Please automate Supercruise - its the most pointless gameplay element.
- Thread starter Twotricks
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as someone else said, going from A to B for minutes is boring anyway, the reason you do it, is because you want to get to B. So other instances like your smuggler outpost or whatever, are nice but they only get me away from reaching B. They add more to the game, thats why i would say, great, put them in, but please, let me do something else while being on the cruise for minutes. Let me check my tables, charts, stats, maps or whatever, let me watch my beautyful designed ship, the shipskin i paid for, the beauty of space... this would bring more fun into SC for me, improving my gameplay, without adding something completely new, easy isn't it?
An idea that's even more controversial than the SC autopilot
No, that would be what is more commonly known as "speculation". Facts refer to things that exist. Since there is no SC autopilot there can be no facts regarding it.
Really? And this bot is going to handle interdiction, fighting pirates, jumping back into SC, requesting docking clearance, buying fuel, selling cargo, buying new cargo, launching and jumping to your next destination is it?
Hardly. Unless you can explain how the bot described above is an inevitable consequence of an SC autopilot with enough rudimentary functionality to fly in a mostly straight line.
Oh I see, more destinations somehow = more to do in SC. Look, the destination could be the annual all female, nude mud-wrestle tournament on Nyphamania III but if it's 300,000ls away from the jump point it's still going to be a pain to get to.
Before these quotefests take up pages on their own: more destinations would probably mean shorter SC journeys, so player activity/LS would be greater. Stands to reason. Anyway, noticed that you ignored the exploration bit, or the bits involving craft like prison transport, which would almost certainly introduce security escort work, or larger ships in general, that would probably provide similar work or other things to do, even if it's just having to take care to stay clear of the giant ships during your journey so you don't get mass-locked out of SC... Then there's the new stuff coming in 1.3, like jobs that involve tracking the target into and out of SC. That might be a simple "interdict and destroy" job, or it could involve tracking their movements and holding fire, and it could have its own complications, like being the target of interdiction yourself from the target's colleagues. Who knows? But the point is that SC can have gameplay that is meaningful and engrossing, whereas an autopilot is just "watching the washing".
Do you know what comes to my mind when i read
"if it's just having to take care to stay clear of the giant ships during your journey so you don't get mass-locked out of SC"
This:
https://youtu.be/mM3b-7MJA_g
space is big, i have to travel a lot, i accept that, how long will this additional mini game - avoiding other starships while in SC -entertain me?
"if it's just having to take care to stay clear of the giant ships during your journey so you don't get mass-locked out of SC"
This:
https://youtu.be/mM3b-7MJA_g
space is big, i have to travel a lot, i accept that, how long will this additional mini game - avoiding other starships while in SC -entertain me?
Explain this post, please. I'm offering suggestions that could improve the game, and making the point that this thread has none, since autopilot is a non-starter for all sorts of reasons - and I'm the one trolling? What have you brought to the table? Tall tales about autopilot bots for sale and how you're going to write one as soon as you can be bothered...
(to learn how to code, perhaps)
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Lol. Voicing a differing opinion is 'trolling' - OK.
Yep I know it ain't happening (as I stated in my previous comment), but like a number of decisions in E: D (the GUI, the HUD, the lack of padlock or external views, releasing the game 12 months before it was ready etc.), I'm not going to agree with it, but I can live with it. And whilst I do love super-cruise, and definitely don't want to see it remove, it does have room for some extra spice, which hopefully 1.3 can provide by having mission target ships actually exist there (still more interdictions still wouldn't go amiss either!)..
As for bots, they are feasible because activities are so shallow at present. Take exploring - if just 'blasting the foghorn' paid peanuts, but a surface scan required some human decision to be worthwhile and profitable (e.g. a mini-game matching spectrographic profiles to determine atmospheric, or crustal, content, which could act like a 'capcha' to prevent botting), then would it matter if an autopilot (like the one present in the two previous Elite games) took you there?
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It might stand to reason in your head, but just because there's a lot of stuff in a system it doesn't mean the distance to your desired destination or the travel time changes. Not going to be interested in some government espionage whatever when I'm on a trading run to a station that's big enough to accomodate my type 9.
All of which is fine and adds depth but NOT ONE BIT OF IT changes travel times. Someone has already said travelling is about going from A to B, throwing in C thu Z in between them doesn't make the actual going from A to B, which is what you're actually wanting to do, any quicker or more interesting. Ignoring the washing whilst I have a chat or maybe have a look at the system info or Galnet is more preferable than having to continuously turn the handle to make the clothes wash.
And the reason I ignored it is because your point is trivial and almost entirely non-relevent. Oh, and avoiding ships, in a 1:1 scale solar system? Really? And who's going to take an interdict and destroy mission when they're in a hauler or type 6. The point being is no matter what you throw in to make a system more interesting, if it's not relevent to what the player is up to at that moment then it makes little difference. I would have thought that obvious. I've lost count of the number of USS's I've blown past on my way to where I'm going, another space station, shipyard, giant space ship, whatever, wouldn't make any difference.
On the subject of ignoring, I noticed you ignored my point about the magical bot which'll do everything and is an inevitability to the point of being a fact and seems to be the only basis for your objection. Hmmm?
Anyway, troll feeding time is over
And all that you say here would be completely unaffected by the presence of an autopilot. Want to get involved in a mission in supercruise? Switch the autopilot off and go mission! Simples! Exactly what I've been doing in combat sims for the past 25 years - fly most of way to target on autopilot, switch autopilot off in ingress, do stuff, autopilot home for tea and crumpets in the mess, except for the occasion SAM up the jacksie. Autopilot don't help there...
*Edit - Damn, ninja'ed by Innigo.
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I think there should be an auto-pilot module that takes up a slot and works as "well" as the auto-pilot lander. Thus making super cruise piloting entirely optional. If you are worried about bots ruining commerce, then just increase the risk of pirates for automated super cruise. Autopilot could work on a bounced homing signal that pirates could use to mark easy prey. This could work in PvE and PvP.
Yes, it was absurdity for humour's sake. I didn't put a
in there because it was obvious, or so I thought. But right now, you don't have to do anything other than keybind 75% to one of your keys, leave A, don't put big stuff in between you and B, and listen for warnings whilst you chat/look at the system info/Galnet/wash your socks. What is the issue? Once you've done a few SC runs, you know roughly how long it will take based upon distance, and your internal timer becomes second nature to set.
If freighters and other giant ships (some might be larger than stations) tend to follow similar routes to their destination that a lot of players also do (otherwise player-player interdictions would not occur), you could come into the giant ship's (much larger) gravity well, so they could mass lock you at a greater distance than a normal ship interdiction, and totally by accident. You could avoid them in much the same way that you avoid the large static bodies in a system, but these would a) move, and b) probably look a lot like normal ships in SC, so you'd have to pay attention. And they might be able to travel a lot faster than our ships with their powerful drives, so avoidance wouldn't necessarily be quite as easy. Think Aztec challenge with the occasional high-speed truck attempting to drive through you from behind.
So you want to ignore all distractions and space truck from A to B, but you find space trucking boring, so you want to have a self-driving truck. Hmm...
You can easily find speed/hull/weapon hacks, instant FSD charge hacks, tools to read market data direct from the client...What's to stop some gold farmer combining that stuff with the relevant macros and pixel reading (to indicate interdictions so that they can auto-submit only to instantly charge back up into SC) making an auto-trade bot, then running it 24/7 and eating everyone else's profits? You can run an infinite jump distance hack. What's to stop someone hacking together a rare trading bot and insta-jumping between stops to flog their rares? Come to think of it, what's to stop them running multiple instances of said bots from the same account? Not much at present, apart from the lack of an autopilot.
I quite agree.Anyway, troll feeding time is over
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If you have a gameplay element that feels like a chore, you need to make it fun instead of giving players a weird way (autopilot ) to circumvent it. If players have no fun doing it, what's it even doing in the game? I won't argue to remove supercruise, because its basic idea is sound. I just want to give my take on why exactly some people, me included, feel like it's a bit of a chore and what we should think about to change that.
Think about this: Why is no one complaining about having to drive your car to the place where your mission takes place in a game like GTA? Sometimes you have to drive for minutes at a time in the GTA games and I have not seen anyone complain about that, even though they have a much more mainstream playerbase than Elite does. Why?
First of all, the drives in GTA are part of the entertainment! You can drive slowly, take in the landscape and eventually arrive without issues. Alternatively you drive as fast as you can, evade traffic and take curves as best you can. It's challenging and engaging and you can make a noticeable difference in travel times, if you put your mind to it. And the long travel distances make you notice very much that the newer GTAs have truly massive worlds.
Compare this to supercruise. You can go slowly, but there is no reason to. Even if you crank the speed up to a maximum, you usually have more than enough time to take in the scenery. Especially since, even with maximum speed, there is nothing that makes arriving quickly and in one piece a challenge of any sort. You can look around your ship or even check your phone while occasionally making sure your crosshair is still on the target. This is not challenging or engaging. All that the need to adjust your trajectory and the occasional interdictions do is force you to be present, even though there is nothing to do most of the time.
Now let's look at what happens if you really put your mind to it and try to arrive at your destination as quickly as possible. First of all, for most of the trip you still can't to anything but put the throttle to max and wait until you're almost at your destination. For the slowdown period, I've tried a lot of stuff. Flying loops around a station until I bled of my speed, pushing the 7-second rule and so on. I did not measure it, but the actual numbers don't matter much, because as a player it feels like no matter what I do I can maybe shave off a few seconds tops, in exchange for a big risk of overshooting. I think this is where a lot of the demand for an autopilot comes from - the feeling that, once you know how to avoid overshooting, you really can't do much to expedite travel, no matter how good you are. I think this is the main issue with SC.
What supercruise does really well is showing you the massive scale of space and giving you the opportunity to travel to any location you like. But it could still do that, while actually offering something to do for the players.
Now, honestly, I don't have many ideas myself on how to make traveling in supercruise more mechanically challenging and engaging and reward good play with faster travel. You can't really put curves and traffic into space, can you? There are ways to do it though. Maybe the accelleration should be WAY quicker, but if you go too far you might damage your ship, drop out of SC or just loose a lot of speed. Maybe we could use gravity wells to gain speed, instead of just having to avoid them to not be slowed down. Maybe even make the ship behave like with FA off when in supercruise. There are ways, and I hope FD is currently thinking about them.
) to circumvent it. If players have no fun doing it, what's it even doing in the game? I won't argue to remove supercruise, because its basic idea is sound. I just want to give my take on why exactly some people, me included, feel like it's a bit of a chore and what we should think about to change that.Think about this: Why is no one complaining about having to drive your car to the place where your mission takes place in a game like GTA? Sometimes you have to drive for minutes at a time in the GTA games and I have not seen anyone complain about that, even though they have a much more mainstream playerbase than Elite does. Why?
First of all, the drives in GTA are part of the entertainment! You can drive slowly, take in the landscape and eventually arrive without issues. Alternatively you drive as fast as you can, evade traffic and take curves as best you can. It's challenging and engaging and you can make a noticeable difference in travel times, if you put your mind to it. And the long travel distances make you notice very much that the newer GTAs have truly massive worlds.
Compare this to supercruise. You can go slowly, but there is no reason to. Even if you crank the speed up to a maximum, you usually have more than enough time to take in the scenery. Especially since, even with maximum speed, there is nothing that makes arriving quickly and in one piece a challenge of any sort. You can look around your ship or even check your phone while occasionally making sure your crosshair is still on the target. This is not challenging or engaging. All that the need to adjust your trajectory and the occasional interdictions do is force you to be present, even though there is nothing to do most of the time.
Now let's look at what happens if you really put your mind to it and try to arrive at your destination as quickly as possible. First of all, for most of the trip you still can't to anything but put the throttle to max and wait until you're almost at your destination. For the slowdown period, I've tried a lot of stuff. Flying loops around a station until I bled of my speed, pushing the 7-second rule and so on. I did not measure it, but the actual numbers don't matter much, because as a player it feels like no matter what I do I can maybe shave off a few seconds tops, in exchange for a big risk of overshooting. I think this is where a lot of the demand for an autopilot comes from - the feeling that, once you know how to avoid overshooting, you really can't do much to expedite travel, no matter how good you are. I think this is the main issue with SC.
What supercruise does really well is showing you the massive scale of space and giving you the opportunity to travel to any location you like. But it could still do that, while actually offering something to do for the players.
Now, honestly, I don't have many ideas myself on how to make traveling in supercruise more mechanically challenging and engaging and reward good play with faster travel. You can't really put curves and traffic into space, can you?
There are ways to do it though. Maybe the accelleration should be WAY quicker, but if you go too far you might damage your ship, drop out of SC or just loose a lot of speed. Maybe we could use gravity wells to gain speed, instead of just having to avoid them to not be slowed down. Maybe even make the ship behave like with FA off when in supercruise. There are ways, and I hope FD is currently thinking about them.
Make it cost one million credits for the autosupercruise , but you get a Lazy insignia.
Because most people are on their way to somewhere else (jump-jump-jump) or grinding away with transportation of cargo and focusing on trying to make enough profit to justify the boredom phase.
I watched Judge Dredd and cringed at the part in the movie where the officer turns over driving control to the onboard computer so that she could talk to her passenger. I don't even like using cruise control but do so only to avoid tickets for times when I'm not paying careful attention to my speed. Driving (and flying) is a technically varied and visceral experience. By treating it as a boring, required task to get from point A to point B in a straight line is to drain all life from the experience. Automating supercruise is the fastest way to turn a fun experience into a 9-5 job. I get almost the same joy out of driving as a 50 year old as I did when I was a teenager. Same goes for flying in space. After several months, I don't get bored from the flying experience. I suppose those who play computer games all day long have lost that joy. So sad. So sad.
If that was the Stallone Dredd, that's yr first mistake
What mistake? I was commenting on the character played by Sandra Bullock when she told the car's computer to drive for her.
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