Please automate Supercruise - its the most pointless gameplay element.
- Thread starter Twotricks
- Start date
- Status
Sounds like you were watching 'Demolition Man'.
After having seen them driving around a rural obstacle course just as well as a human driver would, it completely reassured me. The only accidents have apparently been when a human driver took brief manual control.
The major change will come if/when insurance companies decide the computer-controlled system is less prone to accidents and start to back the technology. Premiums would become cheaper, accordingly.
Yeah, that's great - until a bunch of Jeremy Clarkson types start hacking the AIs so their cars drive like The Stig, or until rival manufacturers/road freight firms/cab firms do the same thing so they can cut each other off on the roads, or until an AI decides that swerving the occupants into a wall is safer than continuing over a toddler that's wandered on to the road because Hyundai doesn't want baby-killer publicity, and as a consequence gets sued so badly that the next version AI mows down a parade, or until people start selling mods that make it so a vehicle ignores cyclists/blacks/group of choice.
Call me a luddite, but I'd like many years more testing on this stuff, and for there to be very good security built in to stop script kiddies sending cars through schoolyards or trucks over the sides of bridges.
edit: by the way, according to the devs, docking computers hand ship control over to the tower at your docking bay, who handle the process manually. No AI involved, so autopilot is unlikely from a lore standpoint.
Last edited:
"Jeremy Clarkson types" don't generally have the kills or patience to learn computer programming. Heck, I used to do it for a diploma and am glad I don't have to now! If anything, it would swiftly graduate towards a government-dictated system of making sure all traffic is equally controlled. 'Privately-owned' public transportation, in all but name.
As for whether one would crash into a wall or toddler, well... Isn't that typically a decision human drivers are forced to deal with, too? The difference would be that the computer wouldn't have to take a gamble on a judgement call. It would know exactly what the mathematical variables are for stopping distance/tyre traction/etcetera, at any given moment.
And, really, who the hell would give a "script kiddy" access to their car?! You could just as easily make the same argument about GPS systems and I, for one, remember that there was no such outbreak of alleged street-gang hackers running around and reprogramming those when they first came out!
As for the fantasy of people selling "mods" to let cars run over ethnic groups of choice, who in the world would buy those? Why would they want to install them, when they're not running over people, manually, right now? Don't you think any on-site accident investigators would immediately check the vehicle's autopilot and its data logs for insurance purposes, alone, if not evidence of intended criminal damage?
Really, if we have this sudden social influx of people with programming skills who want to cause ddestruction for fun, why haven't they been racing into airports or private helipads and doing it to autopilots of airliners, business jets and helicopters? If terrorist organisations haven't been able to, what makes you think random civilians would have the time, knowledge and patience to succeed in it?
They're different because someone can toggle the autopilot off in an instant? Well, that's no different to the one on the cars Google and others have been testing for all these years. A human driver can take manual control at any time.
As for whether one would crash into a wall or toddler, well... Isn't that typically a decision human drivers are forced to deal with, too? The difference would be that the computer wouldn't have to take a gamble on a judgement call. It would know exactly what the mathematical variables are for stopping distance/tyre traction/etcetera, at any given moment.
And, really, who the hell would give a "script kiddy" access to their car?! You could just as easily make the same argument about GPS systems and I, for one, remember that there was no such outbreak of alleged street-gang hackers running around and reprogramming those when they first came out!
As for the fantasy of people selling "mods" to let cars run over ethnic groups of choice, who in the world would buy those? Why would they want to install them, when they're not running over people, manually, right now? Don't you think any on-site accident investigators would immediately check the vehicle's autopilot and its data logs for insurance purposes, alone, if not evidence of intended criminal damage?
Really, if we have this sudden social influx of people with programming skills who want to cause ddestruction for fun, why haven't they been racing into airports or private helipads and doing it to autopilots of airliners, business jets and helicopters? If terrorist organisations haven't been able to, what makes you think random civilians would have the time, knowledge and patience to succeed in it?
They're different because someone can toggle the autopilot off in an instant? Well, that's no different to the one on the cars Google and others have been testing for all these years. A human driver can take manual control at any time.
Ive said this a few times, why not increase the distance to stations when you drop out, and lower the time in Super Cruise... It even opens the gate for REAL piracy, not super cruise chase the tail!! E.g You sit 15Km from the station with your ship on silent running, scanning ships leaving and entering the area and pounce on ones worth Pirating. At present, the drop out distance is like 6 seconds from the Station "NO fire Zone" so its impossible to pirate people outside stations at present....... This FIXES two issues in one go! But FD dont listen.
Last edited:
yes, also, why can we see other ships in super cruise but we cant see them in normal flight?
my ships sensors can spot something in super cruise thousands of kilometers away, but when im out of SC 6km lol. i think technology is actually worse in the future.
In a nutshell: NO.
There's no need. Why don't you play the sims or something, then you can just let them do their own thing while you live your life. You clearly don't like ACTUALLY doing anything in a game. So again. In response to your demand I say no.
Or you could cry some more and hope that fixes it.
Next it will be "please automate combat, it's so tedious"
In a nutshell: YES.
You would have to engage auto cruise anyway, so you would have the choice of using it or not.
It is pointless trying to get it through to these guy's
I love to hand fly these ships, but the lack of automation is ridiculous when you consider we live in a world where aircraft have been navigating the skies and landing themselves for decades, spaceships go into orbit and re-enter automatically. Even my old car could park itself....I wonder what the helmsman on my Conda will do when AI crew get implemented?
Automation should always be about freeing up capacity to perform other tasks, quite simply the 2nd or 3rd crew member. If someone wants to use it so they can just switch off and enjoy the ride...Well, anyone who knows anything about automation will understand what eventually happens if you get complacent.
Automation should be a choice in game, but something that can come back to bite you if you become lazy
Last edited:
The one thing to remember in terms of creating a bot is this - would any given feature allow you to fully automate a series of actions via keystrokes without ever having to use a mouse, joystick, or gamepad in a directional capacity?
If you could do all the following with only keystrokes and button presses, no maneuvering whatsoever, you have a problem.
Jump into a system,
Kill engines
select station via UI (it will always be in the same spot on the list),
select supercruise autopilot
fly and drop into station orbit (length of time to wait determined beforehand and added with buffer to bot program)
select "request docking"
select docking autopilot
dock (again, length of time to wait determined beforehand and added with buffer to bot program)
select station menu
select commodities
go down commodity list X times to desired item
buy or sell it (holding button long enough to be "all")
launch
exit to menu and relog in (aka fast undocking).
select star system via UI
Engage hyperdrive
Jump to system
lather. rinse. repeat.
Once you can do all that, you've got a problem. Currently I can see only two places where the chain breaks down - there is no supercruise autopilot so you need to manually aim at the station.
The other is leaving the station. You still need to aim at the star system you plan to go to next
However, if you have a trade run within a single system (which is quite possible, there's a decent silver run between the moon station and the Earth stations, for example), then the supercruise autopilot is the only thing standing in the way of an automated bot trader.
If you could do all the following with only keystrokes and button presses, no maneuvering whatsoever, you have a problem.
Jump into a system,
Kill engines
select station via UI (it will always be in the same spot on the list),
select supercruise autopilot
fly and drop into station orbit (length of time to wait determined beforehand and added with buffer to bot program)
select "request docking"
select docking autopilot
dock (again, length of time to wait determined beforehand and added with buffer to bot program)
select station menu
select commodities
go down commodity list X times to desired item
buy or sell it (holding button long enough to be "all")
launch
exit to menu and relog in (aka fast undocking).
select star system via UI
Engage hyperdrive
Jump to system
lather. rinse. repeat.
Once you can do all that, you've got a problem. Currently I can see only two places where the chain breaks down - there is no supercruise autopilot so you need to manually aim at the station.
The other is leaving the station. You still need to aim at the star system you plan to go to next
However, if you have a trade run within a single system (which is quite possible, there's a decent silver run between the moon station and the Earth stations, for example), then the supercruise autopilot is the only thing standing in the way of an automated bot trader.
@Mossfoot - Simple solution is to make it work like the real world, no magic autopilot button exists, it all requires crew interaction. For a start, launching the ship requires manual operation.
Still, I don't see what the big deal would be about bot's flying round. They would be just like AI, except the massive risk of the ships owner losing everything to pirates.
Still, I don't see what the big deal would be about bot's flying round. They would be just like AI, except the massive risk of the ships owner losing everything to pirates.
I'd very much like to see an autopilot for supercruise. And I do feel like it would be consistent within the game world. I'm having a bit of trouble understanding the vehement opposition. Personally I enjoy manually handling the docking process (every single time), and it has no effect on my enjoyment that other players might use the auto-docking-computer.
Just to clarify, when I say autopilot for supercruise, I mean a system that can plot a course around planetary bodies and controll the pitch/yaw/roll and throttle to guide the ship to the destination. If it has to use a parabolic out-of-plane approach and would take twice as long as the manual approach... fine by me. So no teleportation, no interdiction evasion, maybe not even disenganging upon arrival.
Now, I'd like to explain why I think that an autopilot would be consistent within the game world.
Such an autopilot would require computing movement of objects in relative motion to each other. And it would require sensors identifying single objects, their positions, orientations and their relative speed to the vessel being controlled. These sensors already exist within the game: the targeting computer can display the distance, orientation, and speed of vessels it currently focuses. And it can provide these data instantly on focusing a vessel. And then there's the system that displays the planetary information and orbit lines on your HUD. This system is also able to instantaneously display the distance, orientation and movement of stars and planetary bodies.
Then there's gimballed and turreted weapons and seeking missiles. These show that within the game world exists knowledge how to build a system that can calculate and predict velocities and control objects according to these calculations. It's really not that hard or unreasonable to adapt such a system from controlling rotary motors and solenoids to thrusters and drives.
Finally, just because it was mentioned many times, an auto-pilot (for supercruise or docking) does not require self-aware AI. An auto-pilot is actually a very simple feedback loop between sensors and actuators, possibly a state machine thrown in. There's NO WAY EVER for something like this to develop self-awareness. An auto-pilot does not need massive amounts of computational power or exceptionally dense and efficient data storage, it doesn't even need to be a digital computer at all. You could totally build such an auto-pilot from analog components. The reason the station personel takes control of your docking when using the docking computer is simply: humans can sometimes be pretty uncalculable and erratic. So quick intervention by a human controller is very much beneficial to the station and it's visitors.
So, I'd very much like to see an autopilot for supercruise. I think it would fit, and be consistent with the game world. If supercruise becomes filled with more content and events, that's fine, but long lonely cruises, that's kind of implied by space (spaaaaaaace) travel.
PS:
Ok, so maybe a super-cruise auto-pilot might make trade-bots possible. But I really don't see a problem with that. In my experience cheaters/exploiters/boters are only a minority in games. Granted they can cause issues in persistent shared worlds, but they're still a minority. If super-cruise auto-pilot benefits the majority of players and is "abused" by others, it's still a good idea based on the principles of democracy
Best way to handle this problem though: Offline Mode! Cheaters can cheat all they want, hackers can hack all they want, and honest players can honest play all they want.
Just to clarify, when I say autopilot for supercruise, I mean a system that can plot a course around planetary bodies and controll the pitch/yaw/roll and throttle to guide the ship to the destination. If it has to use a parabolic out-of-plane approach and would take twice as long as the manual approach... fine by me. So no teleportation, no interdiction evasion, maybe not even disenganging upon arrival.
Now, I'd like to explain why I think that an autopilot would be consistent within the game world.
Such an autopilot would require computing movement of objects in relative motion to each other. And it would require sensors identifying single objects, their positions, orientations and their relative speed to the vessel being controlled. These sensors already exist within the game: the targeting computer can display the distance, orientation, and speed of vessels it currently focuses. And it can provide these data instantly on focusing a vessel. And then there's the system that displays the planetary information and orbit lines on your HUD. This system is also able to instantaneously display the distance, orientation and movement of stars and planetary bodies.
Then there's gimballed and turreted weapons and seeking missiles. These show that within the game world exists knowledge how to build a system that can calculate and predict velocities and control objects according to these calculations. It's really not that hard or unreasonable to adapt such a system from controlling rotary motors and solenoids to thrusters and drives.
Finally, just because it was mentioned many times, an auto-pilot (for supercruise or docking) does not require self-aware AI. An auto-pilot is actually a very simple feedback loop between sensors and actuators, possibly a state machine thrown in. There's NO WAY EVER for something like this to develop self-awareness. An auto-pilot does not need massive amounts of computational power or exceptionally dense and efficient data storage, it doesn't even need to be a digital computer at all. You could totally build such an auto-pilot from analog components. The reason the station personel takes control of your docking when using the docking computer is simply: humans can sometimes be pretty uncalculable and erratic. So quick intervention by a human controller is very much beneficial to the station and it's visitors.
So, I'd very much like to see an autopilot for supercruise. I think it would fit, and be consistent with the game world. If supercruise becomes filled with more content and events, that's fine, but long lonely cruises, that's kind of implied by space (spaaaaaaace) travel.
PS:
Ok, so maybe a super-cruise auto-pilot might make trade-bots possible. But I really don't see a problem with that. In my experience cheaters/exploiters/boters are only a minority in games. Granted they can cause issues in persistent shared worlds, but they're still a minority. If super-cruise auto-pilot benefits the majority of players and is "abused" by others, it's still a good idea based on the principles of democracy
Best way to handle this problem though: Offline Mode! Cheaters can cheat all they want, hackers can hack all they want, and honest players can honest play all they want.
Last edited:
once the expansion ''walk around your ship'' will be available .. it would be awesome to have a co-pilot NPC that does the ruote setted, or a computer autopilot
for short travels.. while you go in the back of your ship to drink a coffee or to prepare some tools useful for something else later..
for short travels.. while you go in the back of your ship to drink a coffee or to prepare some tools useful for something else later..
Launching the ship only requires you to press "launch". And currently you can log off, and log back on and appear outside the station - which can all be done with keystrokes.
So the same problem with crew interaction applies with the example given above - if there is some way to select between crew members via keystroke, it's by default automateable.
The only way to make something impossible (or at least very difficult) to automate is if there's a stage in the process that cannot be done without manual maneuvering with the joystick/mouse/gamepad.
So basically my only reservation in automatic supercruise revolves around that point - will it create a chain that can be automated. If not, then it's something that can at least be discussed and pursued. But if it is... best not to go there at all.
Well, not everything. Just one load of cargo and an insurance rebuy. Once the bot makes X runs it's all profit.
The problem is partly ethical, partly exploitable. Ethical because you should have to work to make your money regardless of what career you're in. It's morally repugnant to think of someone letting a bot run in a closed loop run in an out of the way system for a week (ah, forgot to add "refuel" to above list), and come back with a billion dollars.
And the exploitable element is how this would be sold to players either indirectly as cash-for-creds is currently done (so the bot makes those selling cash for creds that much easier) or even more unethically, by distributing or selling the bot program to others for them to to tweak and modify as needed.
It's also not just the intended consequences, but the unforeseeable unintended consequences that might come up later.
----
Personally I still think what might help many people who don't like Supercruise is to have their ETA and distance readout show up everywhere - make sure it's visible not just when looking straight ahead, but when looking at the left and right UI panels, when using the Galaxy and System maps, and eventually when using GalNet and the Powers menus (in whatever form they take).
That way you can simply set your course, set your cruise speed, and kill time as you see fit until you get close.
It would help, at the very least, I think.
Last edited:
- Status