The developers explain dynamic AI navigation and Moon Collider's reactive AI for ships, planetside characters and boarding actions. They also cover hangar and landing fees, salvage rules, collectible-style achievements, DirectX 12/Mantle support, the Scythe's hangar status and dogfighting module testing.
Whenever stuff changes, it's recomputed on the fly. And we try and bring that dynamic approach to everything we do. We don't want the AI to be too controlled. We want it to react sensibly to the player. So designers can't specify every single thing this AI will do. We just give it, these are your objectives, do them in an intelligent way and react to the player itself.
So I'm not talking about Xbox 360 achievements where it's just a ding, you just killed your 20th guy or something. The way that Chris looks at achievements is more in the sense of you can do unique things that nobody else does. Like, you could find a jump point and navigate it. You could kill a certain bad guy. That kind of thing.
The Dread Pirate Roberts, for instance, yes. It's an excellent example. And those kind of things would show up in the Collectopedia. It's like, you did this thing, and you're the one who did that. As far as other types of things you would think of as achievements in other games, there are going to be things you can collect if you travel around the universe. Like fish.
Well, technically, we have been testing the dogfighting module at all the studios. So yes, we have been testing it at different studios. There is not an official Top Gun yet, although when pressed, Chris did say he is not the best pilot.
Not just yet. We're not completely there yet. I think we've got, and we can ask Jason about this later, but I think there's one big blocker bug that we're trying to get with a spawn issue that's stopping us from testing. But the server is up. This is close, very close.
So basically, for all you people out there who already have your ships, we're going to give you hangar space. We've already said this before. So hangar fees are for when you need additional hangar space. So if you're visiting somewhere where your main hangar is not, for instance. So when you go to land on a planet, then you pay your landing fee and you can leave your ship there temporarily.
Exactly. And then you can leave your ship there temporarily, run over to the store and grab the guns you want and leave again. Or if you need to store something on that planet, then you could actually rent a hangar space more permanently. So you could have hangars all over the place, but you'll only pay for ones after the first one.
No, of course not. I mean, if they've already died and there are pieces of their ship floating in space, fair game. Free for all. But don't do any premature salvaging. That's when it's considered stealing. If the guy's floating around in the EVA suit, if the guy's still flying around in the ship, that would be considered stealing.
Well, of course, since we're not starting out with free roam planets, then it won't be as exciting to bring your buggy to another planet. But eventually, you'll probably drive your vehicles around another planet.
Yes. Actually, we are sending several of our programmers out to GDC specifically to go to sessions on that, among other things. And so they're obviously going to be evaluating the tech. We intend to stay up with current graphics technology, so I can't see why we wouldn't.
So it's done on the outside, but there's a lot more to it than that. I mean, we need to get HUD in there. We need the animations for opening and getting into the ship. There's still a little bit more to be done on the interior, plus the lighting and things like that. So when those things are done, you will see the Scythe in your hangar. It's not like we're holding it back on you just because we don't feel like putting it in. It's coming to you. We like to put things that you can interact with in there rather than just jumping up and down.
I'm not sure about scooters per se. But A, you're going to have jets on your space suit. So you can jet around in space just in your suit. So you're going to actually get to see a preview of that in the dogfighting module.
It's very dynamic in that it will adjust to situations that change, such as in the demo videos that you saw where the crates fell and the characters moving actually changed where they were moving and changed where they walked to, used different things for cover.
So it'll give itself a new hierarchy all the time based on what's going on in the scene. And that's also what's going on in space as well. Like I saw the bit where they'll avoid each other. There'll be a collision situation that they'll be able to avoid.
In the future, they'll see the character-based AI with characters on planetside and such moving around. But then they'll also get to see it in the first-person shooter aspects, like with boarding actions and such, where you have squad-based AI and multiple characters in combat and reacting in a realistic manner during the shipboarding.
We even have it where as the economy of a planet changes, the characters you might see on the planet and the different jobs they're doing will change based on the changes to that economy. So then you'll see you might have a different AI controlling that character because they have a completely different profession or the economy of the planet is going up or down.