Elite / Frontier Feedback loops and Frontier

Having had to design a couple of PID control loops, the frontier autopilot combat seems like a textbook example of oscillating control. In this case the autopilot does not do compensation which would attenuate the oscillations. Yes, granted the player can twirl the ship this way and that but never the less a PID controller should be able to deal with various inputs resulting in rapidly attenuating oscillations. This obviously needs the coefficients set for each pairing of ships.. But this can be abstracted to acceleration input.

Just some random thoughts there. I don't think many people figured out that the way to fight is to turn off the autopilot which let's you concentrate on pure relative manouvering instead of trying to match crazy speeds..
 
There is no "autopilot combat" in any version of Elite i've seen.

Autopilot is for navigational purposes. It accelerates your ship towards whatever target you set, and decelerates in to match its velocity as you cross the half-way mark.

For docking, it selects a target point in space directly in front of a station door or above a landing pad, stops there, and then makes the final approach as appropriate, automating the landing clearance controls and extending landing gear etc..

In classic Elite, the docking computer would've amounted to no more than a few bytes of code. In FE2 / FFE, it also accounted and compensated for obstacles in the flight path, most of the time, if used properly (ie. allowing it time to make such corrections as necessary, rather than just flooring it flat-out then hitting AP and hoping it can magically sort out your mess for you..)

There's never been a combat autopilot however. You can select another ship as a navigational target, provided it's far away enough to make doing so worthwhile. But selecting a nearby ship as a nav target is pointless, as it can't shoot for you, fire your ECM, missiles etc., and will be responding too slowly to provide any manoeuvering advantage.

As you've found already, by far the most effective (and fun!) way to fight is to map the strafe and thrust keys as you would for any FPS, using mouse to rotate, with engines on full manual (ie. "engines off mode"). "Manual control" or "set speed" mode is also useless for combat, as provided, since that speed is set relative to your navigational target, rather than combat targets.

Pioneer does have improved FoR handling, allowing you to set any arbitrary object as an FoR, including other ships. Unfortunately that's kinda moot tho, since it doesn't yet have any combat, or even beam weapons. For Elite tho, you should be playing FFED3D, or at least JJ's FFE, which introduced full thruster controls (a necessity that completely passed FD and Braben by, somehow).

Soon as you're attacked or about to be, switch to engines off, strafe with the keys, rotate with the mouse, and with a little practice you'll be able to take on an Imperial Courier using only a pulse laser and 2 shields.. The keys i use are W and S for forward / reverse thrust, as well as increase / decrease set speed, A and D for left / right thrust, Q and E for roll, Lshift and Lctrl for up / down, with pitch and yaw on mouse. This is the slickest, most intuitive setup you can have, i believe.

There's never been any good reason why we can't have a combat computer of course - it's something i've always wanted to see in the game, and trivially simple to implement (merely assigning AI to control the player ship as it would any other), but like basic thruster control or intelligent FoR control, Frontier are just pathologically and institutionally incapable of understanding or capitalising upon their own flagship IP, as evinced by the travesty that is ED.. and the ongoing 20+ year wait for a proper Frontier: Elite sequel..
 
Top Bottom