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It has been more than a year since we've heard about Quantum. Without spoiling the upcoming presentation, can you give us a bit of an update on how things have been progressing, and whether you're happy with where we're at right now?

TL;DRQuantum has progressed a lot, with a much faster C# rewrite and the service now shipping with the game, and the team is now connecting it to back-end services, with game-facing results expected in the not too distant future.

Tony ZurovecPersistent Universe Director

Yeah, it's come a long way. All the TypeScript logic has been redone in C# for the AI, which basically resulted in somewhere in the range of a three order of magnitude increase. So we can basically easily simulate several million Quanta, and we can do that at multiples of normal speed. And that's important because we need to be able to tweak certain levers, let the simulation run for an hour and then see how stuff balanced out and what kind of limits we hit on certain things. Did prices ever get too out of whack here? Did the offering price for a particular mission ever get completely ridiculous given these parameters that we'd set up? We're in the final stages now of starting to connect Quantum to some of the back-end services so that they're actually feeding data from the simulation to the services. The services will have long been feeding that information then to the actual game servers and then basically receiving it back. One of the most recent examples here, and it's kind of related to the dynamic event shop modifier stuff, is the potential to add new items to a particular shop. So right now that inventory has always historically been fixed. And so now with the modifier, since we can add something, it's the same thing you'll see in Quantum, which is shops may occasionally change some of their inventory items. And so it turns out that there's a little bit of work we need to do on the game server in order to support that. There's been a lot of focus on basically extracting chunks of information from the service beacons. We demonstrated before that we were generating the events, but they weren't actually making their way to the back end. So that information will be filled out. In other words, where you see calls for assistance, calls for combat assistance for you to come, will in the not too distant future be dictated via that Quantum simulation. The price of fuel will be dictated by how much of a load there is in that particular area. And all of these things take time, because in the previous iteration we showed of Quantum, as you got all these Quanta going around, they didn't have at that time any concept of fuel or efficiency in terms of what ship they were flying and how much fuel it consumed. They basically got transport for free. And so a lot of those kinds of things are being wrapped up. We spent, relatively recently, a good bit of time getting Quantum, the service, to basically be built and shipped with the game. So we're not currently exploiting it, but it's there right alongside a litany of all these other services. So that piece, which was a significant effort, is now in and done, and basically what that means is we've got the basic elements of plumbing to get all this information going back and forth. And what we're focused on right now is actually realizing some of that stuff.

Star Citizen Live›Dynamic Events·
Published on this date.29 Jan 2021