:31

    then just give it some variables that have some ranges and and by doing so we can we can then allow it to almost generate its own chains of missions with difficulties that are driven by how much reputation you have and those can give you different amounts of rewards and spawn different amounts of enemies and put things at different distances etc. Just kind of dynamicizing that that mission variation. Yeah, and there's there's actually a lot to this, a lot of additional complication besides the mission itself because when you think about it, you may have a mission giver and the mission giver looks at your reputation and decides that he's only going to give you the junior starter missions. And so, he calls up the you know, go kill bad guys in this particular section and he basically says, you know what? Given your reputation, I'm going to assume that you can only take you know, a difficulty value of one and passing a difficulty

41. 00:32:18

    value of one into that mission will only create one or two guys and your reward will be you know, of a considerably lower rate than it would you know, than what it might otherwise be. As you do that mission, you build up reputation with him, all of a sudden he's passing you know, higher difficulty levels into that mission template and one one of the complicating factors that we faced is we need to be able to take this template and before we've actually instantiated it, before you've actually accepted it, we need to be able to extract information out of it and process that. What I mean by that is we need to know before we've created the mission how much money you should reasonably be paid in order to do this and we need to know if we need to have a sense of where this mission might actually take you and what the current status of that area is. Or is he sending you into an area rife with

42. 00:33:06

    pirates or is he sending you into an area that's you know, got tons of security and it's the safest thing in the world. Or an active supernova or like any number of things that are terrifying to go to. And and and this is this is part of the reason why we've actually made some significant progress on this particular problem, but there are multiple facets to dealing with it and I'd actually say that at this point we're in a relatively good you know, place on the on you know, on the on the underlying the dynamic mission side and we've still got a considerable amount of work to do over on the actual UI side to take a mission template, look at your reputation, create some proxy references to that mission template with different metadata associated and then assuming that you actually select option number three which has metadata this, then

43. 00:33:55

    we'll instantiate the mission, pass in the metadata so that it actually customizes it as appropriate for the selection that you were just you know, shown and you can then go off and execute that mission and you'll be paid the correct amount and you'll encounter the appropriate amount of difficulty for you know, for what you were promised and for what he thought you were capable of doing given your reputation level. Because we already do have in game something that players can kind of play with right now, the bounty hunter chain which is effectively what this will look like to players. It's just a matter of that took a lot of setup and now it should be something that we can pretty much like click a few buttons and we're good to go. That's exactly like in the end it's all about allowing you to as quickly and easily express a solution to the problem of I've got a mission giver. This mission giver is going to dispatch you

44. 00:34:43

    to deal with you know, with bad guys. The variables wind up becoming well, how many bad guys and how quickly are they going to reinforce themselves and are they going to be are they going to be flying capital ships or you know, little small hornets and what kind of stuff will they have on board and in what areas of the solar system you know, will this conflict be taking place. So, these are all things that we can bend as appropriate depending upon what you know, what we think you're capable of or what that NPC you know, would theoretically think you're capable of. Well, and we talked a little bit about the procedural character generation in the last USPC thing that we did on for Star Citizen Live, but that's going to be taken into account. The the back end is going to be generating more and more difficult NPCs based on the gear, based on the quality of the stuff that they can do, their behaviors. So, all that needs to get fed into the mission and become part of how

45. 00:35:30

    we reward the players and and enhance that experience, but these are all things that are going to be fed into the mission instead of just the static data that we kind of have right now. Like you you literally have to place nodes in the mission script logic that that says like spawn this kind of thing if we roll this and this kind of thing if we do that. It's just it's It's just time and and this is all data that that we as long as we can get it up front, we can pass that into the mission ahead of time and and actually show that in the mission write up. You know, it's like here's here's a mission that's going to take you here, who's offered by this guy, here's general rewards. Expect a medium level of resistance or this many hazards or Yeah, fundamentally that's why reputation is so important is it's it's your I I would say see how good you are then. It's it's it's the single most important means of progression within the game. Clearly you can you you can basically upgrade your character by buying different ships. You

46. 00:36:18

    can customize your ships. You can buy you know, different armor and weapons you know, for your character, but in terms of granting you you know, membership within an organization or access to areas you know, um you know, with with more or less hostility depending upon which organization you're a member of and you know, what your reputation is within there and how this character responds to you and whether they give you the you know, the super challenging and lucrative missions or the super easy things that basically just have you you know, doing you know, fiddly little stuff that anyone can accomplish because they don't yet know you and don't yet trust you. Um that's what the reputation system is all about. We we've got we completed the you know, as I said earlier, the basic system last year. We incorporated the reputation logic into the you know, the into the subsumption you know, mission and AI language. Um we got the Delphi apps so you can actually

47. 00:37:05

    see what your standing is with all these different NPCs and organizations. The one piece the you know, the key piece of the puzzle that we're still missing is the ability of the mission system to basically one, have the mission templates you know, created that actually take these inputs and then be able to feed them in and have it customize itself as appropriate and related to that is you know, and it's no small challenge. It is a fair is is going to be a fair bit of work to adapt the the UI to actually allow for this and that's you know, just just on a brief aside, one of the big task remaining on the on the USPC group for next year is going to be refactoring the entire mission interface and converting it from the old flash tech to the building blocks you know, tech and that's one of the reasons why we made some forward progress on this and then

48. 00:37:52

    we kind of like waited because anything that we would have done over on the flash side would have been throw away work and so we made the decision to basically wait to complete the last 25% of this particular puzzle until we had the correct you know, UI foundation in place which ultimately A, it'll make it much easier to implement these changes that I'm talking about and B, you know, we're not going to have to you know, design it, throw it away and then design it again. And it doesn't mean that the players won't be able to experience those changes in the game without the UI, right? That'll that'll still be there, but we'll be able to present that and and give you a better indication of how the mission's going to play out or what you're going to get as a result of the mission with that the new UI. And also to show you you know, missions that you don't have the reputation for. It's weird that how important that is,

49. 00:38:41

    but it actually is is vital that you be able to see like hey, I'm not actually with these people. They don't know that I'm that good of a cargo hauler, so they're not going to give me this super difficult cargo hauling mission. But you got to know what you're striving towards too as well, right? It's like I I I want to get better at this. I want to do missions with these guys because that's going to push me to go and get that one right there. That offers this much extra reward or this this membership here. And I I and I don't want I don't want to go into this. This is a this is like a No, I just mean that this this is a topic for another day, but I was just going to briefly mention it orgs, perks, benefits. So, we're talking about reputation and you can see your standing with you know, with different organizations with players and we will you know, at some point you know, next year you know, start to move forward with you know, with with when I say orgs, perks, benefits, you guys know what I'm talking about which is basically all of

50. 00:39:29

    the benefits that may you know, that may be conveyed upon you just as a result of being within this organization or having a certain level of stature within this organization. This may be anything from you know, expedited you know, ship deliveries, you know, after your ship gets blown up, you you don't have to basically, you know, pay a fee to basically, you know, get it as quickly as possible. That's automatically covered. You may get, you know, discounted prices at certain shops. Um you may, you know, simply not get a hostile response from pirates in this area if you're a member of, you know, of the pirates guild and things of that sort. And so this plays into what we're talking about here because you're able to look at an organization, you're able to understand what kind of benefits it conveys to, you know, its most exalted members and then you can decide whether or not you want to basically try to increase, you know, increase your

51. 00:40:19

    ranks, you know, within there. And you know, in in terms of doing that, the challenge is simply having enough mission variety and diversity to enable the player to feel, "Hey, I I started out, he didn't trust me, he gave me, you know, the real simple, not particularly lucrative mission, and I've been working on this for days and days and days, and I've been moving up in terms of the difficulty that I faced, in terms of the reward that I was offered, and finally I got to the promised land, and now I basically, you know, have membership within the organization, and now I can basically go to Grim Hex, and have no concern that, you know, the local, you know, pirate organization is basically going to assault me in the Turrets aren't going to shoot at you, etc. And importantly, like that is something that makes your character unique. In an MMO, it's very important that you bring

52. 00:41:06

    something to the table that other members of your your friend group might not have, frankly, or your organization. You have to come in and say, "Hey, I actually have access to this really cool mission or this really cool thing." And and by doing that, I can can make things cooler for my group, and we encourage that community play that is so vital. Yeah, that that actually brings to mind right now we have we've historically had this faction system that we used to determine hostility. It's it's it's always been it's it's it's always been one of these systems that we know we're going to change it. We know that it's not sufficient, you know, for where we're eventually going. Um it's just never Yeah, it's just it's it's just never it's never been a high enough priority. We're getting to the point where we're going to have to resolve this because the rest of the game is getting complex enough to where it's it's it's really starting to fray at the seams. So, earlier this year we released

53. 00:41:55

    the XenoThreat mission, and that was still entirely based upon the faction system of hostility. And that imposed a serious limitation in that while players could join up and basically fight on the side of the UE and try to repel the XenoThreat invaders, there was no real, officially sanctioned, you know, means of you joining the side of the bad guys, the XenoThreat. You could go shoot, you know, the players that were you know, supporting the UE. You could shoot the UE itself, you could get a crime stat, but the XenoThreat would still view you as hostile. They would still engage you, still try to kill you, etc. This was something that we got right up to the very end with Nine Tails, and it was driving you and I crazy, and we wanted to fix it. And we put in what equates to, I'd say, it's a temporary hack to where what we can

54. 00:42:42

    effectively do is allow a faction to override its normal, you know, dislike of someone in another faction based upon whether or not they have a particular mission token in their inventory. Well, it's if they're doing a certain mission at this time. And and that is honestly not how we want to do this long 100% So, so in this particular case, if you accept the support Nine Tails, you know, missions, then they would normally view you as hostile, but because you're holding that, you know, that token, that mission reference, they'll go ahead and grant you an exemption. But this is, it is clumsy, it was viewed as a a very temporary solution. The long-term solution that we've always discussed is going to a more reputational, you know, based uh you know, hostility system. Can you go into a little bit of detail about why

55. 00:43:30

    that's so important and what kind of additional things uh will be able to support in the future when we have such a a more flexible system? Sure. I mean, the the the why it's important is is fairly obvious. Like if I have to make sure that you have a certain mission in order to do something, then I can't say, for instance, you can't go to Grim Hex, I'm sorry. You're on the side of the police. Like they will shoot you. That is a problem. No right now like they are actually just civilians, so that they don't they don't care, essentially. Um if it's reputation, it's something that persists. Doesn't matter if you have a mission or not. You have done something that has made these people like or dislike you, and no matter where you go and what you do, unless that changes, they are going to attack you or not attack you, and you you can kind of count on that. Well, your actions have an impact on how the world perceives you, right? And it's especially important like as as we go

56. 00:44:17

    into Pyro, as there's multiple factions that are that are kind of at war with each other out there. We we want the players to be able to get in good with one or one or the other. So, I I it's a change that we know we need to make, and I think it's really going to take shape and form as we go into Pyro cuz UE in Stanton is a pretty, you know, binary thing. There's little pockets of pirates, but it's not it's not like Pyro where it's going to have like these very distinct groups that are kind of warring with each other, and we the reputation system is perfect for that. It will allow us to open up also just like an entire branch of content. Like we don't really have missions where you work with criminals for the criminals. There's there's nothing that really makes you a long-term criminal player. Your crime stat can be wiped, you can kind of, you know, get rid of that sort.

57. 00:45:05

    It's it's not something that I am a criminal player, and I I I log in and I'm going to do these kinds of things. I'm going to be on this side of things. These people hate me, these people love me. Um that allows you to define your character, that allows you to define your play style, that allows you to to define where you're going to do and what you're going to do in the game. The entire game shifts if you have the ability to Yeah, I I would say it's much more like the real world to where it's you know, the concept of what, you know, hostility it eventually equates to binary. Either I engage you, either I attack you or I do not, but in between there's there's literally just, you know, a sea of grays in terms of this organization hates that one, this one likes this one, you know, this one doesn't like this one, is neutral towards that one, etc. And you wind up having inevitably some sort of unique mixture of all these different

58. 00:45:52

    things. And so in the end, you know, you'll you'll you know, we will prioritize these things and determine like, "Oh, well, you're you know, you're a member of, you know, the you know, the walk old ladies across the street. Well, I I like that. Oh, but you're also a member of the pirates guild. I I really hate that." So, even though I like that one, I'm still going to attack you. And so it's just it's much more flexible in terms of you know, in terms of determining all these, you know, complex relationships that players are eventually going to instill upon their characters. Like it's not going to be either I'm left faction or right faction. It's like there's going to be lots and lots of different organizations, lots of different NPCs, and your standing with those will be all over the map. Some players will be in really good standing with this, some players, you know, will be really low on this other one, and you know, the the the level of variability that we'll be

59. 00:46:40

    able to support with, you know, with the reputation system is just going to be, you know, far far superior to what we have now. Dorsey, you implemented the Nine Tails mission which allowed players to fight on either side of the conflict. How does the gameplay experience differ depending upon which side you choose to support, and can you explain how this actually in the end wound up being a server optimization of sorts? Well, I mean, you kind of hit the nail on the head. What happens differently is if you are on on the the lawful side, you are working for Crusader Security, they are sending out scanning ships to try and locate the Nine Tails fleet, and you have to go and protect those. And then once you have found that fleet, you go and destroy that fleet. You are killing ships until you basically deplete their resources and make them

60. 00:47:27

    retreat from the area. On the Nine Tails side of that, you are of course going and hunting those scanning ships. You are given their locations, and you're told, "Hey, go destroy these." And then once the fleet portion of it gets found, you go and try to defend that fleet. And if you can hold them off for long enough, then Nine Tails will actually win, and and Crusader will be unable to drive them away before they achieve their their objective, essentially, which is a a hidden objective that that we aren't revealing at this time. Um But we are now. But well, the the the the genesis of this though, Nine Tails was not originally actually supposed to be a PvP event at all. It was much like XenoThreat, supposed to be just pure PvE. That had performance problems, frankly. Spawning enough ships in a a pure giant fleet battle to

61. 00:48:17

    challenge 30 to 50 players made the server just tank. It was it was incredibly painful, and it just didn't play very well. It also, to be honest, was the same thing as as what XenoThreat already had done. And I wanted to do something a little different. And that that kind of combined into to this this push to get the aforementioned kind of duct tape solution for hostility, and so that you can align on on both sides, and and by doing that, I make it so that I don't need to spawn ships to challenge 30 to 50 people. If things are running smoothly, I have 25 versus 25, and I don't need to spawn really just about anything. You you bring the NPCs in just to flesh out to basically to even the odds, to to get the challenge, you know, to the level you need. Um but when you actually have players that will

62. 00:49:05

    legitimately fulfill a particular role, you you take advantage of that. That was a creative way to load balance the mission and the population in the area. I I would say though that in general, this is 100% exactly what we do want to do, which is we want to give the players the total freedom to basically do whatever they want, and then as I always say, it's like, you know, they live with the consequences, they live with the repercussions of their actions. If you go and support Nine Tails, if you support XenoThreat, it's like that will have, you know, an impact on how people view you, you know, the aforementioned reputation system and your standing with, you know, with key NPCs within the game and how you the UE views you and you know, whether or not certain organizations want to allow you within their ranks. And some of these things you do will have long-standing impact to where if you ally yourself with a group, you know, like the Nine Tails, you may

63. 00:49:52

    be prohibited from joining some organization that you've been aspiring to for a very long time. Unless you do something to work that back. Yeah, well, and it's a balance, right? And and we want we want those scales to go one way or the other. It's not that we want you to be able to be perfect with everybody all the time. Like that it comes at a cost. upon the severity, right? Which is if you do jaywalking, well, then sure, someone is not going to find it that difficult to basically assume that from now on you'll stay on the right side of the law. So, we'll go ahead and you let you into our transport guild. If on the other hand, you're you know, committing acts of piracy and murder and everything else, it's like, oh, well, now I'm not sure that I actually want you in our organization which adheres to all the laws of the nearby area and everything of that sort. That element of being able to pick your side and and do what you

64. 00:50:39

    want to do in the game is something that, you know, because of that we want to allow in pretty much every piece of our content going forward. it needs to be as much as possible. Ingrained in the game with everything else. The only reason we haven't, you know, traditionally supported it is is it's the tech. It's it's it's well, and and to a larger degree that you can call out a few specific pieces of the tech, right? Which is the reputation system certainly plays a role. The you know, the lack of a reputation based hostility system. We're still using the old faction system. For Xenothreat, that was literally the number one reason why early in the development process, we nixed it. On Nine Tails, we were literally within weeks of release and it it it would it it was going to bother me to put out a second one that had the exact same limitations as the first. And so,

65. 00:51:28

    despite the fact that it was going to be, you know, an unattractive hack to fix it, I wanted to fix it. It it did it completely change the experience. And so, it it is, you know, what I always refer to as it's duct tape. We'll get some value out of it as soon and as quickly as we can, you know, convert the hostility system over to the, you know, the proper reputational version, we'll do that. But in general, for the short run, we can continue to use this hack for some other missions that we have in the offer. And once we have that reputation version in, like, we will update Nine Tails to handle that and it will play better as a result. Yeah, that that's actually another point that I wanted to like touch on a little bit, which is so we did Xenothreat and we released it and then we basically brought it back and, you know, did some relatively mild alterations. We changed how the two middle phases basically

66. 00:52:16

    transitioned automatically between them as opposed to being distinct so that we could have the whole salvage process and then you had, you know, the climactic battle and it kind of like rolled around, but there were still salvaging, you know, during the later part. On Nine Tails, we basically released it and you've already identified a number of shortcomings with it that you want to address not just for 3.15, but even beyond that. And this is this is something and so I want to I want to get to that in a second, but this is something that we're going to continue to do with a lot of these dynamic events. They are intended not as one-shot missions. You play them for, you know, a month, a quarter, you know, six months and then we lose interest and we move to other stuff. The the basic idea for these things is these events represent some sort of, you know, archetype almost. Yeah, well, I'd say they they represent it's almost like a

67. 00:53:04

    customized chunk of gameplay. It's Pirates have locked down an area or Xenothreat has decided to invade the solar system or Pirates have basically run amok, you know, over in this area or, you know, drug runners have completely, you know, seized control of these, you know, manufacturing facilities, you know, etc. etc. And the idea is that we'll have all of this information over within Quantum and then we'll look within our extensive library of these events and we'll decide which one most closely, you know, matches that. We'll customize it as appropriate and then trigger it. So, the idea is that we're we're layering all of this this custom handcrafted designer content onto this systemic background. And so, we really get the best of both worlds. We get, you know, a nice logical systemic universe that ebbs and flows.

68. 00:53:53

    It evolves. It basically changes logically in response to player actions. But at the same time, we get all of the, you know, incredible stories and the explicit dialogue and the intricately designed challenges that a designer has put a lot of, you know, time and thought and effort into doing. And so, you really get both of these blend together. But back to Nine Tails. So, on 3.15, we're going to tweak a couple of the problems that you've identified. So, you want to start with that. They're relatively small things, honestly, just due to the schedule. It's probably the most impactful one and the one that I've seen the most people talking about. There is a portion of Nine Tails on the lawful side where you can deliver medical supplies to the blockaded station for a bit of an extra reward. They will pay you a little bit more if you have a certain mission. And also, their inventory is just very

69. 00:54:41

    rapidly depleting, so you can pretty much always sell there. And and they you will be selling at the best price that they can offer. The problem that occurs there is that everybody buys all of the medical supplies out there. And while that's really cool on a realism statement, with with the game in the state it is and with trading in the state it is, that means that a lot of people can't participate in that part of the mission. And that's problematic. Particularly at this point where we want to be testing how those play. We really want people engaging in that part of things. Those of you who were part of the the first wave of Evocati when we first tested this way back might actually remember that we originally had shop modifiers on the places that were selling medical supplies to make it so that they had a higher inventory that refreshed fairly frequently so that everyone could kind of engage in that. We were asked to remove those so that we

70. 00:55:29

    could emphasize the derelicts which are around the station that you can take medical supplies off of because basically the derelicts made it so that there was another way to get those medical supplies, but they didn't it took so much more time that there was really no reason to do that if you could do the trading. back to what you were talking about earlier, which is I can buy them instantaneously from the shop and there's no loading time and then I can move them over here and I can instantly unload them. If I had to physically pull them off, you could more easily balance these things. Whereas right now, I really do have to go manually pull each individual one off the derelict ship. And so, I'm incurring all of the, you know, the physicalized cargo expense on one side and not on the other. And so, in the end, sure, you know, just due to the sheer amount of time is like it takes me 30 minutes to get 12 boxes this way or I can go buy 50 boxes, you know,

71. 00:56:16

    in a split second. Which one are you going to do? Some people might still do the derelicts because they're fun, frankly. It's a fun little FPS raid, but a lot of people are going to look at the the the dollar signs and just go, okay, this is obviously the better option. That being said, we're probably going to put back in. It's actually a pretty easy. I left them in there had cuz I had a feeling we might want them back. We're just going to flip a switch and probably put those shop modifiers back in. We've seen how people play the derelicts. There's plenty of them in Xenothreat. We want to see the trading, frankly. And and so, that will allow that to come back online. Another relatively small change that that that is probably going to be coming in. We are seeing that many people are not engaging with the criminal side of things. And that is very much like the whole thing that we were doing with making it into a PvP mission for for the purposes of of

72. 00:57:05

    helping performance. We're going to have to better entice them to basically fight on the Nine Tails side of things. them. So, that means I mean, they already are being paid more than the other side. I'm probably going to up that even more, frankly. They are going to become very lucrative, hopefully. That is the short-term solution, frankly. and this is where like ideally you, you know, helping out the Nine Tails build their reputation. Ideally, we would be able to offer other benefits of being in that organization. Other things that some percentage of the players would aspire to and want, you know, other rewards that you get for build, you know, for building up your standing with them. Which won't be for 3.15, but but that is definitely where that is intended to go. The other thing that we might want there is a system to dynamically modify jurisdiction because one of the big punish points that happens to a criminal when they are helping on that side in that area,

73. 00:57:53

    despite the fact that Nine Tails has supposedly taken over this area, when they get killed, they go to jail, which is a bit weird, frankly. We we originally did want to make it so that you wouldn't get brought to jail, but there just wasn't enough time to fit the tech into the schedule. There still won't be for 3.15, but that is a longer-term thing that we want to have is the ability to kind of dynamically modify the jurisdiction. that shines light on a problem, right? Like exactly. It was one we kind of saw coming, but frankly, it was good to have it confirmed. And now we can hopefully put some pressure on that that happening. Yeah, we we we have a lot of those. Like we added this we added the shop modifiers. We added the probability volume modifiers. We added the ability to do, you know, the Quantum lockdowns, you know, through the dynamic events and stuff. We haven't yet added the ability to add the the dynamic population modifiers. And so, this one was, as you said, we we knew this was going to be an issue. You can't necessarily get

74. 00:58:41

    everything you'd like into every release. And so, the point is we got Nine Tails out. You had some other longer-term things that you wanted to address as well. Can you talk about those? It's it well, some of them, frankly, are just things that are going to be things that will naturally happen, to be honest. Um performance is still a big problem. I do want to like talk to the performance thing for, you know, for a second, which We've we basically generated something on the order of 120, 130 different individual gyros that people were addressing in the run-up to Xenothreat because what what inevitably winds up happening is is we get performance to a certain level and then we're at, you know, we're basically adding more locations. We're basically enhancing the AI logic. We're adding, you know, new functionality. And so, it's it's it's always a running battle

75. 00:59:28

    to where you're adding more, you know, you're adding more stuff as you're making other stuff run faster. And so, you tend to get a net washing. We actually found ourselves with Xenothreat, one of the reasons we held it for a couple of extra weeks was we wound up finding ourselves in a very bad spot to where there are inevitably there are there are problems now, we're very familiar with them. They were much worse, you know, just a few you know you know when we were originally supposed to release it. We fixed just it was it was an endless litany of these things to where it's like, you know, on profiles, you know, things showing up stalling the main thread 100 milliseconds, 200 milliseconds. Those are getting cut down to a millisecond here, 2 milliseconds. But there's just such a quantity. And so, the what I want to touch on a little bit is as we finalize some bits of tech like part of the reason we were able to devote as much time to

76. 01:00:16

    getting things back into at least, you know, what I'd call like, you know, an acceptable state, not a great state. We've got a lot, you know, we've got a lot more work to do to get this thing to the level of performance we want. There's a lot of problems, you know, the rubber banding that, you know, we're intimately familiar with. We absolutely, positively want to deal with it. It drives us. We, you know, we all hate it. You know, we want to fix it. But as some of these people roll off of things like their server meshing, you know, tasks and stuff, we're now getting to the point to where we can keep people focused on this particular problem for, you know, certainly a longer period of time than they've been able to do in the past. It's just a matter of it being the focus. That's exactly it. It's just a matter of it being the focus. A lot of the engineers that are working on server meshing are the people that would be fixing these optimization problems, right? So, your your game's going to run

77. 01:01:03

    as fast as your biggest bottleneck, and that's about it, right? And you're going to hit the next one and the next one, and you're going to keep fixing them until your game runs a lot Yeah, it was it was almost an endless litany of spawn stalls, entity, you know, deletion stalls. And it was impressive to see how quickly those guys were eradicating, you know, some of these really, really egregious, you know, performance, you know, impactors. 3 400 millisecond spikes going down to 1 or 2 milliseconds. 1 or 2 milliseconds, yeah, absolutely. We we spend a lot of time crafting to make sure that like this these waves are coming at the appropriate amount of difficulty for the number of players that are there and and all this stuff. And if the spawn queue starts to slow down, that kind of snarls. It doesn't it just doesn't work. You can't design a great You can design okay experience, but not a great one. As you know, on on

78. 01:01:52

    Nine Tails, I know we we played with this quite a bit. We definitely did on Xenothreat to where it's like, well, we want to bring in 10 guys at once to a a certain amount of challenge, but then we're like, spawn them all simultaneously. And so, we wind up bringing them in one at a time. So, we're basically distributing, you know, the spawn load over time. And while it's true that, you know, on average, the, you know, the amount of, you know, uh you know, challenge you're going to face will be identical, there's a big difference between 10 ships showing up at once versus one. And there was the same thing with the number of capital ships was originally large, and we had to whittle that down. And so, as the performance gradually improves, obviously we'll basically start to expand our ambitions in terms of, you know, what we're, you know, what what what kind of experiences we're actually putting out there for players. And the

79. 01:02:39

    existing ones will just improve, frankly. Those missions will almost become new beasts just by the very nature of that happening. And that's that's what when when you say like, what is the long-term thing, that to me is is the biggest thing, because a lot of these events will just be better. You're currently working on a sequel of sorts called Jumptown V2. Can you go into some more detail about what players can expect from that with the initial release? Yeah. It's it's actually I'm trying to keep it very, very simple. Jumptown was originally this this community event. Uh and and I want to keep that that vibe as much as possible. I'm trying to have a very light hand. So, what I'm doing is I'm basically taking a location. I'm going to make it so that it starts to spawn physically a bunch of boxes of a very lucrative material, in this case maze commodity. And and

80. 01:03:28

    that will then it will start to spit that out at a certain rate, which will will entice people to go there and and and collect it, put it on their ships, fly it away, whatever. Um But but but the the point there is that that is an area that will be very, very lucrative for a short period, which will entice a lot of people to conflict over it. Um When when you've got a place that is that is popping out a box of maze for free that you can just pick up at every 30 seconds or so, like that is that is dollar signs, and and people will kill for that. Not only because it's fun, but also because it's it's worth it, frankly. So, so essentially, there is a location, there is a thing that spawns these boxes, and I'm going to turn it on. And that's about it. One one of the things I didn't like about the original

81. 01:04:15

    Jumptown was it was at a fixed location, and it was always on. It basically spit these things out at a certain frequency. Outside of the fact that it was a bug, but you know. So, but but it was It was it was very static. Yes, that's exactly it. And in in general, I just I hate static things because, you know, it's it's it's always the same. So, how Let's talk a little bit about Jumptown V2 is being designed as a dynamic event. And it's also extremely configurable. So, we're going to start with support for any of the drug labs, although that's really just a function of whether or not we could get environmental art team support for the other areas. Longer term, we will be able to activate this at, you know, at a wide variety of different locations. The concept itself is pretty simple. It can

82. 01:05:02

    be worked at all these different places. Sorry. Sure, but but there there's a lot of things like we put a lot of thought into recording additional lines of dialogue to support different types of, you know, drugs or different types of commodities. You know, we have some generic lines so that it can apply to, you know, all the stuff, you know, that's in the We don't want to be hampered by that because the the the the lead-in time for for getting that dialogue can can be a little bit damaging to doing just quick adds, frankly. Like we want to be able to just say during a quarter, "Hey, you know what would be really cool if there was an underground facility that was pumping out data or metal or at a refinery, and we want people to fight over that." And we can just add that because we So, we've got dynamism for Jumptown V2 with respect to location. We've got dynamism with respect to what exactly it's going

83. 01:05:51

    to be pumping out. Another one that I wanted to support was the quantity. In other words, how long will this thing be spitting it out? Is it going to spit out 100, you know, you know, 100 SCU of cargo or 1,000, you know, 100 units of drugs, you know, you know, or 10,000? And this was something again, so it's been configured as a dynamic event to where it can have this this information passed into it and then configure itself as appropriate. At runtime. Like that means whoever or whatever, if if it currently is is launched by a person who is literally like pressing a button on a on a page. And when they do, they can enter in a bunch of variables, and and those will determine where it's happening, what it's spitting out, how long it's going to last, how fast. I I I'll actually talk about that a little bit later to where right right now, you know, all of the events that we've launched so far are are triggered, you know, via Quasar, and a person goes in,

84. 01:06:38

    specifies the event, specifies the inputs, you know. And you'll talk about it being 100%. Jumptown V2, another one of the specific design objectives was to use it as the first test case for these systemic triggers to where we can actually have Quantum inject this information dynamically. And so, like right now, we're running Nine Tails, and one of the complaints we've seen is, you know, "Hey, it doesn't fire, you know, often enough. It's like, I missed it, and then it's gone." And so, one of the you know, one of the directions in which we want to go is having some of these events like Jumptown, which can be triggered by player actions. by player actions or Quanta or player and Quanta basically doing whatever we determine. Maybe it is a certain amount of drugs are being bought, sold, you know, lots

85. 01:07:26

    of, you know, drug runners are basically, you know, traversing this shipping line. Whatever kind of, you know, conditions we want to put, and then we can measure, you know, both on the Quantum side, you know, eventually and then even in the short term, you know, on the players, it's like, how many players are basically moving drugs back and forth here? How many players are basically, you know, dropping commodities off at this location? And if we have a dynamic event compatible with whatever these, you know, with whatever these, you know, whatever these conditions are, then we can go ahead and automatically trigger it and inject, you know, inject those customized parameters into it so that it so that it basically more accurately represents what's actually going on in that area. Right now, we're just short-changing that, but but eventually, yeah. That's that's actually, you know, I I I like the whole, you know, Jumptown concept, but I, you know, my my favorite aspect by far is the fact that it's being designed as a test case for some

86. 01:08:13

    of this, you know, up-and-coming, you know, systemic technology on the back end so that we can start to go, "Oh, at 3:00 a.m. conditions, you know, were met, and we're going to go ahead and trigger Jumptown, you know, on, you know, on on Lyria. And we're basically going to put this particular drug into it, and it's going to be 679, you know, units of drugs, and you know, however quickly, you know, players are there to basically, you know, pull those things out, that will be how long it last. And so, all of a sudden, you have, you know, it's it's a transient event, which is sometimes we may inject, you know, we if we can scale this however we want such that, you know, when these conditions are met, do we take the total number of, you you know, delivered drug, you know, drugs or whatever multiply times 10? So, we can basically turn it into something that's going to range for an hour, a day, or 10 days, or whatever else, but we can we can add that

87. 01:09:02

    variable factor to where it's not always a constant. It's not always, you know, on for the entire, you know, for the entire lifetime of the release. It's not always 7 days. There's actually going to be, you know, you know, it's it's going to depend upon what is really happening within the world, and that's going to cause it to be customized. Just something that's happening in the game. I mean, it's it's You It's natural events triggering in people saying like Nine Tails wasn't happening enough and they would log on and they would wait for it to happen. That is not the goal. The goal is I log on and I see something is happening. There should always be an event of some kind that you could go and do. Maybe you logged on and you wanted to do this particular thing, but also, oh man, that's happening right now? Cool. Kind of thing. So. Yeah, there will be there will be there will be some of both. You know, XenoThreat is obviously yeah, the big

88. 01:09:50

    ones. And then you've got what I call like you know, the the the mid-range you know, things like the Nine Tails and stuff where you're locking down an entire area and all of a sudden we basically we've cordoned off, you know, a region and we're not allowing you to easily transport your uh cargo, you know, back and forth to there, which basically starts knocking the prices up, which is why we added all the you know, the price alerts and things like that so that you can actually be enticed by the fact that oh, this area that's been choked off, they really really need copper. They're willing to pay this. Don't you want to try to break through the blockade? That actually does kind of get to uh what you were saying earlier in terms of allowing some of the player ships that are going to or some of the NPCs that are going to interdict you to actually be more effective at it as we start to expand those quantum interdiction zones, you know, to a larger size. It all interconnects. Yeah, and it can be influenced by players or the back-end

89. 01:10:39

    simulation. It's it's something that we'll be able to balance. We'll be able to pull analytics from the back-ends. It's it's measurable and it'll be something we can tune over time. An- another one on another point we're talking about on Jump Town for future directions forward is and you and I have had this conversation a couple of times is I would like to eventually be able to have NPCs basically fill in the other side. Like right now, one of the inherent flaws in it is it's purely PvP, right? Which is I go there, I basically you know, control that area, I get the loot for as long as it's pumping it out and unless other players come and try to basically kick you out of that area, it's it's a cakewalk. And what we would want to be able to simulate obviously is we're going you know, if if players are not going there, would would quanta you know, over on the simulation side, would

90. 01:11:27

    they be attracted to you know, this value generator? Of course they would. Great. At at what rate? And that what rate's going to depend upon what it's spitting out, what the street you know, value of that stuff is, how far it is from civilization and they therefore have to travel etc. And so the point would be that we want to be able to just as we were talking about earlier, we want to be you know, with Nine Tails to where we were aligning you know, players on either sides and we'll use NPCs to basically you know, to balance it however we want. In this case, if there are zero players on you know, the you know, on the attacking side trying to like take it over, well, we're going to have to fill those ranks with NPCs. That being said, one of the things that is called out very often as being an exciting portion of Jump Town, the original, was going there and not knowing if you were going to find resistance. That could kind of keep you on the edge of your seat a little bit.

91. 01:12:13

    There's that it's too quiet. So it won't always A 100 a 100% but but you don't need that that uncertainty doesn't necessarily need to only come as a result of whether or whether or not players are willing to do it. We can have uncertainty on the NPC side and say, maybe we will, maybe we won't basically you know, have them as all. Maybe they'll come in a straggler, one guy at a time. Maybe they'll come in a big coordinated group of 12 NPCs all in heavy armor, armed to the teeth and you know, and and you'll basically be doing your absolute best you know, to you know, to hold that calling your friends you know, etc. etc. The the the point is like right now, unless we have the ability to basically set those scenarios up, then you know, some players on some servers will never

92. 01:13:01

    get that cool experience of a whole burst of guys, you know, arriving at one shot or the stragglers. Now, if players are basically going in there attacking, well, sure. I've already got 20 players on this side, maybe I don't need to throw any other NPCs out to you know, to Or maybe they want to add fuel to the fire frankly. Or maybe you want to throw yeah, Players were very creative in the first one. Yeah. Like and and that's honestly what I'm really looking forward to is is what the the tools that have been added to the sandbox at this point. It's such a simple event. I really am looking forward to seeing how they they handle it. Like you can come in in a land vehicle and you can you can set up a tank or a ballista and just like pick people out of the sky, defend that area, turn it into a fortress. You can have dogfights in the air over it. You can um if you're stupid and you leave your ship turned off with its shields off, like

93. 01:13:48

    someone's going to blow that up. You and I talked in the early early stages of Nine Tails about the fact that it's a drug lab. Why is it basically spitting you know, spitting these things out? And the idea would be well, they produced a lot of them at that location. And so who would be one of the most logical people to come and try to take back control? It would be the guys that you know, that basically you know, originally had control of that drug lab. It'd be you know, whatever you know, uh criminal organization we want to basically have that thing. And it's a competition. The 100% and so you could see you know, players are in there basically you know, reaping the rewards. Another you know, player team assaults them and now the much much larger threat comes and the players you know, it could be a three-way. The players can team up you know, with each other to basically hold them off and then split the goods you know, etc. etc. So The real point to my mind is is just comes back to is

94. 01:14:36

    configurability, which is I want to I want to be able to vary the location, vary the you know, the type of material, vary the quantity of that material, the frequency with which it's produced. I want to be able to vary the challenges you'll face trying to basically hold it. And all of a sudden that starts to become representative of what we're trying to do with all these different dynamic events, which is we have a we want to make templates that we can you know, I always call it object-oriented content creation. You know, it's such a common concept over on the coding side, you don't really see much focus over on the content creation to basically put all of these rules and procedures and processes in place so that you can basically build nice modular chunks of content and easily link them to other pieces so that you're not reinventing the wheel every time you're doing this. A like a good you

95. 01:15:24

    know, you know, a good example is the spawn closets that we're doing you know, over for some of the infiltrator missions that we'll be talking about. It's like that's absolutely going to play a factor in some of these you know, future iterations of things like you know, whether it's Nine Tails. You could see Nine Tails eventually you know, supporting on the derelicts. Some of those derelicts actually have Nine Tails members on them that we can basically create two or 20, you know, we can create them over time. We can basically you know, change you know, the Or taking over the station. Like there's so many things you can do with that. So. Yeah, Pyro is going to be a a good test bed for a lot Pyro is going to be amazing test bed for the strife that is supposed to be going on out there. So. I'm looking forward to it. All right, let's bring Luke into the conversation now. We started working on the XenoThreat

96. 01:16:11

    event around March of 2020 and it took about a year to get it out the door. We knew that it was going to be extremely difficult because we were missing so much of what we needed including everything from the dynamic mission service that would drive the back-end logic to the capital ship AI, target prioritization for turrets, functional countermeasures, tons of dialogue and countless other things. Part of the allure though was that in one shot, we'd have a great test case for a litany of important features like battles far larger than anything we'd previously done and a test bed for creating missions that supported a variety of different play styles like ship-to-ship combat and salvaging. So Luke, from your perspective, what were some of the big lessons we learned from XenoThreat? Well, XenoThreat was our first attempt at a large-scale fleet battle so we learned a lot. The biggest takeaway was that we needed to develop our overly simplistic friendly fire system, which was leading to players receiving unfair

97. 01:16:59

    crime stats and being kicked from the mission. So in the recent re-release of the event, we made major improvements to our friendly fire detection and tolerances, which drastically cut down on unfair crime stats according to the feedback and analytics we received. What's great is this kind of change improves the whole game, not just the event, and paves the way for more large-scale space battles in the future. I think it's also important to add that another thing that became clear was that players wanted a counter mission involving PvP. So we've started planning with this in mind for subsequent releases. Luke, as the performance gradually improves over the next few quarters, what sort of things would you most like to change about XenoThreat? I think most people would expect my answer to be throwing more AI at the player, but it might be that when performance improves, our AI becomes much deadlier,

98. 01:17:47

    which could actually lead to us reducing their numbers. And this balancing is always the most difficult part of mission creation. The AI's performance can be wildly different on our local servers versus what it might be like on an over-the-tax live server. And if a mission is too easy, it's not just a case of throwing more AI at it as this will only compound the performance issues. We were happy with the balancing we achieved, but it wasn't quite what we hoped for. Once performance is improved, we hope to rebalance and deliver the experience we intended. Luke, we've invested a lot of engineering effort into our spawn closet tech, which allows us to precisely and intelligently push NPCs into and out of an area. The first major test of this tech will be the infiltrator class of missions, which I wanted to provide much more varied and challenging FPS situations than anything we've

99. 01:18:34

    previously seen. To that end, we can now determine at run time the type and number of NPCs we want to insert at a location, often at the behest of quantum. We can also apply a litany of rules to the spawning like how many can be active at once, how the spawn rate changes when an alarm has gone off and whether a boss might be found wandering the area with his guards or only after they've all been dispatched. The mission template supports a wide variety of objectives ranging from killing everyone at that location to only killing select individuals to protecting NPCs from any harm to hacking computers to extracting designated materials. Can you go over some of these mission variations in more detail? Of course, Tony. The underground facilities were the locations we chose for our first implementation of spawn closets. So this is where players will find new missions as well as some existing missions that have been vastly improved by the

100. 01:19:22

     addition of spawn closets and non-combatants. One of the new missions sends players to kill a heavily armored target who only shows himself once his crew have been wiped out. Another involves the player searching a friendly facility for a number of boxes identified using information provided on their mobiGlas. At any point during the mission, small enemy assaults can be triggered. And the thing I love about this one is that players can choose to avoid the fight and gamble on the facility's defenders being able to repel them. And the last one I'd like to mention is, thanks to spawn closets, we now have our first FPS defend mission where players join friendly AI in defending a facility from multiple waves of enemies. And the nice thing about this one is that in addition to the basic mission reward, players also receive bonuses for the AI who survived to the end. Some of

101. 01:20:10

     the benefits from this mission template are coming from smarter use of existing tech, like more modular subsumption logic. And some of it stems from new features like the spawn closets. Luke, how has the design setup of the infiltrator scenario varied from what you've done in the past? Well, spawn closets have had a dramatic effect on the types of missions we can build. Without them, we were unable to spawn AI mid-mission as we couldn't risk them spawning out of thin air without warning, as that's really unfair on players. Thanks to spawn closets, we can now spawn reinforcement waves and spring ambushes anytime we want, with players able to recognize where AI is likely to reinforce from. Not only does this allow us to build brand new mission types, it allows us to spawn manageable amounts of AI and only reinforce when some of those are dead to better balance the difficulty of the encounter. And you mentioned we're building our

102. 01:20:57

     logic in a modular fashion. And the eliminate boss mission is a great example of that because we've essentially taken the eliminate all and the eliminate specific objectives and combined them to create a new experience where players must draw their target out of hiding by first killing all of his crew. Luke, another mission template we're currently working on is called rescue transport, and it revolves around getting NPCs to a specified location. One of the variations allows the NPC to request personal transport via service beacon, just like a player, to a designated location. Other variations involve adding assorted complications to getting the NPCs on board your ship, like having to first outsmart or outfight their captors, unlocking their prison door to release them, safely escorting them back to your ship for transport to the desired drop site. Longer term, we're going to add support in this mission template for a lot of other combinations, like having to drag

103. 01:21:45

     unconscious characters onto your ship and back to a hospital, and trying to lead NPCs through a burning ship. Luke, where do we stand with the current implementation of this and what remains to be done before we can push it out the door? Well, Tony, we're at the point where we have a working prototype in which AI can be asked to follow, wait, and take a seat aboard your ship. And even with this rudimentary setup, we've been able to flesh out the mission flow to a very detailed degree, and have made a lot of headway into planning the dialogue requirements. We've gone to some effort to make sure that the mission is more than a delivery mission where the box has legs. So, the client has patience that can work then, with your tip and rating being calculated based on your performance. We'll also be developing AI behaviors to deal with what happens should the player decide to kidnap them. The rescue mission module has been designed in such

104. 01:22:32

     a way that it can work in conjunction with others like infiltrator, meaning that we can easily inject some obstacles in your way, like a base full of captors. These missions will drive the development of AI following. So, once complete, we'll be able to leverage that throughout the rest of the game. I want to pivot now and give an update on some of the systemic functionality that I detailed last spring. I said that we were soon going to have Quantum controlling a few select bits of the universe, and that we were going to be very measured in the rollout. We remain on track to activate these changes with 3.16 at the end of the year, and this initial release will allow Quantum to dictate three encounter frequencies, the prices of three commodities, and everything related to combat assist service beacons. As the simulation is refined and more of

105. 01:23:19

     the linkage to the game is completed, we will expand the scope of these early tests and enable Quantum to play an ever larger role in shaping the universe. So, let's go over how the gameplay experience is set to change. Probability volumes dictate how the likelihood of an encounter type varies within that region, and historically that information has always been static. Dynamic events, introduced in early 2021, allow that data to be changed by mission logic, but still don't support systemic modulation. You can see the frequency curve for pirate activity in red on the screen here, and the long and short of it is that no matter how many pirates you, your friends, or the entire community kill, the likelihood of encountering a pirate at this spot right here would always be about 5% per minute, and farther out, right about there, the odds would drop to 2%.

106. 01:24:09

     Now, let's see what happens when we activate Quantum and it starts to provide real-time guidance to the probability volume service that controls this information and distributes it to the game servers. As is often the case with such demonstrations, the simulation is running at an exaggerated rate of speed so that I can easily illustrate some key points. The first thing you'll notice is that the fixed pirate curve just flatlined because Quantum says there aren't currently any pirates in this area. There are some valuable materials on the surface of Cellin, though, and that's starting to attract some Quantum miners represented in green. The distribution of the miners determines the shape of the green curve, and the quantity determines the amplitude. With the value of the ore available on Cellin sky-high and no threat in sight, the number of miners continues to increase, and you can see the encounter curve changing to reflect that. Pirates are drawn to high concentrations

107. 01:24:56

     of wealth with minimal security, though, and are starting to swarm into the area, and as they do, you can see the red pirate curve adjusting. Quanta security, represented in blue, is drawn to conflict and is thus often a lagging indicator of criminal activity. So, at this point, there are several distinct things happening. The number of miners in the area is still increasing, but the rate of increase has slowed dramatically as they start to weigh the increased risk of piracy. The number of pirates is still increasing because there's still sufficient value in the area to attract them and not yet sufficient security to dissuade them. The number of security forces continues to rise because the pirate problem is raging out of control, and thus security pay in this area has gone through the roof. This trend continues for a while until finally the risk of piracy gets too high and the quantity of miners starts to drop.

108. 01:25:43

     The pirates are doing their own independent mental calculus and still see sufficient value in the area, even once the miners start to fall off, to continue increasing their numbers, but that simply speeds up the rate of decline in the miners, while at the same time, the threat from security continues to grow. So, eventually the number of pirates in the area begins to fall off as well. As the threat of piracy begins to subside, the impact gradually ripples through the economy, lowering the rate of pay and demand for security services. The quantity of security forces streaming into the area eventually peaks, too, then, and begins to decline. If you watch the curves, you'll see a rhythmic action to it all, with miners looking for high-value ore in safe areas, pirates searching for unprotected wealth, and security chasing conflict. Three different, but very interdependent calculations. The system is always searching for

109. 01:26:30

     equilibrium, and just as in a real economy, sometimes overshoots a bit in one direction or the other, which ultimately equates to opportunity for the thinking player. NPC combat assist service beacons have historically been generated via probability volume data, and were thus every bit as static as the encounter frequencies that I just covered. The odds of a request for combat assistance at a given location didn't vary based upon what was happening in that area at that time, and no amount of concerted community effort to stamp out what was putting those NPCs in danger had any chance of succeeding. To illustrate what's changed, let's jump back to Quantum. The miners are back in force, but there aren't yet any pirates, and thus there aren't any requests for combat assistance. Just as previously occurred, though, the pirates are going to slowly sniff out

110. 01:27:16

     this opportunity and begin gravitating to this location. As their numbers increase, so will the odds of conflict with the miner, and thus the likelihood of a combat assist service beacon being issued. You can see a few contracts now represented by the green icons. Quantum is dictating how many beacons should be present in this area and the exact details, such as how much Alpha UEC is being offered, but the data is actually maintained by the service beacon service that interfaces to the game servers and exposes these contracts to players. So, every contract that you're seeing pop up, which is a direct result of the amount of conflict happening within Quantum, can be seen and accepted by someone within the actual game. Security has started to show up, but isn't yet a major force, and the risk of piracy has gotten so great that some of the miners have decided to exit. The frequency of combat assist beacons

111. 01:28:03

     is a function of both the quantity of miners and pirates, and clamped by the minimum of either. So, as the miners depart, the number of outstanding beacons drops. Security has now reached the point where it's really starting to deter the pirates, and the reduced number of miners is just adding fuel to the fire. So, now the number of pirates starts to fall off pretty dramatically, which also impacts the total number of active beacons and instantiation frequency. Player actions are fed back into Quantum such that if a lot of beacons are accepted and the NPC is successfully defended in the game, the security risk as perceived by the pirates in Quantum will increase, thus affecting their sense of whether the risk justifies the reward. This means that not only will the system ebb and flow of its own accord, but your actions within the game will directly impact the simulation and thus the overall state of the universe. There's one other important thing that I want to mention here, and that's the

112. 01:28:50

     value of the additional context that Quantum is providing. We now know exactly who issued the request for combat assistance and even the likelihood that multiple ships might be involved. All of this information can be packaged up and associated with the beacon so that when and if a player accepts the contract, the instantiated mission can be customized to better reflect what Quantum says you should be seeing. The shop service has always had the ability to modulate the price of commodities based upon things like the amount of inventory on hand and its rate of change, but we haven't really exploited that feature for some of the basics like fuel and HPMC, which is the material required to affect repairs on a ship. One of the reasons for this is that it's one thing to have tradeable commodities fluctuate in value according to some algorithmic logic that doesn't consider

113. 01:29:37

     anything beyond the confines of that particular shop, but it's quite another when those materials are critical to playing the game. Now that we can properly gauge demand based upon factors external to the shop though, even if the simulation logic still needs a lot of work, we're going to flip the switch and let the prices of fuel and repair materials start to undulate. So, let's bring Quantum up again. The tram in Myers mining outpost on Cellin has been selected so that we can see its real-time prices for plasma fuel, quantum fuel, and HPMC. Keep an eye on these prices as the quanta arrive on scene. A few of the miners are from distant locales and will be looking to top off their quantum fuel tanks, and that increased consumption is causing prices to trickle up just a bit. Plasma fuel is jumping quite a bit more though because it's in constant demand due to the fact that the miners routinely have to traverse the surface of the moon looking for valuable

114. 01:30:24

     deposits of ore to extract. The price of HPMC hasn't budged because there hasn't been any conflict in the area, but that's about to change. The pirates have started to arrive and attack the miners, and that means that there are going to be some damaged ships that require repairs, and the price will continue to rise as the amount of conflict grows. Pirates require fuel, too, and most of their need revolves around the plasma they'll use to engage ships in close proximity, so it's starting to get fairly expensive. Security forces have now started arriving in force, which means even more conflict in the area, which is why the price of HPMC has finally started to take off. Security forces burn a lot of plasma fuel hunting for pirates, and this is proving to be more demand than the local stores of inventory can satisfy. This means temporary shortages and skyrocketing prices until either the demand debates or the economy rebalances

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     to ensure a more regular supply of fuel to this area. Up until now, all of our dynamic events have been manually triggered by someone loading up Quasar, selecting an event, specifying the input variables, and activating it. This works fine for major events that are intended to run for a long period of time, but it's problematic when the event needs to run multiple times per day or only when specific conditions warrant or needs to be customized based upon the current state of the universe. The solution to this problem is systemic triggers, which are small analytical programs that let us specify what sort of conditions within Quantum warrant the creation of a dynamic event, and allow that event's inputs to be mapped to all sorts of simulation state. I'm going to bring Quantum up one last

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     time and highlight the location of the three drug labs within the Stanton system. Raven's Roost is on MicroTech's moon Calliope, Jump Town is on Crusader's moon Yela, and Paradise Cove is on ArcCorp's moon Lyria. For this test, I've removed all commodities except for drugs, and thus any green quanta you see moving around are focused on moving these illicit narcotics. A systemic trigger has been set up that monitors the total drugs purchased at any of the drug labs, which you can see in the graphs below the star map. If the total amount of drugs purchased at one of these locations over a period of time exceeds the specified threshold, it will trigger the Jump Town V2 dynamic event. The location and quantity of drugs sold would be passed to the event as inputs, which the mission logic might use for any manner of things such as temporarily overriding the shopping data at that site for the duration of the event.

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     The shop service that communicates with the game servers is linked to Quantum, and thus all player transactions in the game are filtered back into the simulation, and their purchases are therefore just as relevant to the totals as those initiated by quanta. All of the drug labs are seeing a bit of action, and Paradise Cove looked like it might be the first to breach the threshold. Some red pirates have started moving into that area now though, and the green freighters have started to flee. It looks like they've decided to focus on Raven's Roost, and you can tell by the constant level of elevated purchases that they're probably going to trip the trigger pretty soon. There, that's it. The conditions for the systemic trigger have been met. You can see that Jump Town V2 is now been added to Quasar's active dynamic events list at the top right, and below that you can see the input parameters that it was sent, which include the Raven's Roost location and a numeric value of 916 for the total purchased

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     drugs variable, which the actual Jump Town V2 logic uses to configure how many free units of drugs the location will produce over the lifetime of the event. The ultimate purpose of systemic triggers then is to allow us to easily and programmatically dictate when and exactly how handcrafted custom content will be layered onto the background tapestry driven by Quantum systemic logic. As our library of dynamic events grows and the sophistication of the simulation evolves, you'll eventually find that it's difficult to tell where one system ends and another begins, and the whole experience will just feel more engaging and unique than what either technology could deliver by itself. That's it for our show today. I hope that you now have a better sense of some of the things we're aiming to accomplish

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     over the next year, and that you're as excited as we are about the potential of these new features and technologies to really transform the gameplay experience. Until next time.