As a captain of a large ship like the Constellation, Reclaimer or Starfarer, how will I control NPC pilots and tell them where to fly and where to land?
TL;DRCaptains would give basic queued orders to ships and crew through a strategy-style fleet interface; AI crew may refuse orders based on personality and should explain why, while drones simply obey.
It's the ability to hire NPCs, yes, but that does not necessarily have much to do with how you control them. The control is a separate interface, but I can speak a bit about this. So we initially started looking into this when we realized the capabilities of the Idris and figured out that you have a full crew that you need to control. And also you will be, let's call it the main ship in a fleet, rather than just a single ship dogfighting. So the Idris has this battle sphere, which you guys have seen, that we turned into an interface, joined together with MFDs, but think about it more in the sense of a strategy game. So you can give orders and queue orders for certain ships or internal people. So you can tell, yeah, wing five, attack this target, you protect that ship. So it's basic orders. There's the AI behaviors that will do the heavy work under that. But the basic orders, we need to be able to give whoever is the captain of that ship the chance of commanding stuff in a fleet or commanding stuff inside their ship.
Sorry, just to interrupt, Jared. It should be one of those things where, if you're saying target this person, if you have players in that turret, they're also seeing the same thing.
Yes, they might follow it or might not, because they're players. They do what they want. But they do get: this is your main target because the captain said so. And then you know at least what the fleet wants you to attack. I mean, the same interface we can also use for drones, for example, if you're a ship that has a lot of drones. The difference between a drone and an NPC AI is that, let's say you hire an AI and then you give him an order; based on various skills and traits that he has, he might not take that order, or he might take it and do something completely crazy. So that will be an interesting thing to play with once we add that part of the AI behavior. You will have to know which dude will react badly to a certain situation. If you send a guy to kill himself to save the fleet, you have to make sure that guy actually will follow the order. The drones will just do whatever you tell them to. They have no personality, but AI will have...
It'll be an interesting day when we have to separate: did the AI not do what you told it to do because it was a bug, or did the AI not do what you told it to do because its personality matrix was like, no, I'm not dying for this?
Yeah, but this is where we have logs and we can actually go through them and go like, yep. Also, there will be a lot of feedback. We do not want AI to be just doing things and not telling you why. If he's canceling an order that you gave him, he will tell you. So he will not just quietly cancel that order. He will tell you why, and you will take immediate action to rectify the problem.