EDIT: The AMA has ended. Thank you all so much for your fantastic questions! The team has to get back to work now, but we had a great time hanging out with y'all today and can't wait to share more as development on Quantum continues! Happy Wednesday, everyone. Welcome to our AMA on Quantum! We're joined today by Senior Technical Designer Jake Muehle [@jake-cig], as well as the usual suspects from the Community Team. We've opened up the thread a bit early to collect questions - Jake will join us at 11AM Pacific to dig into your questions. We're also joined by Gamerizon devs Martin Lizee and Robert Lizee, the engineering force behind Quantum and the ever-so-awesome Starmap, who will answer questions through Jake. Quantum is the behind-the-scenes system that will allow Star Citizen devs to create and manage a realistic and dynamic universe through in-world actions by NPCs. Quantum has access to all backend services and actively manipulates game data in real-time to adjust to the needs of the star system in question. Quantum works through observing the actions of hundreds of thousands of lightweight NPCs called Quanta. Each Quanta has its own desires, skills, jobs, and inventory, but without the overhead of things like pathfinding, animations, or even geometry. Quanta represent the rich background world of Star Citizen that the player is a part of, and Quantum will use these Quanta to create contextually appropriate NPCs or events for the player to interact with. The system allows us to add resources and locations of interest that will spur Quanta to move about the star system, complete tasks, and affect those actions by adjusting variables (ex. resource refinery time, wages at factories). Quanta will be making the same choices as players make, choosing between jobs like mining, security, or even piracy. .Like players, Quanta will also generate mission content, such as an NPC stranded after a pirate attack who will call for your help with a service beacon. The real magic with Quantum is that it’s not just an NPC simulator--player actions will feed back into the system to influence what kinds of jobs, trades, and actions all the Quanta choose to take. Player choices and activity are all fed back to Quantum to influence the behavior of the world real-time and make the world a living, reactive place. With ambitions as big as Star Citizen, Quantum is the tool that will keep the development team ahead of the game and focused on balancing the universe so that it’s always full of engaging content and still internally consistent. We’re thrilled to finally be taking this step that we’ve been planning for a long time. We could write pages here and it wouldn't even begin to scrape the surface of how cool and complex this system is. Before jumping into this AMA, we'd highly recommend catching up on all things Quantum with Tony Zurovec & Jake Muehle's CitizenCon Panel and checking out the attached screenshots of the system below. Got a question? Great! Drop it in the comments below! POSTING GUIDELINES Questions should be relevant to the topic of this AMA. Only one question per post. Do not make use of special formatting in an attempt to draw more attention, and therefore more votes, to your questions i.e. BOLD, H1, etc. No "when" questions. All information we have about the intended release of any feature is represented on the Public Roadmap. Posts violating these guidelines or the subjects of the broadcast may be deleted, as may in-line replies. Have fun!