Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Engineering Intelligence

26 January 201700:46:001,275 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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[Music] Hey everyone and welcome to Around the Verse. I'm Sandy Gardner and with me is Star Citizens game director Chris Roberts. Hey Sandy. Um so thrilled to be here of course. Um I'm actually going to be heading off to uh Europe. um this Sunday. It's over there for a few weeks. So, you'll have other hosts here with um Sandy going forward for a few weeks until I come back. But speaking of Europe, yeah, speaking of Europe, look what we got from a fan in Switzerland. Uh he sent us lots of sugar, obviously. Uh Swiss Toblerone, Swiss caramel, Swiss knife from Zurich, Switzerland. Martin Whip. Yeah. And sent us a t-shirt from his organization. Thank you very much. Check this out. Yeah. Bold. Yeah. pretty uh I am not that brave to actually get a real Star Citizen tattoo on my arm, so I'm not either. But well well done well
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done and very impressive and thank you very much, Martin. Um but anyway, back to the show. Um so today's show is going to be about something very dear and near to my heart. Uh the game's AI. That's right. We got Tony Zurbec and Franchesco to sit down and answer a few questions about how players will be interacting with NPCs in the game. But that will be coming up later in the show. Uh yeah, first up we have our weekly studio update from Nick Elms and our UK team. Hi everyone. Welcome to another studio update from here in the UK. My name is Nick Elms. I'm the creative director here at Foundry 42. Um as you might imagine, since the 2.6 release, we've been very busy trying to get 2.6.1 out for you. Um there's been a lot of um of bug fixing um a lot of feedback that we've taken on board from you guys. And uh John Crew and Andy Nicholson have been looking at incorporating a balancing pass now with all the feedback
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we've been gathering from from you guys in the community um from you playing 2.6 and um and they're making a comprehensive review that hopefully we're going to be getting into uh 2.6.1. We're going to look at the uh MS grazer next which I think you saw in November u for the concept sale. Uh it's now with the ship team and in particular Joe Neville who's uh who's working on it through its whitebox stage as part of the ongoing VFX polish and optimization. We're going to take a look at the Drake Caterpillar. Um we've been working on the throttle up and down engine effects and with the Herald been working on the explosion effects. Um this is the kind of stuff that we sort of send around the office on a daily basis. Uh and we thought we'd share it with you guys so you can get an idea of what we see. And as you'll see here, the VFX guys have
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shared us a V-roll uh of all the ship weapons firing simultaneously. Surface Outposts um is what we're going to take a look at next, which I think we've released a couple of snapshots of, but uh it's starting to come online uh a lot further now for us um in the form of the the building sets that we're starting to get through from the artists. Uh the designers are particularly excited now about uh all the gameplay opportunities that that these will afford um as they they can actually lay them out on the planet surfaces now for you guys to investigate That wraps it up for another UK update.
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As I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of work still going on behind the scenes with bug fixing, optimizations, and feedback, etc. All remains really is me to say back to LA and see you in the verse. Appreciate the update, Nick. Excited to see where the building sets are headed. I mean, that stuff looked fantastic. A lot of great stuff in there. Definitely. No kidding. And the work effect the effects team have been doing is really impressive, especially the herald explosion. That was very cool for me. And as was seeing all the ship weapons lined up like that. Yeah, definitely seeing things shoot and blow up is always very cool. Uh Nick also mentioned all the work going into 2.6.1. If you want to learn more about the up andcoming patch, make sure to head to the website and look at our full production schedule to get a sense of what you can expect. And we'll be updating the schedule every Friday until the release so you can track our progress um via our website. And of
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course, a lot of the changes and rebalancing that we're doing right now are thanks to the fantastic te testing that our backers have been doing since 2.6 went live. So, thank you to all the backers out there. Uh, absolutely. Yeah, your feedback is invaluable to the project. So, I definitely want to encourage all backers to keep playing Star Marine, Arena Commander, and Crusader. And to keep letting us know what you think on the forums, issue council, as well as on Spectrum. And please, if you have tried out Spectrum, try Spectrum it beta because we'll be going live with that soon. It'll help 2.6.1 and 2.6.2. Uh, and after that, all the subsequent patches to be as good as they can be. And as many of you know from our newsletter, we recently had many of the directors and leads over at the LA office for several weeks of discussions. While that was going on, we took advantage of everyone being here to record some deeper conversations about what we're actively working on. Yep,
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absolutely. And as the game's AI system is one of the most complicated and groundbreaking uh features that we're currently in development uh on Star Citizen, we figured it would be a great opportunity to have lead AI programmer Franchesco Rukuchi and Sist Universe director Tony Zurvik give an extended discussion about the systems they're building. I'm Tony Zervik. I'm the director of the persistent universe for Star Citizen. So I'm Franchesco and I'm lead AI programmer for Star Citizen. So yeah, we work a lot together. Yeah, I'm predominantly focused on the architectural side of the stuff. Um what the basic capabilities are, how we expose that functionality to the designers so that we can get you know uh
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as much leverage you know from the development process as possible. This includes uh working on you know the actual you know developing the editor itself which was the designer's interface. Well I take all the architecture from from Tony and we make drill in the code basically and we develop like both the the code we architect the code and we implement it and then I manage like other three people so far uh in the in the I team. So we have like Andrea Garbon, uh Mario Sarina and Rich Welsh in the UK studio. So we are a bit like in Germany and a bit in UK. The current state of AI and Star Citizen is that we're basically I would say we're cresting the hill with regards to the initial tier of architectural
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functionality. Um, Franchesco has now, you know, got a lot of work to do to basically take all of that, distribute it to his guys, get that working within the game. And what we're aiming to do in the fairly near term is to be able to, you know, for the first time in significant fashion to be able to start exposing this functionality to the designers and they should have enough of the base, you know, uh the base capability to start crafting actual missions within the game. It's going to look uh to some degree like the missions you've seen before except that they should be able to create them much more quickly which means we won't be talking about 17 missions. Uh they'll be able to uh you'll be talking about you know much larger you know uh uh you know potential
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number of missions. Uh you'll be talking about a lot you know a lot larger number of different things that you'll be trying you know the you'll be able you know problems that you'll be able to present you know to the player. um you'll be talking about a lot more content that's going to have uh an algorithmic component to it. Uh for example, right now, you know, locations tend to be fixed and we're going to be introducing in the not too distant future the ability to go down to planets and stuff and we don't want you to always encounter a derelic spaceship with, you know, a stranded pilot that needs to be transported to here all in always in the exact same location. Uh when you go to pick up that stranded pilot, we don't want him to always necessarily be friendly. um when you go to pick him up, we don't always want him to be alone. Sometimes it's going to be an ambush. Uh sometimes he's going to need medical attention. And so these are things, you know, all just within the
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course of that one, you know, with that one basic scenario, which is distress, signal, crash, pilot, etc. There's a world of opportunity for us to actually create a range of interesting, you know, potential experiences for the player. And this is what you know as soon as basically uh Francesco has basically integrated the rest of this and I'm sure there's no pressure on me little little bits and pieces as we start to try to mock up some of these you know the the first tier of these subumption missions. Um but as soon as we we've got that then we we'll finally start to get a sense as to what the designers can create with this. I think it's always like this um this first step right of getting the core y there that is you know in a state in which you're not only happy with the architect of the code as well because for me like it's a lot you know uh I know I can rely on the vision of Tony
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for the architecture of the design and all the other designers that we have because all very talented people and and the code as well needs to be architect in a way in which you can scale you know as much as possible. So like you know the the big you know work we've done so far has been like to make sure that you know subsumption runs you know in a really good acceptable amount of memory usage you know and CPU usage. So uh we have all this concept of you know activities that are actually templates that can be reused between a lot of characters without creating like instance everywhere you know or you know having the mission system that as well reuse as much as possible from the subsumption architecture. So you don't have to recreate the same logic over and over again in different system just because you know uses different systems and you know also accessing content from one actor you know to the mission and
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you know pass information it just becomes very much quicker you know you don't have to go through different DLS or you know each DL can expose different functionality without you to have to add code uh you know between like different complete different structure you know and then you have to how do I expose this part to this other system it just becomes everything much more fluid and you know much quicker to add stuff. So yeah that's some time it takes a bit of time but then I think we are starting to arrive to the point in which we are very happy of that you know we're discussing the last bits that you added for example the this concept of adding some kind of reusable piece of logic that you can recall and for us it's kind of very easy now to implement that and and this every new functionality seems it's always quicker to add and you know and you kind of start to feel like yeah we're doing a
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good job here you know at least it's you know it's I don't like to say that you know myself but I think you know it's good when you when you are happy of the work you're doing and that's something I referred to before which is uh we're very we've we're very much focused and we always have been with regards to the direction we're going with the concept of this you know object-oriented content creation which is to basically distill you know all of you know the different pieces of functionality that we're going to use to build up these larger missions to break them down into all these component parts s and then just like you do you know in an object-oriented language like C++ to basically allow us to you know pass inputs in to you know extract you know outputs out um so that we can customize them dynamically in the you know in in the scope of you know a
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much larger problem. And so what this is going to wind up allowing us to do is after we've got that initial library of, you know, functionality. Designers are going to be able to craft this stuff much much more quickly than they've been able to do, you know, c, you know, in in the past. Um, and what this effectively means to the player is uh a much larger amount of interesting things to see and experience and challenges to face, you know, and solve within the game world. The first the first part of subumption the easiest part of subumption to basically you know expose is actually going to be the the mission side of it. The mission side is basically built on you know on top of the you know what you want to call like the the lower level uh AI layer. There's there's a there's a lot of commonality in terms of how we do
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message passing the data structures you know the concept of you know functions uh reusable parameters and all this type of stuff you know task archetypes you know with which we build up the solutions to these problems. Um, the mission stuff in general is a bit more straightforward to expose because it doesn't directly control any of the animation stuff. And the animation when you're talking about, you know, you know, a modern, you know, 3D game, animation, even though it's not technically part, you know, of what most people would call the AI, it's it plays a a massive role with regards to how people perceive it. Um, if you have a bartender and he's going about doing his business, but the pathf find, you know, is, you know, smooth, the the the pathfind doesn't operate very very well.
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He goes right, you know, goes right up to other characters and then does 90 degree angles around them as opposed to doing nice splines. If he basically doesn't align himself precisely, if things don't, you know, snap right to, you know, to his hand. If, you know, if he can't actually operate, you know, things uh in believable fashion, then he doesn't actually look intelligent. even though under the scenes he's still able to search for this. He can still basically, you know, go over to it. He can still utilize, he can still create items. He can still send messages, receive messages, uh, you know, query the environment, all that type of stuff. Um and so one of the big issues that we face, you know, before we really, you know, expose, you know, the AI side of it is we want to make sure that a lot of these, you could call them cosmetic issues because they really are predominantly isolated from the AI itself. Um although the solution to them
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is occasionally quite complex be because they're still so tightly integrated. Like by way of example, uh one we've talked about before is you've got a pathfind and in combat you've got a character and he's running towards cover and he actually needs to know in the pathfind that he's running towards cover and he's you know in a you know in a combat situation and then he's basically going to modify the end part of that pathfind you know he's you know that running to that destination by sliding into cover. Um, and if you're talking about a character that's actually going to manipulate something or sit in a chair, they need to know how they need to be aligned, you know, so that while the path mind, you know, the predecessor step is in action, it can be taking that into account. So, because what you don't want is them to get to the end point and then, you know, spin 80°, you know, and then basically to, you know, to play the appropriate animation and stuff. And so the mission stuff is, you know, is the
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first and easiest, but given the release schedule, um, and we we can't talk too much about that. Uh, we've had we've had, you know, some conversations about, you know, whether or not we might have, you know, a small iterative, you know, release that might expose some of this for testing purposes. Um, but we we'll just have to, you know, talk about that, you know, as we announce it later. also like subsumption is like this really global general you know name. So I think we probably when the mission system is out well that's part of subsumption. So you know they will basically start to experience what subsumption is in general right but um but yeah as Tony said like I mean most of the animation issues are the one that we we are basically you know uh working on to before we can show something or not much
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before we can show but before we want to show. That's exactly because I think that's the critical part. It's like for me like you know I think we are both like very critical to the work we do. So it's like always like ah this doesn't look very good. I don't want to show it. And this was one of the big things with the Squadron 42 vertical slice to where one of the largest issues was the animation integration into the system as opposed to whether or not you were under the hood actually doing all of the appropriate AI logic. um the AI logic a lot of it was actually operational because this subsumption logic you already it's it's already you know we have in our gain our builds I mean we already used the activities we already use sub activivities we already have secondary sub activivities running you know people you know say hi do you agree if you seeing from far having different activities right but we were having
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problems orienting correctly and and and user you show that it looks much more primitive than what it really is. And so that that was one of the reasons, you know, why up until the very end, we were like, well, how how how quickly can we tie up some of, you know, the most egregious, you know, animation issues because you you kind of make sure like you want to make sure that something that it can be very impressive, it actually is. Because otherwise if you if you ruin the look of something that is actually quite complex, you know, quite advanced with a bad look, then it's hard to remove that type of first impression, you know, and and it's not it's not smart and it's not like I don't think like it gives, you know, the right credit to the system. Yeah. We want the we want the quality of the integrated animation to match, you know, the the
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ambition of the actual logic. And that's, you know, that's still going to require, you know, that's still going to require some effort. 3.0, I think we're actually going to aim for a pretty diverse, you know, uh, set of things. most obviously would just be starting to make the landing zones actually start to feel alive so that you encounter you know a variety of different you know character all pursuing you know their own particular you know set of interests. This will include everything from you know the the prototypical you know bartender and bar patrons you know tourists, vandals, businessmen uh yeah various shopkeepers uh you know you know muggers, criminal you know elements you know things of that sort. Um, and then some of the, you know, some some of the more interesting
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stuff in terms of the gameplay potential, I would say, would be the the combat aspects because the combat like is, you know, of course, is what like, you know, I already worked on and it's something that, you know, I'm really really happy to work on and I want to push it even further. It's like that is going to be interesting because we try to make this uh first iteration on it where there is already coordination between the guys that fight you know people that can advance while somebody else covers from you know the the you know the advancement from from a cover spot or if no cover spot are allowed you know they will just I I think the main thing with the combat that I'm really trying to to push is the fact that they understand the environment and and you are sure and you understand that what they are make sense for the type of environment which they are in and and that is going to be I think like what is
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cool in this in this scenario you know because maybe you find some pirates on the side you want to to get a good deal but then they turn on you you know and then then the fight makes interesting you know the situation and and and this will play into a number of things when you encounter like right now the only you know ships as you're just generally wandering around stuff you tend to encounter uh is is really other players and stuff um and that should be dramatically different in 3.0. Uh not only different in terms of you encountering them, but in terms of, you know, what you can do with them. If you disable, you know, if you're a if you're transporting cargo and you basically get attacked by a pirate and he disables your engines, then it's entirely possible that he's actually going to try to board your ship. Or vice versa, if you're a mercenary or if you're a pirate
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and you're basically trying to uh you know to to basically uh you know take out a freighter, then part of what you're going to have to do is you know after you basically disable the ship is board it and those characters will actually be able to you know fight you know uh to to fight back within the confines of their ship. And this is again just going to open up a world of possibilities in terms of uh making you know the world space you know etc feel much feel much more alive kind of unique as well because I think like it's you know it creates this kind of scenarios that are not very easy to find somewhere else like you know it's going to be a very very interesting to see how the players will play you know. Thanks guys. Hopefully that gives you a better sense of the progress we're making uh and gives you an idea of how awesome the final version can be. As
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more and more of the features like the AI, the mission system, um you know, locomotion for player and AI come online, uh and are implemented into the game, we're able to unlock more opportunities to push the boundaries even further and create that firsterson universe that Star Citizen is going to be. And we know that AI has been one of our most asked about topics from the community. So, we decided to open up the conversation to the community and let Tony and Franchesco field some of your questions about how it works. Uh multi crew ships will operate fairly similarly to the hier the hierarchy the chain of command that you'd see you know in a typical you know civilian or you know military vessel in that you'll have a captain and the the captain will tell
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the navigator where he wants to go and the captain will basically tell the engineer what to prioritize whether he wants needs the weapon systems back online first or the shield generators or the engines and he'll basically you know dispatch you know the you know the chief medical officer to deal with medical problems in this area or that area. Uh so it's at a very high level. I've said before it's like we don't want to, you know, be sim citizen. We don't want to have too much micromanagement in terms of control. That's not, you know, the type of game we are. But the concept of being able to just generally prioritize things and then to have your your lieutenant characters basically address those. And this actually segus nicely into how players are basically going to be integrated into the equation. If you've got a captain and you've got a navigator and you've got a chief medical officer and you've got a chief engineer and you got a chief weapons officer and all this other stuff and then all of a
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sudden the player wants to basic, you know, one of your player friends wants to basically uh deal with weapons or deal with engineering, then you'll have a very, you know, uh, easy means of, uh, factoring in how the other characters are going to interface with them. Uh, and what you're going to wind up getting out of this is a a a nice concise system to where you can customize as much or as little as you want. You can basically have as, you know, uh, you can basically recruit NPC characters to do as much of the work that you or your friends don't want to do as is necessary to accomplish the job. Yeah. Yeah. We're basically really moving away from one behavior for one ship, you know. So it's really like each seat will be controlled by the people
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not just want to work on that seat. So I think there would be really the the crew feeling you know working on the on the spaceship as Tony already said and I think that is the only way to also give a bit more realism in the sense like you know even if you board a ship and and the pilot is trying still to bring the ship somewhere and you kill him then you don't want that you know the spaceship has this kind of external behavior that still like you know drives automatically or you know controls the tourets anyway you know you just want to really see that that something is there and then I think we are also trying to make these type of you know AI modules that you you can buy and and assign to specific seats. So it's like you know you don't have an actual crew member sometime but you want to have kind of small computer that controls the turret for example. So some stuff maybe the medical officer cannot be substituted by a computer but
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you know the turret can have a controller an automatic controller and if you just sit down then you can immediately take control over the things turn on and off and I think you as a player you are also able you know to customize a bit how the ships automatically responds to things and can be you know really cool because you can have like just the combination of you know that you can have that already makes like a huge different between one ship and matter the advantages of AI crew versus human crew. I I I I wouldn't really say, you know, that there's definitive advantages. I would say, you know, the devil's always in the details. Um, what you will have as a player is the ability to recruit NPC characters to fulfill specific jobs on your ship. Um, but when
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you basically go to recruit them, that's, you know, that's that's where the details start to matter. How much are you willing to pay? And that's going to determine the level of quality, you know, the level of professionalism that you're going to get from that particular member. If you want a if you want a turret gunner that's really effective, um, then you're going to have to pay a higher monthly hour, you're going to have a, you know, a higher running cost. And so what you'll see a lot of player you know and this exact same scenario exists with players is like some will be more adept at a given occupation uh you know uh you know given skill um others will be less capable and so what I think you're going to wind up seeing in a lot of cases is players you know you may have you know a ship that's you know ideally crewed by you know six or eight or 10 people and the you know the players party will basically take on those roles that they're best at and
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then they'll basically you know recruit recruit NPCs to, you know, uh, to whatever skill level they can actually afford to basically fill in, you know, to fill the remainder. So, about the interest, right? Because maybe some players have interest on, you know, piloting, some others have, you know, a really good interest on on shooting, you know, and then you can use the eye to just fulfill the roles you don't like too much, but at the other hand, like the eye won't rage quit on you, right? So, you want to have like, you know, player disconnecting and, you know, so you have an advantage with the eye. Well, and and that's true like all of the whereas most of the things that players will actually do will depend upon, you know, their actual capabilities or their ship capabilities or their equipment's capabilities, you know, to expose things. Um, but how how well you basically can fire, you know, for example, at another player, your
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accuracy, that's determined by your physical dexterity, and it's influenced by the weapon, you know, which may have more or less kickback or, you know, a wider, you know, uh, you know, uh, area of effect, you know, in terms of its damage, etc. And NPCs will have, you know, a variety of characteristics that will model how well they deal with all of these, you know, different, you know, with all these different things that the player has to uh, you know, has to handle themselves. Yeah, the skills would be like would definitely be a huge part, you know, on deciding like this NPC is good at doing specific job or jobs, but maybe you have, you know, two that are kind of good at the same job and you still need to fulfill another role. And you put the one that is like, well, you I still need the shield management even if none of them is is pretty good. But maybe after certain
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amount of mission, well, it starts to get used to that and he starts to improve his skills as well. So, you know, you you can decide like, well, pay a bit less, but you know, I risk a bit more at the beginning. I try to make you know simpler mission so I get used to these things and I think that is also like uh interesting to see how the player will use their you know strategy to you know both balance the the hiring and the other NPC they have with you know how they they can it becomes another resource to manage another way by which players can different differentiate their style of gameplay versus another is like well do you go with you know with with three engineers of lower quality or one really you know stellar performer. Um, so there's going to be a multitude of ways for you to customize the gameplay experience via the choices you make in all these different areas. There's no real limitation just
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given the distribution of responsibilities. Um, it's it would really just be more along the lines of the larger ships will require larger crews to operate effectively and therefore their running costs on average will tend to be higher than crew, you know, than ships that can, you know, be operated with with a much smaller crew. Obviously, you can modulate that to some degree with the quality of the crew you're hiring and things of that sort, but there there there's no hard-coded limit. uh and there you know and there's really no reason why there would be given how all of these you know tasks and responsibilities that they're going to be uh executing are going to be I think that is really like coming from you know to the to the fact that basically really this individual behavior you know are controlled by a captain or something like that but then each of this NPC will just do its job. So you know there is no real limit on
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the amount of people that they execute their job if you know you have like five seats to control five different turrets. Well, you know, there would be just like five different people. Their coordination, of course, it depends on the amount of targets they have. You know, who they can target. But, but that it doesn't matter like if there are three or five or 15 because, you know, the code would just scale for that. You know, it would try to distribute the targets. But, as as you go as you go to the upper echelon of ships, you're going to probably need, you know, more experienced, better commanders because they're effectively going to be, you know, uh, in control of more, you know, of a larger number of crew members. And we'd probably probably just model it such that you know if you basically get a lower in uh you know a lower uh a lower quality of chief engineer starts to basically buckle under the pressure and he starts to make bad decisions etc.
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once he starts to get beyond three or four or five guys that he's controlling. Uh exact same thing that you'd see in the real world. It's always been our intention to allow the player to form long-lasting relationships with all of the characters in the game. Uh what this means specifically is that you will develop, you know, what we call reputation in a number of different fields. Are you known for, you know, your acts of piracy? Are you known for your, you know, humanitarian missions? you know, you're you're basically very medically oriented and you're rescuing people, healing people, you know, solving uh you know, uh medical crisis, you know, etc.
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Um do you are you are you really well known for, you know, how effective, you know, uh you know, a transporter you are in terms of, you know, uh commodity goods and things of that sort? You got a high a very high uh success rate in terms of getting it done. Um, so there will be those reputational aspects that characters will be able to, you know, of yourself that characters will be able to query to determine how much they like you, dislike you, whether they want to offer you, uh, the more advanced missions or just the starter missions, uh, what they're willing to pay you in order to do that, etc. There will also be these what I call like these mini toone relationships to where um, it's it's not based upon your, you know, your piracy rating or your transportation rating. is based upon your specifically one-to-one relationship. How do they feel about you? Did you take a specific
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mission from them? That's probably going to be weighted uh much more significantly than stuff that they heard that you did for other characters within the universe. Um they're also going to be able to take into account your the organizations of which you're a part. Do they like that organization? Do they hate that organization? Are they neutral with that organization? And so all of these things together are basically variables that the characters within their conversation logic can factor into how they respond to you. Um and so and then we'll wind up having you know these things uh gradually uh uh you know return to a baseline if you don't keep doing it. In other words, if you're an exceptional uh exceptionally good at, you know, transporting merchandise, very high success rate, if you haven't done that in a day, in a week, in a month, then people will no longer be talking
00:32:01
about that behind the scenes. And therefore, you would expect that reputational aspect to gradually, you know, deteriorate over time, and you're going to have to just re you're basically going to have to keep doing that type of thing and keep doing it well if you want to maintain your standing with the community in that regard. Yeah. Right. So like for us, for me especially you know on the on the I team what we try to do is like to expose all these functionalities to make sure the designer can create as much content as they can. So like you know once we have these things that we got the relationship variables or attributes is really like a matter to to give this to the designers and then designers can use any of these like can be the reputation can be this you know what they feel about you and they can just create all the logic you know that they want. Plus we have we're kind of in a unique position because like the game can constantly be updated. So these characters can also get new responses
00:32:50
you know based on the state and you know and all there is all these new content that we can create with time that just makes you know the relation always more smooth and you know you can go deeper into details and you know mention other stuff that you have done and mention events that have happened. if you know if I have a good relation with you, maybe I gossip about something with you and you know we can create this and always add more and more and more. So yeah, and there's the stuff that really matters in terms of you know the missions they give you, whether they'll talk to you at all that stuff and then there's also just the more cosmetic stuff. Are they telling jokes? Are they more light-hearted? Are they basically bantering on about their history because they feel comfortable with you because you've done three missions for them within the last week? Um are they frowning at you as you go? Are they repulsed by you? Are they disgusted by you? You know, all of that type of stuff. So the I would say you've got different elements coming together which
00:33:39
is you know not just how they explicitly react to you but more just you know they're they're just uh their more subtle behavioral characteristics with you know when you're in proximity for the future of AI. I think that uh we're clearly going to head more and more towards the algorithmic you know generation of content. Uh that does not mean by any stretch of the imagination. We've said from the very beginning it's like we don't want to be pure algorithmic. We have no interest in being purely algorithmic. We don't think that that makes for a good gameplay experience. It just makes for uh good taglines in terms of hey let me give you an arbitrarily large number of this but it's all you know it's it's all bland and uninteresting and there's nothing really you know handcrafted to to to draw you into it. And so what we've been pursuing for years now is basically the
00:34:29
ability to create all these handcrafted pieces and then to allow the designers to build on top of those to link those pieces together to create very quickly what you know what seems like incredibly customized missions, but they're able to do it in in in much more rapid fashion than would otherwise be the case. And so I think what we're going to wind up having, you know, as you go forward is just the ability to algorithmically create more and more, you know, uh, variations on these things. Um, but you're not really going to notice it in terms of the quality of the content. It's just going to look like it's going to look like you went from 12 designers dedicated to doing this to 24 to 36 as you basically refine all those algorithms and you start to get your base library of functions and stuff uh
00:35:16
all entirely operational. Yeah. The other thing I I think we can talk about as well is like this way of I think what I would like always to push further is this uh kind of realism. If you want to start to follow one guy for example and you know we start with something like you know the guy will live in the planet but maybe you know eventually you have this guy that even change planet you know and you will be able to understand that there are connection between you know jumping into a spaceship take the spaceship fly use this quantum jump and going to this other planet and then go down and search for another bar you can just follow it and then it will be always more realistic like you know I think that is uh from the tech perspective you know we will have of course lots of optimization you know multi training and stuff like this that we want to have like just to have as quick as possible. So I think there are like these two parallel you know uh work that we are doing both on you know
00:36:05
content production tools you know to create always more and give more feeling and then like all the technical problems that we are trying to solve like you know using object while you use another object you know sitting on a on a spaceship and while you are sitting you actually interact with all the object and each of these interaction triggers something else. I think these are all things that you know we're going to eventually have in uh it's the details you know it's an amount of details that you will eventually have based on all the different iteration. So the first iteration will have even even on the combat side. First iteration will have of course some sort of coordination but then the this you know other iteration will have always more and more coordination using more type of weapons being being smart and know which type of weapon is best in a specific environment or in a specific scenario and I think
00:36:54
this is just going to give like always more realistic feeling. Well, yeah, because another another long-term objective, and this is not within the next 12 months, it's more of a, you know, 12 to 24month window type of thing, is basically support for what we refer to as the persistent dynamic NPCs. And what we mean by that is there will of course be, you know, specific characters at specific areas, you know, within, you know, within even the persistent universe, certainly within Squadron 42, but we'll have those types of characters even within the uh persistent universe. And then there will be another class of characters that are just, you know, created as you wander around the world. Um, you encounter, you know, uh, you're you're basically transporting a load of commodities from one planet, you know, to a refinery and you encounter a pirate and that pirate
00:37:42
winds up, uh, inflicting significant damage. You wind up having to call for help and, you know, once the, you know, once your help arrives, you basically just hightail it and get out of there. Um, this is the kind of thing to where what we want to eventually be able to do is to keep the essence of what that character was, that pirate. What, you know, what was his name? Uh, what does he look like? Was he talking to you on the radio? You know, what was, you know, what voice were we using for him? What was his rank? Uh, what was the what was the source of the interaction that you had with him? What's your history? You know, he basically, you know, got the better of you in a battle. And then we want to be able to use that as an input into this library of mission content such that the next time we're looking for a pirate to basically be utilized in one of these uh
00:38:32
in one of these mission archetypes, we have the possibility to insert him as the specific character and he then has the ability to refer back to that prior history. And so what you'll wind up having is your own little custom version of the world to where these are characters that we didn't specifically go out and hand create and give a history to, but you're encountering them. You're interacting with them made them real, made them persistent for you. They're also of course persistent for any party members that you've got. It's like everybody can see them, but those particular characters that you've interacted with in a certain way become available for us to utilize when we need an equivalent character as you encounter lots of, you know, different, you know, scenarios within the game world. Well, I think like, you know, other
00:39:25
things that I also look forward is even the wildlife on the planets. That's going to be really interesting because it's something I worked a little bit before on crisis. We had some little wildlife, you know, and it's always like this big difference for me between like the the smart wildlife and then like the more simply cystic wildlife like you know if you have a frog well you don't expect the frog to be super smart. You know you can create this kind of you know what the crunchy were you know animals that can move around and they react to your presence or your proximity but not much more. But then you have other things like like pets or you know even just bigger animals like you know a deer or something like this that that you know that they are smarter and they need to do something with you. They're not as complex as a human but they're pretty complex and you know to give the actual feeling of a planet. I think we
00:40:12
will have to tackle all of these things and it's going to be very interesting. But it's just like with the cities where you want to basically make this world that you're traveling through look as alive and as interesting as you know as possible because if like right now what I'm sure bothers us all is just the fact that we've got a great big world but we're not yet able to effectively populate it with you know a lot of interesting material for the player to see. And we've talked in the past about how, you know, we've got 17 missions, you know, in the game right now, you know, in the persistent universe that you can go and accomplish right now, but those were implemented in a, you know, in a completely different fashion than what we've been, you know, aiming, you know, to eventually be able to do. Um, and we, you know, but these systems are such that, uh, you need to have maybe not the entirety, but a significant
00:41:02
majority of the base functionality operational before you have anything. And so what makes me, you know, most excited about, you know, 2017 is just the fact that we should start to get this stuff that we've been talking about, uh, on the content generation side, uh, finally into the game. And this is where all of a sudden the ability for players to start to, you know, do a variety of different occupations and for them to just, you know, fly around orbit around the moon. and you know content that we didn't explicitly put there will be able to you know to fill in and there will actually be interesting you know stories and you know and and things to you know to things to do uh all you know littered throughout the entire system um and so I think that you know once we get 3.0 I know is, you know, supposed to be the initial iteration of, you know, pushing
00:41:49
this stuff out there and then all the successive releases are just going to be refining, refining, basically taking advantage of, you know, this system that we've put in place. And so I I think that Star Citizen in the in the 3.8 the 3.x iterations is going to it's going to finally start to look like, you know, like a real a finished game to where you can just go in and lose yourself for hours and hours at a time. And that's not because you're marveling at just, you know, the technological ambition of the project. It's because there's actually enough gameplay content in there to keep you interested. Yeah. For me is also like because after when we have that, we can actually see how the player plays with the game. Because I think like the the most interesting thing for me to work in games is the fact that, you know, you produce something that people actually play with and they interact with. It's not that you know, you just give it and it's not
00:42:38
that only. It's like it's really how you use it. It's like how you play that. and the game plays with you. So I think at that point you can also start to tweak things say ah this is how people likes to do you know what people likes to do and people like you know the way they like to play and then you can adjust things and give more content here you know or so I think that is going to be very interesting I I I can I can foresee us using spectator mode quite a bit to actually see how players are interacting with all this you know initial set of mission content that we're mode always great to hear more about how NPC crews are going to work. It sounds like it was been a huge undertaking to develop a system this complex. Uh yeah, no, it's definitely a huge undertaking and we're still hard at work at it. Uh especially Franchesco and Tony. Uh we really want our NPCs to have complex
00:43:25
behavior as you would expect. Uh so the work Tony, Franchesco, and the rest of the AI team have been doing is vital to our plan moving forward of creating this immersive Star Citizen and Squadron 42 uh first person universe. Um, so once we have the foundation in place, we'll be able to tie it into the mission manager and this mission system itself and create some really emergent immersive scenarios either by scripted design on the designer side or through sort of um systemic or procedural generation that's in response to player or AI behavior. So I think it's uh, you know, going to provide some really cool and unique gameplay. Cool. Well, that brings us to the end of this episode of ATV. And as always, we'd like to thank our subscribers for contributing to the creation of all our in-depth behindthe-scenes content. Yep. Thank you
00:44:12
guys very much. Thank you for having patience with us being here doing all this. Uh and a huge thanks to all our backers who are supporting Star Citizens Development. Um so you guys are a big part of what makes the project so unique and special and we definitely could not do it without you guys. So thank you very very much. We could not. And if you would like to hang out with more of the team, make sure to tune in tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. Pacific for the latest Star Citizen happy hour stream to watch some live gameplay and discussion. Yes. Uh not quite sure which one of our devs will be there, but they'll be there. And it's kind of a cool opportunity to have an informal sort of Q&A and discussion. But until then, we will see you around the Thank you for watching. So, if you want
00:45:20
to keep up with the latest and greatest in Star Citizen and Squadron 42's development, please follow us on our social media channels. See you soon.

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.