10 For the Chairman Episode 28. July 7th, 2014

In terms of the alien civilizations in the 1.0 version of the game, you will interact with them, but we're not really gonna have the abillity for you to go deep into the civilizations. Those are sort of areas of expansions that we're thinking once the game is up and running we would concentrate on and eventually allow you to actually even play a different race, rather than just the human race. So at the beginning we probably wouldn't have those abilities but as the game progresses, and everyone's having a good time, and hopefully we're doing well, those will be the kinds of things that we will be adding down the road. Cos it would be pretty cool.You will definitely see Tevarin around the UEE universe. You'll see some Banu and you'll see some Xi'An, but they will be more in NPC capacity and for trading with. There is involvement with the Xi'An as well as the Vanduul in Squadron 42, so that's pretty cool, and the story I think is pretty fun and interesting. So I think you guys will like that.

Well there's a lot of stuff that we're working on. One of the biggest things that we're working on is moving from single precision, which is 32-bit float, to double precision, which is 64-bit float. So we can have much larger scale maps and deal with much larger scale objects. In a first-person shooter which most 3D engines are built for (CryEngine, Unreal, etc...) everything is in 32-bit float, which is fine if you're in a limited space, say 4x4km or whatever. But we're obviously out in space with ships that, even though they're not flying at the speed of light, they're still pretty fast and can cover hundreds of thousands of km easily. So 64-bit just allows us to have a much bigger address space. It's a fairly big change because the whole engine is in 32-bit so it touches pretty much most of the engine, and we also have to work well with the rendering pipeline because the GPUs tend to be on 32-bit. So that's in progress, though I wouldn't say that it's something we don't know how to do but we're working on it. So we haven't overcome it yet but we're not worried about overcoming it - it just is a lot of work.Multi-crew ships sort of falls in a little bit with that, where we have our whole local physics simulation that happens inside the ships - which we're in the process of. So yours truly is doing some work on that, and a few other people including some talented folks at Crytek that are helping us out on that. But we've added functionality to the physics system that allows to have local physical worlds inside ships and now we're in the process of integrating that into the game. So that's also in progress, and later this year we're hoping to show you all that kind of working, which will be fun.And then I guess the other biggest technical challenge we have on the project is the overall sort of server structure. So right now we're playing multiplayer on Arena Commander but that's the local server that handles the frame-by-frame update between the ships in the area. But then there's a couple of other levels of server that we have above that. One is the system server which handles the matchmaking and co-ordination, and sort of runs what is happening in side the system in terms of which players will see each other when they go across a certain area. And the there's a universe server which keeps track of your status, your equipment, and where you are in the overall universe. So they're all in progress and we've made a lot of progress on the actual backbone, the technology, the communcation protocols... all of that. So we have "skeletons" of a bunch of that and some stuff is more fleshed out than other stuff.I would say those are the three big technical challenges that we're working on, and if there's any network programmers out there, we're hiring cos you can never have enough network and back-end guys. So give us a shout if you're out there!

The Persistent Universe is going have a combination of a whole bunch of stuff. So one is the procedurally generated stuff that comes out of the economy... A factory needs goods, and you take to mission to bring the goods from the planet to the factory... Or the factory could be asking for someone to protect the shipment of goods... Or the local law enforcement authority could be putting out an "ambert alert" or a bounty on a certain criminal, and you could take that mission. So there's a lot of missions that will be generated by the economy and created in reaction to what the NPCs are doing and what the players are doing in the universe.Then also in addition to that we'll have some more sort of scripted linear missions sprinkled in there for flavor and character, and those ones will tend to be maybe multi-mission ones where there's two or three parts to the mission and... maybe you have to track someone down, and you go to a place and get some information on where he is, which will take you somewhere else, and eventually you'll track down your target. Or smuggle some information from point A to point B.So we're gonna combine some scripted missions with procedural generation missions. And then also we allow our players themselves to create jobs or missions for other players. So I think between all that it should be pretty vibrant and interesting missions, and then it's kinda up to you what you want to take. So you don't have to do this thing first and then that thing afterwards. You could have maybe two, three or four missions on the go. Of course if you take a bunch of missions and you don't complete them that would knock your rating with the people you took the missions with, so they wouldn't necessarily want to hire you down the road. So you have to juggle all those things, but I think there's going to be some pretty... errr... a lot of options, let me put it that way.

On our side we've been sort of playing around with the idea of the star systems, and building them in a bigger simulation that we wouldn't necessarily render in real-time, but use that to build the background "space sphere" you may want to say, for when you're inside a system it shows stuff off in the distance. And if that's the case, that will probably show the relative positions of stars and constellations, as you would from that system around our setup. And then also when you're looking down on planets we actually do model the planet, so we will model... like, if there's a city or light pollution, we would probably put that into the planet.Not so sure about like being on Earth, looking up and seeing the Big Dipper and all that sort of stuff. CryEngine itself actually has that model for Earth itself for the first person stuff. The issue for us would be modelling what the stars would look like from various planets because we can visit hundreds. So we haven't necessarily made a decision on what that would look like. We probably will be using sky and light boxes on different locations and then they can probably be done in such a way that they would generally represent what would be in that area, so if you're like near a nebula and you're looking up from a planet you should maybe potentially see the constellations you would see from that planet. But that's sort of all in progress so we're still trying to figure out exactly how we can do that the best way we possibly can, to put you in the universe.

So for me, I mean obviously there are different roles you can plan in the game, but I'm kind of a big proponent of how good you are at what you do is more informed by you as a player, and then also by the equipment you've collected and how you learn how to use it. So we're sort of a hybrid of what would happen between a traditional fantasy RPG where, you know in those you progress when you get better equipment, but you also increase your stats. For us we don't really have player stats, but we do have equipment that you can find better tuned, learn how to use better, and then as a player hopefully you can do things quicker or better than you could when you first started. So it's sort of a combination, it's sort of more driven by the equipment that you've got, the equipment that you've found, the equipment you've fixed up.NPCs will have their own internal rating system because you have to have some level of learning and progression from them. But for players it's based on your skill and based on the equipment you've collected.

It's a great goal but it's not going to be in the initial version of the game. So, uhh, long-term we're actually doing some procedural research and investing some money in a small group of people to look at doing all that kind of stuff. But we've got our work cut out for us in just building out the systems that we have, building out locations you can land on, building out the characters, the story... cos we're essentially building this universe and sketching it out in a pretty detailed level, and it does have some procedural elements, where building out certain locations are partly procedural and partly designed, but it's still a huge, huge, huge amount of work. So being able to fly down on any one of the planets and fly over them, and do all the rest of the stuff, will be super cool, but right now we're not ready to be able to do that. It's again one of those goals - once the game is out there on version 1, then those will be all the things we'll be looking about how we can actually create a planet... you know in these cases to be able to do it at this level you have to be able to create a planet mostly procedurally.Transition from atmospheres and planets, that's actually the least of the difficulties, and there's a bunch of pretty easy... you know, go down, go through the atmosphere and then "boof" and then you're down on the planet. But creating a planet big enough that you can fly over that has lots of interest, feels like, operates holistically, you know the different cities communicate with each other, they have their own businesses... doing all that is a huge amount of work, mainly cos of the level of detail we're simulating the world at.So that will not be a v1.0 goal, but it will definitely be a longer-term thing we'll try to work towards, because I do agree it would be very, very cool!

We'll definitely have some of these things that you'll be able to see. I'm not so sure about simulating it all the way, but we're playing around with the ideas of certain areas in space that have an environment that affects your communications, how you fly... and obviously being close to a black hole would be one of those environments... or into a deep gas cloud inside the rings of a planet... all those kinds of things. So we are looking to see what kind of interesting astrological aspects or physical effects that would come from various different elements in space, could affect the game play, could affect your ship, all the rest of the stuff. But its sort of too early to say, "well, you know black holes will definitely do this thing" or "a neutron star will do this thing". But that's all the sort of stuff that we debate and we're trying to thing about how to fold in to the gameplay experience.

A couple of answers to this question. First off, the shields, to maintain their shield level need a certain amount of energy. So if a ship is unbalance, i.e. you have too many items pulling too energy, like your thrusters, your shields, general standard operation stuff, then your shields will not be able to hold their top level. Right now we have a problem on our ships in Arena Commander because we haven't really done a very good job of balancing the items on the first three ships you have. So there's some out of skew like the 300i with way too much power coming from its power plant, there's some issues with the Hornet because there's not enough power... so there's gonna be a balancing pass that goes into the 12.5 patch, and then longer-term more balancing that goes into 13. But the way the shields are meant to work is that they need to maintain their level, but there will be some level of capacitor in the shields so it doesn't mean as soon as there's a spike in energy use it doesn't mean the shields necessarily go down. It's just that if you're overall energy output is lower than what you need to maintain the shields then over time the shields will drop down to whatever the equilibrium level is, based on the energy output. So this is actually one of the aspects that we're still tweaking and turning, but long term what will actually make for really interesting game play is how you set up your ship. So you know you have to balance your energy, like "I know what my power plant is and what weapons I've got," so you make sure that your entire set up isn't going to be compromising your ship. The example would be, "okay, well I've got too many things pulling too much power so I can't maintain my shields." Well at that point you may not need the shield generator that can have, you know, 200-level shields vs 100-level shields.So I guess the answer is, yes, it's kind of intended. There is going to be some level of capacitor on the shields so it doesn't instantly drop down or up, it will just over time drop down to equilibrium, so when you have a power spike it won't be fluctuating your shields as much. But if you aren't supplying enough energy over time to keep the shield up at its level then it will not be able to hold that level.One of the longer-term things is energy balancing on your ship. We're working on the HUD interface. It won't be in 12.5 but probably in 13 there's gonna be a much cleaner way of accessing an interface and all that stuff, so you control it and move between different profiles. But you know I kinda like in longer term combat, especially when we're gonna roll out some of the later stuff where you actually have to work as teams together, you're going to see a lot more smart use of weapons - when they're off, when they're on, when we're using them, you know, putting all our power into our shields, or putting our power into the thrusters... and that's kind of the idea of the combat system design of the ships. It's still very early days, that's why we're still balancing and we've still got some things that are broken in the system that don't let you get to appreciate that as much, but once everybody can play multiplayer, and also multiplayer in something that isn't like a free-for-all death match, because that really doesn't give you an opportunity to show off combat, because basically what happens is everyone spawns and someone is shooting at someone else and they're not looking at you and you shoot them in the back - it's madness basically. When you're playing team vs. team it's a lot different and some of the other game modes we're gonna have will be different, and then allowing people to alter and change their settings... "ok, this is my one power configuration in this battle mode, and I'll have this other power profile when I'm doing this," or "I'm running away from someone so I'm going to put all my power to my back shields." So we're going to allow you to have all that. There's already the infrastructure there in the systems. The interface is broken in some ways to let you do that, but that's what we're working on, and when we get all that balanced and you're doing all that, I actually think there's going to be a lot of interest and depth to combat. Especially when you don't have people spawn on top of each other, so you know, there'll definitely be cases where you can go sort of silent or dark and maybe surprise someone or hide against someone, or sneak up on someone. So there's a lot of possibilities.I know that answered a lot more than the question about the shields, but it sort of gives the idea of why all of these things are interconnected.