Persistent Universe Panel 2 - A Living, Breathing World

The primary method by which you navigate to distant locations within a given star system is via quantum travel. It's roughly .2 light speed. There is a bit of ramp up time. In other words, you can't just immediately engage your quantum drive engines. It takes 30 to 40 seconds for these things to spin up. There's a little bit of dexterity involved in regards to aligning your ship perfectly with some concentric rings that you'll wind up seeing. Taking any sort of weapons fire during that period of time will wind up causing a slight shudder to your ship. It'll wind up making your navigational computer have to reset and therefore the process starts all over. What this effectively does is it means you can't be right in the middle of a big combat and all of a sudden click your quantum drive and basically get away. You're actually going to have to separate yourself...

I think you could, if you're willing to take the hits, you can. Quantum drive is in a straight line from point A to point B. It's going to take some time for your drive to spool up to create the gravitational effect to propel you very quickly to [...]. I think we're talking about different ships having some level of variation in their very top speed at quantum drive. And during the course of this, you have to basically be heading in the direction because there is no changing course, because you get propelled in a straight line. If you change course, it would be way too much force on the [...]. You have to be on this straight line, in the meantime you can't deviate course, like you're in the middle of battle and you [...]. Or someone could get in your way and that would basically turn off the quantum drive sort of spin-up mechanic. But if you felt like there was no one in front of you and you were willing to take the hits on the back side and put shields there and you've got enough time to do it, it's kind of a calculated gamble. You could jump out of an engagement in the middle of an engagement, or if no one's paying attention to you. I mean, that's basically the setup. It takes time to engage that and you're sort of at risk during that and you can't deviate your course. But if you manage to get to the end of it, then you can jump out, is the design setup on it.

The other method of travel is jump gates, and that's basically from solar system to solar system. That actually utilizes wormholes to allow faster transit. That's something that we've been talking about quite a bit over the last few weeks. There we've got a little bit of concept art. No, this is just static images.

So later on tonight we'll show a tease of kind of what that will look like. But not now.

Estimates have varied, but in general for a typical star system, you're probably looking at somewhere in the range of roughly 8 to 10 minutes to cross the diameter. Now that said, there is the spool up time, and so basically covering 10% of a solar system may take considerably more than 10% of 8 to 10 minutes, because you need to engage it, you need to exit it, and then you actually have the transit time. While you're doing quantum travel, you have free control to wander around your ship, but you can't interact with the external environment. There's no combat during quantum travel or anything like that. Another point of interest on the, well, actually, I guess I shouldn't get into that since we get into that a little bit later. But going back to the jump gate travel, it requires quite a bit more dexterity than quantum travel, in regards to you're not just lining up with some concentric rings trying to keep your ship pointing in the right direction for a period of time and then engaging. Jump gate travel, you're actually trying to follow a twisting, turning path through these wormholes. Another thing that was only recently added is basically the concept of rating the wormholes according to classes. And what this will allow us to do is basically have wormholes that will allow ships of a certain size or ships of a particular level of maneuverability to cross from system A to system B very quickly. Whereas a larger freighter that can't fit through it or doesn't have the level of maneuverability necessary to actually make the maneuvers necessary, it's going to have to take a much more circuitous route through multiple wormholes to get to the same place.

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't necessarily say jump gate, a wormhole, but think of them as sort of mountain passes. So some mountain passes are narrow and treacherous, and you can't go take a big truck up through the mountain pass, but maybe you can do it on foot, and some passes would be big and wide, and you could have big heavy equipment go through. So that's the same idea with the various wormholes and jump points around the galaxy, is that they're rated between different levels. I think we're sort of talking about three levels. So there's the kind of cap ship level, which is the biggest. There's the sort of medium level, which would be the sort of multi-crew ship, kind of a Freelancer or a Constellation. [And there's] the level that would be for very small craft. And the idea is that, say we call the small craft level class one, and class two would be the medium, and class three would be the heavy ones. So the class one jump points a lot of times will provide a route that can get to a destination quicker. So, for instance, as Tony said, if you want to go to Sol from, I don't know, some other system, there may be a class one jump point that gets you directly there. But that's actually really sort of treacherous and only a small ship can go. If you've got heavy cargo and you've got to get the cargo there, you may actually have to take a class three jump to another system, another class three jump to a system closest to Sol, and then finally the final jump to Sol. So what that ends up doing is, there's reasons why, for instance, if you're a trader, maybe you're running a small ship because you've got perishable goods or something that has to get there quickly, whereas if you're transporting bulk goods, then maybe you take the slower route. So it's not too dissimilar to what would happen with sort of freight: you can air freight it, or you can put it on a ship, which is obviously slow, but you can move a lot of stuff at the same time. So that's kind of the idea with the jump gates, is they're sort of different sizes. There are also different levels of stability. So some of the jump gates will be less stable. So in the case of the design, all the jump points, they're slowly going to go out of phase. Some will go out of phase quicker than other ones. And what that means is there will always be jobs for people that are basically navigators. So one of the jobs we're thinking about is you go through a jump point, through the wormhole, and your job is to map it again. And so what happens is if I've bought the nav data from, say, the UEE navigation guild or whatever it would be, then I have the route that I would take through this jump point that would show up on my HUD, and it would show me which [...]. [Otherwise] I don't have any hints of where to turn, which way to duck around the corner and all the rest of the stuff as you fly. And you'll kind of see what I'm talking about when we show something at the end of today. And so the idea is that you, as a navigator, would potentially have a job: you're good at flying these things, you've got great reactions, you fly it, you map it, you get paid for it, and you're constantly keeping the nav data up to date for everyone else that's subscribed to get the nav data from this sort of UEE navigation guild. And then when you've got the nav data already, then it's sort of giving you the hints. So in all cases, probably, flying a jump point requires you to fly it. It's not 100% automatic, but it's either flying it in easy mode, where it's showing you where you need to go, [or] hard mode, where you don't have any hints and you've got to have good reactions.

And we'd also talked a little bit about the concept of being able to fail a jump. In other words, what happens specifically when you go a little bit outside of the boundaries within which you're supposed to be sticking. And where we kind of wound up gravitating towards is we didn't like the idea of basically making it such that if you wind up failing the jump, your ship is destroyed. And so where we wound up going was more, depending upon how much of the jump you've already traversed, that's going to largely dictate where you wind up. In other words, if I made it through 90% of the jump to a particular system and then I miss one of the curves at the end and I get kicked out prematurely, I'm still going to likely be thrown into that system, but I'm going to take a bit of damage as a result. If I only made it 10% of the way through that jump, then I'm probably going to get thrown right back into the system I came from, and my ship's going to have taken some damage along the way.

Yeah, so visually, some of the things that we had thrown around was the idea of, I don't know if you guys have ever seen Fantastic Voyage, but it's basically a movie about shrinking yourself and injecting yourself in a human body. And that was kind of the idea for this, where it was an organic thing that moves and undulates and is alive in a predictable way. So a lot of these things that you see, it's almost like an organism that is connecting and reconnecting itself and snapping apart. And you're in the middle of this chaotic, almost like an intestine or a vein or something. So we kind of attacked it that way, because obviously these things would have to be organic in nature, we were thinking. We were thinking a lot about fractals, which occur in nature quite a bit. So we were rolling around those ideas, and also the color and the vibe of things also has a lot to do with electrical impulses and things, again, kind of body oriented, organic oriented, with this feeling of undulation. So that was a lot of the direction that we went, which kind of evolved into this interesting gameplay, which was like, these things could collapse or open up at any given time, and the walls could contract or expand. And it's up to you as a player to be able to move your ship side to side and also up and down and left and right. It's not just one dimensional, there's a lot of aspects of it. And the whole thing is turning like a large tube also while all this is happening. I think probably what we want to do is certain wormholes obviously have certain characteristics. We were talking about that quite a bit too, where maybe a certain wormhole has got more of that where the walls are connecting, and then some are more like the walls contract and expand, depending on what wormhole you're in. And like Tony was saying, we were also talking about the size of the ship that you can traverse through it. Obviously some wormholes are more optimal for smaller ships, and obviously big freighters are going to have to have more consideration. And certain wormholes you just cannot take a certain size freighter to, or you'll be destroyed. So that was some of the ideology behind the art direction of it.

Within the ship, you're actually going to have a HUD. And we've actually got a demo that Turbulent did as a proof of concept. We're actually in the middle of basically converting this in-game. And so we can actually give you an idea. So let's switch over. There we go. And so this would basically represent the galactic map, and you can see every system that you can eventually access. You'll eventually be able to get some information in regards to commodity prices, missions that are available, just by clicking on the system here. That information may be stale since, as Chris has said in the past, he wanted the concept of information actually taking [time to travel]. And so here, this is more representative of what you would actually see within one specific system. And within a specific system, you'll see all of the points of interest that you can bring up and select and engage your quantum drive to actually jump to. That's going to include things for the local star, planets, moons, large asteroid fields, space stations, and a variety of other things that persist indefinitely. It's also going to include on this localized star system map what I would call transitory points of interest. And that's going to be a lot of things that pop up, exist for some period of time, and then they fade away. For example, the pioneer occupation that I mentioned earlier: if he discovers a comet, if he discovers an asteroid field, if he discovers a derelict ship, and he actually broadcasts that information as opposed to keeping it to himself to exploit, it would wind up showing up here after he sells it to a public information broker. That makes it available to the entire community. You'll wind up also seeing on this map distress signals from other players and NPCs, such that if you're a mercenary and you're basically looking for freighters in distress, or you're looking for somebody that's in need of combat assistance, you will actually see those distress calls being transmitted to this display.

No, that was another thing that we started addressing four or five or six months ago, which is we wanted the ability to do a lot of first-person battles in environments where we'd have a little bit more flexibility to create exactly the type of environment that we wanted. So as we were talking about earlier, we have combat on a lot of the major planetary landing zones, but it's in a controlled fashion for the majority of those areas. Some areas are large enough. Terra Prime, for example, will have another area that you can transition to called the Blocks, where it's much more unchained in terms of the level of violence that you can actually encounter there. But that's not going to be the case for a lot of landing zones. And so what we wanted was the ability for you to have these big raging first-person battles according to whatever dynamic missions we were creating to basically provide you with content. And so what we wound up adopting was just the concept of these space stations. Mark will talk a little bit later about it, and we're doing the exact same thing for space stations that we're doing for the cities in regards to building these things out of all of these component pieces, so that we can quickly create a variety of different space stations that will suit a wide variety of different mission needs: medical facilities, research facilities, mining stations, military outposts, et cetera, all from these same building blocks. There will be a lot of custom art that will basically help to give these things a very custom feel, despite the fact that there's a lot of commonality in terms of the external space station components and such.

Hero props.

Yeah, hero props. That's exactly it.

In the last panel, we didn't quite get to the question, but the question was: okay, so you've got all these hundreds of places that you're going to go, and obviously we're going to have to have a tier system way of looking at it. How are we going to make these all different? How are we going to make them different enough where it's just not the same thing over and over and over? So we've been thinking about that quite a bit. We just had an environment summit not too long ago to talk about some of these issues. One of the things that we broke it down to is architectural styles. So we have pillars of architectural styles, which you guys have seen already. The Self-Land, the AeroView, and the Revel & York hangars are kind of pinnacle styles of the low tech, high tech, and super modernism, which are our base first run at making a modular system and to see how far we can go with those. Now, obviously the architectural styles are going to expand. I know Chris wants history, which is huge from an art direction point of view. These environment locations have got to have history, and they do. A lot of them have it in the stuff that has been written for Star Citizen. There's tons of history to draw from and tons of things that have happened on any particular landing site location that, as an art director, gives me something to grab onto and be able to expand and give detail to. The more history someplace has, the more detail that you can pull out of it. And we've also been talking about places like Terra Prime and stuff like that, that are not only just places to visit, but they're destination places, where you have this idea of exploring the universe and actually, like going to Paris and seeing the Eiffel Tower or going to Egypt and seeing the pyramids. We want to convey that in Star Citizen, and the way to do that is to have historical places that you go visit and significant things that happen within the universe, and you're like, oh man, I want to go see that. Well, okay, you can, and it's on Terra Prime, and there's a big statue there of an important thing or an important person. So these architectural styles kind of feed into that. And what we can do is we can take historical styles and also mix them with modern styles, because, as you know, in Seattle and a lot of places, what they'll do is, as the culture evolves and the architecture evolves, they'll build on top of stuff. Or I'm sure you'll visit locations that are ruined, so you'll land someplace and see that there was a big battle here at some point. So all these architectural styles are being worked out as far as the tier goes, for the breadth and the width of what we want to achieve. So a lot of these things are going to be: you'll have a base architectural style that you start with. And then, like we were saying before, there are other things that you can put with it, like props and lighting changes. And there's a thing called theme changes, which we're doing, and which the ships have been doing quite a bit of. And that's using a blend system to be able to convey things like economic ruin. So you go to a planet, it's nice, you come back a month later, it's in ruins. It's got spray paint on the wall and it's rusted out. The economy has just totally gone south and things are looking bad. And we obviously want to convey that through the architecture also. So we've been putting some thought and time into creating these things with themes embedded in them, which are controllable by materials.

Yeah, they absolutely will. We were just talking about the economy, which is obviously a huge catalyst for the evolution of any given location. We want to make it where you can land on a planet and I want to convey that it's uncomfortable, that you are in a dangerous place and that you should probably watch yourself. It's my job as an art director to visually clue you in to things like that. So we're setting up the architectural styles, like I said, to convey some of that. Now, the next question would be weather and stuff like that. I absolutely hope that we will have various weather on different kinds of planets, obviously. Yeah, absolutely time of day, too. We were just talking about this whole time of day with Sean Tracy, actually, and going back and forth on the ramifications of it. If you think through it, there's a lot of dominoes that fall when that happens. There absolutely will be a time of day, because you want to be able to go to Terra at night and do dealings in the dark, or go down...

And that's actually an important point, which is it's not just a cosmetic effect that we're applying. I'd separate it into two ways that planets evolve over time. There's the short term, the 24-hour cycle. We've talked before about how there's this economic simulation that's going on in the background. It's basically running a simulation with, give or take, 10 million NPCs. The values that are thrown out of that simulation wind up informing, affecting what the player actually sees. It takes things like the population, the per capita wealth, the employment rate, the landing zone GDP. All of these things wind up getting factored into what you see when you actually land at one of these things. And so as GDP, as employment, as these things start to increase, you can actually see ripple-through effects, like we were talking about the other day in regards to the addition of smog to some of the environments. As a planet starts to produce more goods, the amount of smog can increase. The number of blue collar workers that you might see, given the type of product that they're actually producing, may actually start to increase. Depending upon whether or not they're creating higher end products or lower end products, it may affect how many tourists, how many businessmen you actually wind up seeing at this location. But then going back to the smaller scale, the 24-hour stuff: if you wind up landing on a planet in the middle of the day, the shops will be open. You'll tend to see security guards within the street. You'll see, in general, kids frolicking, et cetera. If you wind up going to that exact same destination in the middle of the night, then some of the shops may well be closed. We haven't actually discussed it in this panel yet, but there will likely be some sort of compressed time schedule. We don't know exactly what that will be, but in general, a day in the game will most likely not equate to a day in the real world. And what this means is that within some multi-hour period, you'll actually be able to watch a planet go from day to night. So if you arrive in the middle of their night, you may have to either elect to wait some relatively small portion of time for the shops that you're after to open, or you may have to pursue alternative means. You may have to go to the shady arms dealer at the back of an alley, and you may have to be willing to put up with his inferior selection, his higher prices, because you want it right now. There are a number of ways that we're trying to basically make these planets feel like they're alive, as opposed to just these static entities where you go, you restock your ship and then you head back out into the universe. You will see significant evolution, both in terms of the NPC constitution, in terms of the missions, in terms of commodity prices, in terms of some of the atmospheric effects and stuff, in terms of what types of weapons, ships, et cetera, are available on that planet, and what the constitution of the NPCs is in terms of criminals versus businessmen versus all of these other types of things.

It's unlikely you're going to corner the market, but never say never. I mean, the reality is there are many other NPCs. As Chris mentioned earlier, the number of NPCs to players is probably going to be roughly 10 to 1 in terms of what we're actually simulating. What you're actually affecting, therefore, may be largely superseded by other things that are going on. So if you really want to have an outsized impact on a particular commodity or the availability of a particular item, and therefore its price, or a whole slew of these things, your best bet is to basically go to an area that has a smaller population. Your best bet is to basically team up with friends and work in concert. But in general, you can kind of picture it like a spring, where if you're clever and you pick the right spot and you get some friends to help you and you basically do a good job of preventing every freighter that you see from actually landing in a given landing zone, then you can actually start to bend the needle and basically start to have an effect on the price of that commodity, and therefore everything that's built utilizing that would eventually show some effect. But in general, it's going to be the larger, more macroscopic things that are going to significantly move the needle. And what I mean by that is if you've got a raging battle in a particular solar system between UEE security forces and pirates, then that's going to be consuming not just what one player or 50 players would; you're effectively going to have thousands of NPCs and hundreds and hundreds of players involved in this battle, all chewing through ammunition, chewing through ships, chewing through personal weapons. What that's going to do is it's going to create a tremendous demand for commodities that won't, at least immediately, be able to be satisfied, and therefore you're going to wind up having a choke point in the production of everything that depends upon those things. And so all of a sudden what you'll see is the price of ships, the price of ammunition, the price of personal weapons will all start to basically rise.

And so I could see a really cunning organization starting a war between two other organizations in the system, having stockpiled a whole bunch of missiles and weapons. And then there's a run on the stuff in the shops, and then they can go and sell the stuff at a premium.

Yeah. And that's actually another concept that we talked about relatively recently, which is your ability to store significant stocks of commodities and other sellable goods at various spaceports. And so depending upon what the situation is, you could very well think that because of how things are evolving within a given system, copper or a particular ship or you name it is going to increase in price, and therefore you basically start planning ahead of time. You basically stock up, and when what you've been predicting actually occurs, assuming it does, then you can actually reap a very significant reward. But the real point there is that you shouldn't expect one player to basically go in and assume that you're going to take out one freighter and that's somehow going to completely constrain the supply. It's a very large world that's being simulated. And while one player can have a very significant impact in regards to some very specific situations, where you're talking about a low population or a distant outpost or something like that, you're not going to move the needle very far by yourself or even with your group of friends in some of the more populated zones. That's really going to take one of these more macroscopic events to really move that needle.

Yeah, there are actually two different types of missions that I kind of categorize. One is the type that you formally accept. You go to a TDD or something and you basically say, I'm looking for this type of mission, and you look through the list and you basically sign up, or you talk to an NPC and effectively get the same effect. Then there's all the stuff that's just randomly happening around you as you fly throughout. I've got my ship, I'm cruising through. I mentioned a little bit of this earlier when we were looking at the solar system map: all of these transitory events that can pop up on your radar screen. There's a freighter under attack by pirates. There is a pilot that has gotten into a conflict, he's had to eject from his ship, and he needs to be rescued and basically taken back to a space station. So there's a large amount of stuff that will be made available for you to basically accept or ignore.

Yeah, I mean, there could be no one online but you and it will still be a fully functioning, breathing universe, where NPC actions cause reactions from other NPCs. And so I think the design's pretty good in a way that there will always be interesting content available for people to experience. And it's not really scripted. It's sort of emergent from the actual simulation of the universe.

Yeah, and it kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier in regards to that whole symbiotic relationship, where you may have a player or an NPC, and because of their own personal motivations, they decide to do something. And maybe that goes well, maybe it doesn't. And so now they need help or assistance, or you may be tasked against them. For every mercenary that basically signs up to protect a freighter as an escort and get it safely from point A to point B, there are going to be other players that are going to view that as an opportunity. They're going to look at that freighter loaded with that valuable ore, and that's going to be extraordinarily appealing from their pirate-minded point of view. And so what you've got with such a diverse set of occupational capabilities is a lot of possibilities in regards to aligning players against themselves at times and having NPCs add to the mix.

I'm not sure I caught the entire question, but I think I got the gist of it. One of the things I'd mentioned was all these transitory points of interest. You can picture a pioneer, and a pioneer basically finds an asteroid field. And this particular one contains 2% tin by volume. So it's extraordinarily appealing from a miner's point of view when tin is in high demand. But what happens basically as tin starts to recede in value and fewer miners are attracted to that? What we wind up doing is clearing out some of these things. Basically that knowledge eventually gets lost. And the idea is that if we don't have sufficient player traffic or NPC traffic, if there's no demand for that particular resource, then eventually it winds up fading away. And what this does is it opens the door such that later in the economic cycle, when there again is a demand for tin, then you need pioneers to go out and basically do this long range scanning slash probe slash discovery stage to find additional ones. And so it's the same thing with comets or derelict ships or any of these things, which is: if something is discovered and it's appealing enough that you're actually drawing player and NPC traffic to it, then even though it's dynamically constructed, it will persist and persist and persist. But once you get yourself into a state such that, for whatever economic reason, that's no longer drawing interest from those entities, then we'll wind up cleaning it up. And what that does is it sets the stage to basically need explorers, discoverers, pioneers to basically find more of that content when demand later ramps back up.

Yeah, so the way that the universe is simulated and how it impacts the players is a system that Tony actually came up with, which is actually quite brilliant: we basically have a simulation that runs the universe that's separate to what everyone's going to be playing. And on that particular simulation we're running millions and millions of AI. It doesn't have to be real time, because they're just going about their job and going from planet A to planet B and accepting missions and everything. And that is linked to what the players experience by a certain level of fuzzy logic. So it's not 100% a one-to-one correlation. If on the economy side we've got a bunch of pirates attacking the various transports, and then there's a bunch of missions for players to go out and go after the pirates, we've ascertained on that system what the likelihood of an encounter with a pirate is. And if there's a lot of people, there'll be a fair amount of instances. And so there may be a case where on the economy simulation there were 10 pirates, but we just happened to have enough people jump in that there ended up being 12 engagements and 12 pirates died. Well, it's sort of fuzzy. It goes back to the economy and it says, okay, pirate died, pirate died, pirate died, pirate died. Okay, all the pirates are dead. And the fact that 12 died versus 10 died, no one's ever really going to know, because you're talking about millions of people playing it all at the same time. And so that's kind of where the fuzziness is between the actual economy simulation and the reality, because the problem you would get is if you have to have everything that happens on the player side be exactly a one-to-one correlation with a full simulation of millions and millions of AI agents, you're going to have race conditions and you'll have problems and deadlocks. And so having it be fuzzy basically means, okay, a bunch of bounty hunters and mercenaries came up and attacked those pirates and took them out. They're gone from that system. They'll be gone from the economy simulation. So you basically will have the end effect where the pirates got cleaned up in this system. The fact that 12 or 13 pirates got killed instead of the 10 that existed on the economy simulation isn't really something that is that important. The importance is a change was effected. And so that's, I think, one of the fundamental ways. And also, because we're disconnecting to a certain extent the overall simulation of the economy and what we see on the gameplay side, it allows you a bit of a buffer. It has some fudge room here and there. And it's also nice for things like: if the economy simulation server goes down, it won't kill what's happening with the players on their side. And we can deal with some offline fixing up of the economy simulation and then bring it back up. Then it can be updating what the various players see on their side. I don't know if you want to take it from...

Yeah, just to add a little bit, because Chris did cover a lot of the most important points there, but basically, the way it's being engineered, you could take this economic simulation offline for a period of time and no one within the game would know the difference, just given how the data is all distributed.

Things wouldn't change, basically. It would just feel static versus changing.

That's exactly it. And the reality is a lot of these things are actually going to evolve, just like in the real world, very gradually. You shouldn't expect that because you prevented a particular freighter from actually delivering its payload of copper, that's going to immediately spike the costs of ships, because the demand is not going to have outstripped the current inventory supply for some period of time. Also, you've got the producers of goods; they all maintain an inventory. Another thing is there's the concept of rails integrated within the economic simulation. And the reason for rails is to prevent exactly what you're saying. We're running this enormous simulation, and so you've got a lot of different feedback loops. And there are a lot of algorithms, there are a lot of values that have been assigned. It's always possible that something temporarily gets out of whack, and we may need to wind up going in, adjusting a formula, tweaking the availability of something to basically bring things back into balance. And that's why we have this concept of rails. And so you can kind of think of it, it's very similar to what I was saying earlier in regards to a spring, which is you can basically push against the system, but as you have a larger and larger impact, additional changes become more and more difficult. And so there's no effective limit in regards to how far up or down you can push something, but it does become progressively more challenging. And so what that does is it prevents you from ever getting into any sort of unattractive situation like, for example, all of a sudden there's just an absolutely gargantuan battle raging across the system. Something in terms of gameplay that would never be fun would be ammunition, because of a supply constraint where you haven't yet had enough new supply added back into the mix, becoming, if not completely unavailable, so exorbitantly expensive that only a small portion of the NPC and player population can actually purchase it. That's a scenario that you never want to happen. Employing this spring-based progressive scaling of a lot of these parameters allows us to have localized changes relatively easily. It allows us to have larger changes as the affecting agents become dramatically larger. But it prevents you from ever getting to the point that any of these critical values start to adversely impact gameplay such that you would not have a good experience.

I don't know, maybe that went over everyone's heads. But anyway, it's a very cool system. All I can say is that because we've disconnected the economy from being real-time with what the players experience, it allows a buffer, and it gives you a slightly fuzzy logic that makes it easier to protect against imbalances that can happen in the economy. The way to think of it is that the economy simulation is like a turn-based game. That's why we can simulate millions and millions of NPCs. It's going to be on one server. I don't know whether we're considering it being a multi-core server or not, but essentially it will just go through system by system and update it. It's like a turn-based game. The NPCs have the rules of, okay, now at this factory I'm producing this, and I'm now generating jobs to have this good taken from here to here. And those are the sort of jobs that a player can peek into and accept. And then at that point it gets taken away from the NPC pool and the player is responsible for doing it. And if the player successfully does it, then he tells the economy simulation once he's done it, okay, that's back. But most of the time, because obviously it's nine to one or ten to one in terms of NPCs to players, it's all happening on the economy simulation. And so each system gets updated, and you don't need to do every system all the same. You don't need to do it 30 frames a second, because in the case of an economy simulation, you don't need to have that fidelity. You can say each turn is an hour, each turn is 30 minutes. We haven't specifically said the actual ratio of it, but it will be along those lines, which means that you can go around and simulate every single star system with all these people, no problem at all. And then what we do is we actually go through doing the same thing on each system. We basically analyze the system and say, okay, in this system, there's these traders doing this route. There's pirates over here. There's some police over here. And we distill that down into what Tony's calling probability cubes. The short version of that is, you could call them encounter cubes or whatever you want. But basically, when you're in space, that determines what happens as you're flying around. It says, okay, there were pirates in this area, and there was a 30% chance that you would encounter some pirates. So you enter that area of space, it rolls a dice, yep, there're the pirates. So it generates the pirates based on various template encounters, which we set up and build. So we'll have eight or nine different versions of, like, a pirate ambushing a cargo ship, or a pirate lying in wait in an asteroid field, or a cargo ship going from point A to point B. So they're all getting dynamically generated by the economy simulation. So the idea is the economy simulation in some ways is sort of a procedural mission generator or encounter generator, where, based on the snapshot it sees in the economy, it creates all the encounter templates that you're going to see in the system. And those get updated on a time-slice-per-system basis. And that's why, when you finish your mission or you kill a pirate, that message goes back to the economy simulation and says, okay, I've delivered the goods, or I've killed this pirate. And then on the economy side, it says, okay, the goods are now on this planet, or this pirate's now dead. And it keeps track of it. But that's the point where I'm saying, if a few more goods are delivered than were in the economy system, or a few more pirates are killed, it's okay, because it's slightly fuzzy, and each system is getting updated, I don't know, whatever our frequency of updates would be, every five minutes or every 10 minutes. But if you're sitting around in a system, you're not going to notice. The state of the economy doesn't change in five minutes' time. It changes over days. So that's why the way we have the system works very well. And what the economy simulation does is it basically is procedurally generating a lot of the content for you, the missions you'll take, what's happening. And it's actually quite an elegant solution to what could be a really complicated simulation problem.