Persistent Universe Panel 2 - A Living, Breathing World

29 January 201500:52:141,373 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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so without further Ado um let's introduce the people you already know Chris Roberts Tony zerc Mark Skelton will be joining us again on this panel and that's me all right so um Tony earlier you were talking about uh the Pioneer uh occupation let's talk a little bit about kind of how exactly the uh the pioneers and other players are going to be um traversing this galaxy uh yeah the primary method by which you navigate to distant locations within a given uh star system is via Quantum travel um it's roughly point to light speed um there is a bit of ramp up time in other words uh you can't just immediately engage your Quantum Drive
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engines it takes you know 30 to 40 seconds for these things to spin up there's a little bit of dexterity involved in regards to aligning your ship you know perfectly with you know some concentric rings that you'll wind up seeing um taking any sort of weapons fire during that uh period of time will wind up causing a slight shutter to your ship it'll wind up you know making your navigational computer have to reset and therefore the process starts all over what this effectively does is it means you can't be right in the middle of big you know uh you know of a big combat and all of a sudden you know click your you know Quantum you know drive and basically you know get away you're actually going to have to separate yourself from any of that type of stuff for some period of time uh get I think you could you if you're willing to take the hits you can I mean so the idea is that you go Quantum Drive is in a
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straight line from point A to point B it's going to take some time for your drive to spool up to create the gravitational effect to propel you very quickly to uh that uh you know point to speed of a light or slightly faster because I think we're talking about different ships having some level of variation and they're very top speed at Quantum Drive uh and during the course of this you have to like basically be heading in the direction because there is no changing course because you get propelled in the straight line if you change course it would be way too much force on the the the the you know the people on board the ship and so that's why it takes you out of Quantum Drive when a ship's in front of you or an asid or an aesal elements in front of you so what happens is you have to be on this straight line in the meantime you can't deviate course so it's quite easy if
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like you're in the middle of battle and you want to jump to Quantum people will be you know shoot can shoot at you if you're doing it or someone could get in in your way and that would that would basically turn off the the the the the Quantum Drive sort of spin up mechanic uh but you know if you felt like there was no one in front of you and you were willing to you know take the hits on the back on on the back side and put Shields there and you've got enough time to do it is kind of a calculated gamble you could you could jump out of an engagement in the middle of an engagement or if no one's paying attention to you I mean that's basically the the setup so you Bas it takes time to engage that and you're sort of at risk during that and you can't deviate your cost but if you manage to get to the end of it then you can then you can jump out is uh is is the design set up on it um the other method of travel is Jump Gates and that's basically from solar
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system to solar system uh that utilizes wormholes to uh allow faster Transit um that's something that we've been talking about quite a bit over the uh last few weeks um obviously they need to be there we've got a little bit of concept art no this is just static images so later on tonight we'll show um a tease of kind of what that will look like so so but not now yeah yeah exactly do you want me to wait and talk a little bit about the visual side of it then I'd kind of like to know first uh how long will a crossing a star system traversing to another one all altogether take uh estimates have varied but in general for a typical star system you're probably
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looking at somewhere in the range of roughly 8 to 10 minutes to cross the diameter and uh now that said there is the spool up time and so basically covering 10% of a solar system may take considerably more more than 10% of 8 to 10 minutes because you need to ENT you know basically you need to engage it you need to you know exit it and then you actually have the transit time um while you're doing Quantum travel uh you have free you know control to wander around your ship um but you can't interact with the external environment there's no there there's no combat during Quantum travel or anything like that um another uh point of uh interest on the uh well actually I guess I shouldn't get into that since we've got we we get into that a little bit later um but going back to uh the jumpgate travel is requires quite
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a bit more dexterity than Quantum travel in regards to you're not just lining up with some concentric rins trying to keep your ship pointing in the right direction for a period of time and then engaging jump gate travel you're actually uh trying to follow a twisting you know turning uh you know path through these wormholes and uh another thing that was only recently added is basically the concept of rating the wormholes according to classes and what this will allow us to do is basically have wormholes that will allow ships of a certain size or ships of a particular level of maneuverability to cross uh from system a to system B very quickly whereas a larger freighter that can't
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fit through it or doesn't have you know the level of maneuverability necessary to actually you know uh make the maneuvers you know necessary it's going to have to take a much more circuitous route through multiple wormholes to get to the same I mean I would think of the uh sort of the the um basically the you I wouldn't necessarily say uh jump gate or Wormhole but think of them as sort of mountain passes so some mountain passes are narrow and treacherous and you know it's you can't go take a big truck up through the mountain pass but maybe you can do it on foot and some some passes would be big and wide and you could you know have you know a big you know heavy equipment go through so kind of that's the same idea with sort of the the um the various uh wormholes and jump points uh around the Galaxy is that they're
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they're they're rated between you know sort of like different levels I think we're sort of talking about three levels um so you know there's the kind of cap ship level which is the biggest um there's the sort of uh kind of medium level which would be the sort of multi cruise ship kind of sort of a freelance or a constellation then there would be um the level that would be for very small um craft and and the idea is that you know the smaller um you know say let's say we call the the small craft level is class one and class two would be the medium and class three would be the heavy ones so the class one jump points and a lot of times um you know will provide a route that can get from a destination quicker so like you could for instance like you know as Tony said that like you know maybe going if you want to go to s from I don't know some
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other system uh there may be a class one jump point that gets you directly there but that's actually really sort of treacherous and can only a small ship can go if you've got heavy cargo and you've got to like you know run a whole sea and get the cargo there you may actually have to take a class three jump to another system another class three jump to the system closes to Saul and then finally the final jump to S so kind of what that ends up doing is it allows you to uh you know there's reasons why you know for instance if you're a Trader Maybe you're uh running a small ship because you know you've got perishable uh Goods or something that has to get there quickly whereas if you're transporting bolk goods um then you know maybe you would take the slower route so it's not too dissimilar to say what would happen with sort of um a freight you know you can air fright it you can you know put it on a ship which is obviously slow but you can move a lot of
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stuff at the same times so that's kind of uh the sort of the the the idea with the the the jump Gates is there sort of different sizes there are also different levels of stability so um some of the jump Gates um you know will be uh less stable um so in in the case of the design we're going to have all the the jump points they're slowly going to um go out of phase so some will go out of phase quicker than other ones and that what that means is there will always be jobs for people that are sort of basically Navigators so one of the jobs we're thinking about is you know you fly uh you know you go through a jump Point Through the Wormhole and you your job job is to map it again and so what happens is if I've bought the nav data from say the UE um you know navigation Guild or whatever it would be uh then I
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have I I have the route that I would take through this jump point that would show up on my hood and it would show me which which way to turn and what I would be doing uh but that data is dependent on um the navigation data being actually updated by people flying it blind so like if you fly a jump point and no one's flown it or you don't have the navigation data then you don't have any hints of like where to turn you know which way to duck around the corner and all the rest of stuff as you fly and you'll you'll kind of see what I'm talking about when we show something at the end of today about how it's going to be and so so the idea is that you as a navigator um would you know potentially have a job that you could you know you're good at flying these things you got great reactions you fly it you map it you get paid for it and you're constantly sort of keeping the nav data up to date for everyone else that's sort
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of subscribed to get the nav data from the sort of uee uh you know navigation Guild uh and then when you've got the nav data already then it's sort of showing you where to it's sort of giving you the hint so it's kind of like uh in all cases probably flying a jump Point requires you to fly it it's not 100% automatic but you know it's either flying it in Easy Mode where it's showing you where you need to go or it's flying it in uh hard mode where you don't have any hints and you've got to have good reactions and we we'd also talked a little bit about the concept of being able to fail a jump in other words what happen happens specifically when you go a little bit you know outside of the boundaries within which you're supposed to be you know sticking and uh some of the ideas um that you know that we were tossing around where we kind of like wound up gravitating towards is we
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didn't like the idea of basically making it such that if you wind up failing the jump your ship is destroyed and so we W where we wind up going no you're killed corre your ship May May and so where we wind up going was more depending upon how all much of the jump you've already uh traversed that's going to largely dictate where you wind up in other words if I made it through 90% you know of the jump to a particular system and then I miss you know one of the you know one of the curves at the end and I get kicked out prematurely I'm still going to likely be thrown into that system but I'm going to take a bit of damage you know as a result if I only made it 10% of the way you know through that jump then I'm probably going to get you know thrown right back into the system I came from and my ship's going to have taken some damage along the way yeah cool um Mark yeah we want to talk a
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little bit about the art direction and what's going on in these so visually I was just going to mention that um so some of the things that uh we had thrown around was the idea of possibly I don't know if you guys have ever seen Fantastic Voyage but it's like a it's basically a movie about uh shrinking yourself and injecting yourself in a human body and that was kind of like the idea for this where it was an organic thing that uh moves and undulates and and is alive uh in a predictable way um so a lot of these things that you see um it's almost like an organism that is connecting and reconnecting itself and snapping apart and you're in the middle of this chaotic uh kind of almost like an intestin or or
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you know in a vein or something so we kind of attacked it that way because uh obviously um these things would would have to be organic in nature um we were thinking uh we were thinking a lot about fractals which uh fractals occur in nature quite a bit um so we were kind of you know rolling around those ideas and also the color and the vibe of things are also has a lot of um has a lot to do with electrical impulses and um things again like like kind of body oriented organic oriented um with this this feeling of of undulation so that was kind of a lot of the the direction that we went which kind of evolved into this interesting gaml you know um which was
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like these things could collapse or open up at any given time and the walls could you know contract or expand and it's up to you as a player to be able to you know either move your ship side to side and also up and down and left and right it's not only uh it's not just onedimensional there's a lot of aspects of it and it's also uh the whole thing is turning like a like a large tube also while all this is happening so um I think probably what we want to do is um certain wormholes obviously have certain characteristics we were talking about that quite a bit too where maybe a certain uh Wormhole has has got more of like that kind of upper middle where more like the walls are connecting um
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and then some are more like the walls contract and expand depending on what worm hole you're in and you know and like Tony was saying that you know we were also talking about um the size of the ship that you can Traverse through it obviously some wormholes are more optimal for smaller ships and some are for you know obviously big freighter are going to have to have more consideration um and you know certain wormholes you just cannot take a certain size Freight or two um or you know you'll be destroyed so that was some of the ideology behind the the art direction of it so now that we know kind of um you know where or how how we're going to be traveling around the Universe um how do you know what's available and uh where to go within the universe uh within the ship you're
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actually going to have a HUD and we've actually got a demo that uh turbulent did a proof of concept for some work uh we're actually in in the middle of basically converting this in game and so we can actually give you an idea so let's switch over somewhere we have there we go and so this would basically represent the galactic map and you can see every system in the you know in the that you can eventually access you'll eventually be able to get uh some information in regards to commodity prices uh missions that are available just by clicking on the system here um that information uh may be stale since as Chris has said in the past uh he wanted the concept of uh information actually taking time to be
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uh transmitted across the known Galaxy and so here this is more representative of what you would actually see uh within uh within one specific system and within a specific system you'll see all of the points of interest that you can bring up and select and engage your Quantum Drive to actually uh jump to um that's going to include things for uh the local star planets moons large asteroid Fields uh space stations and a variety of other things that persist indefinitely um it's also going to include on this localized star system map uh what I would call transitory points of interest and that's going to be a lot of things that pop up exist for some period of time and then they fade
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away uh for example the Pioneer uh occupation that I mentioned ear earlier if he if he discovers a comet if he discovers an asteroid field if he discovers a derel ship um it's you know and he actually broadcast that information as opposed to keeping it to himself you know to exploit um that it would wind up showing you know showing up here after he sells it to a public information broker that makes it available to you know to the entire Community um you'll wind up uh also seeing on this map uh distress signals from uh other players in NPCs such that if you're a mercenary and you're basically looking for freighters in distress or you're looking for uh somebody you know somebody that's uh that's in need of uh combat assistance you will actually see those distress
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calls uh being transmitted to this display cool all right um so once you engage your Quantum Drive um are you guaranteed you reach your destination are there any dangers inherent in such travel uh you're definitely not guaranteed to reach your destination it will actually be pretty common for you to be kicked out uh if you're trying to cross half of a given you know half of a star system you're probably going to be kicked out at least a couple of times that will increase or decrease depending upon what's between you and your destination Point um if there are large battles raging if there's you know a significant you know force of pirates um there could be meteor showers um micro black holes uh Dark Matter nurseries just a variety of different uh things that can basically cause your
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navigational computer which cannot make uh quick course corrections to chart you around these things um it will wind up engaging essentially a safety mechanism kick you out of quantum travel and at that point you need to uh just navigate your way through you know through that around it plot of different course Etc um such as you can get to uh your uh your original destination all right uh a star system typically typically only have a few planets in it uh does that mean that if you're not at one of those uh specific Landing zones within a system you're going to be on a ship the rest of the time uh no there's actually uh that that was another thing that we started addressing four or five or six months ago um which is we wanted the ability to do a lot of uh firstperson battles that
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would in environments to where we'd have a little bit more flexibility to create you know exactly the you know uh you know the the type of environment that we wanted um so as we were talking about earlier it's like we have combat on you know on a lot of the major planetary Landing zones um but it's in a you know it's in a controlled fashion for the majority uh of those areas some areas are large enough Tera Prime for example will have uh a another area that you can transition to called the blocks to where it's much more uh uh it's it's it's much more Unchained in term terms of the level of violence that you can actually encounter there but that's not going to be the case for a lot of Landing zones and so what we wanted was the ability for you to have these big raging first-person battles um according to
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whatever Dynamic missions we were creating to basically uh you know uh provide you with content and so what we wound up adopting was just the concept of these space stations and so uh Mark we'll talk a little bit later um about uh what we're doing in regards to uh some of the modular building sets and we're doing the exact same thing for space stations that we're doing for the cities in regards to building these things out of all of these component pieces so that we can quickly uh create a variety of different space stations that will suit a wide variety of different uh Mission needs we'll be able to make uh medical facilities research facilities you know mining stations um military outposts Etc all from these same building blocks there will be a lot
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of custom art that will basically help to give these things a very custom feel despite the fact that there's a lot of commonality in terms of the external you know space station components and such hero props that's what we call her yeah hero props so yeah that's that's exactly it so let's go ahead and talk about that uh right now actually Mark do you want to touch on a little bit of the the modular building sets and how we go about the design and creating those I mean in the last panel we didn't quite get to the question but the question was like okay so so you've got all these hundreds of places that you're going to go and obviously you know we're going to have to have a tier system way of looking at it how are we going to make these all different um how are we going to make them different enough where uh it's just not the same thing over and over and over um so we've been thinking
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about that quite a bit uh we've just had an environment Summit not too long ago to talk about some of these issues um one of the things that we broke it down to is um architectural Styles so we have pillars of architectural Styles which you guys have seen already um the selfland the arrow View and the Revel and York hangers are kind of um Pinnacle styles of the lowtech high-tech and super modernism which those are kind of our base first run at making a you know a modular system and to see how far we can go with those now obviously the architectural styles are going to expand I know Chris wants um history which is huge in as far as an art Direction point
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of view uh these environment locations have got to have history and they've got to have and they do a lot of them have um in the the stuff that has been written for Star Citizen there's tons of History to to draw from from and tons of uh things that have happened um on any particular Landing Side location that that uh as an art director gives me something to like grab on to and be able to expand and give detail to I mean history obviously you know the the more history someplace has the more detail that you can pull out of it um you know like and we've also been talking about um places like Tera Prime and stuff like that that are they're not only just places to visit but they're like
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destination places where you have this idea of exploring the universe actually you know like going to Paris and seeing the Eiffel Tower or going to Egypt and seeing the pyramids we want to convey that in um Star Citizen and the way to do that is to have historical places that you go visit uh and significant things that happen within the universe and you're like oh man I want to go see that well you know okay you can and it's you know on Terra Prime and you know there's a big statue there um you know of of of an important thing or an important person that happen so these architectural Styles kind of feed into that and what we can do is we can take historical Styles and also mix them with u modern styles you know because as you
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know you know like Seattle and a lot of places what they'll do is um you know as the culture um evolves and the architecture evolves they'll build on top of stuff or I'm sure you'll visit locations that are ruined so you know you'll have you'll land someplace and see that there was a big battle here at some point um so all these architectural Styles um are are being worked out uh as far as the tier goes to for the breadth and the width of of what we want to um what we want to achieve um so a lot of these things are going to be you'll have a base architectural style that you start with and then like we were saying before you have like uh there are other things that you can put with it uh like props and um light changes and there are a thing called theme changes which we're
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doing which uh the ships have have been doing quite a bit of this uh and that's using a blend system to be able to convey things like um economic ruin so um you go to a planet it's nice you know you come back a month later it's just it's you know it's in Ruins it's like it's got spray paint on the wall and it's rusted out and the E the economy is just totally gone you know South and um things are looking bad and we obviously want to convey that through um the architecture also so we've been putting some thought and T and time into creating these things with with themes in embedded in them which are controllable by U materials that's actually a good a good segue into um
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talking about whether or not planets are static so sounds like what you're talking about the planets are not static do they evolve over time and if so how do they do that yeah they absolutely will I mean uh we were just talking about um you know economic is a huge uh obviously Catalyst for um the evolution of Any Given location um you know I we want to make it where you can land on a planet and I I want to convey that it's you know it's uncomfortable that you are in a dangerous place and that you should probably watch yourself you know know uh it's my job as an art director to uh visually clue you in to things like that um so we're setting up um the architectural Styles like I said to
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convey some of that now we were also talking about the next uh question would be like weather and stuff like that I absolutely hope that we you know we will have like various weather on on different kinds of planets obviously um and time of day cycle yeah absolutely time of day too we were just talking about this this whole uh time of day with Shan Tracy actually and um going back and forth on the ramifications of it and and uh there I mean obviously you know if you think through it there's a there's there's a lot of dominoes that fall um when that happens but there absolutely will be a time of day because I mean you know you want to be able to go to terara at night and uh you know do dealings in the dark or you know and
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that and that's actually an important point which is uh it's not just a cosmetic effect that we're applying and I would actually I I'd separate it into there are two ways that planets evolve over time uh there's in the short term the 24-hour cycle um we've talked before about how there's this economic simulation that's going on in the background it's basically uh running a simulation with give or take you know 10 million MPCs uh the values that are thrown out of that simulation wind up informing affecting uh what the player actually sees it takes uh things like the population the per capita wealth the employment rate The Landing Zone GDP all of these things wind up getting factored into what you see you know uh you know on on you know uh you know when you actually land at one of these things and so as GDP as employment as these things start to increase you can actually see
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Ripple through effects like we were talking the other day uh in regards to the addition of smog to some of the environments and so smog as a you know as a planet starts to produce more good Goods um the the amount of smog can increase the number of uh you know blue collor workers that you might see be you know given the type of later you know given the type of product that they're actually producing may actually start to increase um depending upon you know whether or not they're creating higher end products or lower end products it may affect you know how many you know tourists you know how many businessmen you actually wind up seeing at this location um but then going back to the smaller scale the 24hour stuff um if you wind up landing on a planet in the middle of the day the shops will be open you'll tend to see you know security guards within the street you'll see you know on you know in general you know
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kids frolicking Etc um if you wind up going to that exact same destination uh in the middle of the night then some of the shops May well be closed we wouldn't want to uh we we haven't actually discussed in this panel yet but uh there will likely be some sort of compressed time you know schedule we don't know exactly what that will be but in general a day will most likely not equate you know a day in the game will most likely not equate to you know a day in the real world and what this means is that within some multi hour period you'll actually be able to uh watch a planet go from day toight night so if you arrive in the middle of their night then you may have to either elect to wait some relatively small portion of time for the shops that
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you're after to open or you may have to pursue alternative means you may have to go to the Shady arms dealer at the back of an alley and you may have to be willing to put up with his inferior selection his higher prices because you want it right now and so there are really uh there there are a number of ways that we're trying to basically make these planets feel like they're alive as opposed to just these static entities to where you go you restock your ship and then you head back out into the universe these things uh they you will see significant uh evolu Evolution both both in terms of the NPC constitution in terms of emissions in terms of uh commodity prices in terms of some of the atmospheric effects and stuff um in terms of uh what types of uh weapons you actually what types of uh weapons ships
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Etc are available on that planet um what the constitution of the MPCs are in terms of you know criminals versus businessmen versus you know all these other types of things so um y'all mentioned the economy a few times U I know that's something that we L working on as the economic simulator um but we don't have anything uh to show right now uh but I would like to know how much of a difference can one player um or a large organization of players really have on the price or availability of a commodity or retail product can you Corner the market for example yeah it it's unlikely you're going to Corner the market but you know you always uh but never say never I mean the reality is is there there are many other MPCs as Chris mentioned earlier the number of NPCs to players is
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probably going to be roughly 10 to one in terms of what we're actually simulating um what you're actually affecting uh therefore may be largely superseded by other things that are going on so if you really want to have an outsized impact the your best CH you know on a particular commodity or the availability of a particular item and therefore its price or a whole slew of these things your best bet is to basically go to a an area that has a smaller population you're best bet is to basically team up with friends and work in concert um but in general you can kind of picture it like a spring to where um if if you're clever and you pick the right spot and you get some friends to help you and you basically you know uh do a good job of you know preventing every freighter that you see
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from actually Landing in a giv Landing Zone then you can actually start to bend the needle and basically start to have an effect on the price of that commodity and therefore everything that's built utilizing that would you know would would eventually show some effect um but in general it's going to be the larger more macroscopic things that are going to significantly move the needle and what I mean by that is if you've got a raging you know battle in a particular solar system between you know uh UE security forces and Pirates then that's going to be consuming not just you know what one player or 50 players would but they effectively going to have thousands of NPCs and hundreds and hundreds of players involved in this battle all shwing through ammunition chewing through ships through you know chewing through personal weapons what that's going to do is it's going to create a
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tremendous demand for Commodities that won't at least immediately be able to be satisfied and therefore you're going to wind up having a choke point in the production of everything that depends upon those things and so all of a sudden what you'll see uh is the price of ships the price of ammunition the price of person you know personal weapons will all start to basically rise and so I could see a really cutting organization St starting a war between two other organizations in a system and have stuck piled a whole bunch of missiles and weapons absolutely they'll never and then and then there's a there's a run on the stuff in the shop so then they can go and sell the stuff at a premium yeah and and that's actually another another uh concept that we talked about relatively recently is your ability to uh store significant you know uh stocks of you know Commodities and other you know sellable Goods um at various space
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Sports and so depending upon what uh what the situation is is like you could very well think that you know because of how things are you know evolving within a given system um that you know copper or a particular ship or you know you name it is going to increase in price and therefore you basically start planning ahead of time you basically stock up and when that thing actually you know when when what you've been predicting actually you know occurs assuming it does then you can actually you know reap reap a very significant reward um but the you the real point there is that you shouldn't expect one player to basically go in and to assume that you're going to take out one you know freighter and that's somehow going to you know completely constrain the supply it's it's a very large world that's being simulated um and while one player can make a very you know uh significant
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you know uh can have a very significant impact in regards to uh some very specific situations where you're talking about you know a low population um or you know on a on a distant you know Outpost or something like that you you're you're not going to move the needle very far uh you know by yourself or even with your group of friends in uh in some of the more populated zones that's really going to take you know one of these more you know macros macroscopic events to really move that needle so we talked a lot about what makes the environments the economy living and breathing how will I as a player be able to contribute to that living breathing Universe uh do I have to formally accept jobs in order to progress or can I just fly around see the universe uh and step into in situations I encounter just as I see fit
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uh yeah there are actually two different you know types of missions you know that I kind you know that I kind of categorize one is the type you know the you formally accept you go to a tdd or something and you basically say I'm looking for this type of mission and you look through the list and you basically sign up or you talk to an NPC and effectively you know have you know get get get the same effect um then there's all the stuff that's just randomly happening around you as you fly throughout um I am you know I i' I've got my ship I'm cruising through uh I mentioned a little bit of this earlier when we were looking at the solar system map all of these you know transitory you know events that can pop up on your radar screen there's a freighter under attack uh By You Know by Pirates there is a pilot that you know has gotten into a conflict he's had to eject from his ship and he needs to be you know rescued
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and basically you know taken back to you know to a space station so there's a there's a large amount of stuff that will be made available for you to basically accept or you know accept or ignore yeah I mean the yeah I mean the universe is I mean that could be no one online and just you and it will still be a fully functioning breathing universe that reacts to um you know you know MPC actions cause reactions from other MPCs and and uh so I think that you know the Design's pretty good in a way that um there will always sort of be interesting content available for people to experience and it's not necessary necessarily or I mean it's not really scripted it's sort of emerging from the actual simulation of the universe yeah and and and and and it's it kind of goes
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back to what I was saying earlier in regards that whole symbiotic relationship to where you may have a player or an NPC and because of their own personal motivations they decide to do something and maybe that goes well maybe it doesn't and so now they need help or assistance or you may be tasked against them it's like for every for every mercenary that basically uh signs up to you know protect a freighter as an escort and you know get it safely from point A to point B there are going to be other players they're going to view that op you know as an opportunity they're going to look at you know that you know that freighter loaded with that valuable ore and that's going to be extraordinarily appealing from their pirate minded you know point of view and so what you've got with such a diverse set of you know uh occupational you know capabilities is a lot of uh a
00:37:27
lot of lot of possibilities in regards to aligning players against themselves at times um you know and you know and and having NPCs add to the mix cool all right well uh we actually have uh time for a few questions um so I guess if we can raise the house lights a little bit uh there are two microphones one on either side of the uh of the audience here so if you have a question you want to ask it please approach uh the microphone uh without killing each other thank you be gentle Ben you want to take the first one yeah I was wondering I was wondering uh with the living breathing deal when say somebody discovers an asteroid field
00:38:17
or derer shift once that's played out like salvaged or mind will there be something randomly generated later on within that area so there's constantly something new to discover uh I I'm not sure I caught the entire question but uh I I I think I got the gist of it and one of the things um I'd mentioned like all these you know Transit transitory you know points of interest uh you can picture a Pioneer and a Pioneer basically you know finds you know an asteroid field and that asteroid field this particular one contains you know 2% you know 10 you know uh by volume so it's extraordinarily appealing from a Minor's point of view when tin is in high demand but what happens basically as tin starts to you know recede in value and fewer miners are attracted to that and so what we'd wind up doing is clearing out some
00:39:06
of these things basically that knowledge eventually gets lost and the idea is that if we don't have sufficient player traffic or in player or NPC traffic if there's no demand for that particular resource then eventually it winds up fading away and what this does is it opens the door such that later in the economic cycle when there again is a demand for 10 um then you need Pioneers to go out and basically do this long range scanning SL probe slis Discovery stage to find additional ones and so it's the same thing with you know uh comets or deric ships or any of these things which is if something is discovered and it's appealing enough that you're actually drawing player and NPC traffic to it then it you know even though it's dynamically constructed it will persist and persist and persist but once you get yourself into a state such
00:39:55
that for whatever economic reason that's no longer drawing interest you know from those entities then we'll wind up cleaning it up and what that does is it sets the stage to basically need explorers you know discoverers Pioneers to basically find more of that content you know when demand later ramps back up go over here you're designing a a really ambitious complex system here of a lot of different autonomous agents operating on all different variables with the economy and the the different aspects of the simulation when all of that complexity is put into place what safeguards are cig planning against race conditions that might break the universe in terms of our experience as a player are you going to have people babysitting the universe and tweaking it in real time is this going to be stuff that's tuned
00:40:44
primarily during the beta it seems like there's a a big risk of stuff getting out of control with all these variables going at once take I'll take it t on this if if you want to take it and then I'm definitely I'd definitely like to respond uh yeah so we the way that the universe is simulated and how it impacts the players uh is a system well I mean Tony actually came up with it which is actually quite brilliant but we basically have a uh a simulation that runs the universe it's separate to what everyone's going to be playing um and we're on that particular simulation running millions and millions of AI it doesn't have to be real time because they're sort of just going about their job and going from planet a to Planet B and accepting missions and everything and that is linked to what the players are experienced by a sort of certain
00:41:34
level of fuzzy logic so it's not 100% a uh onetoone correlation in terms of uh you know if if there's a system and on the economy uh side we've got a bunch of pirates um sort of attacking the various transports and then there's a bunch of missions for players to go out go after the Pirates we've sort of ascertained on that system kind of like what the likelihood of an encounter with a pirate is and we've got all these people you know like we have you know if there's a lot of people there'll be fair amount of instances and so there may be a case where you know on the economy simulation there was 10 parents but we just happened to have enough people jump in that there ended up being 12 engagements and 12 Pirates died well it's sort of fuzzy it goes back to the economy and it says okay well you know Pirates died pirate died pirate died pirate died okay
00:42:21
all the Pirates are dead and the fact that 12 died versus 10 died no one's ever really ever going to know because you know you're talking about millions of people playing it all at the same time and so that's kind of where the fuzziness is between the actual economy simulation and the on the reality because the problem you would get is if you've got um you know if you have to have everything that happens on the player side be exactly a onetoone correlation on a full like simulation of millions and millions of AI agents you're going to have race conditions and you'll have sort of problems and Deadlocks and so having it sort of be fuzzy where basically it means okay a bunch of bounty hunters are mercenary came up and attacked those pirates and took them out they're gone from that system they'll be gone from the economy simulation so you basically will have the end effect where the Pirates got cleaned up in this system the fact that 12 or 13 pirats got killed instead of
00:43:08
the 10 that was existing on the economy simulation um you know isn't really something that is that important it's more more of the importance is a change was affected and so that's kind of I think one of the fundamental ways and also because we've because we're disconnecting to a certain extent the the overall simulation of the econ economy and what we see on the gameplay side um it allows you a bit of a buffer it has it has some um I guess you know fudge room here and there so and it's also uh you know nice things like if the economy simulation the server goes down well it won't kill what's happening with the players on its side uh we can like sort of De with some offline fixing up the economy simulation and then bring it back up and then it can be sort of updating what the various players see on their side I mean I don't know if you
00:43:55
want to sort of take it yeah I mean so just to add a little bit you know because Chris did Cover a lot of the a lot of the most important points there but basically you could take the way it's being engineered you could take this economic simulation offline for a period of time and no one within the game would know the difference you know just given how the data is all distrib wouldn't change basically that the feel static versus changing and the the reality is a lot of these things they're actually going to evolve just like in the real world they're going to evolve very gradually you shouldn't expect to see you know because you prevented you know a particular freighter from actually delivering its payload of you know copper that's not going to immediately Spike you know the costs of ships because the demand is not going to have outstripped you know the the the current inventory supply for some period
00:44:43
of time um that uh also you've got the producers of goods they all maintain an inventory um another thing is there's the concept of rails integrated within the economic simulation and the reason for rails is uh to prevent things from exactly like what you're saying it's like so we're we're running this enormous simulation and so you've got a lot of different feedback loops and it's always possible that a group of players you know or NPCs or whatever I mean there are a lot of algorithms there are a lot of values that have been assigned it's always possible that something you know temporarily you know gets out of whack and we may need to wind up you know going in adjusting a formula tweaking you know the you know the availability of something uh to basically bring things back into balance um and that's why we have this concept of rails and so you can kind of think of it as there are
00:45:32
it's it's very similar to what I was saying earlier in regards to a spring which is you can basically push against the system but as you have a larger and larger impact additional changes become more and more difficult and so there's there's no there's there's no effective limit in regards to how far up or down you can push something um but it does become progressively you know more challenging and so what that does is it prevents you from ever getting into any sort of unattractive situation like for example all of a sudden there's just an absolutely you know gargantuan battle raging across the system something in terms of gameplay that would never be fun would be ammunition because of a supply constraint and you haven't yet had enough new Supply you know added back into the mix ammunition becomes if not completely unavailable so
00:46:20
exorbitantly expensive that only a small portion of the NPC and player population can actually purchase it that's a scenario that you never want to happen and so employing like this you know spring based Progressive you know uh scaling of a lot of these parameters it allows us to allow it allows us to have localized changes relatively easily it allows us to have you know more you know larger changes if as as as the affecting agents become dramatically larger but it prevents you from ever getting to the point that any of these critical values ever uh start to adversely impact gam play such that you would not have a good experience I maybe went over everyone's heads
00:47:07
um but uh anyway it's a very cool system all I can all I can say is that uh be because we've disconnected the economy from being real time with what the players experiencing allows a buffer between them and it it gives you a sort of slightly fuzzy logic that just uh makes that it's easier to protect against uh sort of uh I guess you know imbalances that can happen in the economy because essentially what happens I mean the way to think of it is that uh the economy simulation is like a turn-based game and H you know that's why we can simulate millions and millions of NPCs it's going to have it'll be on one server it's probably you know I don't know whether we're considering be multicore server or not but essentially it's going to go and it will just go through system by system
00:47:55
and update it do it's like a turnbas game and you know different and with the you know the NPCs have the rules of okay here's you know this Factory I'm producing this and oh I'm now generating jobs to have you know this uh good taken from here to here and that's the sort of jobs that a player can sort of peak into and accept and then the then at that point it gets taken away from the NPC pool and the player is responsible for doing it and if the player successfully does it then he tells the economy simulation once he's done it okay that that's back but most of the time because obviously it's N9 to one or 10 to one in terms of NPCs to players it's all happening on the economy simulation and so each system gets updated and you can you don't need to do every system all the same you don't need to do it 30 frames a second because you know in the case of an economy simulation you know you don't need to have that Fidelity you can say each turn is an hour each turn
00:48:43
is 30 minutes you know we haven't specifically said the actual ratio of it but it'll be along those lines which means that you can go around and simulate every single star system with all these people no problem at all and then what we do is we actually go through doing the same thing on each system we basically analyze the system and say okay in this system there's you know these there's these Traders doing this road there's Pirates over here there's some police over here and we distill that down into sort of um you know what probability CU yeah what what Tony's calling probability Cubes but you know the short version of that kind of uh so so you can call them encounter cubes or whatever you want to do um but basically when you're in space that sort of determines as you're flying around it says okay well uh you know there were pirates in this area and uh there was a 30% chance that you would you would
00:49:31
encounter some Pirates So based on you know you enter the the that area of space rolls a dice y Yep they're the pirat so it generates the Pirates based on various template encounters um which we set up and build so you know we'll have U you know eight or nine different versions of how like you would you know a pirate ambushing a cargo ship or a pirate laying and weight an asteroid field cargo ship going from point A to point B so they're all getting dynamically generated um by the by the economy simulation so the idea is the economy simulation in in some ways is sort of a procedural um you know Mission generator or con or an encounter generator where it based on the snapshot it sees in the economy it creates all the encounter templates that you're going to see in in the system and those get updated sort of on a Time slice per system basis and as you go
00:50:18
around and that's why when you finish your mission or you kill a pirate that message goes back to the economy simulation and says okay you know okay I've delivered the goods or I've killed this pirate and then on the economy side it says okay you know I'll the gods are now on this planet or this Pirate's now dead and he keeps a track of it but that's that's the point where I'm saying when when if a few more Goods is delivered than was on the economy system or a few more Pirates was killed or a few it's okay because it's slightly fuzzy and and each system is getting updated you know I don't know whatever our frequency of the updates would be every 5 minutes or every 10 minutes but you know if you're sitting around in a system you're not going to notice you know it's the the state of the economy doesn't change in five minutes time it changes over days uh so that's that's why that's the way we have the system uh will work
00:51:06
very well and what the economy simulation does is it basically is procedurally generating a lot of the content for you the missions you'll take what's happening um and uh it's it's actually quite an elegant solution uh to what could be a really complicated simulation problem yeah so so unfortunately I think we are out of time this panel that's the definition of a good question so uh we are going to take a five minute break can we uh make a note real fast for all the people that have questions that haven't been able to ask them you can tweet them to us using the hash starcitizen town hall and when we get to the bigger uh idea session we'll be able to bring some of those back up so take five and we'll be starting back
00:51:55
up here uh in a little bit with getting social our third panel thanks thanks guys

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