This week’s episode of Around The Verse covered more of the development progress being made on Star Citizen, along with a lot of community events happening around the game. The episode also talks about some of the demo gameplay featured in the Hurston demo at CitizenCon.

The designers who worked on the environment and AI modules discussed how the combat AI can automatically navigate procedurally generated levels and that the AI can make use of the environmental objects to maintain cover fire, peep around corners, and that they utilize proper squad tactics. You can see how the gameplay, level, and AI designers all worked together to bring the demo to life at CitizenCon and how what was on display at the convention will make its way into the actual game.

For the scripted part of the demo, the level designers had to use a very specific layout for the demo so that everything went according to plan during the demonstration at CitizenCon, but in the actual live version of Star Citizen‘s persistent universe, the layouts aren’t static and the rooms are procedurally put together so that the environments are always unique and different.

Now that the basic tech has been put into place and the first iteration of the combat AI is live in the persistent universe, the updates and future iterations of the alpha will include more underground missions, more procedurally generated outposts with dynamic AI that can navigate the environments without any sort of hand-holding.

One of the really cool parts about the AI is that they will be scaled up in newer updates of the alpha, so that the basic grunts will do basic tracking and shooting, while more advanced AI will utilize cover more dynamically and will be a lot more aggressive, while the elite AI will not only do all of the above but also direct traffic by giving its teammates directions on how to track, hunt down, flank, and out-maneuver the player, which sounds like it could make for some awesome PvE gameplay encounters.

You can learn more about the development of Star Citizen by paying a visit to the official website, where you can also keep track of the developmental roadmap and all of the new content being added to the game and the content scheduled to be added to the game in future updates.