Star Citizen Live: A. I. and U

20 November 202001:01:481,724 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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hi everybody welcome to another episode of star citizen live ainu uh i'm your host uh jared huckabee and if you've never seen star citizen live before uh it's where we take about an hour out of our day to uh what oh am i not supposed to hold on [laughter] that's where we take an hour every day at the end of the week and chat about a topic related to the development of star citizen today we have members of our esteemed uh various uh ai teams on the show uh with us uh this week so let's just jump right into it and now that i've had my fun at their expense uh let's just go around the room uh do what we always do introduce ourselves talk a little bit about what we do who we are and all that
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jazz we will start just we'll just go clockwise we'll counterclockwise so this way william who are you what do you do for star citizen uh hello i'm will i'm an ai programmer um specifically i work on ships along with andrea um yeah i recently have been working on a fair bit on the sort of pilot combat like uh how how fighters behave in combat and making it trying to vary it a little bit between different different personalities you know different traits that kind of thing that's the kind of thing i do know uh and andrew hello i'm a senior gameplay programmer i work on the social ai team but i'm not very social i'm quite shy
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um and i'm currently working on some stuff for squadron 42 to do with um people eating and drinking in the muscles so got lots of uh social behaviors and using lots of machines like food dispensers and getting the right knife and fork which we've got had a lot of discussion about the way that we your perfect place setting for sitting at a table but that kind of stuff and all of the ai behaviors to do with that so that's what i'm working on okay uh next up andrea who are you and what do you do for star citizen yeah i'm an ai programmer in the francophone tank force office and my work focus mainly on ship ai so i work with william most of the time and
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i've been working the recent time in this year mostly on the 3d navigation aspects of sheep ai and more in general the awareness of the special environments or even properties of environment like gas clouds and also took care of quantum linking with ai and players uh yeah this kind of system basically very cool so very important stuff related to the the the ai ships of the persistent universe uh francesco who are you what do you do for star citizen i'm yeah i'm i'm the eye director i'm francesco cucci and i'm mostly working a bit with you know all the guys here i'm trying to make sure you know that all the
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architecture all the systems fit together uh try to do some work myself you know and i'm i'm not busy with lots of meetings uh recently i'm working on a bit of functionalities to allow ai to open doors that are closed and you know where the front doors uh being able to basically create any complex logic out of uh environment transitions uh that is gonna be interesting and on the future to see it i bet and last but certainly not least dan hey uh i'm dan i'm lead system designer in the frankfurt office and uh i deal with a lot of the system works but in regards to the ai i deal with uh the designs on uh the fps combat ai team and more
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specifically more recently the combat uh for vanduul the combat behaviors so dan no stranger to uh star citizen video programming uh the rest of you welcome some of you this is your first time on any of our shows so we'll we'll try to take it easy um start you off with a with a softball here uh chairs no [laughter] so uh as usual all right okay look at it uh for those of you who are watching live uh yes we are aware that currently uh the website servers the whatnot are are down at the launch of iae um everybody as as happens quite frequently with these major events got very excited all at the same time we are here doing this show i don't have
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any formal updates for you i don't have any information to give you other than what you already have other than to say that there are top people who aren't doing a show right now who are all working on that and if we have any updates during the course of the show we'll be sure to provide them for you with that the subject today is ai and you basically all the ways that ai is being used currently in the persistent universe and maybe some of the things that we're working towards in the future if you're watching live you can submit your questions in one of two ways you can either put your questions in the twitch chat uh prefacing your question with the word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets that's going to help our community management team pull it out from the chat you can also do the same on spectrum well you could if spectrum was working so we'll just stick to twitch chat
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that's what happens what habits man habits are hard to break uh as usual we also collected questions throughout the week on spectrum where folks could submit their questions and then vote them up uh so as usual we're gonna start in on some of those as some of the live ones are curated and pulled in um all right you said it let's just start with chairs sounds good why wha what what what happens why does this happen so yeah i mean we had like funny enough like this type of bug is like visually always looks similar right so i think since the beginning i think really probably is one of the oldest bike we have like i think it's like maybe four years ago started to you know i was starting to have like people standing in the chair and the box that it was that time is completely different from the bikes that we have right now you know we started with having i think one of the
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first one i remember was there was something to do with the animation that when the look pose was actually kicking in and causing the body to turn then it would go on uh basically full body animation would kick in and it would just detach the thing from the chair or the couch you know so there was one long time ago and then i think for a while we've been like quite in a good shape and then you know we started with optical tennis streaming and this is where i think we are starting to find a more zinc issue in a sense so basically for people who don't know right this the chairs in star citizen are pretty much usable what we call usable our usables are are pretty much just the representation that the eye has of how to interact with the world so like a chair is pretty much just an
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object where you can sit and to achieve that what you do is like there is one part that is on the eye code that basically says oh there's something where i can sit so how do i need to arrive to start to play the animation to you know enter into the chair and then i play my idol on top of the chair then there is this coupling of these two objects that is the character and the share right and then what happens is there's the streaming code that can happen at different times right so when you are part of the chair right now you're also part of the aggregate of the environment so when the environment streams out ideally what should happen is that the attached object should first stream out that is like usually the character then the environment streams out and then when we stream scene the environment streams in and then the character streams in as well and he knows that it should be attached to the
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to the chair and then the kind of request gets propagated to the different components of the character and then the component decides to reattach it and put it in the right state right now we are like these components we are fixing them some some of those and we're fixing of course one at a time you know when we find the bag we fix it uh so far we found that there were some issues with the with the fact that initially the usable were detaching the character before streaming out so at that point it was like yeah we have lost information you know i was like wait you started [laughter] you don't know anymore that was one uh then i think we had some the sync on the events that were coming from the networking and we fixed that uh then we fixed another bag that basically was always related to
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the order of synchronization so basically what would happen was that some characters could just try to stream in in longer time and what happens is in the meantime some other character that the streamed in earlier it was not attached or usable but still the usable from the characters to stream in right so in a sense some of those bags won't really be so important in the futures once we have the simulation and once we have all the the server mesh because it won't matter that the ai is actually sitting there right the simulation with the care of saying you know what it should not be sitting there on the chair or actually the share should be reserved for this guy and if the guy is removed then it will just be cleared right because the other issue that we had is i if we reserve that spot we can't guarantee that actually the
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character streams back in because there are characters that might be dynamic right so maybe the share then remains forever reserved and then actually never comes into play so we actually already added like some code that basically handles that and now we basically found another bag that is actually under you know investigation we are trying to solve it basically that is like sometimes happens that the character streams before the objecting which is attached to so we are running you know we are basically handling this code a bit better and we are trying to handle the fact that you know some of this order might be slightly different even if you know if right now uh where you know should not have really happened that one uh but it will also like keep the state and the problem is this is this ownership within this code right
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what we want to have as well as achieving as a developers is to try to have code that is that is owning that state right so that you can tell it's like okay i should be sitting there now if the chair is not coming i know it's gonna come so it doesn't matter if it comes in this frame next frame or you know in 10 frames or one second but i know that this is my state and i should not run other logic to do other things and complete the sync this is basically where we are at and of course it's quite fun to see that he's always the guy standing on the chair right it looks like oh it's like it's that's hard to fix that and it's like yeah no but it's just like a lot of things happening at the same time that give the same visual glitch yeah it's it's actually an example of something that happens quite often in through a lot of systems in the pu where the same
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uh the same outward symptom can be caused by a number of underlying you know causes and it can often look no progress is being made in resolving the issue but it's like no actually where there's a crazy game of whack-a-mole going on underneath that you don't see and you know i see the change logs i see the reports yes resolved resolves often it's like it still happens it's like and the thing is the good thing is the progress is still happening so what i mean is like these systems are getting much more stable it's just that you know as a player of course sometimes you might perceive there is no change but actually there have been a lot of changes and it's one of those things how how often you you spend a lot of time working on something that happens like it used to happen an awful lot and
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now we're spending more and more time on the just the very small occasions that it happens but because they're so visible and so recognizable it's always you know over time those things generally that is generally a good thing that is the fact that it's so visible and noticeable it makes us find it uh absolutely because otherwise if it was a hidden thing that only happened in a corner you only notice is once in a while then you would run with a big system that is might cause way more problems later yeah no and and i think also i think this is why we are not putting any any kind of patch yet right because this is i think the good thing for us is that this helps us stabilizing the underlying system like some of those bugs are not even necessary ai per se related right it's just that we are the kind of bottom
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of the chain so if something goes wrong in the mean you know on the way then yeah the eye looks bad so the short answer of that very long answer is blame the chairs of course always always explains and actually again blame the npc always so now that we've had our fun let's get into let's get into some more of the questions that that folks have been submitting here um how would you consider the current state of ground-based ai fps combat and what is needed to make it more a more challenging or rewarding experience to players dan do you understand yeah um i mean the state right now we're seeing a lot of difference technically when you're looking at the state of it when you play it uh in single player versus when you play
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multiplayer we're definitely seeing a lot of issues that come from uh dsyncs and from uh sometimes server performance or stability but besides that there's a lot of things that we still have on our plans from design slash behavior perspective that we want to do with the ai the eye right now are fairly simplistic they run a few behaviors that they run in an okay way they either push if they have a shotgun or they stay in their area and fight you from that area um we are now working on on them kind of going and replenishing ammo uh surrendering enough if they run out obama completely and they can't find a place to replenish their ammo stuff right so we're adding the stuff but
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there's so many other things that we need to look into we need to look into how we flank how we try to intercept and kind of head off the player how how we're gonna throw grenades to make sure the player doesn't hunker down in the net in a single area and tries to snipe everyone from there uh how they're gonna react to grenades getting thrown their way there's there's like so many things left to do here uh we're just uh we're just beginning let's put it this way from a design perspective um how does uh how does the work on the new uh the planetary navmesh play into any of this so i think definitely like that one is uh it's gonna be like a critical part to have like you know encounter on the surfaces right so i think right now uh i started some work uh on uh
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verifying like you know how much we can generate and navigation mesh can you know right now basically can generate on the planetary surface we can properly handle like you know the the basically the planet mesh uh on that side um basically what is the plan the plan is to use the navigation mesh the basically features that we have but expand it in a way which can work more efficiently on the planet right so planets are in essence created by those patches right that can just leaves around the players and basically we would probably use uh uh an approach very similar for the mesh so there would be like this kind of dynamic knob mesh what i call a piercing mesh that's gonna be applied to planets and basically the patch of this mesh will only exist where we want to have ai so it's going to be
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much more efficient than having like you know the the full generation everywhere and then of course like basically the the eye will function in essence in the same way as it will work somewhere else the critical bit is how we connect does that mesh and this is part of the work we already started i think last year uh that was basically the ability of connecting multiple num meshes so we have what we call navigation links irrigation links are basically a way to define some object that can connect uh kind of areas right so imagine if you imagine the uh ugf on some planets right those will have like some parts that have the entrance of the the ground base and that one might just have navigation links to the planetary navigation and those one can also link
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multiple zones multiple physics grid and allow basically the eye to automatically transition i think we in the last year demo when the where npc is entering a spaceship and flying off that was basically the first iteration that we worked on for that and you could tell basically the you know the spaceship's land you know opens the door the door dynamically links to navigation area that is uh you know uh physically placed on the object container that is placed on the on the planet but then these two things dynamically link when the door is open in that environment so the eye can find a proper path can enter can transition between the different grids and then you're going to disconnect it and going away so this is basically all these little pieces are gonna be just going together to just create this experience
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on the planet as well plus i think this is going to also be beneficial for having you know creatures on the planet and all the all the different type of you know life that we want to have there this next question is kind of tip uh topical at the moment uh has to do with server performance so here's a question for the programmers here how much of the ai that we see is affected by general server performance there is quite a bit maybe i think andrea or will can also you know talk up some example of the spaceships but for example if you look at the bartender right now let's take one social example right what sometimes happens is that he's is reacting to you a bit slowly right and that happens because
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like really the performance of this effort when he goes too much down like you know it takes a bit of time for him to find for example where you are sitting and how to navigate to you especially if there are like lots of you know we have i think some the worst case scenario is something like 2 000 characters or 1 500 characters active at the same time right and uh one server and that is you know quite a lot for you know like basically what we do is i do not go too much heavy on the on the server we of course distribute calculation over time but that means that if you have some much you know so many requests at the same time it just takes more time to receive the the results um so of course that one is going to be for that beneficial like the server mesh some other stuff i think what we see
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also is the the time of reaction i think in fps combat that then just mentioned right if you if like let's say let's mention how we handle vision vision is true you know it's physical vision so it's like you can really tell if a character seeing in that type of environment like the other player right but even that one is a distributed calculation so you you have a sort of cached uh information that you persist you know that you that persistence said your perception system and he updates every time he can and if the player just pops out you know and it's not updating in that case of course it's not that that fast we introduce some stuff like for example having some sort of priorities for people next to the place and stuff like this but when the you know when the server is really is really heavy have you used you know
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there's too much usage there then of course it's like not that easy to make it snappy as it would be in a single player you know the single-player experience um yeah i mean this is the same for shipshape ai i mean i mean imagine combat uh dogfight when the and the player very very close to each other the ai needs to continuously update its its aiming position it's a trajectory because it changes continuously right and he wants to maybe orbit around around the the target that can be the player or another ai uh if if the update is slow then every every new update the position of the the relative position of ships will
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be really different so the you will notice some maybe the target the the look direction or the gun direction is saying is you will see that it's really off but it should not be and for example william did some work on the accuracy for ship ai for pilots and i mean for them and the accuracy basically something that basically simulates the the skill the the amy skill of the pilot of the gunner updates in time so the longer you are aiming at your target the better you you are and you have a higher chance to tweet and if the frame rate is too slow this will never happen basically you know so the aiming will be always off a little bit behind orbit i mean i had
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maybe depending on the strategy it's not based on the frame rate obviously it's based on uh well yeah it's not based on like per tips you add this much but it's like it's always the tick it's really based on the time but yeah it's still like it's still like if you if you have one update at the per second right the player does so much because the play is not updating i want one one time per second right so the player on his client is super snappy and he's like oh i seen him he there and now he's like he's over there he's like now he's over there it's it's just really hard like for for the eye to even you know i don't know just find a great solution when the when the performance are very low of course when the
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performance are medium then it's a different thing we also have like a lodi's update on the behaviors you know when our things are a bit far you know we update less when things are closer we update more often you know we are interested of course like not everything is implemented yet but you know we want to you know have better weight into what is the action you know what is the important thing that we need to update as well um how does that affect the way that you program it's it's do do you program this stuff for an ideal situation that maybe sometimes isn't always there or do you have to adjust uh your workflow based on the current state of things it's a bit of a bit of both right so i
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think there are things that you need to do in the best the edl case like combat needs to be the ideal thing in the sense that you want to have it the snappy decision you know you can't of course even in combat you have different approaches for example if you're going to cover right cover is a state where you can you can survive there right it's like i'm just in cover i can make my calculation a bit slower while i'm actually doing some short-term decisions that maybe it's not based on whatever uh requires like high performance and it's the same with social right with social is like if i have a guy said standing on the chair sitting on the chair uh basically you you can assume that there is a state that can persist and make sense right so if that one makes sense then you can take the time that you have
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like eventually you have a guy reading a book if if he stands five seconds in five seconds in ten seconds it's not really important right that the its state can communicate what he's trying to do no matter what and basically the idea of writing behaviors is a lot about this is about it's a lot about you might stream in any usable right you might start in any usable as a starting point uh and then you might need to decide what is the best thing you can do and the best thing you do first can take a long time to you know or like enough time basically uh to be decided and also you might not never you might never find the optimal thing you want to do right you need always reactively i could do everything right you could you maybe you are a changer you want to take the bronze stick and then the play arrives still and then i say okay what what do you do so you need always to
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build your behavior in a way to handle situation of course but i think a lot sometimes it's also just bikes that we have due to the you know server performance that we see i would say as well sorry uh that the question is how much of the the performance of the ai is based around the server performance but also the server performance is also based around how well the ai the ai calculation the performance the zebra performances um affect the the code of the ai to determine the server performance so we want things that which are gonna not slow down the whole server because the ai lots of ai are processing the same thing so for example with the usable calculations trying to cache as
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much information as possible so that if you have thousands and thousands of characters they're not going to be slowing down the rest of the server performance right and everyone else's experience just because they're calculating something which might be very cosmetic for example so it's about not what the server can do for you but what you can do for this uh yeah it's also i think this this is distributed across all the departments right it's not just the eye but it's like it affects everything even the ipcs cannot absolutely absolutely yes consequences it's every time you because we do a lot in a few places we do predictions so based on the current uh position and velocity of the target um what will be in the next frame it
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will be maybe here but you know i mean but if it's in two seconds then it's like well i mean the second two milliseconds okay your prediction is okay it's fair it's okay it's okay it's not you know what happens but if it's two seconds can be anywhere i think i think it would probably do a whole hour just on how important prediction is to oh yeah ai yeah a collision avoidance for example um uh this next question's uh we talked a lot about the bartender for a lot so i don't want to spend too much time like in the history of these shows we've talked a lot about the bartender so i don't want to spend too much time but we do have two questions about the bartender basically the first one is what's next after the bartender now that the bartender is in uh what's next for social ai uh they're referencing
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shopkeepers air traffic controllers uh other civilian roles what can you tell us yeah so currently i'm working on um this this this metal behavior which is kind of um part of all the very um it's four squadron 42 that i'm working on this very uh specific kind of chow line metal behavior but all of this tech is very much geared towards eventually providing systemic stuff for the pu as well so if you're eating and drinking um that's your activity yeah eat and drink is your activity and you want to satisfy your hunger getting kind of hooking all of the bits because we've got kind of we've had little bits
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and pieces here and there of uh we've got people eat looking like they're eating and drinking but are they actually increasing their are they consider actually consuming the things and are those things being done based on their current requirements of whether they're hungry or thirsty so um i'm bringing that behavior in for squadron 42 but then that will that will then key in and some of our other designers are already working on say vending machine usables and how they provide stuff so all of these things the different possibilities and the vendors for example taking the bartender tech and applying that that which is really just now we've got of vend vendor behavior and and and making pizza vendors and and turning
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turning like uh the very core features adding content to make those to expand those two lots of different situations that can be used in the pu and yeah so there's there's lots of stuff that's gonna little things that we're working out now are gonna be then uh allow our animators and artists and everyone else to generate lots of really great content for the pu um so that's that's currently what we're working on with social ai yeah we mentioned some other stuff as well like in the even in my in montreal we write like for example we have like some dancing behavior like connected to the what andrew is working on right like as he said it's like the activities eat and drink is basically what allows any character to you know replenish his
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sustenance pretty much uh and for example if you want to use an arcade machine or a vending machine sorry the key machine is more for the laser one but if you want to you know like it's it's food for your for your entertain so still still food [laughter] but it's like uh for for the vending machine right what you use is like they're just options so let's say you want to search for food it's the same as when the ban when the vendor search for the beard you know who can provide the bu order basically this is why the vendor was so critical because he offered so many functionality we use everywhere else right and now it's like you know you can check the vendor has the same things for example when when the pattern drinks you can check how much is you know the drink going down and andrew you will use the same for when you're eating the food
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right it's like how much is how much food do i still have to finish it and it's the same with the vending machine you say oh i want to buy some food where is it it's like oh it's in the muscle oh it's in the vending machine or is in this shop right you say and then based on where that is we can execute different type of subactivities that are in essence the part of our behavior tree you know behavior flow um it's really more like a baby graph there but basically it's like then we can understand how to then use that that uh the concept basically that is like oh it's food inside the vending machine and now we want to interact with that ambition how you want to consume it and then i think it's just like and then you can use it to how you want to basically dispose of the what remains right if you're in the you know like what you're working on
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andrew is like even like bringing back you know your tray and it's the same as like we have like some trash can where you know if you're eating like a candy bar right then you want to throw away your your your paper right there and i think this is all stuff that right now is possible because of also the bartender because the part that takes off the glass if it's it place it back into the dishwasher dishwasher is just something that accepts objects and takes care of this you know of cleaning that up so i think it is really opening up a lot of you know the doors actually what then mention as well the refilling of the of the ammo clips is the same so basically the ammo boxes are just usable that can provide you are you know either bullets or you know magazines that's just just just it and then you as an eye you can say like
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i need bullets where do i find them right it might be another ai it might be the ammo box and then you execute the behavior to basically get what you what you're trying to get i think this is gonna be really interesting because he really opens up this realism a bit more and our game is very physical right so if the guy needs to get the ammo clip you know it's really like there's really an ammo a magazine there inside the box that if the play arrives first he takes it you know and i think this is gonna be really really cool to see it happen it's great to see these little building blocks of different behaviors that we because we we're putting them together now in a lot more complicated ways that we can build on those on those successes and build that level up and getting someone to who just said i i'm hungry
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he can go through all of this sub-bits of logic and it all it suddenly produces lots of variety of behavior i mean i think even thinking about oh if he's he's hungry but he's not 100 hungry that he might not finish all of his food i might go and have to then dispose of that or or things like that it's really interesting yeah and the more time busy you add more complain like the i at the end is about complexity right so it's like for us it's building something that allows us to you know add as much complex as we can over time right so if at the beginning you just go there you finish your food that's fine and then there's like next iteration you say oh now we actually had all this this kind of uh taste right on top of the behavior and then we add more complexity and then it just looks more and more real and with the systemic stuff as well the
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the food that you're eating isn't just making you hungry also might if you for example if you're drinking beer it might make you drunk yeah and if you're yeah getting away from the ai stuff now uh the last bartender question uh i promise uh speaking of bartenders when will they start knocking the i almost said the word [laughter] knocking out players that jump behind the bar so i think basically right now we only complain right the bartender only complains right just like hey you should go out because i think it is part of i think about the gameplay and priorities on that one you know and uh we are working a bit a bit on the melee as soon as we work on the melee behaviors as well we use that one you know it's not like crosstalk i think it's also a matter of you don't
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expect every bartender to do this a bartender microtech is just going to call security a bartender in uh i don't know a shady place is my might pick up a bat and whack you off or just punch in the face whatever uh we also have to balance what happens with the other players because there might be another player waiting to get their drink and do we interrupt that maybe it's just smarter to just call security and that he can continue serving drinks at that point and security will come and we'll deal with intruder it's probably less less disruptive for the player wanting the drink because then you will have a player that just jumps behind the bar parting that takes care of him that guy jumped just behind the bar they just blocked that bartender forever just by getting in in the they should fight between each other and
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at that point hey just stop punching my bartender just start kiting one bartender to the other bartender um we're going to take a moment here we're about to halfway point and address the the current server outage here uh as many of the folks in the chat are aware uh at the launch of our iae this uh this year um some of the platform back-end service stuff is wasn't quite ready uh to go it wasn't ready for the influx of people this is a this is a thing that happens almost every single year we we do our best to plan for it we do our best to prepare for it and yet it happens um i don't have any information about the solution at the moment uh
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as you folks are experiencing right now sometimes it it comes up and then it goes down what not uh i can say that in this this internal chat that i'm looking at um there's a lot of fire emoji a lot of fire gifts um at least three people are drinking heavily i don't think they're actually involved in the fix they're just watching the people who are one person suggested turning the whole thing on and off again so i assume we'll try everything at some point so guys i i we're here i'm i'm a video producer our guests today are members of the esteemed ai team chosen to be on the show this week because they have no involvement in
00:37:07
this the launch of this uh promotion that's going on today so we are here so that the important people who can get this stuff up and running can continue to do their jobs and resolve this issue as quickly as possible so we understand you're frustrated oh there's flood gifts now i don't know if is a flood more better or worse than fire i don't know when computers are concerned uh either way we're going to continue on with the show i just we're at the halfway point i wanted to give you an update uh if we hear anything more before the end of the show i'll come back with more let's get back to the uh to the ai stuff all right creatures uh a couple weeks ago months ago time in 2020 is blurred it might have
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been a lot more than that uh we showed uh some creatures on ise early creature development one of the most popular questions has been coming through uh has to do with the work with the related ai work wanting to know uh if that's begun yet or not and if so where are we at so i think we basically started to discuss some of the creature we want to i saw your face guys i would say oh maybe i need it or [laughter] something i'm just talking again yeah basically the somewhat decreases we want to to tackle first uh i i have like some of the basic ideas on how to structure the code uh kind of clear you know especially in my head and i need to possibly talk a bit more with andrea as
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well about this uh but the idea is is is that we will we already splitting kind of creatures in in different groups right there are smart creatures and you know less markers like of course if you want to simulate something like frogs or fishes you know they don't require like crazy behaviors running on on them you know they might require a little bit of behavior right but not much mastery communication audio or something like this and some animation playing uh plus i think there are like this split uh the way i want to to progress on this one is that there would be a basic flocking uh kind of state in which they can decide to be part of a flock and when they're part of the flock the flock kind of simulates them uh you know and this can become also part of the more intelligent animals like you know you have
00:39:29
ships you have like you know kind of flying something sometimes they move as a flock and then when they want to do something specific when you as a play interact with them then they can go into this extra mode that is like i'm running a full-blown behavior possibly to defend myself attack myself and something so the basic structure you know we we work on is you know it's pretty much kind of following this line uh basically subsumption code subsumption behavior can be run on any entity for us so it's not really anything related to mpc all the human mpc or you know hdnpcs is really any any object can be uh uh an ii agent you know as we call they can move around we can define them i know how they move uh we can have
00:40:17
different uh but following styles for animals of course you know and different type of actions for example the stuff that i was talking about before like the navigation links right those can define how you jump over objects or how you use some objects to perform you know special actions i imagine you jump against a you know tree and then you just jump on top of a guy these are special action that you can use you can you know dynamically checked similar to how you know a ship would do a special you know action or you know uh wants to show off and um yeah basically not sure if he answers all the you know questions there i don't know then if you want to add anything on that no the question is basically whether we have started development and i think we're very early yeah very early i think the guys that
00:41:07
are working on the actual creature lore and the creature uh art concept art are uh ahead of us but that is generally a good place to be uh i think the the main reason where where we are now is because we're still focusing on on the on the human yeah it's priority definitely a higher priority if this was a hunting game about hunting animals then animals would have been our priority but for now we need to get humans and maybe also some of the aliens needed for for squadron in a decent state before we move to this otherwise we would have to create an extra team which means we get another uh we pull resources from uh from the existing teams and it's it would be a risk right now we'd rather do one thing to it properly then move to
00:41:54
the next priority is always at the heart of every game development decision it's just as no matter even with what is now you know five studios six studios around the world uh 500 s somewhere almost 600 people around the world there's still a finite number of resources and only so many things that can be worked on the only thing we can do and this is what we usually really do is try to be smart right so if we make a systems that we know it might be eventually not you know used by by the creatures as well of course we do it in the proper way so that even if you are not really starting officially they work on that you know when you start you start a little bit ahead right like all this usable code for example again creatures are not necessarily always like on ground as well right they might be you know flying ones and some of
00:42:42
these they used the same code that we use for you know to find a pretty path on you know on a planet surface it's pretty much the same thing we use it you know and we implement in a way which can be used in a generic way and things like flocking behavior for example can feed back into the crowd behaviors the humans and i was actually thinking about um if it's if they're kind of cosmetic um you could that's one example of where you could have the ai actually being on the clients or on the servers because they're flocking if you've got like a flocks of butterflies or something like that if you can't catch them or interact exactly right then simulated to really high fidelity on your on your clients rather than the
00:43:30
server and get something really reactive but can be very effective um seeing lots of flocks of small creatures could be really cool uh will having a pet of some kind be possible yes it would be possible because it's very similar to a friendly npcs you know somebody like kind of when we talk about you know crew management is that you hire a person i said well you know you buy a pet and it's you know of course their behavior is going to be different you know maybe the comments you can give them you know might be different you might interact in a different way but under the hood is really the same system and this is where i was saying like it is cool because what we we are making the same way like when when you open up the door from the vendor to do a lot of behavior it's like that opens up also a
00:44:18
lot of other stuff from the from the animals from the pet right the pet might want to just find food you might put food into a little bowl and when he searches for food he finds the ball that you place there right so i think that is all cool stuff and of course pets were one of the original one of the one of the later but maybe even the last of the original stretch goals uh back during back during the original campaign so um i last creature related question this one's from me will we be able to pet the dog yes i hope so okay because that's the cuddling as well don't don't put [laughter] pets in and not let us pet the dog all right um i'll be very careful allowing players to pick up the pick up the dog i'm scared what they'll do to that well careful careful they say [laughter] pick up i didn't say
00:45:06
pick up well if you cuddle him you have to pick it up somehow okay i'll be back if you're worried about that wait until the tractor beam attachment you can see claire is looking at the dog inspecting the dog and then throwing them bad bad idea bad dog all right back on track um let's get back to some humanoid ai here well ai in the game found it like npcs and stations towns stuff like that or or even wildlife okay follow and use the same survival requirements that players currently do uh basically will ai get hungry will they get thirsty will they have to heal stuff like that absolutely so this is basically what andrew is working on is exactly the stuff with them and these were also like creatures would be the same right so
00:45:54
christian would use you know this stat system you know they would get you know angry humans you know will get angry uh they will have to you know find some food uh of course we are not doing like uh the same simulation way you know that's the bar and stuff like this but based on your flow what if you know if you are working you know immediately like you're really like a uh an airplane pilot for real right then you get hungry it's not that you say oh bye guys you know you just leave the the cockpit then you go eat something so you can sustain you know these these values and you can do it at the right moment but you know we will basically have these these needs that they need to be fulfilled to perform better right if you are like super hungry and swear thirsty you're fighting you're not gonna be as efficient you know uh as if you are like just fed up and full energy then do you
00:46:43
want to add some more stuff on the design side uh no i think that pretty much covers it it's just a simplified simulation that we we're definitely not don't want to use as many resources from the server side as the player does it's just of course the effect is going to be the same the guys are going to have needs basically they're going to have hygiene they're going to have food needs drink needs so they're going to try to cover this they're going to try to find a place in their environment to uh to do this if not they'll try to find the place outside of that they can i travel a bit and then find what i need uh yeah pretty much and that's i think definitely i think what sometimes i think we you know we tend to think backwards in a sense i think those systems also help us
00:47:30
to drive the behavior it's not just uh you know we want to support it because school for ray is really like it's it's cool to have that one because first everything works consistently right the same things that happen for the player happens for the idea is actually running the same code as the play it is sort of you know player on the server in a sense uh uses the same you know of course like there are some adjustments on the state machine based on needs that we have but you know the same machine is the same the systems are the same they're just actor and in terms of of the game but really that one helps us also driving like a realistic behavior right otherwise what you do just to run like randomly you go to eat something and stuff like this but then it's very hard like you lose the context and that context you need to put it somewhere and that point you put it the same place where the player is and then the player wants is and then it works
00:48:19
the same and it much it looks much colder than what you said about the because we've got not just because we've got the plate the reason why the player doing the same thing is so useful is because we've got this the third person player therefore things are driven through animations in the same in the exact same way that they will be different with the ai so yeah that behavior just falls out of the same systems which is really useful although there's always tweaks with the there's some slight differences but yeah a lot of it is so similar and so cool that you get that benefit so uh so we are we are approaching the end we've got about 10 minutes left i do have another update on the outage uh there are
00:49:06
there are many people actually getting online and being able to access many parts of the website so that's good uh but somebody from the platform team just posted the uh the uh indiana jones and the last crusade gif of choosing the wrong grail and their whole face melting away so that seems less good so your mileage may vary uh stick with it they're working on it as we wrap up today uh there were a lot of questions that were related to the idea of ai npc crew now we've saved we've saved a lot of these for the end they were clearly the most the topic that players were most interested in when they submitted their questions uh we're going to talk a
00:49:53
little bit about that now before we wrap up today i do want to stress that when we talk about early work and stuff that is farther on the horizon this is stuff that is farther on the horizon so what we're going to talk about right now is a lot of our intentions the things that we want to achieve with ai npc crews like this but as always happens with game development as other systems come online and as as new new tech comes available uh these things change and evolve over time so we are going to talk about our current uh we're going to talk about our current intentions uh with regards to ai uh mpc crew so let's start off by first explaining the difference between ai npc crew and ai server blades for spacecraft because they are two very
00:50:44
different things and i think sometimes a lot of people use the term ai interchangeably uh to mean both so let's start off with the differential there i'll take that one okay no one else wants to jump on it [laughter] that's all you dan now uh they're both ai they are definitely both ai especially from our perspective they are going to be running the same behavior how an ai needs to aim a gun to shoot down a ship is exactly the same way a human is going to aim that same gun to shoot a ship the same behavior is going to run through all of this now gameplay-wise there are differences a blade is a sub-component on a ship you will plug it in and suddenly sign assign a turret to use that blade and the turret knows how to do it
00:51:32
there are disadvantages here uh first of all the blades are gonna be worse than npcs we have this grading of the player if you take an average player it's going to be better than an average npc and it's going to be better than an average play yeah so pretty much we automatically is not that good at the job the the turret blades are actually going to occupy a blade slot which means you can't equip another blade for other functionality you might want on the ship so that is a valuable slot that you're losing just to have one turret start shoot without shooting without an npc there basically you're cheap you're a cheap bastard you don't want to pay someone to to take that slot whether it's a player or an npc just just pay them pay the money and get hire someone and get them to shoot
00:52:22
you can pay for a blade that is the cheap alternative don't do that i mean do it if you can't afford anything else and then you have the ship is going to have only enough uh blades to run a part of the turrets so let's say you have a ship like a hammerhead you won't be able to have enough blade slots to make all the tourists function so there's not that downside uh so this is mainly where where the difference uh runs uh ai wise i guess uh if some of the programmers want to chip into this with how the behavior for this works maybe they can clear some some stuff behaviors are just the same behavior the npc we run um but maybe most importantly the behavior will be the same the
00:53:10
activity be the same and maybe how you characterize the blade uh we go through skills so uh sort of uh editing your uh the skills the capacities of this in this case i think as dan said it's like not all the seats can be replaced right so there would be crew members that you know they would be purely npcs and and i think the critical part here i guess is to to like basically the same way we let designer in specific environment to ask npcs to do things right this is how under the hood is the same way as when the player will give them commands right if you ask an npc go and be the turret guy right what will
00:53:58
happen is the same as when a designer set up like a mission and he has an npc sitting on a turret you know on a turret seat if you ask a guy you say like you know what i want you to fix that panel right you can do it and it's the same way as when a designer asks you know an npc to go and repair exactly that panel so the way we build the behaviors and you know especially like all the this screw management you know the the part of the crew the guys in the crew uh it's made in a way in which they can perform by themselves as best as they can their jobs based on the skill based on the traits right uh so imagine like you have somebody who likes to you know like just uh procrastinate you will have your engineer that goes around and just sometimes you find this smoking spot you
00:54:46
know or i don't know like some rest and resting areas and it just hides there and not doing its job but you know you might have a supervisor that goes around and sends tasks to viva right and then you know it goes and tries to supervise them uh you know we have the same on the on the bridge crew right the captain can go around and supervise the npc's and see if they're doing a good job or not then maybe you know just tell them something and uh and the same for the player will be basically right and then they can assign them another thing there is like there's more you hire right you gameplay hire somebody really good on shield management but it kind of sucks at you know shooting you know through a turret and if you know maybe you need both but you don't have enough money you know you are one guy and then you know you live with whatever it's most of your needs but the
00:55:35
good thing is that you know these skills and levels you know just carry through the games it's kind of cool that you see the guy maybe getting better at some of those some of those will allow you to train some others will just be your character traits you know somebody's coward you know and you just put him on try to defend you it's gonna just be a coward pilot right so it might just give up defending you if things are bad you know and suddenly this but maybe somebody super skilled you know costs much more money so it is going to create this extra you know level layer of gameplay as well yeah i just so yeah oh god then i would like to mention is that we're already building all of our behaviors to take skills and traits into consideration so uh basically even the guys you you are
00:56:24
fighting in korea they have skills and traits that are going to be driving some of the decisions the behavior tree is exactly the same but there are branches where it goes well do i have this skill to do this thing or how good am i at doing this this specific thing exactly the same stuff we'll be using for for nbc's crews basically because we built the system in such a way where we we we thought a bit ahead and we're like well we want crews let's start building the skill the skill and trade system that's going to dictate how the behavior runs or how efficient someone is at the job and you as a player you discard that you don't know all right so it's like there are some traits might enable you to do a tactic some traits might just make a tattoo different right it's like oh maybe you know you do that and you're really not that good and i'm doing it something like this or the pc thinks he's good at doing it but it's not
00:57:12
really you know you have a very confident but stupid npc exactly exactly problems yeah let's especially what i've been working on actually was the uh we had um defining some stuff like cowardly and show off the pilots and you'd get show off as a like a show-off pilot would be more likely to do tricks but his piloting skill would determine how actually useful those tricks are so you might get a [ __ ] pilot uh who just like really sluggishly rolls uh just for no good reason and actually makes himself a better target i think a lot it would be cool like to have like readability there right with the messages it's like ah look at me you're never gonna catch me and then you destroy me you know it's like that's
00:57:59
gonna be fun so it sounds like so so basically blades are a personality less skill-less kind of bottom tier automation for turrets only and then above that there are ai npcs who will personalities and characteristics and aptitudes and things are good at things they're badass stuff like this and they can operate not only turrets but you know other cruise stations uh within within ships yes exactly and you mentioned something very important there is like the state of your mbc crew which is like art which is going to be important it's not just their skills are they well fed are they happy are they ready are they like almost about to leave your ship then they're not going to do a great job
00:58:48
shooting someone or manning the station they're gonna be upset they're not gonna they're gonna become careless so you will need to maintain your crew you'll need to make sure they're happy you will need to make sure that you provide food that's why our ships have a kitchen have a food dispenser so you will need to really you take care of them as your family if you've seen there's there's so many sci-fi shows that do this that that small unit on a ship that there there's interpersonal personal relationship you have to occasionally talk to them and see what's uh what's going on you have to watch their stats make sure they're in peak working condition while the blade is just ugly yeah cool uh well guys that about wraps it up uh thank you so much for taking the time out of your your busy week to you know be here at the end with us talk about ai as we don't get to talk
00:59:36
with you guys nearly enough uh in fact when i called francesco uh last week i'm like hey and like i feel like he knew exactly what i was calling because because i hadn't called him in so long he's like is it my time i'm like yes it is um to pay the price yep uh as far as a last uh update on what's going on uh things are beginning to come up now the published process is beginning to resume if you don't know what the publish process is that's basically everything doesn't turn on all the aspects of iae don't turn on at the same time it's it's they're all done in pieces so so that we try not to overwhelm the system the system became overwhelmed in the middle of turning on so that's why you've seen things like pioneer warbond but maybe not the pioneer credits stuff like this because
01:00:25
the publish was interrupted in the middle of its checklist while when whatever was happening i still don't know what's happening i've been here doing this but i'm being told that the publish is resuming so things are coming back online so we just ask for a little bit more patience as that stuff is coming online the best place to look for updates is obviously the status page that they have or you can follow along on twitter for instance i know they're doing a lot of status updates there so because everything is kind of shady we're gonna forego the raid uh today uh and just wrap things up there uh william andrea andrew dan francesco thank you so much for being here on the show this week uh allow me allow me to salute you gentlemen
01:01:13
no not again not again [snorts] damn all right i'll see you later everybody take care bye

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