On this episode of Star Citizen Live, Jared meets with Francesco Roccucci, Director of Artificial Intelligence at Cloud Imperium Games. This is the last video for Q3 2022. The next videos, after CitizenCon, will be on patch 4.0 content. It’s an episode that allows you to discover a person working on the project. So there are no questions/answers but a free discussion between Jared and his guest.
Francesco has been working at CIG since 2015. One of his main motivations for coming to work on Star Citizen is the extreme and unprecedented ambition of the project in all areas, which requires finding new solutions and challenging oneself.
From his point of view, Star Citizen is a fantastic project that will offer a unique experience in the world of video games. Throughout the video, he appears very enthusiastic, passionate and complimentary about the project.
Director of Artificial Intelligence
As head of all the teams working on non-player characters, Francesco is very people-oriented. He explains that he pays particular attention to the exchange of skills within his teams, to the construction of a team spirit in general and that he takes into account the professional development of his employees.
Quality of artificial intelligence
Currently, the non-player characters have not yet reached the desired level for the project, but the teams have an overview and are developing the necessary bricks. At some point, all these elements will come together to achieve the desired result. Development is not a linear activity where progress is visible day by day. It’s sometimes frustrating for both teams and players, but it’s unavoidable.
Subsumption
Subsumption is what makes the world believable and realistic in terms of how non-player characters behave. This is a concept that was presented very early in the project by Tony Zurovec, and which takes shape through different technologies, such as behavior trees or mission flowcharts.
Performance of non-player characters
Non-player character performance is strongly tied to server performance. The same code will give different results depending on the state of the server it is running on.
The development of artificial intelligence is done with server meshing in view. This means that the number of non-player characters to simulate per server will be lower than if a single server supports the whole universe.