Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - Gameplay Systems and AI

This is valid for all of those, all three of those systems, the main direction of the game. We don't want the player to just go to a wreck or a mining site and just push a button and things get done for him. We want him to have a challenge. The main thing for us, it needs to be challenging. It needs to be risky, especially for mining, which is a very lucrative opportunity. You can make a lot of money. There needs to be risk involved. And if you're, one, not doing your job right, or two, some other people figure out where you're trying to mine and want to take whatever you mine as their own, that drives that gameplay we want to achieve, because that's the risk-reward factor that drives it. Regarding mini games, this is something where we're trying hard to not do what other games do, which is they just plug and play an existing puzzle. They just go, oh, I know this. Let's take the example of tic-tac-toe. They take tic-tac-toe and they plug it into the game and go like, yeah, that's the gameplay. No, this needs to make sense. It needs to make sense as in when you're mining, you're actually doing some kind of thing that's not just artificially inserted in there. So for mining, for example, we have this mining laser that injects energy into the rock. It basically tries to agitate the particles in there and extract only what you need out of it. There are risks involved. The more power you put into it, the higher the risk that it blows up, and then the higher the risk that it actually blows up catastrophically to the point where it can damage you and your ship. So this is kind of how this works.

And let me specify, this is only for ore right now. And then we'll have different ones for liquid and gas in the future.

Liquid, gas, asteroids, planetary mining. There's a lot of extraction type of gameplay that we want to add. This ranges from big chunks of ore to liquids to gathering organic samples from various botanical or animal sources. So there will be a lot of things where we can gather resources.

Yeah, but I think you should expand upon the tier zero, what we consider tier zero.

Our tier zero that we're aiming to release fairly soon. Moderately soon, yes. We're basically going to be working with the Prospector and we're going to have this laser tractor beam combination, which energizes the rock. We have various thresholds in there. If you're not energizing it enough, then you're not going to be able to pick up any content from the rock. Then if you're energizing further, the more power you put into it, the more resources you start getting out of it, then there's an optimal phase. This is where you want to keep your laser powered, in the optimal phase. And the more you keep it here, the more efficient you'll be, the less slag you pick out of the rock, like debris, because you don't want debris in there. You want your containers to fill up with gold and all the good stuff. And then if you go over that, and you will go over that because there is instability based on the elements inside the rock, you will have various spikes of energy: you're trying to put 100 megawatts into the rock, but suddenly it happens that the rock gives you up by 200 megawatts and that might spike over. So it's constantly fighting you and you're trying to keep it in check so it doesn't go overboard. And then if it goes over optimal and into the super dangerous zone and you don't manage to recover from there, then yes, it will be catastrophic.

So basically the first part of salvage and repair that we're going for would be, I think when we released the Crucible, we did a repair write-up, which basically detailed the scraping of a hull and then cleaning it off and then repainting it, and basically dealing with our UV2 damage shaders. So salvage would be kind of the inverse of that. So with repair, you want the ship covered. And with salvage, you want to scrape off everything before you start going into the mulching phase or breaking the ship apart. And so with salvage, I think that there's basically five different phases to it. There would be the hull phase, or the stripping of it. Then there's the mulching of the ship. There's item extraction. There's data extraction. And then there's possible siphoning, so whether that be air or gas, so like quantum fuel or something like that. But right now, like with mining we're going to focus on ore, from salvaging we will be focusing on the hull stripping first, and then from there start working through those other facets of gameplay.

Yeah, I think this is something worth mentioning. Most of these things now are reaching their tier zero and they'll go live. And once they go live, there'll be so much to build upon that, because we're trying to keep all our systems open-ended so there's always more to come. We don't want to do a minimal thing and then that's it. There's stuff there behind. It just takes time to get there.

It's the ability to hire NPCs, yes, but that does not necessarily have much to do with how you control them. The control is a separate interface, but I can speak a bit about this. So we initially started looking into this when we realized the capabilities of the Idris and figured out that you have a full crew that you need to control. And also you will be, let's call it the main ship in a fleet, rather than just a single ship dogfighting. So the Idris has this battle sphere, which you guys have seen, that we turned into an interface, joined together with MFDs, but think about it more in the sense of a strategy game. So you can give orders and queue orders for certain ships or internal people. So you can tell, yeah, wing five, attack this target, you protect that ship. So it's basic orders. There's the AI behaviors that will do the heavy work under that. But the basic orders, we need to be able to give whoever is the captain of that ship the chance of commanding stuff in a fleet or commanding stuff inside their ship.

Sorry, just to interrupt, Jared. It should be one of those things where, if you're saying target this person, if you have players in that turret, they're also seeing the same thing.

Yes, they might follow it or might not, because they're players. They do what they want. But they do get: this is your main target because the captain said so. And then you know at least what the fleet wants you to attack. I mean, the same interface we can also use for drones, for example, if you're a ship that has a lot of drones. The difference between a drone and an NPC AI is that, let's say you hire an AI and then you give him an order; based on various skills and traits that he has, he might not take that order, or he might take it and do something completely crazy. So that will be an interesting thing to play with once we add that part of the AI behavior. You will have to know which dude will react badly to a certain situation. If you send a guy to kill himself to save the fleet, you have to make sure that guy actually will follow the order. The drones will just do whatever you tell them to. They have no personality, but AI will have...

It'll be an interesting day when we have to separate: did the AI not do what you told it to do because it was a bug, or did the AI not do what you told it to do because its personality matrix was like, no, I'm not dying for this?

Yeah, but this is where we have logs and we can actually go through them and go like, yep. Also, there will be a lot of feedback. We do not want AI to be just doing things and not telling you why. If he's canceling an order that you gave him, he will tell you. So he will not just quietly cancel that order. He will tell you why, and you will take immediate action to rectify the problem.

It's still early in the works. So right now what we're working on a bit more, and it's connected to this, is all these AI skills and perks and how they affect the behavior. So when you want to hire an AI, it's very important to know who you're hiring, why you're hiring that person, and what skills he has, what traits he has. You might actually get the surprise where you hire someone and not everything will be visible from the beginning. We might find out that this guy is, I don't know, a UEE hater. But you don't get that information as a trait. You might have to do a lot of missions. You might have to play with him a bit, and then you start discovering things. The skills will always be visible. Those you will be able to train; you'll be able to go, okay, this is where he starts. This is how much it costs me to actually pay the dude. And this is where I can take him. He will have certain attributes that limit where he can go and what his potential is. But yes, you will have to train him and make sure he reaches a nice level. And once he reaches that level, you want to keep him alive, because you don't want them to die, because you've invested in them.

We haven't really talked about that, just because, I mean, I would prefer that the player is playing the game.

Not the computer. I know for sure Chris would definitely prefer that.

Yeah, so, I mean, it's fair enough to think about, if you're online and you're doing that, and let's say you have an Idris and you've got other ships associated with that, like Gladiuses or other ships that you want flying around in your fleet, and you have AI pilots associated with that. As long as you're there and flying it, then I think that's something that we would think about. But it would be something that would require more discussion, not only from a technical standpoint, but also from a design standpoint.

And also, besides that, you will actually be able to hire someone that already has a ship. So you will hire an NPC for a certain duration. Let's say I need someone for today because I'm doing some heavy missions. He comes with this ship, he has these skills, and you know exactly what support you're getting. You giving your ships away for AI to fly: we're worried about this thing where people have a lot of ships and one man controls an entire fleet. This is something that would break the balance of the game. We need to not overpower people that much. But then, yes, it's exactly what Todd said. You have an Idris, you have Gladiuses as part of that Idris' flight group. They're on your ship, and you might have NPCs that you tell, yeah, get to your ships, launch, because we're attacking someone in three seconds, and they will do that.

I absolutely understand all that. I've actually heard similar sentiments here in this office from designers and from Chris himself. It's not that we're ready to rule it out at this point, but ultimately, if your choice is between having players in the game or having NPCs in the game, we're always going to choose having players.

Well, and even with Chris, he said multiple times he wants roughly a nine-to-one ratio, so nine AI to one player. So right then and there, that kind of says we've got a lot of AI in the game. It's not just going to be only players.

Well, I guess it would depend on whether we're talking about ore and stuff like that. I mean, right now we're going to start with planet side and then from there take it to space. But obviously, moving around a rock in space, you're moving around in three dimensions, versus on a planet surface, you're dealing with either landing or hovering and moving around it. And then Dan can...

It'll definitely be different. We want the experience to be different. How different? We do not want to make it a completely separate type of mining. The ideas will stay the same. You'll just have various things that you can do a lot easier when you're in space or on the ground, and some things that are harder depending on where you are. And then there's the different types of mining, going under the surface and stuff like this versus on the surface. Each of them will have their unique flavor to it.

And I think I promised this to Marco. He doesn't want voxels.

Well, I guess with exploring, we've talked about short-range scanning, and we've had very high-level discussions about long-range scanning and what that means. I think I spoke a little bit about it on the Reverse the Verse that I was on two weeks ago: having different views, so whether it's thermal imaging or gamma or something along the EM spectrum. I think Tony would equate it to the old-school pictures where you would have to stand there for five minutes as the light goes in. It's kind of a similar idea, where you're picking out anomalies, and then from there you would go in and expand on that. But there's a lot of systems that we need to be thinking about, whether that just be background noise in the overall system, and then even thinking about how we're going to populate the system. And so when you're looking in that general direction, you're loading things in that might be interesting for the players to find.

Also, to add on top of that a bit, you mentioned that we're still developing one solar system. That should not be a problem, because even in this one solar system, we want places that have not been discovered. We want players to find their own things and find things that others have not found, and maybe be able to sell that information and the location of rich resources or, I don't know, a drug lab that will offer you various goodies. And all these things, maybe discover a weapons dealer in the middle of nowhere that's selling something that we haven't seen before. And that information alone will be power. So we want people who explore to be the first guys that discover these things, and what they do with it, whether they share it with their organization or they sell it to other people, is up to them. And ideally, once it gets discovered by enough people, then it becomes public knowledge and everyone can access it. But by that point, the money was made from that lucrative business.

And also, from my standpoint, just building the overall system and thinking about how huge this thing is right now. I mean, from tip to tip right now, I think we're talking about roughly 41 minutes in quantum. And if that took up your whole 1080 screen, then the tip of the mouse might be nine hours of just straight flight. And so when I was working with Pete on overall solar system layout, and when we're talking about resources or where possible aggressive paths would be, how do we make sure that it's interesting when you're flying to these different things? Not only just probability volumes, but also, I think people are kind of seeing it right now with interdiction. It happens a lot right now from my standpoint, but it's one of those things where I would like to have a threshold where, okay, you haven't done... We'll bring this up in front of you or around you, so you get a blip on your radar or something like that, instead of actually pulling you completely out of quantum, and you can go and investigate it or continue on your way.

It's something we have talked about. The way that CR has always thought about it, though, was that you need to have a final destination before you do this kind of blind quantum. So in the future, I think it really depends on what it is for: if it's a blind quantum jump to basically get away from somebody, like you're being interdicted and you just want to get away, or if you're just trying to go out and explore. But the idea would be that if you're going out and exploring, you're not going to just blink to some place that you haven't seen. You would try to investigate it and try to make sure that the path is clear before you actually go.

Also, with the blind quantum jump, we can play with it in different ways. We can reduce the speed that you would be traveling at. We can make it very risky, as in you might be hitting a huge rock if you blind jump, because the computer does not have the time to make the calculations for your jump. So you might be hitting anything on the way. So we'll look into this, exactly because it's something we need to figure out for the entire exploring thing. We'll see.

The extent of it, we'll have to see. But I know Chris likes this idea of the AI having needs. And they will have to go to the toilet, and they will have to have showers, and they will have to have decent food on a ship. And their happiness is important. You're the captain. You're not there just to fly a ship. That's the pilot's job. Your job is to keep everyone on the ship happy and in tip-top condition. So whether you hire someone that's a cook, which will probably provide better food for everyone else, or just bring them frozen food that they can dump in a microwave, that will matter. If they're not happy, they will do their job in a worse manner. They might, again, not take an order just because they don't like you anymore.

But even from the player standpoint, CR wants, in layman's terms, it would just be buffs and debuffs. So if you haven't eaten, then maybe your reflexes are slower or your morale is lower or you bleed out quicker, those types of things. So it's something where, when we talk about these, part of it is just prototyping and playing it and seeing: does it actually read in the game? And so a lot of this, even before it gets to the players, we're playing it and thinking about: does this read? Does this come across as I have low morale? And does this come across as I haven't eaten, or I'm bleeding out faster because of this reason?

And also, interactions with other NPCs will be a problem if you haven't taken a shower in quite a while. So if you stink, they'll go like, just go away, I don't even want to see you. So we will have conditions in the behavior: let's say, if your cleanliness or hygiene level is under a certain threshold, then you will not be able to talk to an NPC.

Are you being serious right now?

Yes.

Shower Citizen. We're not saying every five minutes.

No, no, no. But there will be conditions that you go through that will decrease your hygiene level. And after you go through various swamps and, I don't know, sweaty planets and wherever you go, when you enter, let's say, a nice clean station, you might find out that the vendor actually upped the prices by 10% for you, because you're not exactly belonging there.

Well, we've got to get it working and see if it comes across. I don't know if it's like Pigpen and you're seeing dust all the time in front of you or something like that.

Small particle flies flying around.

As long as you're seeing something from a player standpoint and it reads, then we'll put it in.

Well, yeah. I mean, this goes back to some of the stuff that we talked about regarding land claims and all of that. At least in the short term, no. It won't matter. But in the future, if somebody actually owns that property, then yeah, it would matter.

So initially, that will not be the case. As for now, we'll be finding various mineable rocks on the surface of planets. And it'll be not necessarily first come, first served, but whoever comes there can extract at the same time. It's going to be interesting with multiple players trying to pump a lot of power into the same rock and making sure they don't go overboard. So that automatically creates interesting gameplay, where you might have certain deposits that require more people to pump power into them in order to extract anything, because one ship might not reach the required power level. And then you need multiple people. But it might be that two people come along, they don't know each other, and they found the same rock. And they might just peacefully each extract their share out of it and then go on their way.

So from a ship standpoint, we have them there and we have them placed. Now, part of it with the smaller ships is basically LOD and draw issues. So that's one of the things that we're working through: basically, when you open a thing, then it pops out, and then you can actually go and replace that part or switch it out, or even have fuses or sub-items within those things that you can go and switch out. It's something that John Crewe prototyped a while ago and showed working on a Gladius as well as on a Connie. I want it as soon as possible, honestly, just because then there's the inherent gameplay of switching those things out, having it break, having it feel like the Millennium Falcon that you're flying around, and something breaks and somebody's got to go back and fix that while you're trying to hold off people. That's the type of feeling that we want to go for. It's just based off of other technical issues that we're working through, or we've got other higher priorities, like working on scanning and working through a lot of bugs that our vehicle feature team is focused on.

Well, I assume if you're just quantuming, then fair enough. You can get up and go play chess in the background kind of thing. But if something happens, then you're scrambling. As far as just pure autopilot, at least it's not something I've heard Chris ever talk about, besides having an AI actually do it. But I don't want to poo-poo it. Until I actually hear it from my boss's mouth, I'm not planning for it.

Even if we do this at some point, the capabilities of the autopilot will have to be greatly reduced compared to what a player will be able to do. So a player will be a lot more efficient, faster to get there. If we ever do this, even if it's an NPC doing it, unless it's a very well-trained NPC that's flying your ship, it will be slower than what the player can do.

Yeah, it's a tricky one. I think first you'll need to see them and be able to know who they are, because if I see a ship in the distance and I don't manage to scan it, I don't know who that person is, or which other persons might be on board. If I actually scan and find out, if I see the name, I think that's the point. When we see the name, we should be able to know who that person is, whether it's an NPC or a player. But in most cases, you might not see the name. If a dude is hiding behind a rock and you see something there, until you actually get to find out who, what he is, what ship he's flying, you won't be able to tell.

Well, and I think so much of that would go to the naming system. For example, I see some of the names on Spectrum, it would be like Exile Knights, and for us to do Exile Knights underscore 111, there's going to be some things from a name standpoint that just don't fit fiction, but we allow players to do it, just because that's the handle that they want to create.

One thing that will also help is the affiliation. If you see the organization, the faction that they're part of, you will know, because the NPC ones will be NPC only.

It sounds like there will be ways to figure it out, but it won't necessarily be something we explicitly spell out for people.

No, and I think players, for the most part, move a lot more erratically: running everywhere, jumping, doing all these kind of random things. So I'm assuming that will be the first thing that will...

We have it planned. In fact, we've had meetings regarding how we're going to build out the insides of these, just because we do have that planned. I looked at some of the JIRAs yesterday and looked at priorities for those things. But I'm not going to put it above scanning or other key features that we need for S42 to get that thing singing, just because from a player standpoint, you're not going to be switching out those subsystems.

Yeah, I think questions like that come from, I see a lot of people who envision a career for themselves, buying components and tuning them and then selling them pre-tuned to other players.

Yeah, but even then, at least right now, from what we've talked about with some of the item tuning and stuff, we're only talking about a five to 10% difference. But we've talked about weapons and how weapons can be upgraded, and I can see how we would do it from a cooler standpoint or avionics standpoint or power plant standpoint. I can see how we can take those numbers and tune them, and have similar systems for the weapons as well as for the sub-items. It would just be building that system. We have something planned for weapons, so I'll make a note and we'll look at it from a system standpoint as well.

You said only 5% to 10%. The min-maxers out there, Todd Papy, if they can get 0.9% out of something, you can bet they'll pay a premium to get 0.9%.

I can understand 0.9% of, let's say, a capital ship item. That might be a hell of a lot.

But even 0.9% on a smaller ship: you're talking 0.9% for this item, then 0.9% for this item, and they keep adding up and they become more and more powerful. So I can understand why the players really want to have this. It's a cool thing.

Mining.

And that is what he's specifically working on right now.

No, it's a cool thing, and it's going to be the backbone of the economy, because this is where resources come from. And a lot of things will get built on top of mining. We're talking mining, then refining, then using those components to build other things, to research, to do science. There's so much stuff that stems from this gathering of resources. And again, not just mining: mining, salvaging and all this. So all this gathering of resources is going to bring so much gameplay into the game. So it's going to be so cool.

But he's specifically working on mining. He's the product owner for it. And then we've got salvaging being worked on out of LA, Austin, as well as the UK. And so for me, I get to basically oversee those with Tony, and I'm excited about those.