Star Citizen: CitizenCon 2949 - Building a Dynamic Universe

6 December 201901:00:441,424 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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[Applause] can we get those lights brighter okay so hi I'm Tony Zurich and I'm the director of persistent universe for star citizen I'll be doing the lead vocals tonight and over here on my right on the keyboard is Jake mealy our economy designer from Austin ok and we're gonna be showing you something pretty interesting tonight and I want to make sure to call out our guitar and bass players back in Montreal Martin and Rivera Lisey yesterday they spent a lot
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of time working with us over the last you know four or five six months you know very very intensely on what we're gonna be revealing tonight it's been a bit of a stealth project recently we've actually shown it to very few people within cloud imperium because we wanted to get it to a level of maturity to where it was very easy for people to understand what the benefits of this new technology were going to be and I'm gonna give you a glimpse of it tonight but you're gonna need some background information to truly appreciate it so bear with me for a bit and you'll see why we consider it quantum leap so as everybody here obviously knows star citizen is a very ambitious project our goal is to deliver a variety of incredibly detailed solar systems that behave in logical fashion and that they
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can give you ample freedom to follow your interests whatever they may be thus far we've been focused entirely on a single system staunton which includes four planets twelve moons 225 economic nodes 44 trading outposts 13 rest stops and 50 asteroid fields so yeah it's really big the point of this presentation then is to give you a better understanding of how when the first one's taken so long we're aiming to kick things into overdrive so that we can deliver new systems much more quickly this involves obviously a lot of different areas procedural generation of terrain modular art sets detailing of buildings and interiors and a lot of other stuff for the purposes of this talk though I'm gonna focus on what I call the dynamic content so what is
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dynamic content dynamic content responds to player and NPC actions in logical fashion its systemic this means that the universe is in constant motion which makes it a far more interesting place to explore most missions should of course be dynamic in nature they should only be offered when there is an actual need for something this might take the form of a factory that needs some aluminum to create a retail product a criminal that needs to be brought to justice or someone that keeping them from one location to another at their core missions or services provided by one party for the benefit of another and they are therefore one of the fundamental ways by which imbalances in the economy can be addressed likewise economic nodes which include things like refineries factories and retail shops need to be dynamic since they must
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continually take into account the various market forces and adjust accordingly when demand for something outstrip supply whether it's iron ore bullets or ship repairs you expect prices to rise and conversely when there's an excess of something you expect that prices will fall there's more to it of course concepts like marginal demand and price discovery require a fair bit of math but in the end it's all about the constant search for equilibrium as production and consumption levels vary I'll get around to explaining probability volumes in more detail in a bit but suffice to say for now that they dictate what you encounter as you travel through a given area as such they should definitely be dynamic so for example if a new field of asteroids rich and valuable commodities is discovered you'd expect to find a lot
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of NPC miners in the area but as the resources are gradually depleted their numbers should start to fall off pirates should gravitate toward areas with a lot of value to plunder and recoil as the amount of security ticks out so let's look into each of these areas in a bit more detail and see why we've struggled to set up a single solar system and at the same time get a precise understanding of what needs to happen so that we can start moving a lot faster we'll start with the missions a star citizen mission is fundamentally just a container for code and data similar in concept to a class in any of a multitude of modern a programming languages inputs can be passed into a mission from either the runtime environment or services to allow for customization this allows designers to do things like say inject the type and quantity of cargo whether
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the ship should be damaged or not where the ship should be heading into a generic transport scenario so that we can reuse the same framework for a lot of different situations missions can have content tags embedded within themselves to denote their composition or whether they contain security pirates freighters miners asteroids or some kind of accommodation missions can also have somatic tags applied these don't specify physical content but rather detail the headlines story behind the scenario that a designer created so designers can differentiate between a straightforward pirate encounter versus one that includes an ambush once these descriptors have been assigned the missions are injected into a database that other systems can access so that they can be instantiated and customized depending upon the situation this however is where we start to run into
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some major problems designers have to explicitly link missions to various constructs within the game an NPC mission giver for example or a probability volume covering the area around yellow this is time-consuming and greatly complicates maintenance if a Content tag like pirate is split into sub tags like pirate light and pirate heavy so that we can have more control over what we're aiming to instantiate you have to go to every place you design the original mission category and individually determine which of the new ones should be enabled worse this isn't dynamic at all mission content is fixed to do specific NPCs and locations so there's no evolution the universe is completely static another major problem is that we don't have sufficient context to properly customize the missions at a macro level the game doesn't really understand the concept of a route much
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less what miners traversing that route should be carrying or what condition they should be in or which direction they should be if they're going you know if they're empty heading towards a mine or full bringing the results of their efforts back to a refinery this lack of context means that we can't exploit emissions ability to have information injected into it for customization and that means that you see a lot less diversity despite requiring just as much work the last problem and it's a big one is that there's no NPC regulation of the mission content missions are the basic units of work for the economy and if someone doesn't do what needs to be done then everything grinds to a halt in a properly functioning system NPCs need the ability to step up if players aren't going to and the risk award justifies the effort and do the work themselves if a commodity can be purchased at one
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location and sold at another for a dramatic markup and there isn't enough cost or risk involved in a transport to warrant the different the differential NPCs should seize the opportunity and move the material themselves until the price starts to make sense so let's talk about economic nodes now an economic node is an entity within the game which might be represented via an actual storefront a kiosk a UI interface or an NPC that possesses an item manifest detailing the items that wants to buy or sell storage capacity and a fair bit of data related to determining prices this includes refineries that process or factories that produce goods and retail stores where you buy finished products factory inputs aren't explicitly denoted but are instead derived from the production formulae of whatever they manufacture prices what economic nodes
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are willing to pay for their inputs and what they want in order to sell are determined algorithmically based upon the rate of change of their of their inventory versus the tangent of our pricing curve this means that they're smart enough to say raise the price of what they're selling even when their inventory is low if they detect that they're being resupplied at a sufficient rate to get where they want to be in a reasonable amount of time so clearly there's some dynamism happening here which is fantastic unfortunately that's where the good news ends as with missions economic knows don't have any real context in terms of supply and demand and there's no systemic flow of goods throughout the economy why does the refinery want or why is an MPC willing to buy some drugs for you from
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you where does the shop get the goods that it's selling right now the answer to all these questions is the same we fake it economic nodes conjure up their own supply and demand out of thin air if a node is designated as wanting to purchase a particular item for example designers dictate a formula that describes how that inventory will be gradually burned off so that they want more these products you deliver to a node then they don't actually go anywhere there's no real demand this is impossible to balance because while production and consumption are fixed the player count isn't sometimes a hundred players are interacting with an economic node and sometimes none and I mention this because behind the scenes at the economic level all of the players despite being on different servers really are connected to one single
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system a real economy is a tangled web of dependencies and you can't expect logical results when it's gears can completely seize up due to the action or inaction of players what we really need then is NPC regulation of the system for NPCs to purchase items when they need them thus keeping the demand side logical while stepping in to help with the supply when players down and the risk reward warrants it this has ripple effects in two other areas if the demand for missiles spiked because there was a lot of combat you'd expect that the commodities used to construct those missiles would start to rise in price and you'd also expect to see more miners and freighters working to alleviate that shortage if the price got high enough that those transports would be carrying a lot of value so part you know you'd expect piracy to increase at which point you should start to see a lot more
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security patrols and requests for combat escorts a simple change in demand men should be able to alter not only what you see as you travel throughout the system but also the available missions these kinds of knock-on effects in fact should happen regardless of whether any players in an area and that's a separate problem I'll talk about more when we get a probability volumes so let's take a quick look at what it means to set up an economic node as I mentioned there are about two hundred and twenty five economic nodes within the stanton system and many of them deal with a lot of different items each of these items can specify its own production or consumption formula along with a lot of other information storage space optimal inventory level price offsets and much more this information can be archetypes but of course the world's a lot more interesting if every economic node is a bit different so
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there's still a lot of customization that winds up happening so now let's take a look at the economic nodes around a typical planetary system and finally let's take a look at the economic nodes around the entire stanton solar system that's a tremendous amount of data to set up and maintain as we're routinely adding new items and changing prices and the worst part is that it's all extremely rigid there's no way to have an economic node increase how much of something it produces or consumes because those things are attached to formulate that have no understanding of external events so right now designers try their best to brute force this stuff
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to make it feel like it's a systemic world even if it's not if an area is configured to have a lot of pirates they increase the price offsets and demand for goods at nearby nodes if the number of pirates is subsequently decreased or maybe more security is added to the area and the nodes are updated to reflect that fact it's a ton of work and while this sort of hand tweaking does yield something that feels vaguely logical if static it's definitely not a real solution and it doesn't even begin to address the major problems now we come to the last of the major areas for which I wanted to illustrate the problems that we currently face so what is a probability volume of a probability volume is an area of space that contains information detailing what you should see is you pass through the area it's an optimization of sorts in that it allows
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us to achieve a desired effect a certain number of pirates in an area or a particular likelihood of encountering a freighter filled with iron without having to burn a lot of computational horsepower simulating things when there are no players around to see it this is accomplished to be a linking mission content tags to probability curves that span all or part of the expanse of the volume so for example you can denote that security ships are commonplace in airport olace are and gradually fall off over a couple hundred kilometers whereas it's very rare to see pirates who would prefer to avoid security close to port olisar but more likely to see them as you get farther away there are quite a few different types of curves denoting there are quite a few different types of curves because and because until a player actually accepts one of these
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missions as it heads to that location there are variety probabilities I think so our notes got screwed up here anyway so one of the more interesting types of curves is the spoofing curve which allows missions to skirt the normal rules requiring that they can only be created in the proximity of a player and this is done so that an NPC can request that you travel to them to provide something they desire which case obviously we can't limit them to only existing in your immediate and yours or in other players immediate proximity this is how combat assist is currently handled and we'll be adding some other things like NPC refuel and NPC passenger transport in the near future the reason it's called spoofing is because we only keep a small stub active on the back end which is way more efficient we've got other types of curves there reinforcement curves that allow designers to dictate how quickly
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backup tends to arrive when you've been identified as a felon and we also have the ability to modulate that time according to how far away you are from the place you were last spotted and how long ago that was there are bounty hunter curves which allow us to link to a probability which allow us to link a probability to your wanted level so that we can increase the encounter frequency when they'd actually be hunting you and otherwise keep them very rare let's continue on though and get a better understanding of how exactly probably believed audience works here we have an area of space that's marked up as having a certain probability of pirates and freighters security asteroids and derelict ships now let's go ahead and activate all that content that's a lot of content to simulate when
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no one is around to see it a lot of pathfinding NPCs animations vehicle physics collision detection now let's go ahead and introduce a player and clear the board those pirates and freighters and everything else they still exist but only in a probabilistic state as the player traverses through the volume we roll the dice and the various curves and force the probabilities to make a choice does that content exist at that location or doesn't it here the player gets a hit from the asteroid probability so the mission databases in query define missions with the Associated content tag dynamic parameters injected and the mission is instantiated and now a bit later there's Freight when the player trips the freighter probability and then eventually runs into a pirate the key point here is that much of the world exists as a superposition of probabilities until a player gets
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sufficiently close that the wave functions collapse at which point we instantiate them and start simulating the full-blown entities one of the quirks with probability volumes is that they usually represent a variety of low frequency events space is big after all and even in a pretty heavily populated area shouldn't be running into other ships all that often the problem is that the likelihood multiple events happening simultaneously is a product of the probabilities meaning that it's very unlikely you'd ever see two or more at the same time so let's go ahead and see what this means in practice here's a player traversing a probability volume he makes it through a good part of it before the freighters probability curve determines that an encounter has occurred at which point the probability volume queries the mission database with
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the freighter tag and instantiates a compatible mission the player continues on and shortly thereafter the pirate's probability curve indicates a hit which triggers another lookup into the mission database there's nothing fundamentally wrong with this in fact it's pretty accurate representation of what you realistically expect to see two rare events happening on their own schedule the systemic behavior of the freighter and the pirate even if spawned separately would allow them to logically react to one another so if they were spawned in close enough proximity the pirate might even attack the freighter the problem is that this approach lets the algorithms dick take too much of the experience and if you're not careful that's gonna lead to the gameplay starting to feel very formulaic what we really want is the ability for designers to craft more custom content and then have a mechanism by which we can trigger it such that it
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all feels logical if a bit lucky in the timing so what we do instead of basically allowing the algorithms to entirely control what you see after is we defer the activation for a short period of time and bend the probabilities of other things so that we're more likely to get a combination that would otherwise be the case so they once again trade this the player once again triggers the freighters probability but rather than you already got it yeah yeah so we're we're running a little bit ahead but basically what you've seen here is the player hit the freighters probability held on to it we bent the probabilities to increase the likelihood of anything else being able to be attached in this case that that
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involved the freighter they didn't involve the pirate rather so why does this matter think about a pirate and a freighter being created separately it's going to take a good while for the pirate to close the distance with the freighter disable it part next to it and board it this means that you'd never come upon a situation where the freighters already been disabled and the Pirates are rampaging through the ship so you'd better hurry if you want to save the crew that's actually a really interesting scenario though one that be a lot of fun to experience so while we're fine with the systemic functionality driving things by default we want to be able to bend things towards more interesting situations without it ever feeling too random every once in a while the problem with probability volumes then all comes down to their construction each one and there are lots of them contains a litany of curves and
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associated data and is set up by hand which is time consuming and requires constant updating as other things change one of the main reasons why they're so difficult to maintain is that many of the variables that a probability volume details should impact one another more security in an area should of course impact the number of pirates but because they're all handled independently designers have to be very careful when modifying them mistakes are inevitably made which results in a lot of sleuthing around to figure out what broker is now poorly balanced and how to resolve it the worst thing though is that they're static if an area has a lot of pirates it will always have a lot of pirates there's nothing you or the NPC population can do to change that rewards won't vary based upon the level of threat in an area because the threat is always the same a
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new commodity discovery won't cause miners to move in to exploit it and won't in turn attract pirates eager to prey on them demand for security patrols and escorts for that area won't increase in response to the pirates and the pirate threat won't recede as a result what we really need then is a way to dynamically derive the probability curves based upon what's happening or rather should be happening when we manage to resolve all these problems I've been pointing out across the solar system so I've called out a lot of very serious problems things that require enormous amounts of bandwidth to set up and maintain and it still failed to deliver the experience we want what we actually want is a dynamic logical universe we want the demand for goods and services to be the result of a
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legitimate economic need and we must have sufficient runtime context so that we can customize these modular mission templates NPCs must be able to contribute in helping to turn the gears of the economy from buying and selling goods to creating and accepting missions the system needs to automatically balance itself so that we can focus on the high level rules instead of the details all of this too has to be incredibly computationally efficient which means we need a more focused simulation engine one that's only concerned with what we need to achieve the desired effect if we're ever going to reach a point where we can deliver new solar systems in a reasonable amount of time then we're going to need to make a quantum leap so what's the solution yeah well flip over to the end there yep
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let's go ahead and flip the screen so it's exciting I really promise there we go so this is quantum and I know what you're thinking I've seen this before if the visuals look you know particularly familiar it's because we started with the solar system map that we released years ago but this really is a totally different beast the original star map reference static data there was nothing dynamic about it but quantum is totally different for starters it has access to all of the backend services and can pull whatever data it needs from them everything you see on the screen then that's real-time data pulled from the game so let's go ahead and take a quick tour of the system yeah okay let's go ahead and jump on over to everyone's
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favorite gas giant crusader and in the background there you can see Porto Lazar let's go ahead and bring that out now let's I mention that we're connected to all the real-time data let's go ahead and see what the players are up to yeah each of those red dots is a real player thousands of them across well over a hundred servers now to be honest we recorded this earlier mainly because we didn't know how many people would be playing the game while we were doing
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this show right and I figured it would be totally anticlimactic to say here all the players and three dots showed up so let's go ahead and continue the tour of the solar system and jump on over to damar and you can see a number of people affixed to the planet some of those obviously you're going to be at outpost some of them are inevitably mining over there on the right you can see the the current player list let's go ahead and see what a couple players up to just go ahead and highlight them so we can see where they're at and let's go ahead and jump to surco worm and see where he's at it looks like he's in Loire ville
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here he is hi buddy and you can actually see some deaths down on the planet there so obviously there's been some conflict there and you actually see let's go ahead and back out a little bit and find there's a contract to the right you have access to missions so you can see that clip so snore Wang is requesting personal transport to Norval to lore Ville and he's willing to pay forty five hundred dollars get on you buddy let's go ahead and jump on over to Ariel and we can get a view of those probability volumes that I was talking about earlier and so what you're seeing here there as I mentioned there are a variety of different types and lots of different content and thematic tags for all these
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things so you can see everything from the default tags you can see the security reinforcement tags the bounty hunter tags the spoofing tags there are a number of these we'll be adding more in general what it's doing is as I mentioned it's basically representing things in probabilistic state because it's too expensive for us to fully simulate them now let's go ahead and jump over to a shop let's check out the Hicks research station that's on selling yeah we got to go over to crusader and let's go ahead and open up that shop look here's yep there's outpost Korea and you can see that there's a lot of a lot of death around there and over on
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the right at the Hicks Research Station you can see all the things that it buys themselves and what those prices have been doing over time now I suspect I know what you're thinking at this point this is all very cool but it doesn't really solve any of the fundamental problems that I mentioned earlier and that's totally true so let's clear the board and get to that so the primary reason for Quantum's existence is to enable us to have one unified world where we can you know simulate millions of NPCs and feedback into that all the player actions into one unified whole so
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there's really no difference there are some optimized areas the probability volumes that exist in between these two you know these two realities but really this you know this is this is the full-blown simulation it takes into account all the player actions so let's go ahead and start by bringing a thousand quanta to life so you know Jake here is cranking the number of quanta up to a thousand and they're basically gonna come streaming in from another system oh and into the universe there these are simulated into these and some the real significance of this
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is when you're talking about working out the vast multitude of details that we really need to allow this universe to evolve and feel dynamic we don't actually need all of the incredibly high fidelity super computationally expensive stuff that we would get if we were actually simulating these NPCs the traditional way on the server so that they look exactly like they would when you see them these NPCs don't need to do animations they don't need to do physics they don't need to do collision detection they don't need to do a whole slew of things that we couldn't afford to do would be incredibly expensive to try and in the end even if we did it it wouldn't make the end results any more accurate so we also have personality traits - yep one has a little bit of something going on yeah there are a
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number of different traits that were modeling we're still working out the exact configuration one of them is ambition and that specifies how far a quantum can push themselves relative to others whether in crime or legitimate enterprise another one is intelligence and that dictates what sort of things they can pursue and how well they can do something happiness is a measure of whether a quantum the singular form of quanta is miserable or content and unhappy quanta want to change their situation move to a new location change occupations and that sort of thing aggression controls the lens to which a quantum will go to achieve their objective a business-oriented quantum with a lot of aggression might push their workers harder trading their happiness for more profit and as a result have to deal with more turnover and lastly criminality that determines the amount of criminal
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behavior that a quantum will consider no criminality equates to a law-abiding quantum having a little means that they might be willing to commit some minor crimes like smuggling or illegal mining and a lot means that they're open to piracy and murder they can have possessions store up money own a ship or property have a home now all these quanta have basically come to rest within the system and the reason for that is because there's nothing for them to do there's no reason for them to get up up off of the couch so let's jump to the next slide we're going to add a little bit of interest to the system by adding an aluminum line to del amor so we've now injected a mine on to del
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amor and yet you see the quanta still refused to do anything and that's because there's no economic reason for them to do it there's nothing to do with the ore that they could go and extract let's go ahead and open up that card though that represents the mine on Delamar and you can see a couple of stats towards the top quantity and purity and what these are is basically telling you how much of that material is in that mine and purity is to some degree a measure of concentration it effectively details how easy it is to extract it there are a couple of parameters at the bottom that our temporary those will eventually be derived from those top two parameters but for right now we can override it for some of this for some of the testing that we've been doing so let's go ahead and jump to the next so now we're going to go ahead and add an aluminum refinery
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to Crusader and immediately you will see the Qantas start springing to life and what's happening is they've all figured out they've that refinery it wants to build up a stockpile of aluminum and in order to do that it needs some raw aluminum ore and this it's willing to pay for it and so the quanta or our seizing upon that economic opportunity heading out to Delamar doing the work extracting that ore and taking it back to the refinery and this will continue until it develops you know until it's until it's full so let's go ahead and open that card up
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again and we can watch the refined aluminum ore gradually build up you can also see the number of workers a few of the quanta so you see many of them actually acting as miners there's also a number of them that are working in that refining factory refineries can't process this material you know without labor and there's a formula that dictates how much labor is required in order to process this stuff and so they have to hire a sufficient number of workers and act in order to actually execute this operation and so this would continue for quite a while let's go ahead and speed up the simulation a bit and go ahead and keep watching the aluminum inventory is that's finished so they're now building up their raw ore to
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basically load up and after that the entire economy comes to a halt they're the one refiner we've added has no more incentive to buy more it's it's it's storage houses are already full and therefore it's not willing to buy since it's not willing to buy the quanta have nothing to do so what we're going to do now is at a factory but before we do that let's get head on over to the power plant formula and you can see here that building a power plant just like refining or requires something it requires ten workers working for a duration of sixty ticks and it also notably requires two units of refined aluminum or two in order to produce one power plant it's got to be more complicated than that I promise yes again where we're building up
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so let's go ahead and add the factory to Hurston so damn well going too fast there on down and so once again you seem to see the economy spring to life and now you've actually got two different tiers going the factory let's go ahead and open up the factory the factory just like the refinery needs workers in order to build these power plants it also needs refined aluminum so now you've got multiple things going on the factory is willing to buy refined aluminum someone
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has to transport that aluminum from Crusader to Hurston so some of the quanta are basically working you know they're River they're basically working as freighters to move that you know to move that product from one location to another some of them were working at the factory on Hurst and some of them were working at the refinery on crusader some of them are heading back to Delamar to actually do more mining so you've got an entire little you know economic cycle going here however it's gonna wind up coming to a dead end here let's go ahead and accelerate it again just like what we saw before because eventually the factory fills up all of its warehouses it can't take anymore therefore as no more don't you know it has no more need for refined aluminum that will eventually shut down the refinery which will in turn eventually kill off the miners and you can see there that the
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inventory is still building on the aluminum which is why there's still some activity but as soon as it's done it starts flatlining so they see that idea inventories capped out yeah and now they're almost done the factory is basically got but it's it's got all it can handle the refinery has all of its hand to handle therefore the entire loop you know draws too close again so let's add one more node a let's add a shop that sells power plants to our corp slow down again and so now the loop is a bit more complicated the shop is looking it's a retail shop it's looking to sell
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power plants in order to do that it needs to be able to buy them for one price sell them for another so it adds its mark upon and it just like the factory that requires transport of the refined aluminum from Crusader to Hurston it needs the power plants transported from the factory to it and so if you notice there if the individual quanta they'll actually have a little translucent circle around them if they're carrying goods and so you can easily differentiate whether or not the ones that are moving for example from Hurston back to the mine are empty they're going to bloat up on ore and then when they're heading from or back to Delaware and then from Delaware back to Crusader they've actually all got ore and so this loop will actually continue indefinitely and the reason is because
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we've cheated something for tonight which and it sounds very similar to what I was basically saying was a bad idea which is the shop right now is a simple consumer it's burn it's burning off that inventory the difference here is that the solution to that is very simple in the context of quantum and the reason is these quanta the next step of what we'll be working on is they'll actually require chips chips require engines and so all of a sudden there's a real demand for how many power plants do you need how many ships do you need it all follows those same illogical equations so let's go ahead and add a bit more economic complexity so that's far we've shown a very basic economic clue one commodity one refinery
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one factory in one retail shop the real world of course is far more complicated you'll have lots of different commodities refining and production those retail shops and horseplayers in quanta competing against one another for a limited supply of goods and services it's this competition this economic natural selection that ensures that things remain in balance that a logical equilibrium is reached so our current architecture basically has players connecting to a game server and the SIRT and then we've got services behind the
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scenes that can feed information to these servers and receive information back in return and so you can see here you know we've got shop services and probability volume services and all this sort of thing the basic problem with this arrangement is that services don't have any knowledge of what NPCs are doing or rather what they should be doing so that shop service that controls the prices it's got algorithms but it has no real understand it doesn't understand that there are 10,000 NPCs that do or don't need this or what pirates are doing or any of that we don't simulate at that high level anywhere within the game right now you have servers that basically instantiate the stuff near you and you have the services that can run the you know these formula and that's basically it now they can implement these services these algorithmic price calculations but
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supply and demand only comes from players and hard-coded formulate and it's the same permissions in Peavey's the data is completely static and can't evolve the number of servers of course as we've seen here it varies depending upon how many players are in the game so let's go ahead add quantum quantum changes this in dramatic fashion it gives us a place where we can efficiently simulate NPC behavior and then feeds that behavior to the game server so that players can experience it further it allows player actions to be fed back into the simulation so that there no meaningful difference between the real and simulated worlds quantum creates a complete loop NPCs can be simulated in efficient fashion and actually meant to say that quantum feeds the services which in turn feed the game servers so let's go ahead and get back to the simulation and what we're going
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to do now is alter the powerplant formula so let's add a bit of complexity by changing the production formula for power plants to require lera night add some we need to change now we need to change your production pours I hope right yeah okay yeah we do when I have the new mind first so we're gonna add a lair night mind to wala and then we want to go ahead and add a refinery for this lair night and we'll add that to the hearse tournelles three and now let's go ahead and adjust that powerplant formula and we're gonna
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change the powerplant formula right now it requires zero lair night we're gonna change that to two and what we're gonna very quickly see here is that we're gonna start getting some glare night flowing to the Hurston factory so that the power plants can continue to be created and that's that's that that says aleut that's that loop of guys right there that's what they're taking now one of the important things here is that the let's go ahead and look at the Hurston aluminum aluminum now what will end up happening there is
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it was very low for a period of time and that's because they were actually burning off that aluminum inventory as fast as they could get it and the reason why you see that spike there in the aluminum inventory is because as soon as we alter the formula so that power plants now require lera night they were still receiving from all these Freight freighter transports they still had aluminum coming in but they could no longer produce power plants so it's stalled and all of a sudden they started stockpiling stockpiling and then when you see that the aluminum started falling that's because finally the they started receiving supplies of lera night and they were able to resume the production process and so all of a sudden their aluminium started getting burned off a natural rate yep so now we're gonna add a bit more
00:42:41
layer and I out in the asteroid fields and Jake's gonna handle that be a macro and now let's go ahead and increase the supply of aluminum and see what happens so we're gonna add a few new mines so let's add an aluminum mine to sell in first let's add one to Aberdeen as well and lastly we're gonna do Leiria and if
00:43:32
you remember we already have an aluminum mine on Delamar they're telling us we need to hurry up you guys want us to hurry up or keep going all right so it's like four hundred to one let's add a couple more aluminum refineries as well to the Crusader l4 and an arc or Bell one an arc or pull one yeah so now let's go ahead we just
00:44:30
added all of this new aluminum so let's head back to that Hurston Factory and see what aluminum prices are doing there what's that factory having to pay for aluminum with all this new supply these new mines these new refineries and there you see that the price is starting to fall off you speed it up speed it up a little bit let's let you see what it does and if you see it continues to plummet so those prices are pretty much falling off a cliff now from all that extra supply that's been brought on without us having to go back and rebalance anything
00:45:19
so let's go ahead and head on over to sellin and you can see that sellin is in very close proximity to Crusader so you've got to refine aluminum refinery and aluminum mining yet there's very little activity and the reason is because the aluminum at that mine is very difficult to extract so let's go ahead and adjust the mining time on Selin from 180 to 120 and with this again reflects is how difficult is to extract from that particular location and so you see there now you see a few guys are actually willing to put in the amount of work necessary to extract it not all of them it's still a lot of effort and this comes back to every one of these guys having their own individual set of traits so some of them were willing to injure yeah more risk more repel but you know more effort that
00:46:07
sort of thing so let's go ahead now and increase the light consumption let's just go with normal pace all right hey go so let's make the lira night more difficult to work with and more rare and see what happens there so we're gonna adjust the global Lera night refining time from 60 to 120 adjusting the time on hawala we're gonna do both the global refining time we want to take it to 60 to 120 and wall is the extraction of time goes from 60 to 180 that's right 60 to 120 their night
00:47:05
so what we've just done is basically make it more time-consuming more difficult to refine it and we basically made it more difficult to pull it out of the ground so let's go ahead and apply a macro also to Rafal to reduce the default purity of layer night from fifty to sixteen percent which means that refineries are going to need more or to produce the same amount of refined product reactive and now let's go ahead and take a look at the layer night prices on the Hurston factory so we just did three different things to make it considerably you know more expensive for lera night to be utilized and speeded up and you can see that larry night prices
00:47:53
are going up up it looks like they're starting to skyrocket this could be a complete economic disaster if you notice they're just going up up so what we're gonna do now to bring that back in the control is let's go adjust the power plant formula to compensate a bit so let's adjust it from instead of two layer a night let's change it to point one so we just reduced the amount of lair night needed in the economy by ninety five percent and let's head back and check out the prices again and what we should see here in a minute is Lera night should start to drop off pre significantly there you go crisis averted
00:48:50
and this will continue to drop if we wash it you always get it a little bit of turbulence because you've already got contracts you set up themselves right go ahead and leave it in I just wanna see it drop a little bit more I want to see it Tony so it's already down 40 50 percent and it'll keep it'll keep falling okay so now let's go ahead and add some additional factories Delamar looks pretty dead there isn't a lot of economic activity happening over there so let's add a bit of life by adding a new power plant factory and yeah let's add a Hearst nail for factory for power
00:49:40
plants as well to create a little bit of competition for aluminum and then let's head on over to Hurston Hurston Factory and let's check out their workers you notice that their workers are falling off a cliff what is happening well we just open up a new power plant factory and they're getting offered better wages for another place and and what are the wages on on on Hurston let's see what the wages that they were offering I can't fit so they were up at that point two-five yeah Delmar's
00:50:29
offering like almost three times the weight is yep so there you see the differential which is that factory is more desperate for workers and so you see let's go actually go let's look at the yep the basically the workers skyrocketed on Delamar and plummeted on Hurston and eventually those wages of course stabilized they find a point of equilibrium which is a big you know point of you know all of this so let's go ahead now and make some major changes we're gonna do this with a macro and you can see where we currently stand on slide there's like a bunch of stuff that we were supposed to be showing here absorb it quickly everyone there we go so we've added lots of aluminum titanium
00:51:18
and degrees iam and the entries that you see on the screen mark system all of the moons now have deposits we've added a bit more layer night but it's still pretty rare we've also added a lot of new refineries we've added cooler and quantum drive recipes to most factories and they require aluminum layer a night titanium and degree CM the demand for coolers in quantum drives has been introduced and we've also increased the demand for power plants and lastly we've increased you could see there at the bottom of the screen the number of quanta from 1,000 to 2,000 so that we've got enough workers to keep the economy humming now previously we've seen pretty obvious cause and effect at this point though the economy is starting to get pretty complicated and we can look at a few graphs just see what's going on with some of the prices to see this and this
00:52:07
is one of the most interesting things about a really complicated economy which is these changes in quantities and prices the purposeful movement of quanta this dynamism these are all opportunities that you'll you're going to be able to exploit within the game and therein logical motion so that's it the next one be a shame if somebody came to steal from these people huh yep bring up slide okay got a real slide all right so now we've we've introduced some some pirates let's go ahead and so you can see that there are four pirate
00:52:55
crack and there's the nova rioters lowriders ninetails and dusters pirates have to return to one of their bases in order to refuel rearm let's go ahead if you notice they head to the areas of highest value if you let's go ahead and zoom in there and you can see that those are missions being created by the NPC is no different than players would in other words you see a lot of deaths on a route that's got a lot of value and go ahead and hover over some of those contracts these are contracts that are being thrown out by the NPCs on that route what's happening is the NPCs are basically being you know some of the freighters are being picked on by the pirates the ship is being destroyed and now that NPC is has ejected and needs transport back to civilization and so
00:53:42
they're requesting that and these are missions that would be fed back into the game that you'd see and you could wind up accepting these let's go ahead and take a look at Hurston the cooler is upon us out this is where they're operating out of you guys what do you wanna hear to check out the Hurston let's look at what happened to the cooler and quantum drives yeah so since we've now got a lot of pirate activity on that route we want to see what's happening to the cost of some of those Goods for a cool half-a-million UEC you can get yourself your own power
00:54:34
plants it's actually normal piracy is really terrible for economics you guys so yeah so let's go ahead now and really see it over at the coolers or it started it like a really reasonable thing yeah that's that's peg it's just it's the scale so basically they were down around a thousand two thousand and now they just absolutely skyrocketed in price because so many of the freighters moving whether it's supplies are moving you know the finished product from one location to another are now being intercepted and these cuantas I mentioned earlier it's like they have various traits and some of them are very risk-averse and they won't go down routes where you know there's a significant chance of death and so to
00:55:23
counteract some of this danger let's go ahead and bring in someone to fight pirates so here comes some security and what you'll notice is that security is drawn to areas of conflict where there is a lot of deaths and such so they're gonna wind up gravitating towards those areas where there's a lot of piracy and there you can see I'm going over to speed it up a little bit not 200 it's just 200 too fast difficult Oh what's going on and if you notice by the way the police will wind up patrol Ian's area so they're in constant motion whereas the pirates basically are enabling quantum interdiction fields that's why they're basically picking a route on you know they're picking a particular location on the route between you know to between two locations and they're basically you know lying in wait
00:56:12
and the security which doesn't know exactly where they are is scanning the area looking for them and so what you notice here is that the pirate situations starting to look a lot better now that Security's shown up and you would see this reflected over in the prices and so what you have here is a perpetual game of cat-and-mouse to where the Pirates look for the areas where they can reap the largest rewards with the least amount of risk and security is then drawn to them and as soon as you get enough pushback from the system in terms of security then the Pirates look for you know more opportunistic you know pastures and again this is very much like what you would expect to see you know you know an illogical functioning system so let's go ahead and turn on the grid
00:57:08
and what you're looking at here is one of the big problems I referred to earlier is how we wind up getting samplings of this you know of how we generate probability volumes and so what this is showing you is we can look at one of these high conflict areas and it's basically tabulating exactly what's in that area so you can see that there are ten total quantum Freyr eleven pirates five security it also shows you the total value being transported you know exactly what's going down that route let's take a look at a few other locations here you see these security and pirates are fairly even six pirates seven security you know a decent amount of value six freighters so it's a there's actually an almost equivalent number of freighters pirates and security this is the information that
00:57:56
quantum and it's a small piece of the whole this is what it would wind up feeding periodically to the probability volume services so that designers no longer need to go in and say oh well we're gonna hard code a certain amount of security a certain amount of freighters and it can never change we ship it that's all that's ever going to be in this case the simulation is running it's constantly ebbing and flowing and your actions over on the game side get factored into this result just like any of the quanta in this simulation so for years we've had just the backend services and the game servers and the
00:58:45
fundamental problem was that we didn't have a single area where the entire game could be simulated where NPCs could request goods and services because they have a legitimate economic need and could buy with players to provide those things we didn't have a way for this activity to determine what you see as you wander around the universe thus eliminating the need to spend enormous sums of effort configuring vast quantities of static data that could never deliver the dynamic experience we really wanted quantum solves all these issues it also provides us with a lot more context which means that concepts not previously understood like how much risk there is in taking an item from point A to point B can now be easily calculated information like this is vitally important to the price discovery machinery and as I spoke about earlier in a properly functioning economy such
00:59:35
things can and will generate a lot of ripples we also get the information necessary to properly customize mission content meaning we can deliver a lot more environmental and mission diversity without having to do any more work I've covered a few of the large areas that quantum will impact but the effects will be felt far wider how many NPCs you see at a landing zone for example and what they're doing can now change over time manufacturing towns might boom and bust depending upon how much Commerce is passing through them a didn't give in a moment NPCs can grow and evolve separately from their interactions with players into powerful bosses potentially and you'll be able to witness their growth in lots of different ways criminal criminal NPCs with a price on their head can move around the universe just like a player making time to catch
01:00:22
them that much more fun we've got a lot more work to do before a quantum is ready for integration with the rest of the game but it's one of the last big steps in setting us up for a completely dynamic and systemic universe thanks for listening

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