The universe server was supposed to be used to plot how the unseen NPC's go about their daily routine. Counting how many pirates pillage how many items from areas etc. The game servers would then use that information to populate areas with PC's in for gameplay purposes.
This is just one quote of many from Chris about what the the universe server was supposed to do.
We actually have a full Universe simulation that runs… we actually don't need it to run on any particular bank of servers. It just actually runs on one server, and it simulates about 20 million AI agents. It simulates the AI agents in a very sort of high-level manner. Ok, you've got a mission, you're going to go from here to here, so it's not simulating it on the fidelity level that you would do when you're actually connected to the game and flying around and doing combat maneuvers or flying from point to point, it's simulating it more in the – here's the jobs, here's the missions, here's the market demand, here's the things that are happening – ok, you've taken a mission to take these goods from planet A to planet B, so you've now taken that job off the market. Now you're going to go from planet A to planet B, so that's just a line trace, that trip's going to take, say, whatever it would be, a day of game time, and then along the way there's a chance that you could fight or run into some pirates, and if they do we resolve that combat. If you're not there, kind of more like a dice roll, but if you are there, in the area, this all gets sort of created, spawned in where you are – you will see the result, the actual combat will end up getting spawned in, and you'll see it play out, and the result of it will be fed back to the Universe server simulation. So the Universe simulation keeps track of all the NPC's. It's the one that's dealing with the goods and the markets, the economy nodes, so on various planets there'll be things that produce, things that consume, so there's sort of a very high-level meta AI that's running on the economy simulation. And from that high-level simulation we can track the sort of movement, the populations, the progress of AI, in a sort of much higher-level, abstracted way, and of course since that doesn't need to be real time, like you flying around, we can time slice it, which is why we can simulate so many agents. So, we're not having to do 20 million agents at 30fps at all, so you can update every single agent maybe every 5 minutes, or every 10 minutes, and that's how you can manage so many of them. In the time scale the Universe happens, it doesn't need to be the same sort of fidelity that we do on the game server, which is, that's the one where, in Arena Commander now, if you connect and dogfight with someone, the game server is what's sort of running you and the other clients running, and it's worrying about simulating where the bullets are, and all the ins and outs of the high fidelity flight and the combat. So, essentially the NPC population is mostly simulated. I think that, on some level, we don't necessarily simulate every individual person on a planet, so like a planet would say, okay, here's your general population, and that general population where missions have to happen could spawn certain number of bounty-hunters, or a certain number of traders or haulers or cargo folks. And then they will take their missions and then that particular ship… we sort of simulate the ships, and the missions that are happening on an individual basis, and then when you're on the planet, there'll be a setup of here's the population going up and down, is it things going well on the planet, then if so, more people are arriving there, population's getting bigger, it's expanding, if things aren't doing so well, it'd be the [opposite] one.
But it's a pretty decent, high-level simulation, and that information is then fed to the system servers and the game servers, and that will help determine, when you're flying around, whether or not you will encounter NPC's or not, and whether those NPC's are fighting each other, in conflict, or what's happening. So, one of the cool things is, we'll have a living breathing world happening, irrelevant of how many actual players are playing. So, there could be only one person playing in the Star Citizen Universe – I mean I hope to god not – but if there was, there would still be a living, breathing Universe, people going about their daily lives, trading, being Pirates, being bounty hunters, being miners, all of that sort of stuff. So I think when that all comes online and comes together, I think it'll be very cool. We currently have the Universe Simulation happening on a server, and we have an interface where there's the communication of kind of what you would, this is the kind of thing you would see if you're in this area, and that's all in progress so…
