Inside Cloud Imperium Games . Moon Collider and Kythera AI

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:11

   Hi everyone, welcome to another edition of Inside Cloud Imperium. For today's show or edition, we're going to take you behind the scenes in what we're doing in AI in Star Citizen. Like everything else in Star Citizen, we're going to try and push the boundaries of what we can do and what's been done before. So, we've actually partnered with a new middleware company and their middleware is called Kythera. Hi, I'm Sandy Gardner and I'm here with Matt, Mike, and Ben. Three guys from Moon Collider. Um and these three I'm actually sitting with three very smart people. All three of you are from Cambridge originally. We all met at university. We were all

2. 00:01:01

   studying various different courses there. I was doing physics. Uh yeah, I was doing maths and and I was doing computer science. Yeah, I was actually doing programming as part of the course, whereas I think these guys spent most of their time programming instead of doing their course, but I think the first contact I had with Moon Collider was through Matthew Jack who's you know the main uh founder or principal of it along with Mike Bell. And he'd reached out to me over email. He'd basically say, "You know, I I used to work at Crytek and I was the one of the primary AI programmers there and helped develop the the Cry AI system. And you know, now I've gone independent and building my own middleware for AI that's going to be sort of the next step, the next generation. I still do consulting for Crytek. I know the engine really well

3. 00:01:49

   and I love what you're doing and is there a way maybe we could talk cuz I'm pretty excited by Star Citizen and I'd love to help out." And you know, I was like, "Okay, that's great because you know, anyone that has CryEngine experience is always a big plus for us." And someone that actually programmed a large part of the AI system already in CryEngine was obviously someone that we were like very interested in. Kythera is middleware which runs with multiple engines. We chose CryEngine partly because it's such a fantastic showcase especially for AI characters. There's a certain amount of role play initially, you know, we kind of decide how we would want a wingman or a pilot to behave or certain race, you know, if we're looking at the Vanduul, we think about you know, what's involved in that process though. You know, we kind of play it out a little bit. Yeah, there's

4. 00:02:37

   different species, different attitudes, different types of pilots and all that stuff. Yeah. We kind of get an over overarching idea of you know, what makes a Vanduul a Vanduul when they're in a ship, when they're flying around? How would they attack you? That kind of thing. And what what you know, what makes a UEE then kind of more regimented, militaristic type formation kind of thing. That's a big part of I think it's getting personality across because 90% of the time you're going to be seeing not a pilot, you're going to be seeing him in a ship. So, the ship in a sense becomes his avatar. It's his it's how you see him in the world. So, to real really get a sense of personality, we need to make the ship have a personality. You know, the ship needs to move in a unique way for each wingman, for each person, for each race. When a when a thruster fires on a an AI ship, it it's actually a thruster

5. 00:03:26

   firing. It's it's part of the physical world that the ship is in and it will affect the way that the ship functions. This kind of game has so many different aspects. So, I think if you're an AI programmer for instance, it's incredibly fascinating and interesting cuz it's solving a lot of problems on a lot of different levels. It's it's like a much it's a much more complicated task. It's like doing a dive off the top and a triple corkscrew whatever and you know, it's a difficulty of 10, not a difficulty of three or four. And and some people like to do that and luckily I think the Moon Collider folks are those people. As an astrophysicist, I was working on simulations of the universe. So, running large simulations on supercomputers around the world trying to understand how the structure and how galaxies formed. So, I've gone very much from working on one type of virtual universe to a very different kind of virtual universe with

6. 00:04:14

   Star Citizen. One of the big things about Kythera is that it's dynamic. What is dynamic navigation? So, dynamic navigation is a feature for the first-person combat where AIs will react to the world changing. So, if you got a ship landing in a hangar, then the characters know to route around it instead of walking straight through where the ship now is. Whenever stuff changes, it's recomputed on the fly. Um and we try and bring that dynamic approach to everything we do. We don't want the AI to be too controlled. We want it to be to react sensibly to the player. So, we can't designers can't specify every single thing that AI will do. We just give it these are your objectives. Do them in an intelligent way. And react to the player itself.

7. 00:05:03

   We we draw these these things out. We come up with them so that we can have sort of distinct maneuvers, distinct looks to each of the different species and the different types of pilots, capabilities and all that stuff. So, you really get a sense that all of the different AI across the the whole game are are real people. They're they're actual characters piloting ships and walking about and doing all sorts of things and not just a product of you know, some computer program that's ticking away in the background. Um one of the key system there is just the avoidance. When dog fighting is basically about shooting at other ships and getting close enough to shoot them, then pretty quickly what you end up with is ships colliding which is good fun, but Avoidance is an interesting feature and it's one that you we hope people don't notice. You notice when it goes wrong

8. 00:05:51

   when as Matt said, ships collide with each other. But it's actually quite complicated to make sure that ships avoid each other all the time. And And we've also got things like moving asteroids and things other other bits of the environment that are moving around. We have to avoid those as well. Yeah, with Star Citizen with such a dynamic large world, you can't hard code all the things you have to avoid. So, we needed this system which automatically would work out how a ship should turn to avoid something and make sure yeah, collisions don't happen. We needed a a new AI for Star Citizen because it's doing so many things that say CryEngine actually doesn't do it. I mean because CryEngine specifically a first-person engine for running around first-person combat and it kind of handles some other cases, but in Star Citizen we have travel you know, between planets. We fly around in space. We have

9. 00:06:38

   dog fighting in space. We need very sophisticated sort of space-based AI or flight AI, but we also need the meta AI which is kind of what does that NPC do during the day? You know, what does he you know, he's a pirate. He gets up in the morning, brushes his teeth, goes to work grading some innocent traders and then after he's gotten his ill-gotten gains, he goes and fences them and then goes to the bar and has some drinks in celebration and goes to bed and what is that pirate's life goal? What's he trying to do? Is he trying to build a pirate empire or is he just wants to be a solo operator? And so, there's these different levels of AI that go from sort of the basic sort of tactical, okay, how do I get around a corner or how do I navigate to somewhere to like what am I doing today or what am I doing this week or what am I doing this year? But the guys that have really written the bulk of the system that we're actually using, it's just really been up to us to uh

10. 00:07:26

    to run with designs, ideas internally and work with Kythera guys to to actually get the end product into the game. Star Citizen really has a unique set of challenges and I think a lot of people might have dreamt of one or two of them, but putting them all together is pretty bold. And I think it's really only because of the the backers funding that that that's possible. I think with a publisher model, it would be very hard to achieve, but I think with the support of the backers, we can really get there. For us, that's a fantastic opportunity because there are so many different features that we might implement for different games, different genres and they really all come together in

11. 00:08:15

    this one project. So, it's very exciting. All right, I hope everyone enjoyed the look inside what we're doing on the AI in Star Citizen. So, we'll catch you next time on Inside Cloud Imperium Games. Goodbye.