I know this is a big ask, but I think it would make an amazing addition to the game.
Add an option (in game settings) to use your CPU/GPU to train AI NPC's and/or to use your in-game flight data for training purposes. It should be possible to do this in a manner similar to how Tesla captures certain aspects of their customers' actual driving telemetry to help train their Autopilot AI. Of course, the user's system would need to satisfy some minimum requirements, and might also require some trade-offs against the graphics detail settings.
This mode could even made part of the in-game experience. If you opt into the training system and you hire an NPC crew member, you could actually directly train them up from novice. The novice would be some minimally trained ANN with very basic behaviors and piloting skills. The ANN would then be trained by watching the commander fly their ship and/or ship-launched fighter. Multi-crew mode could also be used to train NPC's how to fight alongside the mothership and how to pilot the mothership while the commander is in the ship-launched fighter. The NPCs would still have to earn their own rank advancements, but that could happen much more rapidly with a competent instructor guiding their training.
FDEV could even offer to pay some amount of Arx when / if they decided to clone one of your trained NPC's for use elsewhere in the game. Eventually, we might have a galaxy filled with some fairly interesting NPC pilots. Some of them might end up being terrible pilots (who get deleted after being killed or acting inappropriately too many times). However, there could potentially be some NPCs that possess some rather unique skills and/or flying styles that they learned directly from live commanders.
Add an option (in game settings) to use your CPU/GPU to train AI NPC's and/or to use your in-game flight data for training purposes. It should be possible to do this in a manner similar to how Tesla captures certain aspects of their customers' actual driving telemetry to help train their Autopilot AI. Of course, the user's system would need to satisfy some minimum requirements, and might also require some trade-offs against the graphics detail settings.
This mode could even made part of the in-game experience. If you opt into the training system and you hire an NPC crew member, you could actually directly train them up from novice. The novice would be some minimally trained ANN with very basic behaviors and piloting skills. The ANN would then be trained by watching the commander fly their ship and/or ship-launched fighter. Multi-crew mode could also be used to train NPC's how to fight alongside the mothership and how to pilot the mothership while the commander is in the ship-launched fighter. The NPCs would still have to earn their own rank advancements, but that could happen much more rapidly with a competent instructor guiding their training.
FDEV could even offer to pay some amount of Arx when / if they decided to clone one of your trained NPC's for use elsewhere in the game. Eventually, we might have a galaxy filled with some fairly interesting NPC pilots. Some of them might end up being terrible pilots (who get deleted after being killed or acting inappropriately too many times). However, there could potentially be some NPCs that possess some rather unique skills and/or flying styles that they learned directly from live commanders.