Diego · AI Programmer, Flight Combat

I can take this one, yeah. I think the technology is already there, because I know a lot of people ask the question: is it a concept? Is it already working? We've got the technology there. We're currently using that in-game at the moment for some capital ships and even for the turrets that you see in the bunkers or outside the stations. We essentially have this AI module that communicates with various items in the game, like the flight controller, and they can pass inputs to it, same with the turrets. In terms of bringing it to the players, I think, Francesco, you probably can answer that better.

Francesco Roccucci · AI Director

I mean, yeah, I think we have even some ATCs actually using the AI module in Star Citizen since quite a while. Because basically the idea is that, as everything in the spaceships works, right, where you have items attached to other items, we do have this special item that we call the AI module, that is kind of a blade; the lore is a blade. Basically, you can execute logic, right? You can run specific logic for the operation that it needs to perform. And I think right now, basically, yes, we're going to wrap up these things a bit better. And I think the majority of the work, obviously, is how we want to expose it to the players, how you can buy them, how you can take them and attach them to your ship. So it's a lot more now about how the player interaction, the player loop, is going to be on the blades. But basically on the other side, we did have enough progress in the past year to have that pretty much ready, to have all the basic functionality to support that on our side. So obviously, again, our feature needs to be wrapped around a lot of teams, not just the AI functionality, and that's where we are at right now. But yeah, an AI module, again, right: blades that control the turret, blades that can control the pilot seats, blades that can control... And as everything that we do, right, this runs just our Subsumption behaviors. That means that we can apply traits. We can apply skill levels to those. So you can buy a good blade, a bad blade, and the designers can configure what a good blade means or what a bad blade means. Or a good turret blade that is maybe hitting more often because you paid more money, I don't know. Or a pilot one, different personalities of those blades, right? So that it can also do some special maneuvers and that costs more, or the one that is a bit more conservative and that can just help you piloting your ship. Maybe you're not even going to fight that much, and you just want to have something that you can control and give commands to autopilot somewhere. And this is what we can be seeing.