Persistent Universe Panel 1 - The Path You Choose

The answer to that is yes. So the last few months we've really been focusing on characters and character customization. We've listened to you guys and you guys wanted more flexibility with the characters and so did CR. So we kind of set down this path of how do we achieve what you guys want to see. We've been working pretty close with the UK studio, as you know, Squadron 42 guys. They have been setting up a pipeline for how character customization is going to work. As a matter of fact, we just had not too long ago a character summit in the UK to talk about that, which went really, really well. A lot of the things that we're going to do are things like layering now, so you can have various shirts with jackets, with pants tucked in, untucked in boots, untuck your boots, things like that. So a lot more flexibility than we had originally planned, which is good. I mean, it forced us to think through the process and figure out the best way to do this. We've also done things like switched out our base male for a complete body scan. Now what this does is obviously the resolution and the fidelity goes way up when you do that. We have an actual physical scan that we can adjust and build around. So we get a lot more real world body metrics that way, which is great. Also, Chris had been looking at obviously Ryse for a little while and he wanted something a little higher as far as the fidelity of the face rig and to be able to have emotion in the face. And so we were looking around for a little bit and we started talking to 3Lateral, which is, they're actually one of the companies that was responsible for Ryse. They were really interested in the project and wanted to come on and help us. And it's fantastic because they already had a lot of technology that they had learned from Ryse because they were using the same CryEngine base as we were. So started working with 3Lateral and got some fantastic fidelity out of their head rigs. Just the fidelity in the face and the way that the face is structured now and works is incredible. And soon you guys will be seeing a lot more of that. Per the stretch goal, we got a fantastic face scanning and body scanning rig which has been set up at the UK studio. Right now it's got between 80 and 90 cameras, I believe, but I think we're going to expand that actually for fidelity reasons. I think Chris, you just got your head scanned not too long ago. Although he won't give it to me.

No, actually I was trying to find, unfortunately they've all gone home or are drinking at the pub right now in the UK. But no, it's pretty impressive. Down the road, we'll sort of show you, but the concept is that all the character heads are, we're going to scan the actors that we use in Squadron 42. We're going to scan a selection of character heads for the persistent universe, both male and female, and then we're going to allow you to blend between these so you can change the size of your nose, the jaw, or ears, and color of eyes, and color of hair, and all that kind of stuff. And it's at an extremely high fidelity. And so we don't really have the stuff to show you the final stuff. I think there's sort of a range of motion test that maybe was sneaked on Around the Verse. But that's still down the road because there's a whole level of rigging that's about two weeks off in terms of the fidelity where we're simulating the muscle, the secondary muscles that you would have on the arms and stuff. So there's a base rig and a skeleton now which is kind of what you're seeing. The more subtle stuff is the way the muscles would move and flow and that will probably be completed in the next two weeks. We're also working with Imaginarium in the UK, and Imaginarium is the company Andy Serkis started to do performance capture, and they do a lot of R&D into how to capture the performance on the face side. So we're partnering with them and investing in R&D with them and 3Lateral, who Mark already talked about. There's another company called Cubic Motion that's involved in that pipeline and workflow. But the ultimate idea would be to have an incredibly emotive and fluid facial animation and also body animation. So you guys haven't seen the results of it yet. The stiff character walking around the hangar is definitely not anywhere close to the final result. But probably I would say when we're showing the social module and the FPS stuff, we'll have some of the first iterations of it. Although the stuff that we're doing is going to take beyond just what we're going to be showing you guys in March, in April. But it's all pretty exciting. I wish we had some images to show you of this today, but we don't. We just like to talk and tease you about it.

As we were getting ready for this show, we were looking at various things that we wanted to show or not wanted to show. And for the most part, we decided to show a lot. However, we just hooked up this new mocap to the new rig. And like Chris was saying, we're going to do the musculature. And without the musculature, it looks like this kind of hideous rubber man. And nobody wants to see that.

Well, I think they've seen a little bit because it was on Around the Verse. But basically, the pipeline for the next generation character literally is in the process of being finalized. And once the pipeline's finished, there's a lot of things that are happening that will also come together. And then you'll start to see the results of it in the next few months, where we'll actually be able to show you, OK, here's the layering of the cloth. Here's a jacket. Here's a pair of pants. Here's a T-shirt. And how it layers, how it would all move.

All the pipeline has been worked out for that. It's just a matter of implementing it all. Going through some of these other questions: can I layer my clothes? Yes. Can I select my face, my hair, my color? Interesting thing about hair, we've been looking into alternatives for the way that we do hair. Now, traditionally, you've seen in the past what we call fins, which are pieces of geometry that make up a head of hair. That's really old school at the moment. We want to go beyond that and do something better. We've been looking into a couple of ideas. There's this process called TressFX that we've been kind of looking into, which is more of a spline-based hair. You get a lot more resolution out of it. It's still kind of in its infancy. We're looking into it, but I'm sure it'll get better as we go. But just things like that. Upping the resolution, upping the fidelity, we're always pushing for that. I know Chris is always pushing for that because he wants the absolute most emotive and realistic looking human that we can possibly do. So we've been putting time and effort into all aspects of the character customization to allow for that. Some other things: yes, the color of your face, you'll be able to adjust. Can I wear jewelry? Absolutely. I think we're going to absolutely do that. Thin and fat. So here's an interesting question. We've been going through this. You will be able to adjust your character thin and fat. Now, there'll be a maximum and minimum, obviously, because we've been talking about some of the...

Yeah, I mean, we don't want [inaudible]. You also can't be too small. So that's why, it's kind of like today, if you're in the Air Force, there's a range that you're meant to be between to fit into the cockpit. Otherwise, we're going to have to have way too much variation in all the ships.

But there will be a thin and a heavy and adjustable between them. We're definitely setting it up where that's going to be possible. So, yes, I think all of these are absolutely on the horizon, and we are building the base pipeline to allow for all of these things to happen.

The game begins at the hangar. Basically, we're probably about two versions away on the Persistent Universe release schedule from allowing you to actually select your starting planet. Where you'll actually spawn is obviously within your own hangar. Your hangar, as you already know, serves as a kind of inventory repository. Right now, that's predominantly in the form of your ships. It's in the form of your flair objects. One thing that we'll be adding to your hangar in the very near term with the social module will be what we're calling a sim pod. I think we've actually got an image of that. Yeah, so basically this is going to become your new gateway into Arena Commander and the upcoming first person shooter module that you should see in the roughly March timeframe. We're eventually going to add a lot more customizability to the hangar that's going to include everything from a room system to where you'll be able to add targeting rooms, overclocking rooms, entertainment rooms, a variety of things. One of the things that Chris is very big on is allowing players to basically obtain trophies, pictures from the different areas that you see within the game. There's obviously a tremendous amount of effort going into building out some of the visuals and the locales that you're going to be exposed to within the game. And so one of the very appealing things is just the ability to take snapshots, obtain a trophy from the top of Terra Prime that says, I was here, and you can actually store that on a little display table within your hangar. We're going to add elevators into all of the hangars and the elevators are going to become your transition point to the primary city. So what you'll wind up seeing in the upcoming social module will be an elevator that's been added to your hangar and you can take that and basically select the main landing zone level, and all of a sudden when the door opens, you'll have transitioned over into the full-blown ArcCorp city. You'll be able to wander around, but we'll get into that in a little bit more detail later in this discussion. One thing that we just announced earlier today is the addition of some different skins for your buggy.

Before you get on to that, I just want to mention something about the sim pod itself. So you guys notice the date there on that image. That's a concept that just came in this week. And we are modeling this right now. This will be in pretty soon. One of the reasons why we're adding this sim pod is we want to get away from some of that very gamey user interface of hitting the escape key to have to get into Arena Commander. So we want to actually have something you walk up to and have to interact with to make it feel more alive, really, is what it is.

It feels more like a futuristic arcade game that you're stepping into and experiencing some sort of virtual reality as opposed to what we were basically building into the ship before.

Actually, before we jump on to the buggies, there's one other large feature. It's still a ways off, but obviously a lot of you know we had to put in kind of a stopgap measure because the number of ships that you can fit into your hangar is limited to five right now. And we had played with a few different things where we're going to expand your hangar horizontally, where we're going to expand it to different floors vertically, and then that winds up becoming very impractical. You want to go get a particular ship, you've got to take your own... So one of the things we'll wind up adding in the relatively near term will be the concept of an automated loading hangar, such that you may still only be able to have five ships visible at any one time. But as long as you've got one of these auto-loading hangars, you can go to a little display panel and select which ship you want on which pad and bring it up right then just via a whole mechanical process. Skelton could probably add a little bit of detail in regards to that.

Yeah, if you guys have seen, we were using kind of the Japanese parking structure. Basically it's kind of a big Ferris wheel under the surface and what it does is it basically goes down and dials in which ship you want and then comes back up and then you have your ship on the pad. Obviously, if you want to get to a ship quick, that's going to be a really fast and easy way to do it. That way you don't have to have a million ships that you're taking your buggy to back and forth to see. So the primary ships that you want to show your friends and stuff, you can have five pads worth of them. So we've been talking about this for a while, and I think it makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, the Idris stuff, we've been talking about, where do you park the Idris in your hangar or anything bigger than that. Initially, I think we've been talking about maybe parking it in orbit and then taking jump ships down, but that hasn't completely been worked out yet, but that was kind of the premise.

Yeah, there's obviously going to be a limit just in terms of, at some point we're going to have to have a cutoff between what's practical. I mean, some of these ships, just given the mass, it makes no sense given the overall level of realistic fidelity within the game to actually allow them to be sitting planetside. And so, what is the largest ship we fit in there right now?

I think the Retaliator fits in there. The Caterpillar I thought was the largest. We've talked about having a big landing pad for some bigger ships that isn't in your hangar, that just happens to be a landing pad out there. [...] ship will stay in orbit and you'll have a shuttle craft sitting in your hangar and that's how you'll go back up to your big ship. We'll just have to see because the Idris is twice the size of what it used to be. It's a big ship. That may stay in orbit. It may not stay in orbit. But basically, that was the idea. The idea would be that the bigger ships, like the Starfarer and stuff, would be out on a jumbo-size landing pad in whatever the spaceport is on the planet you're on. But most of your ships would be in the hangar, and then the really big ones would be in orbit.

Yeah, this is actually an interesting one. It was one of the first things when I came on to the project. The original plan, as I understood it, was that the landing zones were originally going to be combat free and then there would be segues. You could take a subway to a more dangerous area. And I wound up talking it over with Chris and he liked the idea of basically trying to expand the concept to give a lot more freedom and flexibility to the players by allowing them to actually carry their guns into any of the landing zones, with all of the design baggage that that's going to involve in regards to fixing a whole slew of problems that come up. But the basic effect that we wanted to get, the ultimate objective, was that we're putting a lot of time and effort, obviously, into building out all of these cities. And the first time that you go to one of them, it's just going to look absolutely spectacular. You're going to be blown away the first time you see ArcCorp in person or Terra Prime or a variety of other areas. But the problem is you start thinking forward and thinking, well, the third time, the fifth time, the tenth time that you actually visit that, no matter what we do with the NPC AI to basically look like a living, breathing world, when nothing out of the ordinary can ever happen, at some point it starts to feel boring. You lose that sense of tension, of anxiety that you get when the unexpected is possible, when, even if it's unlikely, combat can occur. And so we wound up making the design decision to go ahead and allow guns. And what this is going to wind up doing is when you go to a planet in the daytime, there will wind up being a variety of security mechanisms in place to prevent this from ever getting out of control. But that will be scaled according to how much security we want in a given area. In some places, a major hub, a Terra Prime, something like that, there will be so many security guards, there will be security cameras, there will be automated turrets, and they're so advanced that as soon as you try to pull a weapon out in a given area, you'll immediately be stunned, you'll wake up in the hospital, you'll be fined $500 and they'll tell you, quit being so bad. But what we like about this, though, is, one of the original design thoughts was, well, maybe we would just deactivate all of your weapons when you actually landed on the planet. And the problem with that is we would no longer only be able to prohibit combat within the area that we really wanted to make secure, but that would prevent combat from occurring down the dark alleys where it would actually be nice. And so in this case, when you wander on to ArcCorp, we'll wind up having mechanisms to discourage that type of player against [player] stuff from getting too out of control, but at the same point, if you arrive on a planet at night, you look around, there are very few security guards, the normal shops that you want to go visit are closed, and you're looking to restock your ship. And so you know that there's an arms dealer, and he's at the back end of a dark alley, and you walk down there, and you actually hear a door creak open behind you, you will turn around and you will look, because the last time you did that and you didn't, somebody actually stunned you, took all your money, and you've remembered that ever since. And so in this case, having the potential for combat is going to keep you on your toes. It's going to make you always be paying more attention than you would if we just blanket restricted it in its entirety.

But it's also going to be specific to, like, Terra, you're not likely to get mugged when you're in the nice areas. If you go down the blocks, down an alleyway, then perhaps someone will try and mug you. Or if you're on Nyx, where it's basically a pirate base or city or whatever you want to call it, then yeah, there will be much more rough and tumble. I think, just like anywhere, you could probably walk around certain areas of cities without a weapon on you and you'll be okay. You just know if you're going to go to the more sketchy part that you better be ready to defend yourself.

Yeah, absolutely. It'll vary from planet to planet. It'll vary from hour to hour. Like in the middle of the day, the streets of New York are very safe. The streets of New York become a bit less safe at night. The back alleys in New York are probably dangerous, definitely dangerous in the middle of the night. And so what you've got is a whole lot of shades of gray as opposed to just a Boolean, yes, you can engage in combat here or no, you can't. One other thing in regards to preventing griefers, because obviously this is the type of thing where it sounds very good in practice and all of a sudden you get one or two guys that want to screw with the other players and it snowballs out of control and a whole lot of players' gameplay experiences are ruined because of a few bad apples. And so we've got this concept where every time you land at a landing zone, whether you go through the public landing zone or your own personal hangar, just like in the real world, you have to pass through customs. And at customs, there's the concept of whether or not you're actually authorized to carry a weapon into that area. This is also where they would turn you away if you've been banished from that planet. And so if I were to wander over on a planet that actually had a concept of law and order, this might not apply at all to Nyx, where if you go in, you just need to mind your own security. All bets are off. But if you're in a place that's actually got some level of security, like I said earlier, if it's Terra Prime, as soon as you go to pull your gun, there's going to wind up being an automated turret. It's highly accurate. It's going to stun you. That's it. There's no chance. But in a variety of other places, ArcCorp will probably have a little bit lower-end turrets. They're not quite as accurate. They don't actually fire until you fire on someone else, and then only if they don't actually have their weapon pulled or they haven't actually fired at you. And so if you wind up shooting unarmed people in a secure area and you wind up getting caught, then on these planets that have this concept of customs, what you'll wind up having is your license to carry would wind up being revoked, such that the next time you actually come to that planet, and this would probably persist for some number of real-time hours, you wouldn't be able to carry a weapon. And so there's a real penalty applied in terms of, I was able to inflict some pain or damage or whatever to another player, but I'm no longer able to do that. We've instantly flipped a switch and you can't do that for another 24 or 48 hours. And this actually puts you at a real disadvantage because for the same reasons, like now imagine having to walk the streets of New York late at night...

The other thing is that, since we can't have all the players all in the same room at the same time, we instance stuff. So we matchmake the instancing. So one of the things we will definitely do in the algorithm is we will try to separate griefers into griefing balls, if that makes sense. So you can grief each other if you like to grief each other, but not necessarily others. And it's actually quite easy to do. I mean, the system that we have, it works the same way in space, but also done on the planets, is you basically go in and out of containers, which is the instance. And so we're always putting you in and out when you go to a new area in space, or the same would probably happen in a big location planetside where you would go into the concourse, and the concourse would be its own area where there'll be multiplayer, and you'd be leaving. So we can decide who you see. Are you seeing your friends, seeing your enemies, people of similar skill levels? And so that's another tool we can use to essentially make everyone's game experiences [better]. But I mean, I think the real thing to point out is that we definitely have PvP in the game and players working together in co-op, but as we've said, there's 90% AI to 10% player population. So if we have a million people playing the game, there's going to be 9 million AIs running around simulating in the economy. Because of that, you can also extrapolate that there'll be huge amounts of encounters that will be AI based. So you'll be fighting AI pirates, or if you're a pirate, attacking AI traders or whatever. So there'll be a fair amount of co-op versus AI, which is what I think, if you take a look at what everyone's doing right now in the game in Arena Commander, a fair amount of everyone is playing Vanduul Swarm and the single player or the co-op modes. And then there'll also be the player-to-player options in the game. So even though we will try our best so players can't grief other players, there will definitely be threats and stuff that will be legitimate for you to fight. So a mugger tries to mug you on Terra and you pull your gun in self-defense and take him out, that's fine. You're not going to get in trouble for that. So we're going to have lots of opportunities for you to have fun action and tension in places besides just the player-to-player. And we do allow the player-to-player stuff. And sometimes people think about, oh, well, you're going to have a gun planetside, well, aren't I going to get griefed and so on? And that's really not the purpose. The purpose of being able to have the weapons down planetside or doing the EVA into a derelict ship is really for those environmental encounters, which, I mean, there's been some really cool fan videos that have been made about that kind of stuff. It gives you a sense of what it's going to feel like. And so we're pretty committed to making the world feel alive and reactive in terms of things that you can do and the places you can do it, so you don't just go down onto a planet and it's basically a glorified 3D shopping interface. So I think that's the only thing I was going to add to that.

Yeah, no, and that was the original design rationale. We didn't want to ever have the landing zones turn into something that you've seen 100 times before and nothing changes other than the cosmetic effects of the AI. So you'd see the activities change and you'd see more businessmen because the economy is booming and you'd see more criminals when the economy is doing less well. But if none of that can ever directly affect you, except insofar as commodity prices and the missions and stuff that are available, you're going to lose that entire effect of ever being on edge, of ever being anxious because you kind of screwed around a day ago, you shot another player, and now for the next 24 hours, whenever you land on that planet, you're no longer allowed to carry a gun. And if you pushed it farther, if you actually skirted the rules and a friend of yours actually got into that planet and he gave you a gun and you tried to continue the griefing, well, now we basically register the fact that you had already had your license to carry revoked. Now you've been caught griefing, killing a player in a law and order type of area again. And so now we basically flip a switch, and you're literally banished from that planet for the next 24 hours. And so whereas you could still grief, you would not be able to grief for very long.

So there's a lot. I think we've actually got a few images to show for some of these. But one of the first shops that you guys will probably wind up getting familiar with is the clothing shop. And this will be pretty common throughout most of the popular landing zones within the environment. We don't actually have any shop art for that. So we were just going to show some concept art for some of the clothing.

So here's some of the initial concepts where we are thinking through some of the layering system. You see some people have base shirts with jackets on top and various things. Obviously with the NPCs and stuff, they need to be environment specific, so these specific ones I think were for Terra, I believe, initially. But obviously we're going to mix and match. You guys are going to be able to wear pretty much what you want. Yeah, the cargo pants. See, those are up there in the left corner. That's my style, the maintenance guy. But basically, thinking through the characters, we have expanded our flexibility as far as what you guys want, as far as depth of use, and obviously everything that you see should be character customizable too. So you see a fashion on the street, you like it, you can go to the store and buy it if you like. I hope so. It should be. But that is a Chris Roberts call.

This is actually some game walkthrough of some various environments that we've got going on here. The Astro Armada, which is a ship seller.

So yeah, Astro Armada is kind of an upscale, kind of a Ferrari dealership. I mean, we're still kind of working on this. You guys are seeing WIP for sure.

Yeah, it's got a bunch more stuff to be done, right? Lighting, atmospherics. This is just [inaudible] update progress on these locations. These are basically all the locations that are going to be in the planetside module that we'll be showing at the...

We're aiming to actually have all of the initial half-dozen shops. I say eventually, we're aiming to probably have 9, 10, 11 variations of shops, different things and stuff, by the end of this year. But obviously, over time, that list is just going to expand. And so a lot of what you'll see here in terms of shops are at the 50, 60% completion stage. Dumper's Depot is obviously where you buy and sell a lot of secondhand scrap materials and stuff like that, used parts, et cetera. You can get things that are not necessarily in pristine condition or the latest and greatest, but you can get a little bit better prices than you could get at one of the full-blown retail stores.

But you risk getting lockjaw by stepping on a rusty nail.

Yeah. And so Cubby Blast, this is the personal weapons store. This is actually one that we're doing a lot of work on the user interface right now. And that's another thing that we're hoping to deliver with the social module in late March, give or take, which is the full ability to navigate through the inventory selections for the stores. You won't yet likely be able to purchase anything, but you'll be able to get a very good sense of how the interface for browsing and inspecting and finding out basic informational statistics on the weapons works.

Yeah, well, the way the purchasing is going to work in most of the stores is you're going to go in with your mobiGlas and you'll look at all the physical stuff and it will have prices and you'll say, I want to buy it. You could say, I want to buy one or two or three or whatever you want to do. You do the transaction over your mobiGlas and then in most cases, the item will appear back in your hangar or in your ship or something. So you don't have to wheel a cart of weapons out of Cubby Blast. It's like they deliver them to you after you've bought it.

And that's actually true for a lot of things. I mean, if you're already wearing as many layers of clothing as you can and you buy additional clothing and you don't want to swap out what you currently have, then the clothing would be delivered to your hangar. The same thing for personal weapons. You want to buy several different rifles. You want to buy a large chunk of ammunition, parts for your ship. In general, kind of like what I mentioned earlier, your hangar is going to become more and more this large repository for all of your stuff.

So on the art side of a lot of these stores, what I'm trying to attack is to give a lot of these stores, obviously, personality when you walk in. We've got a wide variety of stores, everything from corporate chains to kind of mom and pop, scary gun store owner, redneck guy.

I think Cubby Blast is not a chain, right? Yeah, Cubby Blast is not a chain. So there are the chains that you'll see on a lot of planets and then there'll be unique stores that'll be on the planet. So Cubby Blast is one, I think there's some other ones like clothes stores and stuff like that. But the idea with what's happening on ArcCorp is it's going to be the first planetside prototype that shows you the variety of stores that you can likely expect, and interactions like the bar or getting healed up in the hospital. And then from there, it's more our production. But that gets the functionality for everything that we want to do planetside stubbed in, and then we build it from there, is the approach.

The reason why we put the hospital right after Cubby Blast is specifically because the hospital is basically where you're going to respawn, assuming you die out in space. It's going to find the nearest...

So the last environment bit is the Trade Development Division.

Yeah, this is basically the shop where you'll wind up being able to pick up a lot of missions, you'll be able to find out a lot of information in regards to commodity prices. Basically, this actually doesn't do justice. Come the release of the social module, this is actually one of the more attractive shops I think you're going to see, not just because of what's internal to it, but because you can actually see ships landing, cargo being unloaded outside. You can see all of the outside traffic through this...

Basically, right, this is the combination of the commodity exchange and the mission clearinghouse. You would go in here to get a job. Okay, here's a job to haul cargo from ArcCorp to wherever or something. You could also go there to sell and buy goods for you to trade around. So that's the commodity broker of Star Citizen. And it's also going to look different depending on where you are. That's the big flashy corporate version. And again, like Tony says, this is all very early work in progress. There's a lot of detail. It's still not there. The lighting, a whole bunch of other stuff. The process is all the base rooms and all the rest are getting stubbed in, and then hopefully in two months' time, you'll see something a lot more impressive.

Yeah, actually that's very high on the list and it's part of the reason why I like that concept of this level of gray as opposed to a Boolean. Again, you always have to simplify for a relatively brief discussion like this, but I love the concept of having cameras within a bar and you have a bartender, and basically every time he winds up doing a transaction with a customer, $10 is deposited into his cash register. If you're a clever enough player to distract the bartender and ensure that his security camera, which basically rotates, is not actually focused on the cash register at the time you try to operate it, you can wind up making money.

That may be a bad example since we're in a future world where everything's electronic and cashless. Even in today's world, most bars want to use credit cards because it's hard to steal from them. I guess all I'm saying is it's not going to be a cash-based business in the future.

It's another kind of mini-game.

I would think that you would have the opportunity to steal some stuff. I was just saying, I don't think stealing from the register is necessarily one thing we'll implement. We don't have physical money in the game.

Guns, muggings, you name it.

Well, one thing to keep in mind when we're having any kind of discussion about jobs is, I'll use terms like a mercenary or pioneer and things like that, but there's no real formal concept of an occupation within the game. What you do is largely dependent upon what you want to do, what your skill set is, and what your ship and other equipment allows you to do. And the reason why I mention that is because there's a lot of areas of gray, again, between some of these different occupations where, in certain cases, what I would call the rescue occupations start to sound awfully similar to a mercenary. Where I kind of personally draw the line is mercenary missions, to me, I usually categorize as those that are paid gun for hire; they involve combat. This could involve anything from you being tasked with destroying a particular ship, securing an area of space, assaulting a particular space station. And one interesting thing about that is when you accept a mission, it's not necessarily of the type that you accept a mission and then that mission is gone and no one else can join in. Some missions, those geared towards multiple players, whether you actively join a group or not, you may wind up finding that you have the exact same objective as other players within the game. In other words, I basically outfitted my ship with a lot of weaponry. I've got some incredible armor and shielding, and I'm looking to basically make some money by doing some combat missions. I see that there's a pirate base in the far reaches of a particular system. I accept the mission to go try to quell the pirate menace in that sector. And so do 12 or 14 other players. And you're paid according to what your contribution to... Another thing just on the mercenary side that they tend to be involved with a lot is what I would call more defensive missions. Basically protecting things, protecting a space station, a particular area of space. This could involve escort missions to protect freighters that are traversing through dangerous pathways. They also tend to do a lot of retrieval missions. This could be anything from rescuing a kidnapped politician to retrieving an ancient artifact that's been stolen. Maybe it's on a ship. Maybe it's on a particular station, et cetera, et cetera. Another occupation that is one of my favorites, I categorize it as rescue. And this is kind of what a lot of people would consider a medic, except it differs from a pure medic in that you're not necessarily always trying to heal people. It's more you're looking to help, you're looking to assist, but not necessarily in a combat-oriented way. So this could involve anything from trying to evacuate scientists that are on a space station that's close to a star, and that star has now got a lot of totally unpredictable solar flare activity that's knocked out their shielding. Parts of the space station have collapsed and so you need to dock manually. You need to infiltrate the base. You need to basically free these guys from rooms in which they're trapped, at which point they'll jump onto your ship and then you can transport them back to safety. At the same time, these rescue missions might involve patrolling an area that's heavy in battle and quickly trying to tractor beam pilots that have ejected from their ships. And again, as Chris mentioned earlier, these pilots that are in the midst of these big battles could be NPCs, could be players, could be a mixture of both. And you're basically trying to pull them into your cargo hold, get them back to safety, and you're paid according to how many of these guys you actually retrieve.

I think the important thing to point out is that it's not like in a lot of, say, MMOs where you pick a role and that's what you're going to be. You're going to be a wizard or you're going to be a warrior or something. Essentially we're going to have lots of different jobs and missions and stuff you can do and it's kind of up to the player what he wants to do and also how he's equipped his ship and how he's equipped himself. So you could one day be taking mercenary missions on, the next day taking a rescue mission on, the next day deciding that you're going to take a transport mission on and take goods from planet A to planet B. You could then decide that you're bored with all this law-abiding stuff and become a pirate. It may be hard to go back into the well-policed areas if you become a known pirate and do some of the other jobs. But essentially, the idea is we're just thinking of lots of different things for the... It's up to the players to decide what roles they want to do. And we're also looking at doing roles that are non-combat oriented. So obviously things like mercenaries and bounty hunting are all very combat oriented. But there's other ones that should be less combat oriented, like the rescue ones.

Oh, well, mining is, there are actually a number of different... There are occupations that will benefit tremendously from having multiple players and/or NPCs working in tandem together. So to use mining as an example, mining is not an occupation that's completely safe. These big asteroids that you're going to be injecting megawatts of energy into, they contain volatile materials. They contain compressed gases. There are a number of ways by which you can wind up blowing these things apart as opposed to just extracting the valuable materials that you actually want to get. And so the first thing when you actually go into an asteroid field that you'd wind up doing is you'd have a dedicated scanning operator. And his entire purpose is to basically help you figure out, in this vast field of thousands of asteroids, which ones have a component constitution that's attractive given what you're actually after, given what the prices in that system warrant you spending your time trying to extract. So you've got a scanning operator. You've obviously got the beam operators, which are going to be the guys in the ship that are actually directing these mining lasers that are injecting these beams of energy into these asteroids in order to extract fragments that a cargo loading operator would then seek to maneuver within the ship. And the way by which this works for the cargo operator is he's basically got repulsor and attractor beams. Attractor as opposed to tractor. They're actually a little bit different in regards to how we use them within the game. So the repulsor beam obviously just pushes something away and a tractor beam just pulls it towards you. And so if you kind of picture looking out through your cargo hold towards an asteroid, which would be the point of view of your cargo loading operator, he would see each of these fragments as they're being blasted off. And all that he's essentially doing is, based upon the constitution of each little fragment, he's applying a little force to basically try to maneuver it into your cargo hold or to push it away. The beam operators actually have quite a bit of work to do in regards to monitoring what's going on so that the situation doesn't get too out of control. We've got an exothermic reaction detector that monitors the amount of energy that's being produced. And what that's essentially doing is it's giving you a visual indication of whether or not the amount of energy that you'd expect to see based upon the beam that you're injecting into the asteroid is larger than what you'd expect. And what that would signal is that you're actually starting to generate chain reactions with some of these materials. And that becomes very dangerous, because if you've got something that's sufficiently volatile and has a sufficient explosive force and you actually ignite a chunk of it, again, you can blow this asteroid apart. And so you're constantly monitoring how much excess energy is being produced. You're also monitoring seismic activity. Seismic activity is very important in regards to mining these asteroids because some of these materials, kind of like nitroglycerin, they're not necessarily sensitive to the injection of energy so much as vibration. And so there can be materials on the complete opposite side of an asteroid. And if you're basically shaking, if you're breaking fragments of sufficient size, you're causing little micro-tremors to emanate back and forth through these asteroids. And so the point is that the mining beam operators are monitoring the beams that are being injected to ensure that you're not going to blow the thing apart. The pilot is constantly rotating around the asteroid to find optimal locations. The scanning beam operator is basically identifying which asteroids are most attractive. The attractor/repulsor, the cargo loading operator, he's basically maneuvering this stuff into your ship. You've got a refinery operator that's basically in charge of the mechanics that allow unrefined ore to be converted into pure materials that you can actually sell back at the major space stations and landing zones. And so this is just a small example of, you could do each one of these jobs yourself, but it would be extraordinarily slow compared to basically having a well-trained group of five players.

I mean, the idea is if you're doing it with a group... And if you're doing it by yourself, it'll just take you longer because you'll kind of have to do all these aspects yourself and that will just take some time. So you can do it single player, but multiplayer, working together as a team, you'll make more money probably.

Yeah, and this is something that's true for a lot of the occupations, where you can do it all yourself. You can run from station to station. It will be inefficient. At times it will become incredibly dangerous to do that. ... And your exothermic reaction detector spikes, and it shows you, look, the amount of energy that's being produced is growing exponentially, even though you've completely shut your beam off, then what that's doing is signaling you had better get out of there very quickly. And if it takes you 30 seconds to basically switch over into the pilot seat, then you've got a real problem. And so realistically, for a lot of these types of group-oriented activities, you don't necessarily have to have all of these roles filled by players. There are NPC crew members that you'll be able to hire. And of course, the quality varies depending upon what you're willing to pay them on a monthly basis. So if you get a guy really, really cheaply, then he may make mistakes. If you get a guy that's extraordinarily skilled and you're willing to pay those higher wages, then he's going to wind up doing a much better job of guiding the really valuable fragments that are ejected from the asteroid into your cargo hold. The guy that's operating the refinery is going to do a much better job of actually running a large amount of ore through your refinery in the most energy and therefore economically efficient manner possible than a less skilled player or NPC would be able to do.

Another occupation that kind of meets this criteria would be a pioneer. There are a number of these occupations... Basically, a pioneer's purpose is to discover new objects of interest. And this actually factors in with what Chris was saying earlier in regards to, a pioneer would probably be the closest thing we have to, you just want to see what's out there. I don't really care to exploit it. I don't care to fight. I just want to find things. But it's interesting because it's not a one-off. It's not a disposable mission where he just kind of lives off on his own. A lot of the game design is turning out to be very symbiotic in nature. And what I mean by that is a pioneer's sole purpose is finding things of interest. That might be an asteroid field. Why is that valuable? Well, because after he discovers it and it becomes common knowledge, then the people that actually want to do mining missions utilize that output of a pioneer as an input for them. They need a location. They need an asteroid field at which they can ply their trade. A pioneer might discover a comet that would be extraordinarily useful as something for a scientist to research. One of the examples I use is the movie Armageddon, and you have the space shuttles approaching from the backside of the asteroid that was approaching Earth and you had large fragments breaking off. And so you can picture a science mission basically needing to get a 30-second video of the backside of one of these asteroids that's throwing off all these pieces. And so the danger there is you need to be an extraordinarily good pilot. Another thing for a pioneer would also be identifying derelict ships, which would be of a lot of interest to salvagers and to people that are willing to put in the time to try to repair these things, get them back to port, and if you can actually do that, you may get a large payday. So there's a lot of attention being given to these different occupations within the game where, while there may be a lot of danger, whether that's mining or whether that's a scientist that's trying to get a 30-second video from a dangerous spot on a given asteroid, a scientist that's trying to get a sample of a coronal mass ejection, but in such proximity that it's actually very dangerous, or trying to get precise measurements on a micro black hole, all these things have their own dangers associated with them, but they're not of the combat variety. And so the real point there is there will be a lot of danger both on the combat-oriented missions and on the non-combat, and it's up to the players to basically choose what they're most interested in doing.

The more they do stuff, they'll get better. So if you have a ship and you have an NPC that's in the turret and you survive, you win 10 battles or 20 battles, they will get better. Basically the way the NPCs will run is they'll have very basic stats in the background, like their morale, their accuracy, not probably to the level you would in a full RPG, but enough that we can rate the NPCs. I mean, we already do it for enemy pilots, like if you're fighting, say, the Vanduul in Vanduul Swarm, there's obviously the boss NPCs of a different level of skill compared to the base grunt ones. And so it would be the same, that you would basically just have NPCs that, if they're your crew for a while and you happen to continue to do well, they get trained up, so to speak. And it will also affect, because you can hire a crew member and they're cheap, but they may not be very good, or you can hire a more expensive crew member and they've obviously got higher stats.

Or you can get your friend. And basically what you'll wind up having is, and this is actually a pretty critical point, a lot of these occupations will, I actually call it specialization, for each one of these things. So you've got somebody who is actually going to be an extraordinarily good pilot given the flight mechanics that you're going to need to employ for this particular type of job. Same thing for a refinery operator. It's not going to be flip a switch and all of a sudden your ore gets processed. You're actually going to have what I call a mini-game. Basically, you're going to have a lot of mechanics that you need to manipulate within the game and some players will do that better. Some of these challenges will primarily require dexterity. Other ones will primarily require intelligence. Other ones will require some combination of those two.