For context this doesn't impact me, but I appreciate the problem and how frustrating it might be.
Am I right in thinking the bots would always use a docking computer? I am struggling to see how else you would automate landing/take off with any degree of confidence. For me that should be a hard engagement with validation, not just a throttle movement at the right time. You also have the option of adding something into the dead time while you wait to land or take off.
I would guess that for landing a docking computer is always used, as the trickiest part in landing is find the entry inside the station, once you are inside the station, landing is not that hard, as now you use the same clues on the, I call it the the small navigation ball, you now that tiny circle left of your radar screen, that will show you how far in you need to go, the white dot should be filed and at the "edge" of the circle. if you go to far it gets hollow. Then you only need to roll your ship to orient the white circle at "six-o-clock", or at the bottom. Now you should be over you landing pad and only have to use down thrusters and you will now end up directly on your landing pad, and then you might need to fine tune the placement to lock on to the landing pad.
Bots could exit the station before we had the Advanced Docking computer, so that is no issue, and there is a cheesy way to do it also, when you have undocked and is just "floating" in station, exit to menu, and the enter game again, and now you will be outside the station...
So these things can read the screen, that is the key feature, and so anything you can reliably do while only reading the screen, a bot should also be able to! There are several ways you can get to read the screen, like a simple screen capture software, that takes snapshots of your screen, you could also use the ingame screencapture option that with a button press generates an image of what is on your screen now saved to your computer, or simply place a webcam pointing at your screen.. There are several commercial software that can do this sort of anylyzing, they are now being used all over the place. Of course are costly, but students tend to get access to these things from time to time... And also, as this progress, there tend to be open source options if there is a big enough demand for it.
So once you have a setup to read the screen, you can now add focus areas, like the navigation ball, that will point you in the direction of your destination "circle", and then look for it on the screen, if is solid, you have a direct path to your destination, if it is not, you know there is something blocking you, like the sun or a planet. The same things most players also use to figure out how to get to the destination.
So trying to add some captchas, or have you answer a question, etc, etc, would most likely have to appear on screen, there is no requirement that you MUST have sound on, so if it is on screen, you can detect this, and if it is text, you can use OCR that is now such a common technique that is easily available to implement in just about anything, that is why those captchas use all sorts of tricks to make it really hard for us to read...
So if we call these are the more robust ways of doing it, as these can navigate super cruise, that I would expect to be able to handle most of the things people have come up with as ideas to make it harder...
Then we have the other option of doing this... a simple replay of inputs. we use these all the time at work, so there many variants of this, and these are not costly, so what these basically do, is to record any mouse movements, mouse buttons, and keyboard keypresses, so all you have to do is to do what you want to have automated, and have the software record all the inputs. then you simply replay the recording, and now the software sends all the input to do all your actions. These recording would be time limited, as tie goes by, so does all the planets, stations etc, they move a little bit. and since this is just basically a script that does, press A for X amount of time, wait Z amount, press F for 7 seconds, this is nothing else than a gamer trying to record game macro... using their gaming software. they work on the same principles. The challenges in doing a complete roundtrip in Elite, I expect would be more challenging as there are some variations of how long all the loading screen takes, and these do not know about when the loading of the next instance have completed, but then we have the nice log file, we just need to read the log file and that will tell us when the instanced have loaded etc. But if you are not reading the logfile, you need to add extra delays to account for stuff like that. And these should have got alot more reliable to do with the Advanced Docking Computer, and also Super Cruise assist. And the core mechanics of how this works, is no different from when players using macros to set their pips in a specific way, or use a buy macro to buy Power Play commodities, etc, etc. So this would be a really long macro, or rather several macros played in sequence. These would have harder time to get around a screen challenge. But these
I know that some student did the robust way as a personal project, since that is what they worked on. So once I read his article on how he did it for Elite, I learned quite a few small things about how many small details in the UI I had missed for a long time, and how all of these small queues can be very helpful. These requires quite alot of time to do, even if you have the software, and skills to use, it, you still need to get into the details and define all the things, without getting to carried away wasting time on things that are not needed.
The Macro/playback I have personal experience with from work, where we had to trigger such macros, to enter inputs in some stupid Graphical UI. and in some instances, you had to click on things because you could not navigate the UI with arrows keys /tab etc, so extrapolating that this can be used automate some game repeatable game loop is not that far fetched. the biggest drawback, is that testing and fine tuning this can be quite time intensive, as there are various ways these can be thrown off track, especially when dealing with mouse inputs. so getting these to work reliable can be quite a challenge.
And then we have those dedicated players, who can do this for several hours at t time, with out without aid of using macros...
Then these players can progress to be running two or more accounts in parallell...and if they macros to give them more time to run more accounts, then they are not far of from having several macros that they will in sequence, looking alot like the playback, but with human intervention in tricky parts.
So there is most definitely automation in Elite, the tougher question is, how widerspread is the use of autonomous automation? and how do we distinguish these from players doing the same thing "the legit way"? And after reading some of the "evidence" for how this was widespread, I noticed something, these appeared to be used to help SMALL player groups against BIG player groups. And if this would be the case, which to me is not that far fetched, based on how minor factions and the BGS works. Where big player now regularly stomps on smaller player groups minor faction and block them from being able to expand, even taking over their home systems...That is sad realisation that the game mechanics surrounding minor factions is severely lacking when now have several player groups controlling over 100 system each... So this issue could be a response to these big player groups blocking smaller player groups from certain aspects of the game, like working on expanding their minor faction to other systems...
