I want auto pilot

[Sandmann]

I've just given my evidence: The ONLY difference is that you press a button at the start instead of at the end of the flight.
[snip]
Your excuses are weak and pathetic and until something is done to make travelling in SC a bit more interesting which is extremely unlikely, allowing AP gives players a break from tedium. No I don't want to have to navigate a minefield of things that may damage or even destroy the ship in SC either, my idea of fun isn't playing dodgems at multiples of light speeds.

That's not evidence, that's conjecture and hypothesis. Give one example of a "feature" being introduced that offered a benefit over an existing feature, where that new feature didn't replace the old one as the "default" despite the old being "better game play".

And learn the difference between evidence and opinion before you dare insult me.

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -

Yes, yes that's what I was doing, jumping up and down and yelling "look at me". Not, you know, making an actual criticism and suggestion.

Yep. That's what it looked like.

 

[QBiG1970]

I want auto pilot

No you don't!
No need for auto pilot... takes all the fun out of flying, Commander!

 

[Milamber]

I want doesn't get, remember!

 

[Jumbik]

I note that, despite my request, and despite my offering evidence to the contrary, you've offered no evidence to support your claim that including an autopilot would have no effect on gameplay. As I said, without evidence, all claims are nothing more than conjecture and hyperbole. However...

Bounty hunting. I do most of mine between beacon and station (because I find hunting at a res to be tedious "bounty farming") either at USS's or through interdictions. It's free extra creds on trade runs. It'd also be real hard to do missions when you're on autopilot, and it means you've just guaranteed yourself zero "random encounters", except for interdictions (which would be the next thing you want a way of automatically avoiding no doubt). All these prove your "time dump" theory to be wrong. Fact is you are simply CHOOSING to do nothing while in supercruise, and then wishing for a way to avoid being in supercruise.



Yep.



You're sort of on the right track (and by "right track" I mean "my track". Conceited of me, no?). The FSD already works by utilising an artificial gravity bubble to contract space, and it's already affected by gravity wells in a very simplistic fashion. I'd make gravity visible on the HUD somehow, and have it act like tides, winds, and currents in water borne ships... meaning that "sailing" in space would yield a lot more space than simply ploughing through in a straight line. It would mean you'd ACTUALLY have to fly your ship, not just point it in the right direction and press the "go" button.

I do not mind the super cruise time dump at all. I can get it, I know why it's there and that it may become better with more tweaks to it. I have played a lot of MMOs and all of them had it. It was necessary to mask the lack of content and in all cases the travelling have evolved with more content in the game. But I do not get your point about "doing more while travelling". The whole point of this thread is that people want to get somewhere as fast as possible or without the tedious point, click, wait scenario. I want to look for events while travelling only when I'm on hunt for pirates or other CMDRS. I do not care about unidentified signal sources and other things while I have cargo full of Gold. I just simply DO NOT CARE. What I do care about in such scenario is how to get in my destination as fast as possible. If the proposed gravity waves would be implemented then it would resolve the tediousness and the factor of time in one shot. People would have to be concentrated to get it done properly which would in return net more fun.

But if someone deliberately chooses to Trade on and on and on until the games becomes nothing but numbers, then nothing will help and for such people it will be boring all the time.

 

[Sandmann]

I do not mind the super cruise time dump at all. I can get it, I know why it's there and that it may become better with more tweaks to it. I have played a lot of MMOs and all of them had it. It was necessary to mask the lack of content and in all cases the travelling have evolved with more content in the game. But I do not get your point about "doing more while travelling". The whole point of this thread is that people want to get somewhere as fast as possible or without the tedious point, click, wait scenario. I want to look for events while travelling only when I'm on hunt for pirates or other CMDRS. I do not care about unidentified signal sources and other things while I have cargo full of Gold. I just simply DO NOT CARE. What I do care about in such scenario is how to get in my destination as fast as possible. If the proposed gravity waves would be implemented then it would resolve the tediousness and the factor of time in one shot. People would have to be concentrated to get it done properly which would in return net more fun.

But if someone deliberately chooses to Trade on and on and on until the games becomes nothing but numbers, then nothing will help and for such people it will be boring all the time.

Yep. It's also required for the "feeling of immensity" of the galaxy. When the game was in alpha there was NO supercruise.. you just hyperspaced to a point a few km away from the station and then went by normal flight. This is basically what the "I want an autopilot" crowd are after now. It was dumped in favour of SC because it made the 400 billion star galaxy feel small and trivial, and made it seem like all the "action" was going on around the stations and that the galaxy was otherwise empty.

There are things to do in SC now and I'm sure there'll be more as the game develops. I do take your point though that if the player CHOOSES to do nothing in SC, then it's ALWAYS going to be boring regardless of how much content there is there. ANY activity is boring is you choose to not avail yourself of the fun bits.

 

[Vi.king]

Ah ah ah auto-pilot... oh god, why do you people buy a flight sim if you don't wanna fly?

"This isn't the game you have been looking for (waves hand)"

that moment when you realize that real planes and real spaceships already have computer assisted flightmode aka autopilot and a flight sim (Which should simulate the reality) does not have it because... reasons?


Auto-Pilot does NOT mean that the game will be played automatically by an AI FacePalm...

Auto-Pilot means the PLAYER sets a target, activates auto-pilot that flys him through SC to specified target, drops out of SC and then the player can either manually dock or use the (already built-in) auto-dock-pilot (why is it ok to have an auto-dock-pilot but an, let us call it, auto-SC-pilot is the pure evil itself? )

NOBODY asks for an auto-pilot that does all the flying in normal space (mostly combat at the moment) for you. What people are asking for is a system that manages those 13524231 ls long flights from the Hyperspace dropout to the station/planet. Who in his right mind is going to sit for 20 minutes at his computer doing NOTHING but staring at a number slowly decreasing and doing minimal course correction? Sure right now there isnt much to do anyways. But even then I´d much rather look at the galaxy map / sector map to look for the next destination etc. And as soon as walking inside your ship is possible a auto-pilot for those long SC flight is mandatory.

YES it will make you vulnarable to interdictions, but is that bad? I say no. That only opens up for more possibilities. For example a normal Autopilot would just submit or lose the interdiction minigame and drop into normal space while you hear a loud alarm going off and you run as fast as possible to your cockpit. But there could also be upgrades to your autopilot that evade interdictions a little bit better etc.


Literally ALL arguments I hear from those anti-auto-pilot´s is "wah wah all you want is to not play the game wah wah" "uh next you want is auto-combat, auto-trade..."
Not once in all the threads where an auto-pilot has been discussed have I seen an actual legit argument why an autopilot is not practical.

 

[Sandmann]

that moment when you realize that real planes and real spaceships already have computer assisted flightmode aka autopilot and a flight sim (Which should simulate the reality) does not have it because... reasons?

Ooh here we go again. The "reality" argument. "Reality" would have newtonian physics. "Reality" would have no glass cockpits, and external cameras. "Reality" probably wouldn't even have manned ships (and certainly not tiny little one man ships) doing trade runs and mining. There's HUNDREDS more of them I could name. You blissfully accept all of those suspensions of reality, but when they refuse to give you an autopilot so that you're forced to FLY your spaceship you suddenly get all upset about it being "unrealistic"? Haven't you worked it out yet? We're all flying World War 2 spitfires and Lancasters in space! NOT ONE BIT OF REALISM THERE! Why did they not put in autopilot? Coz they don't want the computer flying it, they want YOU doing it!

Literally ALL arguments I hear from those anti-auto-pilot´s is "wah wah all you want is to not play the game wah wah" "uh next you want is auto-combat, auto-trade..."
Not once in all the threads where an auto-pilot has been discussed have I seen an actual legit argument why an autopilot is not practical.

Wow, another argument ad hominem. Are you really that short of supportive evidence that you have to resort to insults to try to make your point? Noone said it's not PRACTICAL, we said it's POOR GAME PLAY! Sure it'd be PRACTICAL to have an autopilot... it'd equally be PRACTICAL to put in UNMANNED ships which you control from your office on a space station owned by your guild, but this aint Eve either! It's ELITE, and in ELITE you fly your own ship.

 

[iofhua]

I have no problem with it, as long as the auto-pilot is not perfect. It should make piloting errors, especially in dangerous systems. For instance it shouldn't decelerate after making a jump - meaning it should fly straight into white dwarfs every time. Also when it needs to find an escape vector, it should have a GPS-like "recalculating" voice over as it stops and scans for the way out, and replots a new course. I expect the player's ship to get nice and toasty when it's doing this.

I haven't been to a black hole or neutron star yet. Hopefully those are even worse - guaranteed ship destruction if you are on autopilot. Maybe it could rely on star charts and nearest stars for plotting - so when it jumps into a black hole it just keeps going, scanning star charts confusedly looking for a star that it thinks should be there.

IMO I think this would be balanced - it would work 98% of the time when you are jumping to main sequence stars, but when you jump into something unusual it doesn't know what to do, and bad things happen. I feel the same way with auto docking computers - they shouldn't work 100% of the time either.

 

[Vi.king]

Yep. It's also required for the "feeling of immensity" of the galaxy. When the game was in alpha there was NO supercruise.. you just hyperspaced to a point a few km away from the station and then went by normal flight. This is basically what the "I want an autopilot" crowd are after now. It was dumped in favour of SC because it made the 400 billion star galaxy feel small and trivial, and made it seem like all the "action" was going on around the stations and that the galaxy was otherwise empty.

There are things to do in SC now and I'm sure there'll be more as the game develops. I do take your point though that if the player CHOOSES to do nothing in SC, then it's ALWAYS going to be boring regardless of how much content there is there. ANY activity is boring is you choose to not avail yourself of the fun bits.

So tell me. What DO you do in SC? And what WILL you be able to do in the future? Keep in mind whatever you do you still have to be able to constantly adjust your speed and orientation to your target. That means you can not open any other windows (or in future walk away from your cockpit).

 

[Sandmann]

So tell me. What DO you do in SC? And what WILL you be able to do in the future? Keep in mind whatever you do you still have to be able to constantly adjust your speed and orientation to your target. That means you can not open any other windows (or in future walk away from your cockpit).

I don't open other windows or walk away from my cockpit unless I'm docked or have quit the game. If I don't want to play it, I don't play it. Simples.

As for what I do in SC, now we all know you didn't read the thread before replying to it. Look back a few posts. I'm not typing it again.

 

[Jumbik]

Yep. It's also required for the "feeling of immensity" of the galaxy. When the game was in alpha there was NO supercruise.. you just hyperspaced to a point a few km away from the station and then went by normal flight. This is basically what the "I want an autopilot" crowd are after now. It was dumped in favour of SC because it made the 400 billion star galaxy feel small and trivial, and made it seem like all the "action" was going on around the stations and that the galaxy was otherwise empty.

There are things to do in SC now and I'm sure there'll be more as the game develops. I do take your point though that if the player CHOOSES to do nothing in SC, then it's ALWAYS going to be boring regardless of how much content there is there. ANY activity is boring is you choose to not avail yourself of the fun bits.

So in general we agree that the autopilot could be in if a new SC gameplay (gravity) would be implemented? Or are you still on negative side with it? I see no problem with it IF the gameplay would back it up (a lot faster travelling if piloted by human). I have listed the possible negatives of autopilot in my previous post so I will not list them again.

 

[Sandmann]

So in general we agree that the autopilot could be in if a new SC gameplay (gravity) would be implemented? Or are you still on negative side with it? I see no problem with it IF the gameplay would back it up (a lot faster travelling if piloted by human). I have listed the possible negatives of autopilot in my previous post so I will not list them again.

In general we agree that SC as it stands has a great paucity of content, certainly not enough to keep people engaged unless they're pirating or bounty hunting. No argument there. I still would prefer to see content added to increase activity and engagement while in SC rather than a feature that removes the player further from the game, which I strongly feel an autopilot would. You only have to look at the things people (some but not all, I grant you) want to DO while in autopilot to realise that. Once this is achieved, however if a player chooses to not participate in the game, he has only himself to blame for boredom while within it.

Using the "gravity sailing" example, I'd like to see a nav computer be available as a module which would offer suggested courses/routes, but I wouldn't want to see that computer actually in charge of piloting the ship, else what's the point to having a person in the ship in the first place?

 

[Vi.king]

I don't open other windows or walk away from my cockpit unless I'm docked or have quit the game. If I don't want to play it, I don't play it. Simples.

As for what I do in SC, now we all know you didn't read the thread before replying to it. Look back a few posts. I'm not typing it again.

You didnt understand me. I didnt mean to open other windows outside of the game. What I meant with other windows was things like the galaxy map. And with walk away from the cockpit I also didnt mean outside of the game but IN the game (yes not implemented yet but it will be possible to walk inside your ship)

Yes I did not read the full thread as I already read most of the arguments over and over again. Also I kinda have some work to do..
I skimmed over your posts in the last few pages, all I saw just confirmed my post from before. You dont want an auto-pilot because you think we dont want to do anything in SC. That is wrong. I want to do MORE in SC but as long as I am nailed to the cockpit, holding the joystick for how ever so long in my hand just so I can fly in a straight line, there really is not much you can do.

I want to be able to go to the machine room, doing some repairs. Go to my personal room, relaxing a bit. Go to the cargo area checking on some cargo. Go to the nav station plotting a new route. Go to the Hangar check out my Sidewinder. Yes all of those things are not possible yet. But they will. At least I hope so. And if we only can do all those things while we are docked in a station or we are in normal space, standing still, that really would be dissapointing.

 

[Sandmann]

You didnt understand me. I didnt mean to open other windows outside of the game. What I meant with other windows was things like the galaxy map. And with walk away from the cockpit I also didnt mean outside of the game but IN the game (yes not implemented yet but it will be possible to walk inside your ship)

Yes I did not read the full thread as I already read most of the arguments over and over again. Also I kinda have some work to do..
I skimmed over your posts in the last few pages, all I saw just confirmed my post from before. You dont want an auto-pilot because you think we dont want to do anything in SC. That is wrong. I want to do MORE in SC but as long as I am nailed to the cockpit, holding the joystick for how ever so long in my hand just so I can fly in a straight line, there really is not much you can do.

I want to be able to go to the machine room, doing some repairs. Go to my personal room, relaxing a bit. Go to the cargo area checking on some cargo. Go to the nav station plotting a new route. Go to the Hangar check out my Sidewinder. Yes all of those things are not possible yet. But they will. At least I hope so. And if we only can do all those things while we are docked in a station or we are in normal space, standing still, that really would be dissapointing.

OK my bad.. you're right, I did misunderstand your post.

As much as I like the idea of 'nipping down to engineering to see Scotty" or "running to man the turbo laser turrets", most SC trips wouldn't be long enough to justify it... unless there was something wrong with the ship and that'd typically mean dropping out of SC anyway. The gal map should probably have some sort of basic hud elements on it so you can keep track of the ship while in it... just like we should be able to select targets from the system map, you should be able to get destination platform and system info from mission listings on bulletin boards, and a bunch of other UI improvements. None of that speaks to me of a need for an autopilot though.

OK briefly what I do in SC is bounty hunting, which involves a lot of scanning other ships & interdicting them, dropping into USS's, avoiding being interdicted by police ships etc. What I -don't- do is fly in a straight line from beacon to station and watch the numbers count down... unless I'm doing something time critical or I'm too damaged to take the risk.

 

[Jumbik]

OK briefly what I do in SC is bounty hunting, which involves a lot of scanning other ships & interdicting them, dropping into USS's, avoiding being interdicted by police ships etc. What I -don't- do is fly in a straight line from beacon to station and watch the numbers count down... unless I'm doing something time critical or I'm too damaged to take the risk.

Unfortunately this is something that Explorers cannot do. And there are systems that take 30+ mins to scan and it really boils down only to numbers then... watching them to count down to a certain threshold for scanners to kick in.

 

[Sandmann]

Unfortunately this is something that Explorers cannot do. And there are systems that take 30+ mins to scan and it really boils down only to numbers then... watching them to count down to a certain threshold for scanners to kick in.

While I sympathise... what did you expect? The tedium IS part of the challenge of exploration. If it was easy we'd all be doing it. And sure an autopilot would help that game, but putting it in for explorers would take a lot of gameplay and potential gameplay away from people who use SC in populated space.

 

[Pilot in red shirt]

I found a way to make docking more interesting - I try to do it faster each time. However the oversteer in an Asp makes it rather interesting - needs class 6 thrusters or something.
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The second way I've found to make docking more interesting is to find out just how fast you can take an Asp with a class 6A shield, one shield booster, 2 pips in SYS, and face plant it into the space station about 10 metres below the slot and not blow up.
.
I must have smacked it in doing 220+ m/s so far and only lost one shield ring. I'm really tempted to just go for it and flat out boost into the wall at 350 m/s to see what happens but I'm also saving for a Python and really don't want to waste the 2.5 m cr on the insurance rebuy right now.
.
Anybody else ever been bonkers enough to test this and if so what happened?
.

 

[Sandmann]

Anybody else ever been bonkers enough to test this and if so what happened?.

Yes.

From the inside, trying to get out, not paying attention. A rated, maxed Asp. Accidental boost, "oh crud!", *splat*, *boom*, shrapnel, insurance screen.

Not pretty.

 

[0815Pete]

In the spirit of blazing your OWN trail and sandboxing, it would be nice to have FD introduce choice to the game. A universe of speed-nerfed autopilots and faster human pilots is one I can subscribe to. You know, to each their own. I know, it is quite a brazen statement.

 

[SvennoJ]

OK my bad.. you're right, I did misunderstand your post.

As much as I like the idea of 'nipping down to engineering to see Scotty" or "running to man the turbo laser turrets", most SC trips wouldn't be long enough to justify it... unless there was something wrong with the ship and that'd typically mean dropping out of SC anyway. The gal map should probably have some sort of basic hud elements on it so you can keep track of the ship while in it... just like we should be able to select targets from the system map, you should be able to get destination platform and system info from mission listings on bulletin boards, and a bunch of other UI improvements. None of that speaks to me of a need for an autopilot though.

OK briefly what I do in SC is bounty hunting, which involves a lot of scanning other ships & interdicting them, dropping into USS's, avoiding being interdicted by police ships etc. What I -don't- do is fly in a straight line from beacon to station and watch the numbers count down... unless I'm doing something time critical or I'm too damaged to take the risk.

Seems you haven't done any exploring. You can still do all those things and let explorers use an autopilot to get to distant targets, while actually letting them look around or check what they have discovered before. It will use up a valuable slot, can cost 15 million, be less efficient than manual flight, It simply needs to stop in time.
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While exploring, the part in system, there is often nothing to do but fly in a straight line while pointed directly at the target. There is even less skill involved than in train simulator.
The skill is in finding the interesting things, navigating the galaxy map, managing fuel, selecting what targets to explore. (Oddly you're fine with selecting targets directly from the system map, taking away the last bit of 'skill' from in system exploration)
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Autopilot doesn't ruin combat flight sims.
/follow command doesn't ruin mmorpgs
gps doesn't ruin euro truck sim.
docking computer doesn't ruin trading
autopilot won't ruin combat
Autopilot didn't ruin previous versions of Elite
.
Why do you care if some trader decides to use autopilot to get to a station?
It will be less efficient, leaves him wide open for interdictions. It will actually make it easier to interdict as atm that trader will be alt-tabbed or looking at a secondary screen until the engine sound spools up and he makes a loop around the station, outside the path of pirates.
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Autopilot will move the focus from watching a timer and spinny scanner symbol to decision making and checking results in exploration.
It will free up time to look around instead of staring at a dot and a timer.
There is already an I win strategy that involves no flying at all, neutron field mining. Autopilot will make it less tedious to get places and more people might actually explore the systems, instead of neutron star hopping.