Another week means another Around The Verse episode. The developers at Cloud Imperium Games updated gamers on a number of massive alterations and upgrades being made to Star Citizen.

The episode starts by covering some of the upgrades and improvements being made to the overall gameplay, including the improved shader passes for more realistic looking rendering, and procedurally generated food systems.

Additionally, one of the capital ships is so large that the team had to completely alter the inner traversal aspects of the ship after receiving complaints from players. This included adding vertical elevators to get from lower levels to the upper decks. There are also lateral transportation methodologies to help whiz players from one end to the other quickly, hence the team designed a monorail system inside the capital ship. How crazy is that?

They don’t talk much about what’s new coming to alpha 3.1 given that it was supposed to be out this week, but it appears as if that’s not happening.

What the video does do is focus on the AI systems and how the AI is being evolved to work with a variety of different tasks, including how the AI ships maneuver, how they strafe, how they utilize weapons, how they approach aggressive tactics and passive tactics.

The designers also took the time out to change up the way the AI handles every class of ship. Light fighters fly around with careless abandon, whizzing around and executing evasive maneuvers; heavy fighters or non-combat flyers will take on more reserved tactics when engaging you in combat.

The AI flight control system that they’ve designed for the subsumption is based on personalities. Different AI modules for different ships have different “personalities”, allowing players to encounter varying types of AI fighters that will change in both difficulty and how they engage with the environment, various targets, and the player ships.

Unfortunately we’ll have to wait for more news on alpha 3.1 but you can visit the official website to check out the production schedule for Star Citizen.