Frontier Fridays: How History Shapes the Future
Frontier: Universumsgestaltung durch Algorithmen und Geschichtsgenerierung
Das Frontier-Universum entsteht durch Algorithmen, wobei Informationen genutzt werden, um Form und Aussehen zu bestimmen. Die Geschichtsgenerierung dient dazu, eine Grundlage für die Spielwelt zu schaffen, insbesondere angesichts der großen Anzahl an Sonnensystemen. Simulationen erzeugen Fakten, die eine nicht-arbiträre Grundlage für Interaktionen bieten. Die Platzierung von Infrastruktur und Fraktionen wird simuliert, um eine lebendige Welt zu erschaffen.
EVE Frontier
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Vorstellung der Gäste und Ankündigung des Founder Pack Giveaways
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00:04:58 Hello and good afternoon, everybody. Welcome back to Frontier Fridays, broadcasting live to you from an undisclosed location in international waters. I am, of course, your host, CCP Yoten, joined alongside my very good friend and our crack narrative designer, CCP dramaturg, a joint... Oh, yes, thank you. And also CCP overload, pressing buttons for us today.
00:05:27 Thank you, CSP Overload. What a joy it is to have you with us. Certainly. CSP Dramaturg. Yes. It's been a while since we've had you here. It has. It's been like seven months or something. It's been a long time. I think it was December. I'm pretty sure it was during one of the phases. We did something about Universe. Oh, yeah. Like a Q&A thing. We did a Q&A thing. And shockingly, we are going to be doing Universe again today with a different spin. With a different spin. Because we've done...
00:05:55 A lot of work. A lot of really fun work. Yes. And in my academic brain, I'm like, I need to give a talk about it. Hell yeah. I love that. I need to give an academic-y talk about it. Well, we're going to do that academic-y talk. Before we go too much further, and I see it seems to be already readying something up. We're not quite there yet. We are going to be announcing at the end of the stream the winners, the nine winners, maybe ten winners. I'm pretty sure it's nine winners. The nine winners of the...
00:06:24 Founder Pack giveaway that we did on social media the other day. Wonderful. Thank you again, CCP Overload. Love that for us. We are going to be announcing those winners. So if you participate in that contest and you want to know if you won, there were a lot of entries, of course. The thing I'm learning about this, if you want social media interaction, just give shit away. It's super easy. So follow this stream, wait till the end, and you'll see who won those packs. So CCP Dramaturg.
00:06:51 Before we go into this, for people who, you know, it has been a minute since you've been here, tell us a little bit about what you do, you know, what your role is on the team, and just kind of what you've been up to recently. Right, so I am Frontier's narrative designer. My background is in academia and doing NPC character behavior AI and doing a little bit of procedural generation.
00:07:21 Und dann kam ich hier zu machen, um all die Narrative-related Sachen zu machen. Und viel zu meiner Überraschung und Freude und Freude und Freude war, um Procedural Generation zu machen. Und so, es ist ein tolles Mal, um, um, leaving Academia, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um,
00:07:48 It is kind of funny. You know, we talk a lot about, you know, our team is not obviously a big team, you know, especially not compared to a lot of other studios. Frontier is a shocking, relatively sleek team. But in that does force people to fill a lot of different roles. And it does feel as if many different roles have just been like, ah, that's narrative. That's, that's CC Dramaturgist's problem.
00:08:14 Do you feel like you kind of have some, maybe not control necessarily, but oversight of a lot of different working systems right now? I would say yes. And part of that is just the nature of working on a relatively small team. And part of it is also that if you want to build something with a lot of depth and a lot of like continuity in it.
00:08:39 you do want narrative involved in as much as you possibly can sure and it's like the obvious stuff is like yeah you want narrative and aren't talking to each other yeah yeah because one informs the other and you can then tell a much more effective story that way but like i have a technical background like um i have engineering degrees like my phd is in engineering and once you
00:09:04 sit down with a lot of code. And if you approach it, not just from a, can I get the code to do this thing, but it's, can I get the code to tell a story? You can absolutely do that. So that's part of why, to me at least, it's really, really important that it's not just, oh, design and art and sometimes audio. We're all together. It's like, we also want to involve
00:09:31 the technical side of it because you can tell a lot of a narrative with code and that's what i'm going to talk about is how you can do that sick i love that uh popika freka in chat says you seem like nice guys thank you yeah i think we're pretty nice thank you for the most part uh well you have prepared a slide deck uh this is the point where i look this needs to be overloaded make sure he's got the button queued up he sure does all right we're gonna go to the slideshow screen
Geschichte und Universumsgestaltung in Frontier
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00:09:55 I think we're there. Yeah, we are there. Hell yeah. Okay, so let's talk about history. So, you know, one of the things we talked about previously, we've talked about a little bit at length with CCP relativistic in the past has been creating the universe, right? The universe, the frontier universe came into existence through, you know, a series of algorithms that we use to design, you know, you have these three.
00:10:21 You crash them together, you create one, I guess, super galaxy in this case, in a sense. And that, you know, we are using then the information that we have available to inform, you know, what that looks like, what the shape of it is. And now we have this opportunity where we have to go in and see, okay, well, now we know what it looks like. What is the, what happens after that, right? So take it away. Yeah, so our universe generator is really...
00:10:50 Und dann haben wir in zwei, drei Parten, weil es die Physik-Side ist, die TTP-Relativistik ist, und ist unser Experte auf. Und dann haben wir es, wir haben es, wir haben es, wir haben es, wir haben es, wir haben es, und es ist viel zu großartig zu machen, zu machen, so wir kind of sind, zu machen wirklich weird, niche, in fact, research.
00:11:19 ...to get all the tech there to where we can make the galaxy feel like it's a place, and it's a place that has a past. And is it past that you can actually see and feel as you're flying around? Do you feel like, and I know I don't want to just sit here on your first card and just talk throughout the whole... This is the entire presentation, fun fact. Just this one slide. Just this one slide, yeah. I spent hours on this one slide. It's very detailed.
00:11:46 Do you feel like, because the universe is so big and because the universe is often, it often generates without us knowing every single little aspect of it, do you feel like a lot of the work that you have to do now involves learning more things about the universe that has been created before you could even go in there and start talking about what's actually in it? Yeah, like...
00:12:06 We have a lot of data, and I'm at this point very familiar with the structure of our regions and the structure of our solar system data, but there's a lot of like, well, how do we want this particular variable, this particular statistic, this feature, do we want someone to care about it? And what does it mean if they care about this little piece? Sure.
00:12:32 I'll get into a little bit more of what that actually means and how we approach doing it. Okay. We'll send it. Yeah, let's get started. So if you are familiar with roguelikes, a couple of the big famous ones do history generation to varying degrees. And these are the two that have the really big first class history generators. Caves of Cud's interesting because...
00:13:00 Dwarf Fortress, on the other hand...
00:13:27 They generate literally everything from scratch. So you can't as easily retroactively justify things if you have to build literally the foundation of the entire world and then also put people, places, everything on top of it. So we have to operate more in the Dwarf Fortress style of, because we have the physics simulation, we run all of that, we take a snapshot of it.
00:13:54 And then that data comes over to the rest of the generator.
Bedeutung und Funktionsweise der Geschichtsgenerierung
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00:14:01 Really, why would we do this? We kind of talked about it before getting started, but there's a lot of reasons to do this. One of them, the most obvious, is scale. If we have 24,000 solar systems, if we have 100,000, basically any time you get over a few dozen, it starts getting really, really burdensome to hand place things to manually simulate.
00:14:30 So at a certain point, it's just practicality to write a generator, write a simulation to do what you need. Sure. Another thing, and this is a little bit more from the academic side, is you can create a ground truth for the rest of the game, especially if you're making a video game or any sort of digital simulation or digital world. This...
00:14:57 Doing something like this lets you have hard facts that both are like things everybody working on it has agreed that like we want something like this. But it also means there's a ground truth in the simulation itself and like in the way that you interact with it has a foundation that isn't just arbitrary. Sure, right. And one of the more like fun things and one of the things that we actually are kind of doing
00:15:26 Every time we push a universe update is we have some like semi alternate histories. There's a the more academic jargon term I would put here is the universe generator that we have is actually like us like a history volume generator not a history like a line right generator because we know we can force certain things to be very very consistent.
00:15:54 But we can't guarantee like this specific thing happened in this specific solar system because it's all based on the physics simulation. And if we change anything about the physics simulation, that will have wild potential consequences for what we're doing. So you're talking, you're more, the generator is kicking out more chapter titles instead of just like individual paragraphs. Not quite. It's more,
00:16:24 We're setting up rules about what should be true when it comes to the way the universe is structured and the way that human civilization existed. So we can say, we want this particular faction to live in this kind of place. And they'll always live in that kind of place, but we can't guarantee that the place that they care about the most is always going to be on the edge of the...
00:16:51 Galaxia ist immer in der Mitte. So wir haben zu tun, in ein bisschen höher-leveler Weise zu sagen. Ja, ja, ja. Wir können das nicht sagen, in die Weise we're going about das. Partially, weil wir nicht mehr in die Black Hole leben wollen. Ja, ja. Aber es ist mehr über...
00:17:18 We want to make sure that we are placing things and having the history work in a consistent way regardless of where the physics end up. So that you'll always get people living where they care about and fighting over things they care about. Just we can't guarantee they will always be in literally the same spatial coordinates. Gotcha, okay. And that's more what I mean by...
00:17:46 Ja, ja, ja.
00:18:13 40 minutes to generate everything, which we can do a lot better on. Now that 40 minutes to generate, click through those slides a little bit too quickly, on my part, not your part. Those 40 minutes, how long are we talking about that? What is that simulation generating in terms of years? In terms of years, that is...
00:18:39 Es ist mehr als 14,000 Jahre lang. Ich kann nicht die gleiche start-date von wann es ist, aber es ist zwischen 14,000 bis 20,000 Jahren in der Geschichte. All right, carry on. So, die overall architectural structure of this thing ist, wir haben unsere Physik-Stimulation, und das produziert Daten.
Ant Colony Optimization und Infrastrukturplatzierung
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00:19:03 And then this is where most of the history generation happens, which is this ant colony optimization. What's this all about, these ants? So we need to simulate the way people behave. And a lot of history generation doesn't use agent simulation, largely because...
00:19:30 Agent simulation is really heavy and slow and you don't always need something this complicated. And actually where this originally came from was we wanted to place infrastructure in a more interesting organic way.
00:19:47 We initially were like, oh, what if we did slime molds? Because slime mold algorithms are often how if you want like a really good highway network. Yeah. Or you want to see what like the optimal highway network in a city is. You'll run a slime mold simulation. It'll show you like, okay, here's where you want like the big arteries because geography, distance, traffic, etc. Sure. It turns out those are grid based.
00:20:14 And our data is nothing close to a grid. So we couldn't do that. But we still were like, oh, we want something more organic. And we decided, well, we have something that's a lot like a slime mold, and that's an ant colony. And ant colony optimization is graph-based, which is great, when our entire universe is a graph. And that's like a mathematical graph, not a visual. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So...
00:20:42 We have this, and this underpins a lot of the steps about, like, someone comes into the Frontier, they claim things, excuse me, they place things. This is what's, like, doing the actual placement. Okay. And so this is infrastructure, and this is, like, where our ancient civilizations in the current live version of the game are. This is all done via ant colony optimization. Gotcha. Okay. And then we can feed...
00:21:10 all of that placement all of that data back as history data which we can then use to not within the universe data itself but make a lot more things we can do to place locations and reflect that history better than trying to hand author everything okay and this actually lets us again keep everything consistent across or
00:21:37 Mostly consistent across generations. So if we want to place something between two civilizations, we can write that into the way that a site gets placed or the rules around a distribution. And we can do that all automatically.
00:21:55 So, how do we do this whole thing? Yeah, it's a great question. Very, very slowly with a lot of config files. We have config files for everything. So the first thing we do is do the physics simulation. And that I think takes about as long as the history simulation right now. So we do that, we get all this data, we stick it in a folder, and then we load it. And we need to grow all of our automated infrastructure.
00:22:24 And this is reflective of the way we're approaching outside of the simulation narrative. So infrastructure shows up and it is choosing things based on some idea of what is resource rich. Because you want stuff to get built quickly. You want short distances between resources and manufacturing. Okay.
00:22:53 So we do all that. We save that data out. And also part of this is figuring out where the gate connections are. And that's based on how often the ants go back and forth. So the infrastructure is placed in two different ways. It's first we pick regions and we pick, I've read exactly how far they're allowed to spread out, but we can control that. So we say,
00:23:20 You're allowed to have a pocket of infrastructure here and grow infrastructure in these sets of regions. And then within those regions, we release the ants. And they walk around and look for things kind of drunkenly based on statistics they care about, features they care about. And then anywhere that's over a certain edge threshold, which if you think about graphs, it's like you have a node.
00:23:50 We don't do that right now but we really want to start doing that.
00:24:21 Ja, so there's a couple ways we can even approach doing that, where we can put more gates than we want in, and then simulation remove them, simulating wars, and we can actually do some of that right now. It's just a matter of deciding how much we want certain historical events to affect everything. But we can do stuff like...
00:24:48 put a ton of gates in and then retroactively or age them and then based on like an aging simulation go this one's destroyed this one's destroyed some proportion outside of a certain area right they're gonna get destroyed and we can do the same thing for stations okay um but that's like future work yeah right now it's just we place everything and we tuned it right now to be like
00:25:14 Okay. Okay. Okay.
Platzierung von Fraktionen und Simulation von Kriegen
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00:25:41 take a look at everything and survey their environment and they pick sets of regions that they really like. They rank everything and this is one of the slowest parts of the whole thing because the more factions you have, the more humans you want to look at everything, you have to look at the entire universe every single time with fresh eyes.
00:26:09 So we pick their starting locations and these are based on cultural and economic values. And so we can do things like give people overlapping desires and preferences to kind of nudge them together for reasons you'll see in a second. Okay. And we can also do this to like give character to where they show up. Okay. So if you're flying around Frontier right now, like
00:26:38 Especially for places that are colored in on the map when you look at the, I think it's the Extinct Civilizations filter. You can start looking at the solar system data and you might be able to see some patterns about what they like. Okay. Because that's all, this is all very, very deterministic. The only stuff that isn't off the top of my head is the actual like.
00:27:07 walk-around ant simulation. Everything else in this is totally rules-based, super deterministic, which makes it great to work with long-term. So they pick places. Oh, did this? Oh my God. He snagged this. All right, go for it. So then after they pick where they want to start, we run the ant simulation again with...
00:27:35 Their set of preferences. And we do this roughly in the order that each of these factions would have come into the frontier. So first set of humans comes in, they make their claims. Then the next set comes in.
00:27:50 And they walk around. And sometimes they will step on each other. Nice. Very good. And this is how a war happens. And one of the fun things when we were building this out was we knew we wanted to simulate conflict in history. Because humans are very good at starting wars with each other. But it was a question of like, oh, how do we approach this? And then we were running the...
00:28:18 Simulation once we got it in and we noticed that the ants were like removing each other's claims just because of the way the code was written. They were removing each other's claims and then not like moving in because they weren't allowed to claim something that had already been claimed but because of the very early way the code was written they would still delete stuff.
00:28:47 We went, oh, we can get so much of this literally at claim time. So we added a bunch of additional stuff about like, okay, if you see something that's claimed, you can ignore it, you can do all these other things. And then we built a war simulation. Okay. Literally that runs like when the ants are walking over each other and they want to make a claim, if there's a conflict, they will literally start a war.
00:29:16 Yeah. And we track all of these habitation events. So the first claim, we get a record of it and then we, so we get a record of it and save that. And then anytime anyone else comes in and tries to take it, we make a record of it and we track even like how much damage has been done in total to that particular area. And
00:29:40 Everybody has a different threshold at which they'll go like, okay, I can't live here anymore. Gotcha. Okay. So there are pockets in the universe right now where you can go in there and if you pay close attention to the way the map is laid out, you will notice that it seems kind of weird how places are named relative to everything else in the universe. Yeah. And that's one of the ways we're trying to show off like.
00:30:08 History has happened here. People wanted to live here and they wanted to live here too much to the point that they blew it up. Yeah. Went real scorched earth on that area. Yeah. And then so after we do all this simulation that's when we go in and put all the names down and the names are right now I think the clearest thing we have for where some of these major historical events happened. There's a little bit more
00:30:35 We're going to hopefully do with those this production cycle. But yeah, right now this is how the universe, the literal structural foundation of the game gets built. Okay. And again, all these names are based on cultural values that sometimes line up, sometimes don't perfectly line up with like...
Iterationen der Simulation und zukünftige Verbesserungen
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00:31:02 their preferences for where they get placed. And this is, yeah, a way for us to show habitation history. Cool. So this is... This is a pretty early iteration of this, wasn't it? Yeah, this was... We'd gotten all the war stuff in, and I think this was one we almost went with until the physics simulation needed to change. Yeah. And then because the physics simulation changed, we had...
00:31:30 Even though we didn't change any of the parameters on the history simulation, where everybody ended up was completely different. Because again, it's like if you are doing all of this based on like everybody knows...
00:31:44 Das ist interessant.
00:32:09 uh england uh and and and you know much of the rest of the world is the same way so it's cool to see that reflected here as well yeah exactly and it's like and this is sort of what i was trying to get at with the whole history volume thing is like
00:32:23 Where people live is dependent on the geography and our geography is like solar systems and simulated physics for where those solar systems are, what's in them, how they form. Cool. And that all is going to dramatically impact like where people want to live or where people can even live.
00:32:44 And then this was another iteration of this from when I think we finally loaded a version of the universe from all this simulation into the game. And realized that because of the way the filter chooses colors, we're going to have a problem. It's absolutely horrible. This is not just two different groups, to be clear. So you can see three of them. One of them is really hard to see because they don't really like...
00:33:13 exist very much. But there are four factions on there. There are just two of them because of the way it calculates colors are almost the same. And we're gonna try and change that. So after we do all of this foundational history work, we need to uplift it and show it off in a more like
00:33:41 Characterful way than just here is a name. That's all we got. So this is much more of like a work in progress and it's a lot of like stuff that we can do that we're still building out tooling and especially like just content. Yeah. Because we can we have so much data. We have so much really cool data and now it's a lot of just
00:34:08 Figuring out exactly how to use it and how to really show off all the history that's happened. Let me ask you a second question. You may get to this and I'm just getting a little bit ahead of myself here. But obviously we do not have nearly as much content as we are hoping to have in the game at some point. And that includes location, structures, megastructures, points of interest, all these kinds of things. Is the work that you're doing now allowing you to...
00:34:37 So in terms of adding it, this is all about placement. So this is basically going, this is building us tools where we can say we want something here. It's really easy to put something in this location or this set of locations. That's what this is about. This isn't as much about like
00:35:05 Okay. So, and these are two separate things, even if we've occasionally conflated them. Placement and distribution is a separate problem from the actual, like, individual piece of content. Okay. And this is all about how do we place it and how do we keep that consistent and tied directly into the history. Gotcha.
00:35:33 Because this is basically like our way of pulling out interesting things from the simulation, like really highlighting them and putting a spotlight on them or bringing stories out from the history itself or expanding on things from the simulation. And to do that in a sustainable way, we have to...
00:35:59 So this is a very, very high-level view of the way that we approach automating it. Gotcha. Okay. And so all of this is through site placement. And there's two general ways we can place stuff. There's making landmarks, which are fixed locations that are always going to be somewhere. This is a screenshot of me messing around. This was just the other day, wasn't it? Yeah, this was me doing some wild...
00:36:29 Placement for one of the sites that we've wanted for a while to be a landmark, but haven't had time. So we've been spending some time trying to figure out based on what we wanted to see with it narratively and some of the concepts we have. Placing it in a way that was very different than the general way we've been placing stuff to make it.
00:36:54 Es ist mehr wahr, dass etwas strange ist, und diese Dinge nicht normal sind. Sie haben eine weirde Perspektive, die du hast zu finden, wie es ist, andere Dinge, die wir werden mit dem, um, Distributing Content weitergehen. So, das ist eine Vektor für es. Und wir werden also versuchen, viel mehr...
00:37:22 Fixed locations in the world as time progresses, because landmarks are really important. Both for navigation and making places feel like they're places. So this is one way of doing it. And then the other way of doing it is more of what we call distribution. It's all distribution, but when we say distribution, we mean more of like...
00:37:49 There's sets of regions, sets of solar systems, and we want to place certain things into these areas. And this is going to be a huge focus for us, this production cycle, based on everything that I've been hearing.
00:38:06 Ja, so one of the big things.
00:38:34 We really want to work on and a lot of this was just due to circumstances. Because of how much information we have, we had to figure out even like how we could extract that information and then build that into distribution. So a lot of that work was happening when we were needing to wrap stuff up.
00:39:01 The impact of that is the way a lot of things are distributed right now is just like.
00:39:08 To get something in there. Yeah. And what we want to really do going forwards is really get these distributions and get our systems for distributing things to a place where anytime we have to tweak something about the universe and the history generation or the physics simulation, that will then
00:39:32 ...almost automatically take anything that we've decided we want it to be in this specific kind of place... ...and just move it to where it needs to be after we fix it. Okay. And does that automatically? There's no extra input needed from you? There'll probably need to be a little bit. Sure. But the dream... ...the dream is that we basically can just do...
00:39:57 The locations will be tied so directly into the history and physics stuff that we won't have to do too much hand tweaking of it at some point. I've got a couple questions from chat. Actually, some really good questions from Damon Zell. Shout out to Damon Zell. He asks about these factions as if they were ferals. I think these are human factions, just to start. Yeah, these are... Prehistory, or not prehistory, but old history, ancient history.
Fraktionen, Kriege und Spielmechaniken
00:40:25
00:40:25 Der Original Settlers. Ja, diese sind die Menschen, die in der Frontier leben in der Frontier before you. So, looking at this then, the question, just to rephrase his question, and without obviously giving anything away, there's a lot of information that we're still not going to tell people about the history of the Frontier. You have to suss up for yourself at some point. Just to be more broad then.
00:40:46 Are the different factions of these groups, where the faction is different numerically? Or is there one faction that is hunted more by others? Or is one that is more rare? Is one bigger than the others? I assume that is true. Yeah, so you can see that in-game right now. One of them is very, very rare. I think they're in...
00:41:12 Two or three regions. And they were in a couple more. So you can literally see this all on the map. Because there's the two that look almost the same. Sorry about that. Blame Eve for that one. Blame Eve for a lot of things. Because there's the two that are almost the same. And they take up a lot of space. And they were. They want to take up a lot of space. And then there's the.
00:41:42 Other two, one of them kind of exists a lot on the edges. They also have like one little outpost of theirs in the middle. And then there's the super, super rare one and they live in between a couple people. Yeah. And because of the way all the preferences, like everybody's preferences work, it usually happens that
00:42:08 Whoever was there first loses the most territory. Really? So if you want to make a game out of the history simulation, you want to go last. Yeah, you want to be the last man in. Because you at least can take stuff over more easily. But then the flip side of that is there's a risk of you will enter someplace that already had a war and yeah, you want to live there, but someone's...
00:42:38 right now living there right and if you start a war nobody gets it because you you will have just like annihilated the habitability of that there's a follow-up question by the same guy Damon Zell and I actually want to amend this one a little bit too because I also have a question about this his question was during the simulation was there one faction that attacked more so than the others and my fault to that is did you notice a significant
00:43:06 Defender's advantage at all? Or is it something that just didn't really manifest? So it usually happened that whoever showed up to the Frontier last attacked the most people because naturally there's more stuff that's been claimed. So they're more likely to start a war with someone. Sure. You're not starting a war against nobody if there's nobody else in the... Yeah, it's like, well, someone already lives someplace you want. Right.
00:43:35 So your options are ignore it or start a war. And because of the way these civilizations work, usually they will start a war. Okay, cool. And...
00:43:48 So we... The way that the war simulation happens is pretty abstracted. And the way that we've kind of thought about it is it's more like the Hundred Years War sort of thing where it's like this region was fought over basically for time and complexity reasons. We're not going to simulate like...
00:44:16 literally every single tiny little war that happens because at a certain point it can be useful but it you get diminishing returns pretty quickly on like that granularity of stuff um so the defender attacker advantage some of a lot of that was really baked into like how the factions
00:44:43 So there's less of like a defender attacker advantage versus like are they
00:44:53 Like, are they collectively doing more damage to each other and the surrounding area than they would want to live in? Okay. And the answer to that is often yes. One more quick question, and I know we're getting close on time. We're probably going to do a part two of this stream, because I know that you have a lot left in this slide deck. Oh, actually. Almost? I'm almost done with the slides. Are you really? Yeah. Oh, hell yeah, we almost nailed it.
00:45:21 Well, then I guess one very quick question, then we'll finish this up. And that question is, when you're putting your ants out there and you're having them interact with each other, are they all given the same starting personality conditions? So they all want and ask for different things? We have them care about overlapping stuff a lot of the time. A lot of them care about being near gates.
00:45:47 It's nice to live next to a game. Yeah, absolutely. You know how nice it is to be in an infrastructure part of the town, part of the galaxy, not the town. It's good to live near a road. So it's like they have overlapping preferences, but nobody has identical preferences. Okay. And that way, so like sometimes the first faction that shows up will literally get completely wiped out because
00:46:12 Everybody's overlapping preferences mean everybody attacks them. And sometimes they'll be like a little pocket in the current galaxy where they will have eked out a little bit of existence still. Okay, cool. So just to really quickly wrap up. Yeah, go ahead. And some of the things we can show off with the...
00:46:41 Ja, so we can do migration routes.
00:47:08 And if they want to go explore somewhere, or if they historically explored somewhere, we can highlight that. Basically, similar idea of someone was interested in this thing, they went over there, and we can literally show off where they went. And then another thing we can do is, because that's more pathfinding-y, so if you're familiar with AI character behaviors, this is like...
00:47:36 You have a navmesh, pathfind across the navmesh. We have a galaxy that's a graph. We can pathfind and show off like these people took this exact route. Okay, cool. And then we can do things with expansions. So instead of it being like a single path, we can show like where anyone, instead of...
00:48:03 Trying to go to a specific place, just wanted to explore outward, like wherever they currently were. So we can do that. And then using a similar set of tech for that, we can also say like, ah, we noticed that this thing would have been here if it existed, but is destroyed for XYZ reason. Is it supposed to stay there or did it drift in some direction?
00:48:30 Do you, I guess the, sorry, just to ask a question about things that you've noticed as you've been watching the simulation over and over again. Do you see significant changes to the map as it develops over time? Does it feel like groups kind of get to one place and they just kind of hunker down? Or does it feel like they will kind of move around as needs want? With the way that it's built, they'll usually...
00:48:58 Excuse me, they'll usually settle pretty quickly. And some of this is also dependent on like how far they're allowed to go because they're like with the ant simulation, there's certain things that are hard to get it to want to do. Sure. So like if you release them and say you only start in one place, they have a harder time getting really, really far. So we have to, if we want that effect.
00:49:27 um in the simulation that will look different um and also if we constrain them too much like they aren't gonna do more than just settle where they're allowed to cool um and then i think and yeah we have plenty more we can do with this in the future so oh yeah the main takeaway from all of this is the locations
00:49:55 One last question from chat, this comes to us from Aki
00:50:22 What up Aki? Wants to know how much of this will continue to play out after the Riders show up or is the purpose mainly to generate the world and then let the players take things from there? So the like civilization simulation is all pre-Rider and some of that is practical limitations because anytime we change anything about the universe data we have to like delete the entire
00:50:49 Das ist etwas, was das alles verändert hat. Das ist etwas, was in response zu den Riders. Das ist etwas, was wir wirklich wollen, insbesondere wenn es zu Ferales kommt.
00:51:19 They aren't forgotten in here, but we're still trying to decide exactly how they fit in and where we want them with everything. The Ferals too are kind of a post-civilization issue. Yeah, so as far as the universe data, they won't be in the universe data in that history the same way as human civilizations. But what that does mean is...
00:51:47 There's a lot more ability for them to react to whatever's going on. Yeah, cool. Whereas for all the human civilizations, they're dead. They're not reacting to anybody. They're not doing anything else at this point. Cool. If you are curious about procedural generation, here are some resources from some wonderful people in the field. Hell yeah.
00:52:13 Thanks for having me. Absolutely. I'm thrilled to death. We're definitely going to do this again. Especially once we start talking about when we get more content into the game and we have more stuff that we can put places, people are going to inevitably ask, how did that stuff end up where it ended up? History simulation. History simulation. CCP overload history simulation. Wow. Wonderful. Thank you.
Abschluss und Ausblick
00:52:4100:52:41 Okay, well, listen, gang, we are just about done here. Here in just a few minutes, we'll be swapping over to Live to Feed with the Eve Online Community Team. But before we do that, I did promise that we are going to show off the winners from our social media giveaway. We picked nine. Do you have a... Oh, he's ready to go. And those nine are...
00:53:14 I forgot to put a microphone in that scene. Wonderful, thank you. Just read those names. I'm going to go back real quick. Read those names. Pretend my voice is there.
00:53:32 Wonderful. Thank you. Appreciate that, gang. That was splendid. Okay, folks, that's it for us today. Like I said, Live to Feed starts in about 12 minutes. Wonderful, yes. We'll be doing that here shortly. Until next week, I have been CCP Yoten, joining along to my very good friend.
00:53:50 And again, crack out, not cracked out, sorry. Crack! I mean, sometimes I feel like that. Yeah, no shit. You and me both. My very good friend, CCB Dramaturg, narrative designer for E-Frontier. Excellent. And just again, because CCB Goodfellow would be unhappy if I didn't do it. Thank you all so much. We'll see you on the Frontier. And alike.
00:54:15 Fuck, this is the dumbest fucking show. I swear to God. Alright, and we're out.