SBe: So we were actually talking about this the other day, in that I hate the word AI. And the reason I hate the word AI is because from a code standpoint, an entity goes from point A to point B, and then it goes here, and it goes to point B, and then it goes over there, and it goes to point C or whatever. It can do whatever it wants. It can go down the hallway and immediately turn around, like this, and flip around and go back, because it's an entity. But human beings don't react that way, right? There are decisions that you can make from a code standpoint where you say, my guy is going to strafe to his left. He's holding a rifle. He's going to strafe to his left, and he's going to go up that staircase, right? Anybody who's ever tried to... and if you haven't, get out of your chair right now and go do it. Try and strafe upstairs while pointing something. It doesn't have to be a gun. You can go get a spoon or something. And concentrate on whatever you're pointing at, and try not to fall up the stairs, right? That sort of thing: an entity can do it, a person can't. And the key here is that the animation's job is, in each of the animations, to look like a real person doing something, but then also the animation team's job is to work with the AI programmers and the AI designers to talk about how something that's happening is not what a person's going to do. Like for instance, the other day we had an instance where the pathing code, we noticed, had characters going forward and then they would flip and turn around, come all the way back. And then they would make these hard right 90 degree turns. And the character was doing this and it was coming back, and it looked like one of the most immersion breaking things that has happened. It was like, what the heck? So then we said, okay, well, part of our job in animation is to describe what the AI code is doing in a way that's believable for performance. So why would you go that way and then all of a sudden stop and come directly back? You forgot your keys. So what we do is then we go, okay, well, let's insert an animation there where your character's walking and came back. And when we made that animation and animation programming injected it into the system, all of a sudden what looked like a stupid decision that was being made by the entity looked like a person who forgot his keys and was going back, and you bought it. It was believable.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Creative Content Lead

The AI animation, one of the reasons I really want to get to this topic, is that there are many things that contribute to immersion in a game. And everybody knows one of Star Citizen's big buzzwords is immersion. Having a fantastically drawn environment with a fully realized atmosphere and proper lighting that behaves, those are all insanely important. A soundscape, things echoing the way that you expect them to, voices coming from the direction they're supposed to come, all those things are super important. But when you see non-player characters do that instant 180, unless they're the Queen's Guard in front of Buckingham Palace, it's one of those things that instantly breaks your immersion. So animation is one of those tools that doesn't get the same spotlight that fog and lighting and sound does, but it's absolutely essential to making a place feel alive, to make a place feel believable. I've already seen the YouTube comments while I'm talking, because a lot of folks' perspective is only what's in the PU right now. And of course, we know that such a big focus is on Squadron 42 at the moment. But I want to talk a little bit about what I've seen in Squadron 42: the life cycles, the people who roam the halls, the janitors who sit there and they mop, and then they kind of stop and they think for a second. Oh, my lost keys, I've got to go back and do this. The people in the mess hall who are going down and they get this and they get this and they kind of think for a second: okay, no, I'm going to get this. It's those moments, just those tiny moments of, I don't know what you call them, that animation insert, that consideration or whatever. It's the difference between a ship that seems pristine, oh, that's a nice model, and suddenly now it's a place that's lived in.

SBe: It's about thought, right? So when I talk about that, I try not to use the word AI a lot, and I try and use character or people or Doug Johnson or something like that, right? It's about keeping in mind that the people moving through, the entities moving through the world are supposed to be people. And in fact, we were just talking about it today: someone was using a locker, and the character goes up and the animation stops. And then he opens the locker, and it was like, why is he doing that? Well, because of... No, no, no. I don't need for you to tell me how many frames are there, the technical reason why. Tell me why he just stopped and stared at that locker. Get rid of the pause, right? Let's cut that out. Let's trim that together. Let's make that flow. We had another example where there were people picking up crates and moving them, and we have to have a technical point in the behavior where the AI needs to check where it's going to go next, where it's going to path to next. And where they had placed that point, with the myriad of different fragments that they had that contained animations, was after the guy picked up the box. And so he picked up the box and stood there like this, and then walked off. It was sort of like, once you get over the age of 40, if any of your viewers have experienced that, you have these moments all the time. But we talked about where we could... okay, if it needs to happen there, you could have the box there and sort of look around: where am I supposed to go with this? Or we could shift it earlier. So we come in, we acquire the box, or we know what box we're going to use. We pull out a data pad. And as we're doing this, the AI's pathfinding to where it needs to go. The second it finishes, we put the data pad away, pick the box up and move. So how do you hide those sort of choice points or those pathing issues that the AI need to make? They're not as big of an issue when you have a game that is local, but when you have servers and those times that are happening, you do need something to sort of hide that that answer hasn't come back yet, and it needs to look like a performance. It needs to look like a thinking person.