SC is not about NPCs? Players are slated to be 10% of the living world. They have spent the past two years designing and then putting in R&D the tech to make a very compelling AI that has a life cycle and memory of your relationship to them. When not in any visual capacity to other players the AI will exist primarily in the economy simulation where they actively interact with one another. They will get into trouble or even die all at a very high level while no players are around. When players come into visual distance the economy server would spawn the NPCs in question based on the high level data it has and at that point the player will be able to interact with them. I can't even think of another game that has a similar level of detail planned for its AI.
I'm sure everyone can decide once they are done if they succeeded or failed but to say SC is not about NPCs is just plain wrong.
Also the AI has been pushed to the German engine team to integrate it into the larger Subsumption feature.
From today's Monthly Report on Star Citizen: August 2016
Foundry 42 DE
AI
The AI team made a big push on the navigation system to allow designers to setup navigation meshes in different object containers. A navigation area placed inside an object container will now be loaded at run-time, and it will connect to the right zone and the right local physics grid.
In the image you can see the navigation mesh on the landing pad, in Blue, and the one attached to the zone and local grids of the Constellation. We also worked on fixing several bugs related to the characters moving on non z-up surfaces, we still have some work to do there but things are progressing nicely.
We are now consolidating the usage of GUID for all the elements inside our Subsumption Editor and the actual core code, so that we can allow designers a large amount of flexibility when changing names of variables or renaming activities and subactivities, all without breaking any logic. We also introduced several new tasks that are now available to the design team:
- SelectTarget: this node allows an NPC to select a perceived object/character as a target.
- TokenScope: this node allows designers to specify the maximum amount of NPCs that can execute a specific section of the logic.
- ReserveScope: this node allows an NPC to reserve an object for the duration of a specific action.
- IsEntityPlayer: this node allows an NPC to distinguish between an AI character and a Player character.
- IsTargetWithinDistance: this node allows the designer to create a specific logic when the target is within a specific distance.
Over the last month we began moving the combat activity into Subsumption, so that we can start the complete unification of the human behaviors under the Subsumption system.
Regarding the perception system, we can now enable NPCs to track both friendly and hostile characters, allowing us to craft more complex relaxed behaviors. We also submitted the first pass on the Large Object Vision map, this is a very similar system to the normal vision map we use, but oriented towards tracking large objects as capital ships.
The Cover System received the same love as the Navigation System, we completed the first pass to allow designers to properly setup cover surfaces in different object containers and load the cover data connecting it to the proper zone and local grid.
