Calling All Devs - Practical Behaviors

Yeah, a lot of stuff I can't talk about right now, though. But we're also looking at the combat AI, looking at what the next steps are, looking at what we have right there, trying to tighten that up, give it more of a sense of action, of urgency, looking at how they react to certain things that you do and how they counter those, being able to give them more of a feel of enemy combatants and less of a, if you will, a gamey or AI result.

Combat AI, some version of that's been in place since Arena Commander first launched with the original Vanduul Swarm, but I think we're all ready for it to progress and for it to continue to evolve to be everything that we know it can be, especially with Squadron 42.

Well, from our side, what we're really focusing on right now is the ground-based combat AI. So that would be your enemy pirate characters that you saw at CitizenCon and things like that. And those bring across different challenges in dealing with the various animation systems, how characters juke and jive, how they start, they run, they go up and down things that are unique to characters in, say, a ground-based environment or a skeletal environment in like a human or something like that, that don't exist on the ship AI, which has its own particular challenges.

So there's nothing I want to commit to publicly at this point. Obviously, we concepted the Defender in the UK; we're building it in Austin now. We're building the Merchantman in the UK, or we'll be building it. So the designs of the two, we've built in some nice features that both physically and sort of gameplay-wise tie the two together, and we've got some options there. We need to build the Defender first before we lock down which of those options we go on. But when we do, we'll talk about that probably in the ATV about the Merchantman.

This is one of those times where we don't want to get anybody's hopes up. We're pursuing a couple different avenues. I'm going to take this on me here for a second. Looking at doing this, looking at doing that, looking at this. And any time we shared in the past all the breadth of those things and then we only pick one of those three, we've disappointed two thirds of the audience who were hoping for the other two. Kind of stuff like that. So we'll share that stuff with you guys when we have a better idea which direction we're actually going. And of course, the only constant in game development is change. It's never going to be 100%, but we do try to be responsible with the state that the information is in before we do share it. So it's still a little too early to share that. But I did want to address the question because it was a good way to share that kind of information and remind folks that all Star Citizen information has to hit certain kind of milestones of reliability before we do share them, even though they are still subject to change.

At the very least, the Defender is designed to defend the Merchantman, including the name. So it's specific to defending that ship.

So current state of that is we are going to internally, this next quarter, so quarter four, we're going to be using the Terrapin, which people probably played around with in-game and seen that behind the hatches there are components. So those are just hand-placed brushes at the moment. They're not the actual physical components, but this quarter we're going to be replacing those with the actual live working components and then hooking them back up. There were a bit of technical issues we had that meant we couldn't do it before. We're now sort of getting on top of those and the US vehicle feature team are going to be going through the rest of those hopefully this quarter. So that's step one of physically putting the items in the ships and connecting them up to the ships. Then the next step is using all the interaction and carrying stuff. We saw that at CitizenCon, picking stuff up, rotating it around; that's the next step for physically taking those things in and out. And because they'll be on item ports in the ship, when you disconnect it, it disconnects it from the ship, so you get that gameplay. And then if you've got spare ones, like you've decided to buy one and carry an item around, for example, and just left it in your ship, you'll be able to swap them out in there. That's sort of like running repairs sort of gameplay. In reality, most people are going to try and limp to a port to use the proper UI interfaces. But we're going to actively be working on that in the next quarter. It's not going to be ready for a public release in the next quarter. It'll be sometime next year. But yes, we're starting to look at it. And then once we've done that single use case on the Terrapin, that's where we can go wide. We want to get that one ship working properly, prove out all the tech, prove out any of the niggles that we need to solve before we go and do it on something like the size of the Reclaimer.