With 2.6 and 2.6.1 Star Marine has started to introduce destructible props in the game. Shattering glass, explosive barrels and etc. The most recent monthly report mentioned that the team was looking to add more oprs and items that can be destroyed in the game. Presumably this work will carry into the Persistence Universe. Have you put any thought into how destroyed props will be restored in the Persistence Universe? Example being, if a player could shatter the glass windows in Port Olisar, how would the game "reset" to a point where windows are replaced?asked by Poison Taco

So this is something that we're focusing on long term. So it's part of what we've talked about, persistence, we have a very basic version of persistence that we rolled out last year, but we don't have full persistence as in the full persistences persisting state of you as a character, your ship, other items, other locations around the world and persisting state is important for like whether things are damaged or whether there's a window broken or something like that.

That is actually part of the roadmap that we have this year that we're working on is bringing in persistence more and more persistence as we go so we'll be able to persist state pretty much most things as well as where they are, what their location. So if you go down on a moon and you drop an item or leave a ship there and leave that area which means it's going to out of memory on your computer and then you come back to it, depending on the importance of the item, we want persist it which means it will be persisted to the online database that we keep all, you know it's basically this online cloud save game for the entire universe and your ship should be there. Now obviously if you drop a gum wrapper and you leave the area, we don't want to clog up the game with millions of gum wrapper items. So small items that don't mean much like bullet shells or whatever would just be discarded if you left the area, but certain items, especially items that you would own like a spaceship or something will persist and stay around and that's what we call the entity owner manager.

So there's basically a manager that would manage what's in your ship, like in the cargo hold or what you're owning or what's inside the space station or what's on an area in a planet and then that's what responsible for managing the persistence of these items and whether they stay or not and then also is serial and then the items themselves are saving off their stay and so what that means is for something like Port Olisar if we wanted to allow you to break or destroy common areas which is another discussion because you know, we don't want someone blowing out a window in an area where everyone else is and killing all the people hanging out in the space station.

So there will definitely be some areas where we will not allow you to have player generated mayhem, but there certainly could be the cases. You know you already see in the Comm-Satellite missions where you're asked to go and turn them back on or not, well we're definitely going to have stuff where there'll be a space station or a satellite relay that's been damaged or broken by an AI or maybe even by a player and that will automatically generate a mission inside our system to say, "Hey come and repair me" and players or AI could respond to it and they would go there and repair it and then its persistence state would go from damaged to functional again.

That's how

If it's broken then the cycle starts again.

That's how I read the question which is basically we'll have two different tiers of repairs I would say and one of them is significant enough as such that it warrants the creation of missions and this would be damaged satellites and things of that sort and if a player doesn't do it then a NPC will. Then there's also just the more stuff, I would say it's more cosmetic. Windows getting shot out in Area 18 and there's always going to be players there and so it won't be so much an issue of well when the players all go away then we can just go ahead and reset things. That will be handled more by just the NPC community. There will be NPCs that actually do savage, not salvage, that basically do maintenance. Maintaining of a given area and when you break glass, when you basically shoot barrels of trash and garbage gets scattered about, some of the NPCs would have the responsibility of fixing that up, cleaning things up, etc.

Cleaning up after the players.

which makes for that much more an interesting world because not only can you break things in interesting fashion, you can actually see the NPC community put it back to together.

You're going off to prison because you're a vandal. Not a Vanduul, a vandal.