Docking queue
- Thread starter kris44dad
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An actual working docking and launching queue system so everyone knows their time window would be great.
Now serving 3, please make your way out of the station.
Now serving 4, please make your way in to docking pad 11.
Or something similar to this. I am sure Heathrow airport would happily talk to Fdev about how they manage inbound and exbound flights. Watched some great BBC Documentaries on it.
Now serving 3, please make your way out of the station.
Now serving 4, please make your way in to docking pad 11.
Or something similar to this. I am sure Heathrow airport would happily talk to Fdev about how they manage inbound and exbound flights. Watched some great BBC Documentaries on it.
This would make it so nice for avoiding those "Surprise 'Luga" moments in the mailslot. The game already has some sort of an internal Queuing system used for Auto-Dock We just need some representation brought to manual landing. We can choose to ignore it and jump the queue, but I'd like to know that when I approach the slot It's my turn and nobody should be approaching (Unless I'm in a small ship)
It's a nice idea, but 99% of Cmdrs will ignore it and continue to boost through the slot.
Not if the station blows them up for cutting in line.
This has in my opinion a greater importance for " Leaving the station. "
How many times have you left and been told the way is clear, follow the greens just to have some ship lift up in front of you and try to go through the slot first.
This would let you know, no npc will do that again. You will also know if something is coming in.
How many times have you left and been told the way is clear, follow the greens just to have some ship lift up in front of you and try to go through the slot first.
This would let you know, no npc will do that again. You will also know if something is coming in.
I always boost through the mailslot on my way out (I play solo, btw) because it's actually the safest way to avoid being caught in the middle of it with some other ship. I wouldn't mind docking / take off queue if that gives me the priority, but that would mean they need different mechanics for solo and open. So that's the reason why they are not going to do it.
FD got themselves into this by creating a docking / take off bottleneck in the first place. Had they organised it the same way they did with rescue ships (no mailslot), we wouldn't have this problem.
And then another issue is that when you're on the landing pad, you don't know the position of other vessels in relation to yours. You need to take off first and then you find out there's a ship directly behind you and for whatever reason of course it has to take over and get in front of you.
FD got themselves into this by creating a docking / take off bottleneck in the first place. Had they organised it the same way they did with rescue ships (no mailslot), we wouldn't have this problem.
And then another issue is that when you're on the landing pad, you don't know the position of other vessels in relation to yours. You need to take off first and then you find out there's a ship directly behind you and for whatever reason of course it has to take over and get in front of you.
Yes I have mentioned this a few times.
When a station is busy you get a message saying this is the case already or currently. This should be the switch which activates a queue system.
You should have messages from traffic control saying when you are allowed through slot.
If you enter the slot when not authorised you get a fine simple.
Queue would handle both in and outbound traffic
When traffic light, not busy the queue would be disabled. Other flight simulators do it so should elite. After all we need more simulation rather than arcade. Realisum realisum... pls
It would be cool.
In an ideal world any CmDR within the 7.5k radius of a station would be able to tune into an open voice comms channel and speak.
When a station is busy you get a message saying this is the case already or currently. This should be the switch which activates a queue system.
You should have messages from traffic control saying when you are allowed through slot.
If you enter the slot when not authorised you get a fine simple.
Queue would handle both in and outbound traffic
When traffic light, not busy the queue would be disabled. Other flight simulators do it so should elite. After all we need more simulation rather than arcade. Realisum realisum... pls
It would be cool.
In an ideal world any CmDR within the 7.5k radius of a station would be able to tune into an open voice comms channel and speak.
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Leave the docking queue thingy as it is. If you put some form of enforced queuing in place, you’ll kill those that speed into to slot to avoid scans.
The traffic light system on a slot has a bit of mileage. Some form of traffic light when a ship on auto-dock is within x km of the slot to give those leaving an idea that the incoming ship is unlikely to take avoiding action if they put their ship in the way.
The traffic light system on a slot has a bit of mileage. Some form of traffic light when a ship on auto-dock is within x km of the slot to give those leaving an idea that the incoming ship is unlikely to take avoiding action if they put their ship in the way.
I would just like the AI to stop cutting me off when I'm going through the mail slot. :| Player Cmdrs I can deal with because some of them actually have the intelligence to not crash into a Type 9. I cannot even count the number of times I have clearly been at the slot first and then 3 dumb AI on their programmed course zip in front of me resulting in a collision (non-fatal, and below 100 m/s, but still).
I just want a queue for pads that are already spoken for, rather than having to spam docking requests when the pad starts to clear.
You are gonna have to request docking anyway no matter what your business is at the station and if all the landingpads are full you'll get a flat out denial. But this is usually only a problem for medium ships at outpost not so much in big stations.
So after many months away, since I'd gotten terribly bored with the lack of anything meaningful to do in the game, I decided to come back to see if 3.0 brought anything exciting to the table for a casual player who wasn't really wanting to chase the big Thargoid menace story.
Well, despite the fact that I'm still on the same system with no changes, ED has decided to delete my HOTAS configuration and reset me back to basic controls. A half hour later of fiddling and I've finally got things more or less back to the way they were. Thanks, FD, for not keeping a backup copy of complex things like the control scheme config just in case.
So I find myself in a Beluga Liner I've fitted out for passenger hauling, so I grab a couple passenger missions and launch, just to have something worthwhile to do as I'm poking around in the new patch. I rapidly discover that my side-thrusting hat isn't configured correctly, so I can't easily slide up to the mail slot, which is pretty much right overhead from the pad I launched from. No problem, I'll just sneak up and out as the radar doesn't look all that busy.
Well, I was wrong. As I ponderously turn my way up and nose over into the mail slot and *just* get myself gliding out, a Mk3 NPC comes barreling in with no concern for the giant liner that is filling the mail slot, and has been for the past several seconds.
He somehow jams himself up between my forward and aft fins and just sits there thrusting at a fair amount trying to drive through me. I'm swearing like a sailor, unable to try to move laterally due to my dead hat, discovering that both forward and reverse thrust don't do anything due to how the Mk3 has wedged itself into my ship in the mail slot. My shields (which are hefty) start ticking away, while the station starts giving me fines, and my passengers start complaining due to my supposed criminal activity of trying TO LEAVE THE GODDAMNED STATION AT A SLOW CLIP.
Fortunately the shields of the Mk3 failed far before mine, and his imploding hull drifted free and blew while I still had a ring of shields left. I proceeded to then continue my ponderous exit of the station, only scraping the walls once more due to the huge fins on the Beluga and the fact that the FRICKING MAIL SLOT IS POINTLESSLY SMALL FOR NO PURPOSE OTHER THAN TO HARKEN BACK TO HOW IAN BELL MADE IT THIRTY YEARS AGO. Seriously. Is there some technical reason why the mail slot isn't just a round port? There's superior strength in a rectangle as opposed to a circle? Why aren't there launching and landing ports, like one would expect on a properly architected station that is meant to handle serious commerce?
Look, I appreciate that some of the flavor of the original Elite is kept, but the design of stations to handle commerce and shipping is, to put it mildly, LUDICROUS. At the very least there should be automated launching and docking with proper traffic control if you're going to force every goddamned ship through the same tiny space-vagina. Or, perhaps, redesign your stations to reflect how real ports and stations would be built to handle the traffic, rather than how a couple of guys coding stuff hacked it together to deal with the limitations of their 8-bit systems back in 1984! I mean, hell, if you're going to keep the 1984 model, then I want to be able to fly my ship at full thrust into the mail slot and be able to insta-dock like I did way back then.
Because as it stands the FD team is just punishing people to keep a station docking model that is pointlessly archaic. And, frankly, makes me want to *not* play, when I might lose TEN MILLION FRICKiNG CREDITS because your NPC ships don't understand that a giant freighter in the mail slot is a problem.
Well, despite the fact that I'm still on the same system with no changes, ED has decided to delete my HOTAS configuration and reset me back to basic controls. A half hour later of fiddling and I've finally got things more or less back to the way they were. Thanks, FD, for not keeping a backup copy of complex things like the control scheme config just in case.
So I find myself in a Beluga Liner I've fitted out for passenger hauling, so I grab a couple passenger missions and launch, just to have something worthwhile to do as I'm poking around in the new patch. I rapidly discover that my side-thrusting hat isn't configured correctly, so I can't easily slide up to the mail slot, which is pretty much right overhead from the pad I launched from. No problem, I'll just sneak up and out as the radar doesn't look all that busy.
Well, I was wrong. As I ponderously turn my way up and nose over into the mail slot and *just* get myself gliding out, a Mk3 NPC comes barreling in with no concern for the giant liner that is filling the mail slot, and has been for the past several seconds.
He somehow jams himself up between my forward and aft fins and just sits there thrusting at a fair amount trying to drive through me. I'm swearing like a sailor, unable to try to move laterally due to my dead hat, discovering that both forward and reverse thrust don't do anything due to how the Mk3 has wedged itself into my ship in the mail slot. My shields (which are hefty) start ticking away, while the station starts giving me fines, and my passengers start complaining due to my supposed criminal activity of trying TO LEAVE THE GODDAMNED STATION AT A SLOW CLIP.
Fortunately the shields of the Mk3 failed far before mine, and his imploding hull drifted free and blew while I still had a ring of shields left. I proceeded to then continue my ponderous exit of the station, only scraping the walls once more due to the huge fins on the Beluga and the fact that the FRICKING MAIL SLOT IS POINTLESSLY SMALL FOR NO PURPOSE OTHER THAN TO HARKEN BACK TO HOW IAN BELL MADE IT THIRTY YEARS AGO. Seriously. Is there some technical reason why the mail slot isn't just a round port? There's superior strength in a rectangle as opposed to a circle? Why aren't there launching and landing ports, like one would expect on a properly architected station that is meant to handle serious commerce?
Look, I appreciate that some of the flavor of the original Elite is kept, but the design of stations to handle commerce and shipping is, to put it mildly, LUDICROUS. At the very least there should be automated launching and docking with proper traffic control if you're going to force every goddamned ship through the same tiny space-vagina. Or, perhaps, redesign your stations to reflect how real ports and stations would be built to handle the traffic, rather than how a couple of guys coding stuff hacked it together to deal with the limitations of their 8-bit systems back in 1984! I mean, hell, if you're going to keep the 1984 model, then I want to be able to fly my ship at full thrust into the mail slot and be able to insta-dock like I did way back then.
Because as it stands the FD team is just punishing people to keep a station docking model that is pointlessly archaic. And, frankly, makes me want to *not* play, when I might lose TEN MILLION FRICKiNG CREDITS because your NPC ships don't understand that a giant freighter in the mail slot is a problem.
Avoiding incoming ships when exiting a station is so simple, that's what sensors are for. Lift off the landing pad, scan the sensors for ships moving inward toward the mail and simply wait for them to enter. Works in the other direction too except for the rare occasion when some human CMDR jumps his/her ship off the landing pad and boosts out of the mail-slot. o7
I did the same to Beluga once. I was in the Cutter and already almost in the mailslot. Of course, I've seen something in a distance is coming my way, but decided I have enough time to go through (and not enough time to change course) and I sort of was expecting it to stop and wait for me to get through. I guess I was too optimistic about the AI, because, sure enough, the Beluga didn't want to stop. So... It got blown up in the mailslot. As it transpires, Cutter had better shields
And this particular Cutter has "I brake for nobody" bumper sticker. But seriously, I don't know how it's possible, but it seems the AI always has to do something stupid. Like take over whilst you're still in the station and with limited room for manoeuvres. Considering I always leave stations at full speed and boosting, not the best idea...
Or they get in front of you when you're perfectly aligned with the slot, already approaching the station and almost at the mailslot.
I don't see how they could fix the AI or make it better. As I've mentioned earlier, the problem stems from the faulty design of the docking mechanic. Sure, it looks cool when you get the Space Odyssey docking sequence in the game. Once. Or maybe twice. But in the past 3 years I've been playing Elite Dangerous I still look at that mailslot with a mixture of disbelief and disdain. It represents pretty well what I don't like about Elite: the bits where you have to fight the game in order to do basic, everyday stuff in it. I don't mind squeezing through tight spaces. What I do mind is NPCs having a death wish which may cost you a few hours of your activities. For no other reason that nostalgia.
This is also one bit where FD made a decision to shoot themselves in the foot. Because of this, they restricted themselves in possible ship designs. Not much of a chance for a playable ships bigger than the Cutter (perhaps the reason it's all silent when it comes to Panther Clipper). No chance for vertical design ships unless they are small. So yeah, I wish in the beginning they ditched the mailslot and decided to dock player ships on the outside of the stations, perhaps the rescue megaship - style we know from Thargoid infested space. You could still have the station torus rotating around that or the cube attached at the end of a long docking area. You could still have mailslot like structures for smaller craft, perhaps used for smuggling missions or space station destruction missions. And on top of that you could get massive playable ships, freighters and carriers. It's probably way to late to change the design completely, but it would be great if FD started slowly altering it by adding external docking capabilities to existing designs.
Ah, as for HOTAS, I never had my bindings wiped out(except for issues when using two joysticks, but that was due to Thrustmaster's own software, not ED), but I have a secondary set of controls on my keyboard. Got pitch, roll and yaw on the numeric part. Mostly to prevent fatigue from keeping my hand on the joystick all the time, the keyboard works pretty well for long supercruise and additional landing controls (I don't use any dedicated throttle, I couldn't get used to it). Perhaps this could be a good backup solution for you.
While I don't usually have a lot of problems with docking or departing at/from stations, I do agree that an overhaul of the docking mechanic would benefit the game. a work around would be to either use two separate slots (which, however, would mess up the optical landing system which helps getting big ships through the slot) or use the slot for docking only and handle the departure by a different method - like flipping the docking-platform over in order to bring your ship to an elevated platform at the outside of the station - from where you could depart just like from a regular outpost (with rotational assistance still stabilizing your ship until you are clear of the platform). Just an idea.
Alternatively the proposed docking queue would at least avoid npcs from interfering. As for it killing smuggling, this is incorrect. Other games, such as Freelancer back in the day, also featured docking queues and smuggling. The tricky part was just to stay far enough away from patrols to avoid being scanned and enter the docking queue when there was little traffic. It would just require those wanting to skirt the law to outsmart law-enforcement - which is only reasonable.
Alternatively the proposed docking queue would at least avoid npcs from interfering. As for it killing smuggling, this is incorrect. Other games, such as Freelancer back in the day, also featured docking queues and smuggling. The tricky part was just to stay far enough away from patrols to avoid being scanned and enter the docking queue when there was little traffic. It would just require those wanting to skirt the law to outsmart law-enforcement - which is only reasonable.
Here's a quick drawing. Ships gets flipped over for take off. It's not a thin floor, there's still room for the outfitting hangars there. In my opinion that's what they should have done if the wanted to retain the mailslot but at the same time have a multiplayer game. I would still prefer docking on the outside of the station, be it ISS-style or rescue mega ships-style.
https://imgur.com/a/mYDRm