Can you give us an update on Squadron 42 AI and where it is at right now?

So, as you guys probably already know, AI is exactly the same between PU and Squadron, in the sense that we use the same system, we tend to use the same type of behavior structure, we tend to use the same core functionalities. So right now our major focus is split between our three subsystems, sub-teams: we have social, ship, and combat. The social team is mostly focused on improving the stability of our usable system, and how we can improve our pipeline to allow designers to construct and build new behaviors, new content very quickly for Squadron. For example, creating scenes that are required for the story in a much more efficient way compared to what we were doing before, allowing multiple disciplines to work at the same time, like cinematics with level design and so on. Ship has been, in the past year, one major point of improvement for us. We've been working very closely with the physics guys to get to the new 3D pathfinding functionality that we just released in 3.8, and we are going to release new updates in 3.9. 3D pathfinding basically doesn't use any of the classic approach to AI pathfinding. We didn't want AI to have the requirement of building new knowledge about the system, evaluating physics, creating our own graph, and then parsing it to find a point A to point B path. What we wanted to do was to use as much as possible the information we already have, even to optimize performance. So we use the SDF from physics, so the distance field calculation, to understand which objects we have near us, and then we start from the assumption that we can fly anywhere, and then we just need to find the best approach to reach that location. And then we fly around in our close environment, avoiding obstacles, avoiding terrain, avoiding planets, avoiding asteroids. And this is also very important for collision avoidance, to predict where ships are going to move and so on. So this is a major improvement that we released, and it's going to be part of Squadron. Also, for example, to have cases where a ship is leading another ship, or a ship is leading the player, or the player is leading the AI. Then we have FPS combat, which has had its main focus on the refactor of the combat behavior. What we wanted to achieve was a behavior that was very modular. So we structure the behavior so that we have different tactics that can be performed, and those tactics are also able to handle cases where we want to, I don't know, reload because we don't have enough bullets for the next tactic we want to use, or we have different weapons. If we have a shotgun, we want to use specific approach techniques, but if we have a rifle, we want to do something different. Besides that, the team has been focusing a lot on improving the cover generation system, so now we have not only cover locations, but also what we call gray covers, which are covers that are good if nothing better is around, pretty much. So we can use basically any geometry of the environment to progress, letting the AI get close to the player. And then we are also improving the perception system. We want to use more information from the room system to propagate audio around and make sure that the AI reacts correctly to the player.