Tony Zurovec

Yeah, there's multiple aspects of that. Historically, it's been a lot of focus on the persistent stuff that's now starting to shift over to a new group that's basically going to take it and run with that. And we're going to basically effect a handover transition and we're basically taking some of those existing resources and we're going to retask them with helping to add some additional bandwidth into some of these areas that we've been wanting to flesh out for an extended period of time. But there are always so many other higher priorities. And we think, as of pretty recently, like within the last month or so, we've finally eliminated enough of the bottlenecks on the back-end side to where we can pretty confidently support at least 20,000 players concurrently, might be higher. It's difficult to say until you actually stress test some of these things. But we ran into some problems at the 2020 Fleet Week, and we took the lessons we learned there. It was kind of unfortunate timing in that particular case because we knew that we weren't going to be able to support dramatically more players than we had in the near-term past when we launched that event. And we didn't really think that was going to be a problem because for the previous year, we had it in our development schedule to deliver the final bits of iCache and to basically scale a number of the loadout service, the variable service, to cache all the login credentials, all of this type of stuff that was supposed to alleviate, to mitigate a lot of these bottlenecks. And unfortunately, that last Fleet Week event proved to be so popular that we wound up drawing probably about twice the number of concurrent users that we actually expected. And so what that did is it caused us to reprioritize some things so that we could get select pieces of that functionality out sooner. And many of those things are now operational. And so while there's still definitely plenty more to do, we think that we've got a decent amount of headroom given where we think the community involvement is going to be for the next few quarters. And then longer term, we've obviously got some major initiatives still on the horizon, like server meshing, which is where we're actually looking to distribute the workload across as many servers as is necessary so that we can start to scale up the actual number of players within a given instance or shard of the game.

So you have to give a little bit of explanation first. The long-term objective for Star Citizen has always been a dynamic, evolving universe. Most of our existing content to date, though, has been inherently static. So missions are offered at a given price at a particular location because a designer dictated it, not because something within the economic pipeline actually required that work be done. So if you're refueling, reloading, or repairing a ship, that doesn't actually increase the demand and thus the price for the associated commodities and components at refineries or shops. Similarly, the likelihood of running into a pirate on a given route doesn't waver regardless of whether a lot of unarmed cargo transports carrying valuable materials start traveling that path. So Quantum, which is the simulation that I showed off at the last CitizenCon, that's the primary method by which we're going to address this, and it simulates the effect of a vast amount of AI and it then feeds those results to the game and then factors player actions back into the simulation. So you wind up with this very logical ebb and flow that you'd expect. And that creates a lot of temporary opportunities for people to exploit. And in general, it just makes the game feel far more interesting to play. So dynamic events are different. You can think of them as designer-driven short stories that can be layered on top of Quantum's systemic background, and they can be triggered manually or automatically when certain conditions are met. So if the system decides that war has broken out in an area or we just decide that we want to liven things up a little, then designers and writers can inject a lot of precisely curated content into the game and the impact of those modifications will then be blended into the simulation.

Well, it's actually similar to a lot of what we've done with the normal development cycle, which is on the one hand, we're putting out a live product. And so we have to have something that the community can play right now. But at the same time, we're planning for the future. And so if you think about shops as an example, if all that a shop was going to do was basically offer a certain number of items for sale at a particular price, then the effort that we've expended to get us to here was dramatically over-engineered. It's been that way for the last two and a half years. It's only now that you're starting to bring in Quantum and have Quantum start to dictate some of this information, these services, which are going to cache this information. They're also responsible for basically receiving callbacks from the individual shops and then feeding on occasion some of those transactional events back to the mission instances that are running on some of these servers, that you start to see why we made some of the choices we did back then. In other words, it's like before you can get around to building the skyscraper, you have to lay the foundation. We've said this so many times in the past, and we're starting to get to the point now to where we're starting to exploit some of these underlying pieces. I mean, Quantum is another perfect example in that regard in that we have these so-called probability volumes that dictate what sort of stuff you can encounter in a given area of space. And then we have shops and we have service beacons and we have all of these different systems. Right now, designers go in, even missions, what missions are available where and for what amount of money and what level of risk you're going to incur when you actually accept them, that's all fixed right now. The designers are able to set up these data structures, but what we haven't previously been able to do is provide the real-time dynamic inputs that would allow us to make these things ebb and flow. In other words, if there's currently a lot of pirates in an area, then having something delivered to that area should logically cost more. There's a greater risk to you and your ship and all that type of stuff. But designers haven't had the tools to be able to automatically feed that type of real-time information into these mission archetypes that they're setting up. We're just now getting across a wide range of areas into doing some of that. An update that I'll be giving within roughly the next few months will basically explain what we've been working on insofar as not just Quantum, but also some related back-end technologies to help generate this algorithmic, this systemically derived information and then feed it into the game. And in a few cases, we'll actually be able to demonstrate real, actual working examples as opposed to just being theory. I always hate to do too many repeated theory talks. We debated doing this presentation a little bit earlier, but it still would have been in the vein of, yeah, it's coming, it's coming. And so I intentionally wanted to hold it back a few extra months so that we could demonstrate some of this stuff live and actually show some of these pieces of tech and functionality coming to fruition.

I do want to add on top of that, just for the community, this update that Tony is talking about, we're not going to say when. Let's be real. We don't have a great history of saying, hey, we're going to have this video out then. But we're working on it. And from what I've already seen, it's pretty awesome.

It's kind of like a release, to where there are certain things you want to demonstrate and there's always a little bit of uncertainty with respect to development schedules. And so it's difficult to say precisely, but we are already deep into testing multiple facets of what we're aiming to deliver. So it's coming.

There were two primary things on our mind when thinking about this event, and we started discussing this internally probably almost a year ago, back in first quarter 2020, what we wanted to achieve. And the other thing that we wanted, besides it being fun, was that it wouldn't cause us to deviate too much from the natural trajectory of the development effort. In other words, it couldn't be too disruptive. We wanted to take the things that logically followed in terms of development effort and look for ways that we could exploit and reveal these to players and basically improve the overall gameplay experience. In certain cases, of course, a little bit more effort here, pushing something else back to free up some bandwidth so that we could polish something a little sooner than what would otherwise be the case. That always happens. One of the primary things that we wanted to do was get all of the mission and back-end infrastructure operational. For example, there's back-end tools now, and I'll cover this in the upcoming presentation, to activate and monitor and deactivate missions. Again, if you look at Xenothreat, the amount of work that's gone into allowing this event to basically be activated is far larger than what you're able to see right now. What I mean by that is, it exposes an entirely different way for designers to start to set these things up. For example, when they're crafting the mission archetype logic, they can now declare these static instanced variables that are managed by the back end. They also have the concept of phases, which are conditionals that can be associated with these variables that are managed by the back end. The significance of this is that we can coordinate mission logic across all the different servers. That's how Xenothreat fundamentally works, which is, we have four phases in this mission. There's the initial, the introductory phase where we're hinting that something's to come, we're doing some foreshadowing. There's the actual Javelin restocking phase, then there is the climactic battle scene, and then there's the conclusion. All of these are really representative, and what this event allowed us to do most importantly was to test and refine and get all this stuff out working in the real world. Now you've actually got a dynamic mission service and you actually have the concept of these global variables, and the designers are able to communicate with them through subsumption task archetypes and we're able to do these conditional evaluations. We're able to basically have the back end synchronize however many servers we have, to keep them all in lockstep. Then there's all sorts of fine-tuning that goes on to where, well, if you've got a particular server and it's in, say, phase two and they're restocking and they've got the Javelin in port, then the designers can actually set it up to do things, and they are. Things like the number of Javelins that are successfully restocked in phase two can then serve as an input to phase three, such that the frequency of support you get from the UEE Navy depends upon how successful you were in defending those ships in that earlier phase. Again, what matters less is the specifics of what we're doing right this moment with that and more what we're allowing the designers to do in the future, how we're basically unlocking them to do lots more cool stuff.

Another big focus for this particular event, a major one, was from the beginning we knew that we wanted to put a lot of emphasis for the first time on the capital ship battles. So there were a litany of changes that we needed to make in order to enable this. And at the very top of the list was how the AI responded to the threat of torpedoes. So originally, and this was still true as of about four months ago when we finally got to the major push in that regard, neither turrets nor ships tasked with defending a capital ship paid them any heed. And that meant that it was way too easy to take these capital ships out in the early days. It was literally trivial. It was no fun at all. And so we spent over a month fine-tuning various systems so that countermeasures would be launched and worked as expected, turrets would prioritize major incoming threats like a torpedo over most other things. Players would be rewarded for coordinating their attacks with one another. You tend to be much more successful if three players launch torpedoes at the same time. And we built into the logic this sense to where it's not like... proper target selection. Well, what we didn't want to do is make it too robotic, too precise, not because you might not have that a thousand years in the future, but simply because it's not fun. If it targets perfectly and if it's able to perfectly shift its attention, it simply didn't deliver the gameplay feeling that we wanted. And so again, we spent weeks and weeks tweaking, fine-tuning this until we were internally pretty happy with the results. Another good example was the Idris. The Idris was originally pretty suicidal in that it would happily engage the Javelin and get destroyed as long as it managed to get off its railgun. Its logic wound up evolving to the point where it's now much more opportunistic. It wants to use its railgun, but only when that doesn't put it in too much danger. Then one other thing that we noticed was that the turret targeting couldn't be so Boolean. It couldn't focus 100% of its attention on an attacker that was only slightly more attractive than another player because, again, it looked artificial, and most importantly, it just wasn't very fun for the other players. We were getting internal reports of, you have eight turrets active on a ship, and you've got 16 players, and when it was so Boolean, at least half of the players were not having any of that firepower focused on them, even for an instant. And so they felt relatively bored in terms of the danger presented to them.

You want to be shot at. If you're jumping into the battle with an Idris and a Javelin, you want to be shot at. You want to feel like, I'm a threat. Shoot at me.

Yeah, there's a lot more fuzziness and grain, and it took time to basically work through all these details. I mean, we sat through every single week reviewing how it looked when you fired individual torpedoes at a ship, how it looked when you fired multiple torpedoes, how it looked if you fired multiple torpedoes with a very small differential in time versus a large differential in time, how the ship responded when it still had countermeasures available. And another aspect of this was the support ships that basically defend these capital ships. It's the same thing, to where even if you're firing upon them, if a torpedo is launched at the capital ship, they'll see that as a greater threat, break off potentially at risk to themselves and prioritize dealing with that torpedo. And so there's a multitude of these things that had to be worked through. And there's, of course, more we could do, there's more we will do. It's by no means perfect, but I hesitate to say it's light years beyond where we were when this started, because some of this stuff hadn't even realistically gotten off the ground. And now, in some of these select areas, it's actually quite mature.

This is literally the first demonstration of this tech. There's more to come. Another thing we're working on on the back-end side is, right now we have the ability to, when the designers craft this mission logic, all of that logic previously, all the data was basically stored on the server. So if you have 200 servers, you had 200 different instances. And so what you're now seeing is the first example of us allowing the designers to split it into, it's kind of like a client-server architecture, but for mission logic, to where they can dictate this logic runs on the individual server instance and it's got its own local variables, and it can interface with variables and it can interface with functions that are also executed on the back end. What this allows us to do is, like I was saying earlier, you can have an individual mission instance of this Xenothreat on a given server and you can register that you did or did not successfully defend this Javelin. Did you sufficiently restock it and it left and you were victorious? Or did it suffer so much damage that it had to run away? And so we actually tally the number of successful restockings. And then, like I said earlier, that directly impacts how quickly that Javelin is going to come support you, assuming you need it in those later stages. And again, the important point there is it's representative. What we've done now is work out the details of the tech, put it into wide operation. You can kind of think of Xenothreat as the first use case, and it focused our efforts to get all this stuff working. A lot more that you'll be seeing in both the near and farther term. Dynamic events are something that there's going to be continual focus on for the foreseeable future. For example, the next Fleet Week is actually going to be running off of these same fundamental principles. We've got another dynamic event, which we're referring to as Nine Tails Lockdown. It's not live yet, but we're already well into testing the so-called shop modifiers. We can now have mission logic effect at a global scale, and we've resolved all of the coordination between the different servers and issues like that. You can now apply shop modifiers. You can apply probability volume modifiers. You can basically lock down areas of space, inhibit quantum travel within them. What will be coming in the not too distant future will be things like population control, control of the actual spawn managers, things of that sort, access to areas. And you think about this like, what is Fleet Week other than at a certain time, we're going to go ahead and open the doors to a certain area and allow you entrance. And in the case of some of these upcoming events, when those events are active, we've decided as designers that it would be fun, if we're doing a Fleet Week event, to increase the demand for party favors and alcohol and fireworks or whatever other types of commodities temporarily at this location. And so for the duration of this event, we crank up the demand, the price goes higher, we broadcast that information to players, let them know, hey, by the way, the prices in this particular area for these particular commodities are getting out of whack. You might want to take advantage of this temporary opportunity and focus on that. And so all of this is completely new functionality. It's basically adding additional paints to what the designers can use to craft these portraits that they're making.

So yes, you now know what the next dynamic event is.

Well, we're just going to keep rolling them out. We've probably got eight or ten specific ones planned. And like I said, each one is looking to leverage stuff that's come before and then add some new functionality.

Just to be clear, it's not that there's no deviation. Basically, we have a long-term plan of things we want to get done, and it logically makes sense to do this before this other piece of tech, etc. And so you don't, in general, want to deviate too dramatically purely for the sake of an arbitrary event. In other words, if not for Xenothreat, we could have done something else that would also be interesting. But it was time in the natural course of things. We needed to basically start getting the back-end coordination of these events operational. We needed to bring the capital ships online. The torpedo stuff is something that's been bothering us for a long time. Now, some of those bits of tech, when we started last year, they weren't going to be addressed for another six months. We did reprioritize some things. What I was saying earlier is, you don't want to completely upend your logical development schedule, but you certainly refine it, you tweak it, you basically massage things around. So you're kind of looking for the intersection of what's within your grasp, if not absolutely all going to be there unless you actually put some focus on it. And then once we kind of lock that down, it becomes a very good means of focusing everyone's attention, to where we know exactly how we're going to be using everything from capital ship combat to the shop transactions that we can now have fed back into the mission logic to a vast multitude of other things.

The biggest concern from the beginning, I would say, was going to be performance. We knew performance was going to be an issue. It continues to be an issue. We've got a number of initiatives underway to basically improve that. And then we're also attacking it from a completely different angle, which is not just the per-server performance, but the whole server meshing initiative is intended to eventually allow us to distribute the workload over as many servers as we need. And so that was always something that we were aware of. We've basically tweaked and refined things. The maximum number of enemies you face, in other words, do you face 50 enemies at once or do you basically face a dozen and we keep replenishing them as you destroy them or take them out, make them flee, basically replenish them quicker? How many capital ships can we put at a time? There's been a tremendous amount of focus on optimizing everything from turret AI to even seemingly unrelated things like social AI. Any time you're saving there is basically additional time that you can inject into these events that are intended to basically draw lots of players together and have an enormous amount of AI active. If you think about it, this is definitely the biggest such event we've done to date, and we're putting more players and more AI and tons of turrets operational. You have a lot of stuff happening in one area. And so it's like with most things, which is your first iteration of these things is never as mature as you would like in terms of the performance. And we're going to keep refining it. I think you'll see some big improvements over the course of the next few quarters. And we'll go from there.

It's like I was saying earlier. What we set up by default is what I would call the systemic background. That's what Quantum is good at, which is it's like the real-world economy. Things flow, but in general, you don't have major financial crises or great depressions or wars on a regular basis. But the reality from a gameplay perspective is you actually want a little bit of chaos here and there. We, the designers, want to go in and specifically massage it. It's like, oh, you know what? This area of the solar system has been kind of boring. Today, we're going to liven it up. What these dynamic events allow us to do is basically to seamlessly integrate a chunk of designer- and writer-driven content into this background simulation so that how it interfaces with the world as it currently exists, it's all logical. In other words, for example, if we introduce a horde of pirates at a particular location, well, those pirates, they're going to need fuel. They're going to need ammo. They're going to need ship repairs. All of a sudden, you would expect to basically see lots more missions. You'd see escorts of transport ships in that area. You'd see more bounty service beacons being dispatched to that area. So you have all of these other logical knock-on effects you would like, and those they get for free. But you think about it, it's like in Xenothreat, there's all this custom dialogue and stuff geared towards this, and you've got to go record the specific lines and trigger them up. What I would describe as the best of both worlds, which is it's a big open world and you can do whatever you want and make whatever choices you want and the game will respond logically. And if you're particularly clever, you'll occasionally ferret out some cool opportunities. And then at the same time, whether we manually do it or whether on occasion Quantum decides, you know what, there's been so much battling in this area that we're going to go ahead and activate a compatible dynamic event. The way these things are configured is you can think of it a bit like a programming function, to where they've got certain requirements, certain inputs that have to be fed to them. And so what the system is basically looking for at any given time is, for the inputs in any given area, what kind of content does it have that it can match up? And so I mentioned dynamic events, but there's a middle layer to this. Before today, you've had the normal, what I'd call the static missions. And then at the far end of the spectrum, you've got these dynamic events. And in between, you've actually got what I've always referred to as dynamic missions. And dynamic missions, they kind of split the difference, to where they're going to be systemically generated all over the place. You constantly see them. They'll look very much like right now, if you're in an area and there's a high probability of pirates, we actually create a pirate encounter mission or create a cargo transport ship mission or conflict or whatever the case may be. What dynamic missions do is basically allow us at a smaller, more localized scale, now we're not talking about trying to coordinate this across multiple servers or anything like that, it's just that cargo ship that you run into in this area of space, what type of cargo should it have? Should it be copper? Should it be platinum? Should it be aluminum? Logically, it would depend upon, well, is it coming from an area where it purchased those things, where that stuff is mined, refined, et cetera, and where is it going to? If the cargo transport is going from the refinery to the factory, then you would expect that it's going to be loaded with goods the refinery produces. If the cargo ship is headed towards the refinery, then it likely has raw ore that needs to be processed, et cetera. The point being, with the dynamic mission system, designers don't need to fill in things like, hey, for this cargo transport mission, what kind of cargo does it have? Should it be beat up or should it be in pristine condition? Should it have fighter escorts or should it just be traveling solo? Should it basically be a derelict husk in space that you stumble upon or should it basically be in perfectly fine pristine condition? So these all become inputs to these setups. So the designers set up the archetypes and the system feeds the inputs. And what you wind up getting is an exponential increase in variety, because all of a sudden designers aren't trying to hard-code every single specific instance. And so you can think of dynamic events as really just an evolution of that system that adds on some additional back-end coordination. And those modifiers that I talked about earlier for dynamic events, they grant the designer the temporary capability to nudge certain things in the simulation a particular way, whether it be new items added to a shop's inventory, whether it be additional demand for an item at a particular shop, whether it be missions that are going to be offered here, all of those sorts of things. And so I mentioned population control. You can see a Fleet Week in the future will be a dynamic event. And when that event's going on, we're going to turn the dial and crank up the population. We're going to wind up doubling it, because you'd expect to see a lot of people coming to see that show. And then when the event dissipates, then we'll basically turn that dial back down. The population will recede back to its normal levels. It's a special event that we've come in, we've added a ton of custom content, NPC conversations, all this stuff geared towards that. And so we kind of view it as one big comprehensive designer-driven package that can be merged with all of this back-end systemic background.

That's exactly it. Some of these will be one-time, like Xenothreat or a particular Fleet Week, or other ones will basically just add to our library of things that we can activate simply because we want to liven up the place. The Nine Tails, I don't want to go into the detail, because there's some cool stuff that we'll be introducing that players haven't really seen before. I want to keep some of it under wraps. But it's very representative. Some of the bits of functionality that we're introducing in there will then be exploited in more dramatic fashion in subsequent dynamic events. One high-level example would simply be, the Nine Tails stuff is geared towards a certain area basically being locked down as a result of aggression. And in the future, what we're going to wind up having is, if the player community doesn't beat back that particular threat, then it will grow. And all of a sudden, you've got two or three or four different areas locked down. In other words, you, the player community, have to respond and tamp out this fire or else it will gradually grow. Now, it's possible, of course, depending upon how we set it up and what the current inputs are, the NPC population in some cases may eventually respond sufficiently to do it. But you get the overall effect, which is this one event that's geared towards locking down an area, the area to be locked down is an input, and we can feed it one, we can feed it three, we can basically add a little bit of back-end logic controls, and then which ones are locked down can be replicated across all of the servers. So the community as a whole is fighting, just like they are in Xenothreat, against this common threat.

I know from internal conversations we're reserving our options there, whether it's going to be a one-time thing or it's going to come back. But we have the option. That's the important part for this conversation, that we can do these one-time limited events that occur in Star Citizen's history and when they're done they never return ever again. Or we can do ones that are recurring, or we can do ones that build upon each other, where it's like, this is a one-time thing, but it leads into another event X number of months later, which leads into another event X number of months later, and that's how we start adding a persistent and long-form storyline to the Persistent Universe.

Yeah, this one, Xenothreat is basically attacking, harassing the UEE, and you're there to basically help beat back some of the specific challenges, to basically salvage material, to restock the Javelin, defend transport ships to the same effect, all this type of stuff. In the future, there may very well be ones where you actually have to go into occupied space. So it's really dangerous to get there, infiltrate bases, retrieve stuff, bring it back. And then what we'd be measuring is, well, how much total information or assets or stolen ships has the community pulled back? And again, I keep referring to the community because in general, these dynamic events are meant to be things that apply across the entire spectrum of servers and not isolated onto just one individual instance. If you're talking about just an individual server instance, then you're really talking more of, like I was saying earlier, the dynamic missions, to where if it's all on one server, then you don't need all this back-end coordination and variable maintenance and phases and all that. You can literally just run it with your normal subsumption mission logic.

It's actually exactly, it's both. Some of them will be really large, like Xenothreat, and it puts the whole solar system theoretically under threat. Others will be much more localized. Our first test for this, Nine Tails Lockdown, is much more localized, as a threat to a specific landing zone. So if you have no interest in that particular landing zone and the shops that have been cut off from the world and aren't able to get the supplies that they need, and therefore they're all calling out for help and the price is going through the roof, what they'd pay to get medical supplies and all this other stuff, then you can largely ignore it. And so the idea is, again, it's like we're building a library: big fleet invasions of a solar system, smaller things, which is just a particular pirate gang assaulting a particular landing zone. We'll have infiltration stuff. Again, you're aiming to get the tools to allow the designers to basically express solutions to all of these dramatically different scenarios.

Yeah, it's come a long way. All the TypeScript logic has been redone in C# for the AI, which basically resulted in somewhere in the range of a three order of magnitude increase. So we can basically easily simulate several million Quanta, and we can do that at multiples of normal speed. And that's important because we need to be able to tweak certain levers, let the simulation run for an hour and then see how stuff balanced out and what kind of limits we hit on certain things. Did prices ever get too out of whack here? Did the offering price for a particular mission ever get completely ridiculous given these parameters that we'd set up? We're in the final stages now of starting to connect Quantum to some of the back-end services so that they're actually feeding data from the simulation to the services. The services will have long been feeding that information then to the actual game servers and then basically receiving it back. One of the most recent examples here, and it's kind of related to the dynamic event shop modifier stuff, is the potential to add new items to a particular shop. So right now that inventory has always historically been fixed. And so now with the modifier, since we can add something, it's the same thing you'll see in Quantum, which is shops may occasionally change some of their inventory items. And so it turns out that there's a little bit of work we need to do on the game server in order to support that. There's been a lot of focus on basically extracting chunks of information from the service beacons. We demonstrated before that we were generating the events, but they weren't actually making their way to the back end. So that information will be filled out. In other words, where you see calls for assistance, calls for combat assistance for you to come, will in the not too distant future be dictated via that Quantum simulation. The price of fuel will be dictated by how much of a load there is in that particular area. And all of these things take time, because in the previous iteration we showed of Quantum, as you got all these Quanta going around, they didn't have at that time any concept of fuel or efficiency in terms of what ship they were flying and how much fuel it consumed. They basically got transport for free. And so a lot of those kinds of things are being wrapped up. We spent, relatively recently, a good bit of time getting Quantum, the service, to basically be built and shipped with the game. So we're not currently exploiting it, but it's there right alongside a litany of all these other services. So that piece, which was a significant effort, is now in and done, and basically what that means is we've got the basic elements of plumbing to get all this information going back and forth. And what we're focused on right now is actually realizing some of that stuff.

Not at all. In fact, it's actually quite the opposite, because as is always the case with Star Citizen, you see this with so many things that we did with Xenothreat. With Xenothreat, we kind of started out with, okay, we're going to have capital ships, so any player with bombers, they're set. And then the concern was, wait, a lot of players don't have bombers. How are they going to contribute? What if I've got a Hornet? And so we introduced the concept of, great, we'll have a lot of support, light fighters supporting these ships, and you can basically make the Idris retreat and therefore win that battle simply by taking out all those light fighters. And so all of a sudden now, whether you've got the heavy bomber, whether you've got the light fighter, you can contribute. But that still left the problem of, well, what if I'm not the kind of player that wants to do tons and tons of endless ship combat? What do I get to do in this Xenothreat thing? And that's where we started thinking, hey, let's have this whole salvage aspect where the Javelins come in, you're basically restocking them. So now someone's got to go out and basically get the materials. And of course, we've got to have a little bit of FPS combat on that. But then all of a sudden that forces you into that FPS mode. So we start looking and thinking, what if I actually do like the ship combat, but I want to be able to contribute to the restocking and not be forced into that? Well, you've got transport ships going back and forth, and on occasion, you'll be asked to defend them. And if you successfully defend them, you basically wind up generating as much restocking benefit as if you were to fully salvage one of those derelict ships. And so the point I'm making is, regardless of what exactly you want to do, what you find interesting, we try as much as possible to make sure that there's going to be a sufficient diversity of interesting things to do such that you'll have a good time. And so right at the very top of that list would be, sure, a lot of players are going to, on occasion, want to be able to play the part of the bad guy. Some other players will want to play the part of the good guy. And some players, like if you think about, without going into too much detail, the Nine Tails Lockdown, when you're actually trying to deliver those supplies, are you trying to simply take out all of the pirates in that area, basically remove the threat, or are you basically just trying to transport goods in and take advantage of the sky-high prices that are temporarily being paid because no one else can get through that blockade? And then if you're one of those guys trying to transport those goods through, all of a sudden, there's a real need for you to hire, via service beacons, other people to protect you. And so you've got escort potential. You can basically be the guys helping to lock it down. You can be the guy helping to eliminate the threat. There's many different ways you can come at this particular situation depending upon what interests you. And that is ultimately where we're trying to go all across the game.

Well, the PvP stuff is something you always, I mean, if you're going to have freedom, some people are going to basically want to get in there and muck it up for other people. And so the way that I would aim to address that type of stuff is basically within the rules of the system. In other words, and again, we're still in the early stages of the whole prison thing, that's why we have a prison concept, which is you can be a bad guy, and if you get caught, then you basically go serve your sentence. And right now, when I say the early stages, I mean right now escaping from prison equates to walking through a hole in the wall, and basically assuming you actually know the escape route, then it's just a matter of time. And that's another thing that, we've got a few quarters out, to basically do a major revision so the entire process of escaping prison is going to be a challenge in and of itself. And there's going to be multiple ways. Are you talking about bribing guards? Are you talking about coordinating with other players? Are you talking about being the guy that's simply trying to avoid the cameras and do the whole timing thing, setting up distractions, setting a fire in the utility closet to basically draw the guards over so you can go over here? In other words, how many different ways can we support, such that a player can feel as if they've crafted their own particular solution to the problem? And as much as possible, you don't try to hard-code these things. You try to basically create a number of different systemic elements, and what inevitably winds up happening is players will find clever ways to exploit them to particular effect. We're actually seeing this right now. It was a bit of a headache in this morning's meeting when I was talking about the Xenothreat stuff. We were going through PvP and apparently some players have figured out this super clever way of very quickly sharing credits and getting out of prison, et cetera. It's always the case, which is it's an ongoing battle. When you provide a bunch of these raw elements, people will find unintended ways of basically accomplishing their effect. And I personally have always loved that, because that was always my favorite thing in games, was being able to craft what I felt was my own unique solution. In other words, what I don't want to do is expend copious amounts of time trying to figure out the one solution that the designer dictated would solve this particular puzzle. I'd rather give players a bunch of these logical elements and they can string them together in all sorts of ways. I kind of referenced that just briefly earlier with the prison guard, which is, well, if prison guards respond as they must to audible events, then if you can do something that generates a noise over here, then of course they should go to investigate. And so a clever player would basically say, hey, the same way that they'd go investigate a noise, and that would become a problem for you if you're trying to infiltrate an area, can actually become a great means for you to temporarily distract them so that you can get through a door to escape the prison, etc. And so all of this stuff comes back to the same thing, which is giving players the freedom to basically play the game how they want and having the system push back in logical fashion. So if we don't want a lot of player-versus-player stuff in this area, then we should bring logical elements of the game, more security, larger penalties in that particular area, things of that sort, to discourage it. It's still possible. But I wouldn't aim to reduce it to zero or to make it impossible, because impossible to me is never particularly fun. I'd rather make it so that if you want to basically accept the consequences of your actions, then more power to you. In some places, those consequences will be fairly minimal. In other places, they'll be quite large. And you see this across the law system, where we've got 40 different infractions, and some things are viewed as a minor little infraction. You basically pay a fine. Other things actually lock you into prison. And right now, like I said, it's fairly easy to escape prison. It won't be in the future. That will actually become a much more significant challenge.

So it sounds like the approach that we will generally take is to try to plug as many different groups and peoples and play styles into these events as possible, try to provide something for as many play styles as we can, including PvP.

Yeah. And the PvP is just, you always have to be sensitive to it, because a small number of players can always ruin the experience for a lot of other people. And so you do have to put a significant amount [of focus on it].

That's not PvP though.

Yeah, but again, how are you going to deal with that? And certainly there are some aspects where you take administrative action, but in general, to me, if you have to take administrative action, it usually signifies that you failed at something within the game. It's like in the real world, if I go out and I wreak havoc, there will be very real and obvious consequences that you quickly suffer, and it should be the same thing in a game, to where you can do it, but you better be extremely clever about how you go about it, or else the system's going to respond in logical fashion.

You want to take that?

You want me to take that one, cause I'm Mr…. I like the visual stuff. So, from the standpoint of the way we're going to run it is there's going to be a visual indication in the appropriate sort of commodities places, not all commodities places necessarily will have a warehouse window you can see. A lot of them will and I really want that sort of feeling that maybe you had a privateer when you went to the commodities exchange and you can see crates or boxes of the things that you can buy. Now, of course, if we're on a planet and there's ten thousand tons of something we obviously can't fit it all in your view of the storehouse. So what it really is is representation of the general inventory that commodities warehouse, TDD, broker area would have and it actually not dissimilar, in fact it is going to be exactly the same system that runs the shops.

So, the shops themselves have an inventory, obviously they're probably going to have a lot more guns or armour or weapons in the back room then they do on the showroom floor. What you see on the showroom floor even when you go into a shop now is a representation of what the inventory that shop is holding and the same code that runs that is essentially the code that would run the visual representation of a storehouse. In fact the commodity exchange and brokerage is underneath it all, there's no difference between that really and a shop you might buy weapons or armour or anything else. It's a place that can buy or sell items, it has X number items and in the case of commodities area the price of it can fluctuate based on quantities. Price may or may not fluctuate so much in shops cause they tend to have smaller amounts. You will be able to get a visible representation in a lot of cases and that's very much consistent with our feeling of a kind of visceral 'what you see is what you get' world, which is… cause anything about Star Citizen we're very keen on that.

I would just add in that there are a few practical limitations once you start talking about ship shops and some of the larger weapons and stuff. Actually putting them into that area and still giving you a significant selection becomes problematic, so we may give you representative samples of some of the smaller weapons and the bigger ones are basically, pick the size you want via the automated kiosk. Insofar as having that visual element, that's actually something that you've always been very consistent on and that permeates a whole lot of what we're doing over on the design side. Like one of the more recent examples would be the shopping where some of the initial design actually went more to a minimalistic design where you basically selected… more like a Grand Theft Auto thing where you're selecting from a list and one of the things you specifically wanted was to actually be… it's that's tangible aspect of being able to touch, see the white t-shirt, the red t-shirt, the shoes that look like this and not just selecting it from a list of things. So, we're basically trying to implement that concept throughout the entire interface for the game.

Yep, that'll be good. As much as I like Amazon, it's still nice to go into a store and look at things in person

Yeah, so we have talked about the fact that we don't want the larger ships to just park it, click the button and it's done. That these larger ships that have vast quantities of materials would actually take a significant period of time to unload. And they result in missions for NPCs and/or other players to undertake.

We've got a pretty comprehensive design right now but we're still iterating through that because we want to unify some of the functionality for loading and unloading so that it's the same basic concept on the smaller ships as on the larger ships. And right now what we've got in the design stage is something that works, I think, remarkably well on the smaller stage it just doesn't scale so well when you start talking about several orders of magnitude more materials and how you don't bottleneck in terms of getting potentially dozens or hundreds of other smaller ships to extract those resources.

So we're still refining exactly how that's going to work but that's the general direction. So there is going to be commonality in terms of you'll have the ability to work at a very localised scale and then you'll be able to scale that very wide so that there's content for a large number of players and/or NPCs on these bigger ships.

So, yeah, but are you answering whether it's automatic or not?

So like the way I was viewing it is that - and I think that we maybe have this as a later question in the series - when you go ... like on a big space station … like if I have a big container ship and a pull into the port of LA here a Long Beach there's a whole set up: there's longshoremen, big cranes and there's services. And the crew of the container ship don't actually unload the containers themselves - there's equipment that does it and there's people that are paid to do that. And I would say that in general in the bigger space ports you would have that same kind of setup where you would have the ability to unload the bigger ships, unload the containers. Potentially we've talked about having the ability for players to play the part of a longshoreman …

Right.

CR … they're running around in a little Argo and taking off a container from a Hull E and dropping it to another place and doing that. Or having AI do that. And then there obviously will be cases where - which is probably a later question we have here - there'll be manual loading and unloading of cargo where you don't have the big services. Like if I just had a ship and I was off the coast somewhere and there wasn't a port then obviously …

Right.

… I would have to be doing that myself. And so I think we've been looking at way that you have the automatic option that the services provide for you …

The automatic option when appropriate but the fidelity so that on these smaller ships you can actually … and this makes for much more interesting gameplay a of times in a lot of different cases because you can imagine scenarios to where you need to deliver a smaller quantity - a half dozen, a dozen - specific crates of some sort of illegal liquor or something to somebody in a planet, and part of the mission is not just finding where to procure this stuff and then get through customs without being detected, but once you are actually on the planet now you've got to take these crates physically to that guy before he's going to give payment. And so all of a sudden you start to get into a much more localised problem where you're trying to avoid security guards or else you're going at night because you may be …

I think we have that … I think we have a question that basically asks the same thing a little later on but …

You threw everything off because you reversed everything ...

… well … yeah … I kind of … I went from the big and the services to break it down to the other one.

Okay so I think … so the answer is there'll be services but we'll also have some specialised ships and equipment for unloading cargo. Especially in the case of the big Hull series.

Yeah mentally I break salvage into two different concepts. One is what I call scavenging when you're actually extracting entire pieces of value from other ships, could be engines, could be weapons, could be cargo whatever. Then there's also what I'd call scrapping which is basically the extraction of the raw materials. You're actually pulling off the metal plating from the wings and stuff like that.

We've talked about having these elements distributed in a logic fashion so that the players that are more knowledgeable about where the most valuable elements and stuff are on a particular ship can strip the most valuable pieces that much more quickly. So what you're going to wind up having is a tier of players: some of interested in one thing or the other, some of them are interested in only the most valuable parts and then they quickly move on looking for other things to scrap. Other players are basically looking at completely reducing a ship down just a husk and leaving no value behind.

Yeah to be more specific to answer the question. It is going to be a combination of both so you'll be able to just take general sort of debris and essentially scrap it into whatever salvageable material that you will be able to use or resell. Then you can also look to salvage working individual items. So if a wing blows off, but maybe it has a functioning gun that hasn't been damage or damaged very much, if you can find that and detach that from the wing than you've got a second hand item you can sell.

Both those are going to be part of the salvage profession and Tony was talking about the next level which is scanning and knowing the aspects of a ship that may be the best to salvage. So you don't want to maybe salvage the entire hull, but perhaps this part of the hull has whatever titanium armour and therefore is more valuable than another part of the hull so that will be the part that you want to salvage or dissolve into your big salvage tank.,

And one of things I really like about that particular concept is that it scales really well to any number of players. In other words when you think about a salvage ship as having one laser or whatever it is that is basically going to pull the materials off of there, you've only got a single player that can actually engage in that and if you want more maybe we could add a second one of these devices, but you're still going to be fairly limited.

If you start to turn this into something to where players with their individual hand controlled stuff, it can basically extract things then you have two things: one it becomes very time consuming at that level, at a personal level to scrap an entire ship, but it's actually still very cost effective if you have done this enough as such that you know where all the most valuable areas are and that's all you're going to bother so. So what I would say is when you're talking about scrapping the entirety of a ship, that's probably going to be you're going to aim the fire house at it, the big dedicated device, but when you're talking about just extracting bits of value you quickly get in get out maybe because there's a lot of residual dangers in that area, then it actually becomes very effective to have you and four, six guys who's maybe other players, friends of y ours, other NPCs that you've hired to just attack it in mass, just hit the valuable parts and then go on.

Yup, absolutely. So there you go. All those things will be there so I think salvaging will be quite and graphically kind of already handle it with the damage shader because you can sort of dissolve off the surface in a more regular pattern and you're taking off the top of the hull for salvage.

This is a great example where we're reusing technology from one purpose to another and we're actually going to do the same thing, repair is actually going to be largely…

The other way.

the inverse of this process to where you take all the raw materials that you've stored in your ship and you can dispatch three, or four, or six guys or the big dedicated device depending upon how quickly you want to move across the entire ship and repair just select areas.

Yup, alright so the 7th most popular question comes from...

This is actually one of my favourite ones because I like the concept of exploration, discovery and just as I'm flying, going about my business, doing one thing maybe mining or whatever. I'm encountered other stuff and so in terms of the things other than pirates that might kick you out quantum travel for a period of time, this would include everything from meteor showers, comets, derelict ships that cross your path, debris fields, micro black holes, just a variety of things like that. The most interesting aspect about this I think is that all these things that you encounter can not only have potential value to you even though you're currently engaged in something else because this represents information, if you cross paths with a comet and that comet's not known to anyone else you can actually sell that information that may be very valuable to somebody who actually wants to mine it.

You start thinking about debris fields and derelict spaceships and those are very valuable to these guys that want engage in salvaging operations and micro black holes are very interesting to scientists that actually want to be able to study these things to extract value from them. So, you can see this whole circular ecosystem to where as you're going about your business you're encountering both directly and indirectly that can feed other parts of the economy. The other thing that I really, really like about this particular aspect is just the variety that it's going to bring when you start getting all these players interacting in all these different ways.

Yeah, I had else to say that the other things, well obviously we talked about mining potentially hitting a gas vent that can cause an explosion and those sort of things. Cargo and in general just transit we… besides things you can encounter, we very much have this high fidelity of simulation of various components of your ship and part of the big pink unicorn of Item 2.0 is the fact that we have age and wear and things will break down. So, that's not currently in the game as you guys are playing it but it's very much part of the systems that will be part when the full Item 2.0 comes online. Which means that under stress, being used a lot say in a long quantum drive like when you're on a trading cargo run or something, the items… you're powerplant, your engine, your thrusters, lights, whatever, they have aged, they can fail, they can misfire.

So, there will definitely be a certain amount of maintenance keeping your ship running especially in the bigger ships. If you've watched any science fiction movie and you've seen Chewie banging the Millenium Falcon or the crew of the Nostromo having to keep their ship running and stuff like that. That is going to be a gameplay component besides just things that… you know, pirates you can run across and everything like that. We mentioned that with the real vast scale that we have in the game, we're not sort of compressing the star systems the way a lot of other space games have. I mean we are compressing it because if we went full real scale then it would take way, way longer for people to travel across one solar system than I think people would enjoy but we are still having a massive amount of scale. Much more so than other games will have and therefore when you're in quantum drive at 0.2 speed of light, which is very fast you theoretically could spend half an hour to go from one side of the star system to another side of the star system.

Now likelihood is you'll never be in quantum drive for that long because you'll be pulled out for some reason or there'll be something in the way but you could quite easily be in quantum drive for a few minutes, 5 minutes or whatever, 10 minutes and part of we don't want you to be bored so you're running around. There will be things for you to do to keep your ship running while you're doing that, so it's sort of like travel gameplay and that will be one of the parts of being a long distance explorer or cargo hauler where you'll actually have things to do like you would if you were a sea captain on a container ship crossing the Atlantic ocean or the Pacific.

You mentioned boredom and that kind of goes back to that sense of discovery I was talking about. We don't want these things that pull you out of quantum travel to always be viewed, if you're currently doing something else, as an annoyance. We actually want make these things indirectly entice players to occasionally break off what they're doing and explore a little bit more. There's a variety of ways by which we can do that if you think about I'm currently mining and I've basically loaded up my ship with ore and I'm heading over the refinery and all of the sudden you're kicked out of quantum travel, and you got a ping on your radar and all you know is at this distance is that it's a ship and at conventional cruise speeds it's three minutes away.

Do you now start spooling up your quantum engines after you've course corrected to get around it and you're going to go ahead and jump out but the information that there's a derelict ship there when you don't know anything about it, its current state, whether it's already been salvaged, what type of ship it is… that information is worth much less. Or do you go off the beaten path and now you're actually going to invest three minutes to go… you were mining but it seems safe, so I'm going to head over and I'm going to get a little bit closer. Now I know what type of ship it is, I'm going to go a little bit closer still, now I can actually see it hasn't actually been scrapped.

There's a lot of value here, this key that I have is now very extraordinarily valuable when I go to sell that information to someone else but I got a little bit too close and it turns out there's already some other people. You know pirates that have pulled up or scrappers and they don't want anyone else to have this information so they're moving to basically take you out so can't alert other players and bring them there. All of the sudden you wanted to extract a little bit value about something you incidentally ran into and you ventured a little bit too closer and now you've basically walked into… not something that was intentionally meant as a trap but it works out that way none the less.

Yup, when a lot of this stuff is working we have a much bigger play field which is in the off thing, that's what we're working on right now. I think the gameplay possibilities and fun going to be much better… well, I mean much better than it is now. I think it'll be something really special so that's going to be cool, so let's carry on.