Star Citizen: Focus on Dogfighting

With its promise of fast-paced life-and-death battle in open space, dogfighting was among Star Citizen’s most eagerly-anticipated gameplay modules. And of course, such a high-profile feature called for high-quality AI. In this set of videos, we look under the hood of the Alpha release, to see how Kythera AI is delivering the flexibility and efficiency that Star Citizen’s ambition demands.

Star Citizen is built on the uncompromising principle of immersing players in a detailed, believable world. As this in-game footage shows, that ambition translates to a demanding AI goal: to fly the enemy spacecraft using the same controls and thrusters available to their human adversaries. Hundreds of thousands of people have already enjoyed fighting Kythera AI powered agents in the Star Citizen Alpha, which features solo and cooperative battles in varied locations all across the Stanton star system.

As you’d expect, Star Citizen’s AI does more than deliver canned responses – it mimics human behaviour, by selecting and abandoning strategies in response to the ebb and flow of battle. In this video, we’ve turned on debugging information to show how the AI’s choices evolve in real time. This visual, intuitive feedback forms a cornerstone of Kythera AI’s developer tools.

The key to creating this exciting gameplay is Star Citizen’s partnership with Kythera AI, which includes both custom development and an array of existing features. In this video, Kythera AI’s lead architect Matthew Jack explains how Star Citizen has influenced Kythera AI, and why your game could be central to Kythera AI's roadmap over the months to come.