AI are clearly becoming smarter and responding to more situations, but will they start communicating with each other about their actions, warning each other of threats, even if the friendly AI is outside of their vocal audio distance? Would they use radios?

Yeah, we've been making quite a lot of strides recently, joining up with lots of teams, the audio and dialogue teams, to get more consistent usage of the wildlines across both Squadron 42 and Star Citizen. And very specifically on the point to do with radios, we have quite a few of those scenarios within some of the levels in Squadron 42, but they're mainly scripted, where there's stealth levels where if you get detected by them, or if you kill someone silently, do a stealth takedown, and then they discover the body and you haven't hidden it somewhere, then they'll radio on to their leader, and that changes the flow of the level from stealth to a much more combat-based level. So they've been very scripted so far. We have had quite a few discussions about making that much more systemic and generic, but we haven't got too far on that, but there are definitely some great benefits to doing that, because one thing, for example, is that if you know who your squad mates are, you know who to call out for when, for example, somebody's gone down. You'll notice if they're missing, if they're walking around a level and the response doesn't come back, that kind of stuff, and get that more systemic behavior from some of the stealth sections as well. And I'd like to see that more in Star Citizen as well.

It also becomes important with the organization system. As the organization reputation system gets further developed in Star Citizen, we talked about that a lot with Pyro, there are going to be NPC people at Rough and Ready and stuff like this. As you kill them or attack them, your reputation with them starts to go down. They become more aggressive and stuff. There should, of course, be opportunities where you can assault one in private and nobody finds out. But there should also be situations where they get off a radio message before you kill them and you take the necessary rep hit and stuff like that. So there's all kinds of implementations for that radio transmission ability as far as the PU goes that wouldn't necessarily be necessary in Squadron.

But also, in general, the communication, we do have the communication in terms of feature, right? Because right now, if they find that body, right, they will go investigate, they will call out; even if it's not by radio, they will still call out the other ones. And that calling out is what basically allows the other guys to be attracted by the fact that something happened. Or, for example, we do have hearing friendly fire and stuff like this. And these things also propagate correctly through the audio propagation, which I think we maybe spoke about at a certain point, but basically the audio perception on the AI side now does respect the audio propagation. I don't know, Jared, if you remember if it's already in Star Citizen right now or not, but it's definitely one of the things that we'll carry on or bring in the next releases. And we can really say, these are the rooms, you close the door, the audio doesn't propagate there, so you can kill one enemy in a room that is closed, and maybe even if he screams or something like this, if the environment doesn't allow audio to propagate, then the other ones won't be alerted. And if the door is open, they might hear it, and so on. So I think this is actually really interesting in terms of the type of mechanics and opportunities that this opens up for the players.