https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2K1CH22SF8Very interesting discussion about the Persistant Universe / NPC / Interaction programming on this video.
Basically:
The back of house server will be running something like 20 million NPCs for the game universe. These will be generating buy orders, sell orders, be pirates, traders, escorts, etc. They run the 'big picture' and generate / seed the game world in this part of the server. The playerbase will represent hopefully about 10% of the game world.
So say NPC #4500 generates a buy order for 100 tons of steel to be shipped from Earth to Terra, either a player or another NPC will pick up that order and run the delivery. If no players are involved then the mission will complete, or roll a dice maybe to see if it intersects with a pirate or whatever. BUT if no players are in that area then it all happens in server and generates the result and related price and market effects.
BUT, if a player happens to be traveling from Earth to Terra along that same vector when the server says this content is happening then the player will encounter the trade ship being attacked by the pirates or whatever. Say you kill the pirates and help the trader, the results are reported to the higher server, and the NPC pirate is now out of the game, so that route becomes safer, etc.
The idea is to let the players have an effect on the overall game world but not to the extent that they can completely crash markets or shut down the game. I'm not sure how I feel about it but it seems like a neat way to work the system.
The other thing discussed is the dynamic mission content, where they will be making a lot of interlocking mission modules that will spool up on the fly based on your actions, and they are including a nemesis type of system from shadows of mordor, so you will have villians to track and hunt down or nemesis that are against you. Missions will be space and FPS, so you don't always have to pew pew them in space, you could maybe kill the evil pirate's escorts and chase him down to a planet and have a gun fight in a dark alley, etc.
They will also scale mission content for the number of players you are with, so that's fun.
Author
Topic: Star Citizen - from the producer of Wing Commander (Read 131280 times)