Persistent Universe Panel 3 - Getting Social

Yeah, so basically when we release the social module, as Jason said, sometime in March, the key features that you'll wind up seeing in there will be the chat system, the ability to basically maintain a list of friends. You will wind up having the elevator that I mentioned earlier that you can take from your hangar and actually transition for the first time up to an actual city. But before I get into that, just going back to your hangar, you will see the sim pod too. Again, that will be your new access point to Arena Commander and the upcoming first-person shooter module. You will be able to, once you go up into the city, traverse to each of the shops. They'll actually be in the game, all of the ones that we mentioned earlier with the exception of the clothing store, which will not be there. You'll be able to navigate through the interface, inspect a lot of the item inventory. You will see some very early NPC activity. We're probably at about the 40, 50% level in regards to the underlying technology. There's still a lot of significant work to do, but we're starting to get the first flickering bits of capability into the hands of the designers. There's still a tremendous amount of motion capture work obviously to do. We're going to wind up having multiple sessions throughout the year. And so what you'll see with the release of this social module is going to be NPCs wandering around doing some test animations. This is considered a very, very early version of what you're going to see in the game. There won't be any of the evolution of characteristics that I mentioned earlier. The economic simulator won't yet be plugged into the main game. Back to your hangar, the big feature, the big namesake feature of this whole social module is the ability to invite those friends to your hangar. Up until this point, when you ran the game, you were running just on your local client machine. And then when you joined an Arena Commander game, for example, you'd actually be transitioned over to one of our servers and you would play with other players. What's going to happen for the social module is a pretty significant step along the technological road towards getting you into the real persistent universe. That will be another milestone, sometime probably around the middle of this year, where we'll try to expand the scope of what we're doing a little bit farther. But getting back to the ability to invite: when you join the game, you will still be client-side. When you invite another player to your hangar, you will still be client-side. However, something kind of magical happens when they actually accept the invitation, and basically from within an elevator, you will both be shunted over to a version of your hangar that will be instantiated on one of our servers. And in that regard, it becomes very, very similar to what we're going to wind up doing in the near future in regards to all of the points of interest that you're going to be visiting in space. In this case, that map just happens to be a clone of your hangar. There's some possibility at this point that you may be able to transition up into ArcCorp, although we're uncertain as to the level. And so if we do it, it will probably just be for demonstration purposes as opposed to what we would...

What Tony is saying is that originally he was just going to have multiplayer in the hangar and I said, well, I would like to try to have it on ArcCorp when you're wandering around as well. So he's going to try for it but he's not promising it in the very first release.

I made the mistake of pointing out to Chris that given the way that we were organizing and building the technology and what would actually be available in that early March timeframe, what you would expect to see after you invited another player to your hangar, if you both got into your elevator and if you then selected ArcCorp, would be, well, your friend would effectively teleport back to his hangar. At which point Chris essentially said, well, wait, if you can share the hangar, why can't you share ArcCorp? Exactly.

Don't let the multiplayer hangar team off the hook.

Well, it's actually less a multiplayer... In regards to the backend server functionality, that's actually coming along. That's now starting to make some very significant leaps and bounds. The real problem is more one of optimizations. So for all of this initial NPC functionality that's coming, it needs to be optimized such that all of that logic operates client-side, and the server is only giving the basic commands of what these characters need to do. And then the actual execution, the navigation from point A to point B, the actual playing of the animations, all of that needs to happen client-side so that we can actually ramp up the number of players. And so getting multiple players into cities, given where the technology is very soon going to be, that's less of a concern versus the couple of solid months of optimization work that needs to be done to really allow you to scale to something where instead of eight players, we can actually get up to 30, 40, 50, 60 players and at the same time provide enough NPCs, because you have to take into account too, these cities are relatively large, hundreds of meters across. And so in order for us to actually make them look busy, we're not talking about putting 10 or 20 or 30 NPCs. We're really talking about having hundreds and hundreds of NPCs per planet. Now at any given time, you're probably only going to see a subset of that, but it's still a lot of network traffic given the fact that that part of the code base hasn't yet been optimized.

Sure. So in December when we launched the lobby system and we launched the contact system on the website, we started by populating the lobby system with your website contacts. On the web, there's not a great interface to be able to respond to a friend request in the affirmative without either sending an email or doing something like that. So we have kind of a Twitter-esque style where you follow somebody and that makes them a contact. And so as we have more robust interactions in the game, where it makes sense that you initiate a friend request and then they're connected to their client and they get a pop-up and they can accept it, or they have a mailbox or something like that, as this moves more into the game, we can follow some of that on the web. Maybe we'll have a mailbox on the website as well or some other things, but we're sort of starting with the simplest iteration that gave us the functionality we wanted in the lobby system in December, and then we'll just continue to iterate on that as we move forward, lockstep with the game.

Another thing just to add in relation to some of the stuff we've been talking about is basically the fact that starting with the social module, we'll have the initial phases of persistence, and this is another one where each iteration of the Persistent Universe module throughout this year will wind up adding more and more functionality. And what we're aiming to do is basically give you the capability to pull over everything that you've purchased on the website and actually store it for the first time over in our Persistent Universe database. Now since the game hasn't actually launched, we don't really want that Hornet that you pulled down from the website, that you will eventually be able to take out into space before we actually officially launch whatever you want to call the first full iteration of the Persistent Universe module, we don't want that ship to basically be able to be blown apart and you lose it, given the fact that some aspects of the game will still be unbalanced, etc. And so what we're going to wind up doing is adopting a middle ground that will probably persist for the next eight or nine or 10 months. And what it will effectively do is pull down everything that you purchased from the website, store it in the Persistent Universe database, and you will be able to log off, log back on, and whatever changes you've made to your ship, whatever damage you've incurred, in the relatively near future that should start to persist until you wind up actively telling the system, probably via pressing a button either on the website or within the game, to reset your status, at which point it will go ahead and clear out whatever the current version of your inventory is and re-pull all of that stuff down. And so what you're going to have for the short term is kind of the best of both worlds, where you'll have all of your equipment, you can go out, lose it, get it broken, et cetera, and then start right back over. And this will wind up being invaluable as we go through testing through this year. And we've actually got things like mission status, ship damage levels, inventory loadouts, all sorts of things that we actually will need to do a lot of testing on.

So these are all basic building blocks of the game at this point. We're talking about persistence and data architecture and server configuration and writing of servers. This is all stuff that we have to build to put various aspects of the game, that in some cases already work and in some cases have to be built from scratch, together to be a big consistent and persistent universe.

Yeah, the social module will be the first time that the game will actually have some sense of true persistence that doesn't rely upon the website.

I think you'd wind up knowing that he's immediately there.

It's one of those things... I mean, the way that we're doing this is that there's no way you're going to prevent... Fictionally, you shouldn't be able to know, but otherwise everyone's going to have TeamSpeak or Skype or something. So we're essentially treating organizational chat as being the one magic FTL thing that happens. But I think that all the things that require you to interact with the universe will still be bound by the rules of the universe. We're doing this for convenience. The missions won't propagate. If there's a mission in, I guess, the Stanton system and I'm in Terra, if I go to the TDD in Terra, I may not even see what's available in Stanton. It's like, hey, there's some cool missions in Stanton, get your ass over here. Okay, that's FTL, but I gotta fly over there, I gotta do the jump points, and then they may or may not be there by the time I get to Stanton. So in terms of transfer of goods or items, they will all have to happen inside the universe. So if you're gonna sell someone a ship, and you're in Terra and I'm in Stanton, and I sell you the ship, we agree on it, you have to get to where you are to close that transaction and bring the ship to you. So all the things that are mechanically inside the game we can enforce, but the actual communication between friends, between organizations, it just essentially wouldn't work for us to force it to have the same sort of time-delay communication that would be real in the fiction.

Absolutely, and that's why I mentioned it. So you will be able to browse, you'll be able to get a sense of how the interface is going to work, how you'll actually see rifles and ammunition arrayed within the personal weapon shop and stuff, but you won't actually be able to buy them, store them in your inventory, equip them or anything like that.

No, never. You'll never be able to do that. Just for show. No, I mean, I think it'd be important to point out that that's sort of the next milestone. So the first one is the one we're talking about, the social module, where basically you're there in your hangar and you can have some friends visit you. You and some friends may or may not be able to wander around ArcCorp. You can at least go out to ArcCorp, walk around, get a sense of a planet-side location, get a sense of what the shops would feel like and what the environment ultimately is going to feel like. And then in the next stage of the Persistent Universe, one of the parts of it would be more of the persistence, being able to buy and sell.

And exit the planet. Exit the planet, ideally do quantum travel, possibly. I mean, obviously we're not going to have finished effects and stuff for the wormhole travel, but once we've got those pieces of the puzzle in place, nothing prevents us, other than the lack of final-quality art, from allowing you to transition to other systems.

I mean, I think our goal is that we're going to have the social module now, sort of middle of the year-ish is going to be the next stage, which lets you buy and sell, and you can leave and perhaps fly to another planet and land on another planet, and then what we'll do at the end of the year is sort of like a mini version of the Persistent Universe, with not all the functionality we're going to have in the Persistent Universe and certainly not all the content, but I think we're talking about potentially, what, five systems?

Yeah, well, we've been aiming for five, but we were really talking more in the way of unique art sets and stuff. And so once we're actually talking about reutilizing, taking advantage of some of this modular functionality, we've recently started to expand our horizon. And so it's possible we could be in the, call it the mid to high single digits. And another reason, in regards to being, call it somewhat conservative, in regards to how many planets we're aiming to do, is we're actually aiming to do probably one of, if not the most visually ambitious, which is Terra Prime, which is just mind-blowingly gorgeous. But it's also a tremendous amount of work. That was one where Chris took a look at it relatively recently, and basically it got bigger. Shocker. It's actually an interesting one because Skelton and myself and the team at Behaviour and some of the other guys that are involved with that stuff, we were basically doing Terra Prime, but we were trying to keep the sum total effort... I mean, all of these art sets, all of these first-stage cities, basically, like right now Terra Prime uses what we're calling this super modernism architecture. Building the first of those takes quite a bit of time. Utilizing all of these pieces and then adding what Skelton referred to earlier as the hero art pieces to basically customize an area, that's considerably quicker. And so what wound up happening in terms of Terra Prime is we were aiming to keep it within the same ballpark in terms of overall implementation difficulty, effort, etc., as some of these other planets like ArcCorp at Stanton or Nyx. And basically Chris just pointed out how this was one of the largest, if not the largest, trading centers within the known galaxy, and therefore it made no sense for it to adhere to those same limitations. And so what we're really doing now is basically...

To clarify, the city size was always huge and it's massive. I mean, it is like massive. It's like seeing a huge metropolis, and it's really awesome and very coolly detailed. And at some point in the future, I think we'll probably share some of that. The issue is more about what you did on the planet side. So to try and scope some stuff down, Tony and Mark were trying to confine the action to basically Terra Tower. And for me, I felt like I wanted to have more of a texture at the beginning. So we definitely want the feeling of the world's busiest spaceport there. And then you probably want to have another area, which is the rundown... it's called the Blocks. And so then you would land and then you could go to Terra Tower, which is like your sightseeing, the beautiful edifice with all the high-end shops, and then you could be around the spaceport where you would do more ship-related things that would also be appropriate for that, because before, trying to put some ship-related stuff inside Terra Tower just sort of felt weird.

We were basically trying to squeeze... What's happened is Terra Prime has gone from something where we were trying to take a large concept and put it into, I wouldn't say small, but a practical package so that it wouldn't wreak too much havoc in regards to the schedule. And basically, it's now become more epic. And this is not something that's going to be done, as Chris pointed out before, on every planet. It's just that Terra Prime really is a special case. And as a special case, it makes sense to put in the amount of effort that it takes to do it right according to all of the original concept and game background.

Yeah, I've scoped it down. Obviously, the scope has gotten bigger because the funding has gotten bigger. Essentially, when I first started out, it was going to start off with a much more limited set. For instance, a great example is being down on the planet side. The original version of what I was thinking of doing was the high fidelity out in space. I think we would have had high-fidelity models down on the planet side, but we wouldn't be walking around it in first person originally. I was thinking it would be more like Privateer or Freelancer, where you would have some angles and you would have a character or two. And then Hannes, who now works full time for us, Hannes Appell, he's in Germany, he's the guy that did the original Squadron 42 five-minute trailer when I launched the crowdfunding campaign. At the time he was working at Crytek as their director of cinematics, but he was a huge Wing Commander fan, and so he'd asked if he could help me out on what I was doing, and I was quite happy to have him help me out. And so he did a little preview that he did in first person. I thought we could do first person, but then I was thinking, well, we'll make it very... okay, just a location or two. And over time, as we've gotten more funding, as you get deeper into what we're using CryEngine for, we're like, well, we've got a full first-person engine, and we already have items and all the handling and the combat here. And so we're kind of shooting ourselves in the foot not to use it, because it's already part of the package. Some code and support for it, but you already have it. I mean, as you can already see right now, if you want to, you fly in Arena Commander, you can jump out of your ship and you can be shooting the gun around, and I don't know if anyone's done it yet, but I'm pretty sure two people could eject out of the ship, get to the platform, and have a gunfight with each other. And that is literally because it's all inside one first-person engine. So the level of scope that would happen on the planet side has definitely increased in terms of what Tony's been talking about, like having the action. Because we sort of take a look at it and go, yeah, you can really make this game step up to the next level. And a lot of the... you guys haven't seen this because of the Squadron 42 stuff, and because that's a very specific story, we don't want to really share it up front the same way as we share everything in the Persistent Universe, because it would spoil the story. But just seeing... we have these things that are called gray boxes, where the designers run the level or the mission or the chapter or whatever we're doing on Squadron 42. Just the fluidity of being in your ship, flying a mission, being called for a distress call, landing on a space station, getting out of your ship, getting involved in combat, running through, going inside, as this platform, as this space base blows up, having to run for another ship, get in there and fly it off, is something that... So there's been some really great fan stuff that people have done where it's like, oh, look, I've EVA'd out of my Aurora into a wrecked ship to collect an item, and those kind of things. And those are all things that, looking at it as we were building it, we're like, okay, we've got the systems to do this. We now have the backing. We now have the resources. So let's really try to make the world feel more alive. And it's like Tony was saying, it's not just the fact that when you're in space, you have some sense of trepidation. Maybe down on the planet, you're going around, and you go down a dark alleyway, and you could get jumped. Or if you're on a particularly lawless planet, maybe someone tries to rip you off when you're unloading your cargo. It just adds a whole level of immersion to the world. I would say that kind of stuff has obviously definitely increased. I mean, we've obviously added a lot of functionality. We have all these stretch goals, so that's a lot of stuff that we weren't planning to do originally that has now been added. And I would like to clarify, because there's always this sense of, oh, well, you've done all these things and it keeps feature creeping and you'll never deliver the game. The concept with what we're doing, and this is the other thing that I think has changed from when I first started building the game, is that we have a very fluid development methodology, which is we're basically rolling out... Right here, we're basically pulling up our skirt and showing everything in what we're doing here on the social module, in a way that I wouldn't necessarily... I still like to share everything, I just like to maybe have it a bit more polished before I share it. But anyway, the idea is that we roll out the pieces of the game as it makes sense as we're building them, which is an incredibly different development methodology than pretty much any other game. There are some games that have done early alphas and then built functionality up, like DayZ, Minecraft. And so there is a little bit of similarity there, but I don't believe it's ever been to the level that we've done, where we're literally taking early components, before you would even have something that would be even close to what you would call the holistic alpha, and sharing them. And so that's why when we say, okay, we're going to do this extra feature, do this extra feature, it doesn't mean that you don't get to play the game until that feature is done. It basically means, no, this is one of the things that's on our development list and we will get to it. So, I don't know, I've always wanted to have pets in a game. Well, yeah, you'll get them. You're just not going to get them maybe now. You probably won't get them next year, but it'll definitely be on the list. And so the way I view it is we share the development as we go. And everybody gets to experience it. And they also get to give their feedback. They get to stress test it. And I think it's just going to make a much better game. I can already tell on our early stuff. I think people first played Arena Commander v0.8 and then .9, to 0.9.2, to 1.0. You can see where the progress has happened. And we've still got loads of things to change and polish and adjust. But that's going to happen on everything. That's going to start happening on the planet-side stuff. So the very first version of the planet-side stuff is going to be, I'm sure, rough. And there will be lots of things that we want to work out, user interface-wise, performance-wise, functionality-wise. Same will be on the FPS. But the thing is that as we're playing this as we're going along and sharing it, I think we're getting to really craft something with a level of iteration that you normally don't get when you develop. And I would say that, for me, is the biggest change, because when I started this, I wanted to get to where we're going to end up now, but I didn't think we would ever be able to do it from the start or plan to do it from the start. I felt like, okay, I'm going to have to have something... I guess it would be more equivalent to, I'm sure quite a few guys have Elite, right? So Elite's got a more basic feature set right now, and they plan to do a lot of extra things, like, okay, we'll have the walking around in first person and be down on planets. They have a more limited set which is now out, and that's the game that they've released. Ours is just different because we basically got so much funding at the beginning that we can say, okay, well, no, this was really part of the vision, and build towards it from the very beginning. And so I'd say that's kind of the biggest difference: remodulating development, figuring out how to do open development and share the development with everybody that's supported the game while we're also doing R&D on the new stuff, and keeping all you guys interested and entertained, whether it's by playing parts of the game or hearing about the stuff that was coming up, or giving you an opportunity to comment on some of the ideas that we have in terms of how we're going to handle cargo or how we're going to handle trading or whatever it would be. The openness of the development, the level of interaction. I wanted the game to be very community focused from the beginning. That's why we launched a community site before we even announced the game. And that was one of the goals of the whole website stuff from the very beginning, but not to the level that we're doing it now. So when we got into the campaign, it was, no, we need to keep this up. We need to keep adding to this. That's been the biggest change, and to be honest with you, it's also the thing that is probably the most invigorating about doing it, because when you work on a really big, huge project, like I could say Freelancer was a very big project and that took a long, long time, and I wasn't even there at the very end when it came out, it can get tough when it's just you and your team and that's all you're working on. But having all you guys out there be part of it, and the energy and the excitement and the ideas, I think it invigorates the teams that we have working on the game. I would not undersell the power of that. I think that has a lot of our developers get up in the morning wanting to do great work, because they know there's a lot of people out there that are every single day excited by what's been made, what they're hearing about, and I think that's going to end up spurring on a lot of our developers to probably do things that you would think... I mean, it's still going to take a lot of time, but considering the feature set that we're doing, and when I think we'll be able to deliver the features, I would say that we will be doing a pretty good job with respect to maybe some other really big projects that went off and worked for five or six years but were hidden away from what was happening. It's because of that interaction that we have with the community.

Absolutely. So, in addition to Tony's team in Austin that's building the Persistent Universe and a lot of other things, we have the live operations and DevOps team in Austin. And this is the team that really takes the code that's been checked into the source control repository, turns it into a build, publishes it out to the server, and makes sure that that is all efficient. As we did this morning, right? I left Austin right as we published everything to the public and drove here to be with you this afternoon. That process happens continuously. We have about nine different development channels for various purposes: art channels, the latest, greatest code in the main channel that's usually broken and needs fixing, and then we have the different QA channels and the live channels. And so the DevOps team is continuously managing that, making builds, putting those builds into different environments so that QA can test them. As you know, in December, we launched the first iteration of our public test universe system. What that basically means is that we can take a build that is a candidate for live and we can spin up a copy of the live universe in our server-hosted environment, and then let you copy your account over to that server set. And then you can play the game before we actually publish it to the live servers. Some of that functionality will also feed some of the stuff Tony was talking about in the Persistent Universe in its early phase, the idea of being able to copy your inventory from place to place and overwrite your character data. So that's an example of a building block that that team has been working on that will be used as we continue the development process. There's a lot of real geeky technology that goes into building all of these servers and making sure that all of that... Or magic, as we were talking about earlier. It's part alchemy, yeah. But even today with Arena Commander, which is just one slice of the experience, we're running hundreds of servers on the back end to keep up with your login, passing you off to the different mission type servers and game modes, and load balancers and web nodes and account databases, and it's all really fascinating to me, but it's not necessarily great conversation starter material. That's what our LiveOps team is working on in Austin. And as we cross from a period where most of the gameplay has been played on your computer to a world where the most important game rules are managed on the server and your computer is graphically displaying that to you, the role of the LiveOps team is quickly becoming more and more complicated, because managing all of the interactions in a live persistent server environment is a pretty big job. So in addition to the team that we have in Austin, we have other people in other studios that work on different pieces of that. And we also have some very close partners, some technology vendors that we're working with, because an important piece of our plan is to present the game to the world as one cohesive game around the world. We don't really plan to have 35 different server instances that are all running their own economy server and all that stuff. So part of what the LiveOps team is working on is building out the type of very modern, leading-edge technology infrastructure to support that kind of concept. So there's some pretty cool stuff in the works. It's very early.

Basically, if you kill another person and they've got items on them, you can loot the body. So looting is already a mechanic that we have in it. The only thing that will happen is if people are fighting in space and cargo or items are dumped out in space, the items will only persist as long as that instance is up. So as long as there's people flying around in that instance, the items will be there, but not once the instance basically gets shut down. So you couldn't essentially dump some cargo out in an asteroid field and come back to it a week later. That level of persistence isn't in there. Now, if there was an asteroid base, then the asteroid base itself would have persistence. But generally, if you were involved in space combat or ground combat and you shoot someone, the items they have on them or the items they have on the ship would be things that you could collect.

So you will not be able to change instances. The instancing all happens in the background. So basically, from your standpoint in playing the game, in most cases, you will not be able to tell what server is taking care of you. So as you fly across the star system and you go from area to area, in the background you'll actually be handed off from server to server to server. It's how we manage to have all the players in one universe. So you don't know what instance you're in. The only way you probably would know is if you and 100 or 200 of your friends all decided to come to the same location, like orbit around Sol, and of course you wouldn't see all 200 of them. And as far as the infrastructure goes, it's what John was talking about. I think we've mentioned before that we're doing a lot of work with Google and Google Compute. And one of the reasons why we're doing it is because they have an infrastructure between their data centers that does not go through the internet, and it's very, very, very fast. So we've got a lot of different servers, but the game server is the real-time server that takes care of the simulation. So right now, when you play Arena Commander, you are playing on a game server. And then there's a bunch of servers that go above that, like the system server or the economy, or a bunch of services that we have that are layered on top of that, the matchmaking server and stuff like that. But the game servers themselves, the concept would be they would be able to spin up or spin down around the world at different data centers if we're inside the Google ecosystem. And then they would all communicate back to the bigger services, which would probably just be located in one location. And because we're inside the Google infrastructure, we don't have to worry about essentially the ping times and how long it's going to take to go through the internet, and it's much more reliable data-wise. So the whole idea is if you play it as a player, it should feel like you're in one seamless universe. And your performance in general should be fairly decent as long as you're close to one of the geographic areas where there's a Google data center.

Just to add one thing that didn't get mentioned there. The primary reason why you would typically want to physically go to a particular server is because you've got a friend or a party member or whatever, and you want to basically play the game with them. And so there is a bit of logic behind the scenes that will automatically try to place you into the same server instance. It'll go through this whole cycle of: is it a friend? Is it a party member? Skill levels will be considered. What you're actually doing, like I mentioned earlier.

What your location is. So generally it will go, okay, well, you two are in North America, therefore you could be together.

Your location. Or earlier I mentioned a mercenary responding to a distress call from a freighter captain that's under attack by a pirate. And so what he would be able to see is basically all of the activity within that solar system, but when he actually selects that event as being what he wants to respond to and engages his quantum engines to go there, that is basically a key that's going to shunt him into the same server instance as that freighter captain that's being assaulted by those pirates.

Even if you were in Australia and you wanted to play with your friend in the UK, you can specifically say, I want to play with my friend. And at that point, you're basically overriding the matchmaking priority that says, well, the ping's important. At that point, the ping would be less important than who you want to play with. Generally, it should be fair. You should not feel the matchmaking. You shouldn't realize that this is happening unless you actually got coordinated with a bunch of people. It should feel totally seamless.

And just to put it in terms of priorities, the party system will override everything. And so if you're actually synced up with five other players and you basically go and land at ArcCorp, then when your other friends land five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes later, assuming there's free space on that server, and it will tend to reserve a few slots for friends and stuff that follow right behind other players, they will be thrown onto that same instance automatically. The whole idea is basically to give you the effect that you want without forcing you to do any sort of manual manipulation.

At the moment, I don't think we have the conception of you being able to basically sabotage jump point data. I mean, it's a nice idea, but at the moment we've got a lot of other things to do. I think the idea would be you chart it, it's basically tagged inside your nav computer as charted by you, and now you have the ability to share it with your friends, or you can sell it to a service that will pay you money for it.

Yeah, and conceptually the mechanic will wind up working just like a whole lot of other stuff. If you chart a wormhole, if you discover the location of a comet, if you discover the location of an asteroid field, then assuming you're working on your own and not for an organization where the discovery of that is automatically shunted to that group, that's private information. That information has value. You can go to someone that will actually buy that, and based upon what that information is, they'll offer you a price commensurate with the value. And so in that regard, a wormhole to a system that's a shortcut, that basically makes it much easier for freighters to get from point A to point Z without having to take the circuitous route, has more value than potentially some of these other paths.

I can sort of take that first, at least. There's two pieces of that. When I listen to your question, there's some information that's already available from the website today, and a number of industrious fans have figured out how to access an API that already exists to pull a lot of the organization data and do some very interesting data analysis and data mining that I like to read on various Reddit posts and forum posts myself. So we'll continue to expose more and more of that API as it exists on the platform. That would also apply to leaderboard information, your citizen dossier and the information that's available on there. We'll continue to push more data onto your citizen dossier as we expand, further information about kill data and pilot data and pilot skill and preferred ship and a bunch of stuff that's already available in the leaderboards. As far as what you do in the game, that's maybe a question for Tony and Chris: from a design standpoint, how much of that would you want to make available in an API? Because from a technical perspective, it's not that hard. We already have an API. We can deliver it. It's kind of a design question.

Yeah. I definitely think that we will be reporting elements of the economy, just like if you read a paper you can see what the stock market is doing, what they're forecasting the economic growth is going to be. So I think that we would probably have some of that, and may even have a live ticker on the website or something. So that level of stuff we may do. Basically, I would say the rule of thumb would be the sort of stuff that we would expose on the website or we would expose to a second party. We've talked about having something like an iPad app, a tablet app where you can go and check your character out and what its inventory is, and maybe look at what missions are available out there, and basically do some busy work that wouldn't be flying around in space, that wouldn't require the power of a full PC, like organizing a mission that you and your friends are going to do. All those kind of things we would probably expose to a tablet app or the website, and those things would, I would think, be available via an API. I just don't think we would have the full systems exposed at all, because that would potentially be very problematic, with someone looking for an exploit or something. I don't know if that answered your question.

It was mainly about exactly how much you wanted to make available outside of the game. I understand that if we go to a trade hub or so on and so forth, it'll seem like a living stock market where we can see a lot of that information, but what would the support be for organizations, for third-party applications outside of the game?

Yeah, I definitely think you'll be able to do inventory management, mission management. You'll probably be able to see big economic trends. And then the stuff that John talked about, which is organizational structures, leaderboards, all that. That will all be exposed, because that will be our public-facing stuff.

I would say all of the macro data from the economic simulator in regards to unemployment rates of planets, population sizes, commodity prices.

Essentially that's going to get fed to the star map on the website. Exactly. Stuff that we're feeding to whatever you want to call it, a third-party app. It's not really a third-party app.

Are you talking about leaving your ship in space? In space. That's a good question. We've had a few discussions about that. We've had the discussion that if you do that, then your ship just ends up back in your hangar, and then there's the discussion: is that an exploit, because you're far away from your hangar and this is just a quick way for you to get it warped back, or does the ship just take over on autopilot and fly itself back? So I'm not 100%... We're going to have the ability for you to save in space anyway. That's the whole idea of sleeping in the beds or whatever. So, I don't know, maybe the ship would be back and we would have it persist in that position. Not necessarily for other people in the instance, but if you go back to where you left your ship, as the player on someone else's ship or some secondary ship, then we would know to create your ship, which is what I would probably think the answer is, because we need a situation where you can save mid-space anyway.

Yeah, no, I agree with that. In regards to player death, and given the vast travel distances involved and stuff, there are certainly some design details yet to be worked out. We don't really need to go into a lot of those.

Well, I guess I would just say that when you save and you're in space, you log off. The ship's there, but it's not like someone can just come by and have your ship. Your ship isn't actually persisting for anyone else but you. So no one can steal it while you're sleeping, basically.

No, as long as you do a proper log-off with your ship at a given location, that should be absolutely fine for you to basically come back and resume from right there. It's just like on a lot of MMOs, where you're basically going to retire your character, but you want to make sure that you're not right in the middle of combat, and you basically log off.

Now, of course, if you leave your ship in the middle of combat and someone else is around, then they can steal your ship. But as long as no one else is around, and it logs off like you've gone to sleep and saved, then it will not be available for people, and it will only come back in when you come back into that area.

There needs to be a process to ensure that it's...

Well, I'm not so sure about... Definitely when you go into instances, it's not like you only show up with your friends. Basically, part of the rule set is who are your antagonists, who are your friends, and there would actually be slots reserved for those groups, right? So there's slots reserved for your friends, and there's also slots reserved for your enemies. So if you happen to be flying around in space by this asteroid field, and a group of, I don't know, whatever the infamous pirate group is that you're locked in a deadly battle with, is flying around there too, they would spawn in, because it would be known, with your character, your organization, that would be a known antagonist for you, and they would be part of who would be in it. In terms of knowing where they are, that would be kind of the way: either, like I was saying, you find a place and they spawn in, or the same would probably happen on the planet side. I mean, you just want to know if they're online or something, even if you're not close to them?

Perhaps.

You can use the contact list like that. My concern there would just be the possibility for griefing. You get a group of players...

No, no, no. I guess what I mean is, knowing when your friends are online, that's fine. Friends is one thing, enemies is another. Having it out of fiction, knowing when your enemies are online, is not something that I would say we would do. I would say that when it's your enemies, that's all in fiction, as in you're in the right location, or you're seeing them there, or you've gone to where you know they are, or someone's tipped you off and said, oh, I've seen the dreaded pirate group over by this asteroid, and so you go, okay, well, here, I've set my nav destination, I'm going to quantum drive over there. And then you would go and see them. That would all be in fiction. So I don't know if that's answered the question.

This also comes down to the fact that space is really big. And if we're only providing the information about a contact, like if you're using your contact list to track your enemies, and all we tell you is that they're in Stanton, that's a lot of surface area to cover.

Well, I think the other thing is that there are specific missions and jobs that we're planning for in the Persistent Universe. So one thing could be, okay, I'm paying money, I'm searching for this person, so I will pay a thousand credits or whatever for good data, not made-up data. And then people spot that person and they send the information to you and say, oh, we've seen him in this location. And then you go there. And so that is actually adding gameplay to the functionality of that.

But that's also, like you said, not magically precise. In other words, if someone sees them at a location and then they take off and they have not been seen in the last five minutes, you have no good idea where they're at. Another thing, just to clarify, it seemed like there was a little bit of confusion on the instancing, what I was talking about in regards to shunting players over to common servers based upon their party affiliation, their friends, their skill sets. That's purely in regards to areas that have too many players. In other words, it's an overflow mechanism. If you go to a distant asteroid field and there's two other players there, then the server that's maintaining those guys has absolutely no problem basically merging you all into the same instance. It's only when you start getting a picture around Terra Prime. There could be 10,000 players flying around in space. You're going to have dozens and dozens and dozens of servers. Same thing for when you're actually down on Terra Prime, the city. There could be 50 instances of that city. So which one do you actually go into when you actually land at your hangar? Well, it would prioritize that and go, well, you probably want to go into the instance where your party members are. And if you don't have any party members that are actually already on Terra Prime, then it'll look and go, well, you probably want to be merged in with your friends so that you can actually walk around, interact, say hi to your friends, and so on and so forth.

So this has a benefit, right? And the benefit to players is that it makes it hard to grief another player. And the way that we are engineering it is such that you can still play with your friends whenever you want to, so that that's not hard to do. The thing we don't want to do is make it hard to play with your friends, and the thing we do want to do is make it hard to grief, and consistently grief over and over and over.

And that is the precise reason why, earlier on one of the previous panels, we were talking about how the mechanism that we're using right now to initially populate your friends list is not at all related to what we're going to be doing in the near future, because right now I can form a link to you regardless of whether you want it. And that goes into your friends list right now, and we definitely do want you to know where your friends are. And so that's the whole reason why we're going to wind up tweaking that whole system and going to the proper 'I invite you to be my friend, you have to formally accept'. And at the point you do that, then we get the automatic link between both of us.