Our aim is for Quanta behavior to act as close to players as possible, accounting for the spread of player types that play our game. Arbitrary restrictions like this will only be used when we haven't developed the AI behavior enough to follow player behavior as closely as we'd like. If we end up using these kinds of behavior rules, we'll also try to get rid of them as soon as possible.
As of now we have no plans to restrict player behavior like this.
Quantum will be creating missions based on the aggregate actions of quanta. The dynamic mission system will be creating missions based on what quanta are doing and what kinds of services they need.
Both Chris Roberts and Tony Zurovec want resources that will eventually deplete from the universe so the PU is always moving. Quantum will know about where resources are and track the concentration of these goods in the universe.
We have plans to be able to adjust these resources through Quantum based on the activity of Star Citizen, but our ultimate plan is to not directly affect things in "god mode" like this. Quantum should be influencing the behaviors of Quanta and economic activity, not spontaneously generating resources from the god seat. We're not at this point yet, but that's part of our ultimate goal.
This is one of the examples that Tony Zurovec loves to talk about in design discussions in the office. A full blockade on an entire planet is impossible in practicality because people will always find a way to get supplies into a location that needs it. What you will see is a huge increase in demand for supplies based on the actions surrounding that planet, like combat, piracy, etc.
There's definitely a difference between something that you can realistically see all the entities interacting with it and something as big as a planet. We're still talking about how to address things like this from a high-level design perspective.
For now, factories, refineries, and manufacturing nodes are all virtual entities that exist to spur traffic in the economic simulation and eventually generate service beacons. In the long-term, we hope to link as many things that happen in Quantum as possible to the actual, player-facing game.
Absolutely. Contextually appropriate content like this is exactly what Quantum aims to achieve. Get away from hand-placed content and make the game dynamically spawn content where it's most appropriate at that moment.
Each quanta has a risk profile that is used to modulate the perceived value of an job. Mission length is also considered through the fact that the value of a job is an amount per period of time, for example the UEC/hour.
We're actually spending a lot of effort visualizing the massive amount of data that Quantum generates. Its no small task, Martin has been working on visualizing this data in many ways to identify oddities and trends in the way that the economy moves.
This information would be entirely possible to show up on in-game screens in TDDs, but we have no plans to do that, yet. Right now we're focused on interactivity with players.
Well, Quanta have different profiles that define their behaviors and opportunities. The economic nodes strategies are directly influenced by its environment and the resources available.
To be clear, though, NPCs that you see in the game are not governed by Quantum. By the time an NPC is instantiated it's behavior is governed by its local AI.
We could, but for the first iteration we're going to use organizations as a constant. Economy balance is the primary focus of this first iteration of Quantum.
UEC, like any real-world money, is an abstract unit representing labor. Humans invented money so we can trade fractions of effort back and forth with a common, unified system. In Star Citizen, "effort" is still largely undefined--especially as additional gameplay systems continue to come online. Our end-goal is to balance the amount of effort you put in for the results that you get out, and make a balanced economy. This problem is incredibly complex. So complex that we made a simulation to help us identify what prices should be. Currently it has like, a million Quanta running around trying to figure out wages. It's called Quantum.
There are always compromises that we can make to get a majority of the benefit before all of the necessary tech is in place, and we plan to do that as much as possible so players can begin to feel the benefit of the dynamic simulation. Server meshing and ICache will definitely help this process, but our tech requirements are more on being able to read and write to other existing services already, like the Shopping Service, the Probability Volume service, and a new Dynamic Mission Service.
NPC crews are under the purview of AI behavior, and is too heavyweight for the kinds of things that Quantum aims to handle. Quantum will only be accounting for the end result of these NPC actions. It won't account for details that the player will see when NPCs are on their ship, but it will account for things like "How good of a pilot is this NPC?" and use that to determine the results of simulation interactions.
Definitely! The whole idea behind Quantum is to simulate a full-scale economy to make it as credible and balanced as possible. When the Quanta interacts with the various shops, factories, refineries, they systematically negotiate prices. We use price discovery algorithms, similar the the ones used for real-world economy, to help discover these prices.
So yes, we definitely want to use the prices generated by Quantum!
Our primary focus is on things that players can currently interact with. Once alien economies take a more active role in the economics of Star Citizen, we will look into incorporating the effects that they have on the economy.
Quantum aims to be an accurate simulation where we simulate what the actual interactions would be if they were players in the game.
Pirates have to make a living, too! Stolen goods will have to be offloaded and sold to some of the shadier merchants willing to look the other way. These shady merchants take the risk of being apprehended by the law for trading in stolen goods, so these goods will end up being cheaper.
Quantas will have access to different ships and the ships characteristics will have a direct impact on the job values for the Quanta. For instance ship speed, cargo space, ship protections, are all elements that have direct influence. Of course, a Quanta risk profile will have a great influence on the Quanta's type of ship.