When can we expect to see NPC pilots flying their own trade routes or responding to player-created beacons? Is there a particular roadmap item this falls under?
TL;DRAI traders are estimated for somewhere around 3.5 or 3.6, after current work on combat variety and AI travel groundwork, and the AI roadmap may not call this out specifically.
All right, so the estimation for that is somewhere around 3.5, 3.6 of actually having AI traders in the game, because we're focused right now on actually getting more diversity into combat, because right now everyone behaves kind of the same and we want to have gunships behave differently to fighters to other things. And we're also working on some groundwork for the AI to actually travel diverse. So that means QT linking, having landing and takeoff in hangars and all these shenanigans. And if this groundwork is done, hopefully it will be not much additional work to get the AI actually picking up cargo and dropping it on the way. So you players have something to raid and loot, hopefully.
Now, players who follow the RSI roadmap up on robertsspaceindustries.com will notice that we recently expanded out and showed 3.5, quarter 1 2019. So as we go through each quarter, we will continue to expand. So keep an eye out on that. You'll see something like that. But most of these AI features probably fall under the overall AI roadmap, though. So you may not see a specific call-out on that as we're building out smaller parts here and there.