Afaik no but who knows what the devs have really planned? The only 'roadmap' we have so far: https://empyriononline.com/threads/announcement-version-1-5-brief-prospect-of-2021.97513/
We already have NPC crew. They are just deco though. Download Reforged if you want to see a benefit from them. It's just a background CPU boost for your ship, but you can use your imagination to pretend they're more than just static deco. As far as a crew who you might interact with? No, best you'll see MAYBE is some random lines of non-interactable dialogue when approaching a crewmember, sort of like we get when walking around some populated POI's now. I'd say, best case scenario, decent NPC animations and meaningful dialogue are at least a year away, if the game keeps getting substantial support that long I would LOVE to be proven wrong.
Kinda makes me feel bad for the poor Polaris guy who is still to this day hanging out outside the base I built out of the Heidelberg. I wish there was at least some way I could coax him indoors.
I would love to see NPC crew that could fly a ship. To work on the ship. To pilot the SV's and HV's. To run the day to day operations of the base. For example: Have a commander sound an alarm when an attack is inbound. Activating the turrets and turning on the shields. Farmers that collect crops so I don't always have to do it. Guards that patrol and well... guard. Other NPC's that can man turrets to better aim, rate of fire and so on. A watch commander that could set post and counter a ground attack. A person to operate the radar and turn on the landing lights when you come in for a landing. Squads. Have three of four guards follow you in a raid. You could equip them differently. Mini gun, AR Rocket Launcher and so on. Also have different types like: Sniper assault sergeant and medic. They could fly around in your SV if you have the seats. Could even do a story line that the player finds part of his own crew and other humans that set up camp on the starter world. The player could hire them there. Even do missions to help support the human colony to. Also CV's could have crews that work on the ship. Engenders to help speed and running of the ship. Gunners to man guns. Marines to repel or do boarding operations. A captain to fly the ship and carry out commands. Even come and pick you up if needed. a person to operate things like radar and navigation. Could have the SV or HV pick you up as well.
I've requested things along these lines for quite a while. It's no small task to teach AI's to do things like "walk" or "fly" around in an area, oh, and not ram into or pass through terrain that is both procedurally generated and/or may have players building things in the way. Even top-tier AI packages, like Apex, Character Engine or even Radiant have plenty of challenges in these areas, and Unity's Behavior Designer is no different here - seemingly simple tasks, like "Navigate across this stretch of terrain" is really a major undertaking, unless you don't mind things like AI-controlled NPC's getting "stuck" on a rock, or marching like lemmings off a cliff because you dug a moat around your base. This also accounts for the rather mechanical-seeming "Enter player base, hijack core" making the NPC's seem like they watched you build your base, and made a map directly to wherever you tried to hide it. I'm not going to give a dissertation on the complexities of AI programming, not to mention the complexities of many of the top-choice programming languages for AI, like Rust, Haskell, Julia, R or Matlab, as well as each of these having their own strengths, weaknesses, and other unique characteristics. Suffice it to say, it's a major undertaking, and even the best AI packages will fall victim to simple human unpredictability. I should also mention that AI packages are seldom modular - they're typically built in to an engine, and tweaking these, tuning these or teaching them new tricks means a lot of deep code diving and praying that changing a single value from .5 to .50001 doesn't result in an AI insurrection of unprecedented proportion.
Heh, no, it's too late now anyway. Either the game finally disabled him or raptors ate him when they strayed near the base.
Probably a delated disable. Never seen raptors or any other NPC/Creature actually interact with anything that isn't made of building blocks, and even then they're not terribly effective.
A lot of this could be done without getting into those realms of complexity. For example, an NPC for the landing pad could just stay put, or walk in a small area near the spawner. It could do signals randomly, or perhaps in the presence of a powered ship (but this is just deco, I realize). If you want it to give useful signals -- well that's really hard, but unnecessary to me. It would be more to give a sense of life to the base. I think grow-plots should be upgradable to have robot arms that pick the crops should be connected to a fridge the way the food-processor is and deposit the food. This would not require AI, and would fit well into the pattern of the game. That said, the game already has Zirax troops that walk around and attack you. They aren't very smart, but they do work. They make attacks on the player base seem much more real. So it seems like the player could have something similar -- "recruited" guards that would be driven by the same AI. Likewise, there are enemy drones all over the place. Why can't the player make drones that would be driven by the same software.
Vermillion has done something like this in Reforged Galaxy, you can have guards running around protecting your base. Quite genius.
Oh, I don't disagree - I've actually advocated for a player Base Done component for quite some time. I think these could add a lot of value to the game overall - limit the number of active drones to 3, give them some reasonably expensive materials costs to construct and maintain, and perhaps limit the number of these per base, and make them base-only and that just leaves the question of How to Acquire this tech. Personally, I favor the implementation of a new hand-held device, to be used on enemy Cores, to unlock bit of tech that are not otherwise part of the progressive tech tree - and something like this would certainly qualify.
