Instant ship transfer is ok, but Auto pilot is not.

I think this is a good idea, as a matter of fact. I am all forward into solutions that automate some kind of repetitive tasks, but not with some drawbacks and probability of failure. This should not be a "macro recording feature" but just a way to chain jumps and save some manual effort. Scooping, honking and other specific tasks would be only be done by the player, and the autopilot route should be carefully planned in order to prevent the ship being stranded for no fuel after the final jump in sequence.



"Winning" in Elite Dangerous is subjective to each and everyone.



No, the auto-pilot would carry on or abort after the ship is fired upon. This ship would be vulnerable in this mode.
And no for the second question. While you picture someone watching the screen after the autopilot is engaged, I find this an excellent feature for breaks or playing while working. During the Distant World's Expedition, I can't tell how many times I was multi tasking, doing simple work tasks while jumping and honking.

For long distance explorers, this would be a great feature to save personal time and even to prevent muscular injuries due to prolonged time doing something as repetitive in the same posture (yes, it happened to me and was a direct result of DWE and my lack of physical fitness by then).

Heck, I would even prefer this solution to the insta-transfer of ships between stations. The downside is that it lowers the hardcore value of reaching the other side of the galaxy by yourself... but not by much, in my opinion.

100% agree, it will only make the game better not easier.
 
> If we're just talking about shaving a little time off your flight by veering slightly off vector here and there, I would rather grab a refreshment.

> That sounds like a step in the wrong direction. But then again we seem to be on opposite sides of this coin and are finding joys in very different aspects ;)

Rather than discussing the specific merits of these random ideas, do you understand the underlying point?

By adding bypass mechanisms, you greatly reduce the priority of making the bypassed function better.
 
I think once one can walk around on their ship (assuming it's how we imagine it to be =P ), autopilot of the kind OP describes may become very desirable because (and correct me if I'm wrong) how else can we make the most of space legs?

I mean, even just walking around on your ship if there's nothing to do is at least as good as manually piloting courses, right? Like, it's not like it's going to get more boring if we can at least walk around?
 
Have any of you played Duskers? I would love to be able to plan and execute a journey via the galaxy map and console commands like you can control actions in Duskers [up][up]
 
Not autopilot, but you can hire a NPC as copilot, it's the same guy that will take your condor in a dogfight in the next version, who will fly your ship during the voyage from one point to destination. You can set the ROE of this NPC to:

agressive (he fights everything WANTED nearby, at your own risk to be destroyed)
hold fire (he fights if someone start shooting)
passive (he only will fly the ship, and will give you control if something weird happens, with a loud alarm sound!, so you can run from the toilet with the pants off to the cockpit! :) )
 
Have any of you played Duskers? I would love to be able to plan and execute a journey via the galaxy map and console commands like you can control actions in Duskers [up][up]

LMAO sure...

[video=youtube;h5OkFO6v5s4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5OkFO6v5s4[/video]
 
Rather than discussing the specific merits of these random ideas, do you understand the underlying point?

By adding bypass mechanisms, you greatly reduce the priority of making the bypassed function better.

I get it, if, if you can make those what I would consider mundane tasks interesting and interactive. I think the issue is, some people enjoy it the way it is. A 'shortcut' allows those who don't, a way to avoid it and those who do enjoy it, to keep on keeping on.
 
Ok, I think y'all are starting to convince me...autopilot would be kinda neat.

So, where would it stand on a level of priority to any of you?

For me, I want to see a lot more added to the galaxy first. Comets, rogue planets, planets in collapse, planets in formation, black holes consuming accretion disks, and star formation to name a few.

That way, when I am looking at system map during a long autopilot, there is even more to look at and study.

That kind of stuff has been asked for for quite some time. God only knows when they'll even look into that type of content. Sometimes it feels like they only have one art dude chained to a table, and he is soley responsible for populating an entire galaxy with content.

Wonder if they should do a community thing where people can submit models for stuff like this that they might use? Asteroid bases, etc. Anything to help out...its a big void to fill after all.
 
I would actually love to have an autopilot for galaxy route plotting. This would simply be used to move from system A to system K, going through B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I and J. I can imagine it like this:

-Plot the route.
-Say options: "Every two jumps, fuel scoop until the tank is full".

That autopilot would carry on until: A) You press ANY button or the throttle (even ADS, to avoid "automated exploring"), or B) When anything happens. With anything I mean from another pilot interdicting you, to arriving to an star the autopilot is supposed to scoop, but it's not scoopable .

I would personally love this feature.
 
That kind of stuff has been asked for for quite some time. God only knows when they'll even look into that type of content. Sometimes it feels like they only have one art dude chained to a table, and he is soley responsible for populating an entire galaxy with content.

Wonder if they should do a community thing where people can submit models for stuff like this that they might use? Asteroid bases, etc. Anything to help out...its a big void to fill after all.

It very difficult to do this, however a community contest for designing some cool assets would be great. It could be anything from outposts to industrial settlements.
UI design would also be great to see from the community, I feel that FD need a bit of help here sometimes.
 
*No offense, but I kind of feel you're post is sarcastic, but I'm not sure about it ;)

None taken, it wasn't sarcastic. I guess part of the difference may also be that I primarily play in VR where looking around for stuff and flying by planets and such is a lot more interesting. You provide a decent counter argument with wanting to be able to do other things, but that also discourages actually doing things in game somewhat. I think they wanted people to explore a bit more on the way or setup runs to avoid it. Fact is there probably should be more to do in game while flying from point A to point B, but I'm not sure what that would be.

I do know that personally, if I didn't have minor course corrections and such to focus on during a long flight and evaluating where I was going or if I wanted to stop off anywhere, I would find it a lot more boring. I can play without using the autopilot, but I'm not sure some people wouldn't miss out on the little things you can find to do while flying in favor of just alt tabbing out and eventually realizing they don't really actually find the game that interesting.

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That surely is a weakness of underdeveloped exploration gameplay though? If the only gameplay in exploration is pointing at a jump vector and pressing J then it deserves to be removed. The interesting stuff in elite happens outside of supercruise/hyperspace (except marginally scoping). I'll take the stick when I'm in a fight, or if I think a fights about to start, to dock/land and so on. But that's the rest of the time I'd much rather be looking out the window (or better still the external camera), reading galnet, querying the local station about rumours and jobs or market trends, actually looking at the solar system screen which I never ever open currently. All sorts of things that are less boring than keeping my ship on course/speed.

I was more thinking of long in-system flights where you only have to make occasional adjustments anyway. The hidden load screens of system jumps presents a problem for in-game content while jumping. It would be nice if they could fix that, but thus far they haven't.
 
That surely is a weakness of underdeveloped exploration gameplay though? If the only gameplay in exploration is pointing at a jump vector and pressing J then it deserves to be removed. The interesting stuff in elite happens outside of supercruise/hyperspace (except marginally scoping). I'll take the stick when I'm in a fight, or if I think a fights about to start, to dock/land and so on. But that's the rest of the time I'd much rather be looking out the window (or better still the external camera), reading galnet, querying the local station about rumours and jobs or market trends, actually looking at the solar system screen which I never ever open currently. All sorts of things that are less boring than keeping my ship on course/speed.

I so much agree with this, some times that repetitive tasks just gets soooo boring, I just quit and start another game up! however if we have a autopilot I would travel more, and longer for sure.
 
If it doesn't auto-honk before jumping I have no use for it.

Straight line SC auto-pilot would be pointless if there was an obvious audio indicator telling you the time-to-target indicator goes below 10 sec (or 15, or maybe programmable :p ). It could even be the computer saying "Approaching destination." That would be fantastic, I could set off to a planet a few thousand Ls away, go into system map, and not worry about overshooting!

Even without that, I would vote no for that kind of auto-pilot, since it would still overshoot (b/c it's expecting me to take over) if I was in the system/galaxy map.

Seriously, the only place this would be more helpful than my suggestion above is if you don't take a discovery scanner with you on a long journey. If you have a discovery scanner, there's no reason not to just honk even if you're in a rush. Free credits! I think I have >10 mill just from honks on the way to Jaques.
 
If it doesn't auto-honk before jumping I have no use for it.

Straight line SC auto-pilot would be pointless if there was an obvious audio indicator telling you the time-to-target indicator goes below 10 sec (or 15, or maybe programmable :p ). It could even be the computer saying "Approaching destination." That would be fantastic, I could set off to a planet a few thousand Ls away, go into system map, and not worry about overshooting!

Even without that, I would vote no for that kind of auto-pilot, since it would still overshoot (b/c it's expecting me to take over) if I was in the system/galaxy map.

Seriously, the only place this would be more helpful than my suggestion above is if you don't take a discovery scanner with you on a long journey. If you have a discovery scanner, there's no reason not to just honk even if you're in a rush. Free credits! I think I have >10 mill just from honks on the way to Jaques.

So then we should abolish the docking computer because why do we have that, this is about piloting the ship, there are no need for a docking computer? I'm sorry but I can't follow that logic, maybe you are not interested in honking, maybe you just want to trade long distance, or just travel to a point that is far away.
 
This is exactly why I don't want instant ship transfer.

Because the OP is right.

If we can have instantaneous ship teleportation, then things like autopilot are completely fair game and it wouldn't make sense NOT to include it.

That's the kind of bar-lowering that the word "instantaneous" brings when it comes to travel and transportation.
 
I can see a lot of misunderstanding of the whole OPs idea, when I read all your answers commanders...

* NPC driver is not able to get to your destination faster, same time as if you were driving
* if you use NPC driver, you dont gez the honks, loosing credits on exploration data
* route must be carefully planned before letting the NPC to drive, otherwise you risk ending up fuelless
* alert sound with NPC pilot desciption og the situation goes off if something happens


No more need for docking computer, because if you want your NPC pilot can dock for you... You can even watch him doing it from your fighter flying around!


Its all logical...
Its not a I win button
It bring new gameplay - commanding your crew members

Why cant you see it?
 
I can see a lot of misunderstanding of the whole OPs idea, when I read all your answers commanders...

* NPC driver is not able to get to your destination faster, same time as if you were driving
* if you use NPC driver, you dont gez the honks, loosing credits on exploration data
* route must be carefully planned before letting the NPC to drive, otherwise you risk ending up fuelless
* alert sound with NPC pilot desciption og the situation goes off if something happens


No more need for docking computer, because if you want your NPC pilot can dock for you... You can even watch him doing it from your fighter flying around!


Its all logical...
Its not a I win button
It bring new gameplay - commanding your crew members

Why cant you see it?

you are right, its not a I WIN button, more likely a I loose my ship button if used wrong.
 
So then we should abolish the docking computer because why do we have that, this is about piloting the ship, there are no need for a docking computer? I'm sorry but I can't follow that logic, maybe you are not interested in honking, maybe you just want to trade long distance, or just travel to a point that is far away.
I'm not going to complain if it does get added. That was my 2 cents on whether I would find it useful. If it has "approaching destination" warning when I'm map planning, I'll definitely use it! If it doesn't auto-honk when travelling long distances, I won't use it for that. At least unless I for some reason have real time pressure in both ED and RL, seems unlikely for me though.

This is exactly why I don't want instant ship transfer.

Because the OP is right.

If we can have instantaneous ship teleportation, then things like autopilot are completely fair game and it wouldn't make sense NOT to include it.

That's the kind of bar-lowering that the word "instantaneous" brings when it comes to travel and transportation.
I'd say this is the same reason Galnet/powerplay got added to ships computer, but if that got applied evenly then we'd be able to at least plot the most profitable trade currently on your market history. That's not even multi-hop.

For me, the issue of whether this feature implies we should have this thing began with the Advanced Discovery Scanner (almost realistic in it's scale, but better application would have been some really fun gameplay). If we have infinite range astronomical scanner that can detect a 10 K ice ball at (literally) 100 billion km, why can't we detect a ship 10 km away when it's radiators are at least 1000 K hotter, and the rest of the hull is 250 K hotter as well? And then there's the class 8 sensors being 64t and costing 1.75 million credits for a D rating! Compared to class 1A being 1.3t and costing 20,000.

Definitely uneven application of principles. Don't worry so much everybody, you can still play your game. Seriously if people cared this much about something important like who your next leader will be.... You know, I'll leave that one to your imaginations.

TL;DR 1st world problems ;)

Edit:
Its all logical...
Its not a I win button
It bring new gameplay - commanding your crew members
Which may even be what we get with NPC crew in 2.2. Maybe the point should be moot anyway...
 
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Now that is EXACTLY what is in my mind... I am a COMMANDER, the boss on my ship...

Piloting? I have a paid NPC crew memeber for that! And I can pilot myself when seated in the pilots seat of course...
Repairs and maintenance? I have a paid NPC crew member for that!
Navigation? I have a paid NPC crew member for that!
Flying my fighters? I have a paid NPC crew member for that!


Finally somebody understands my point ! Thank You!

o7 Karlos



I agree.

I would like an autopilot (or a well-paided, skilled NPC co-pilot) mainly to do the routine slowing down to drop out of supercruse when arriving at stations.

It is an annoying, tedious task which is made more annoying by the "slow down" warning message that often pops-up when it is too late to slow down.

It would be good to be able to spend more time looking at the system or galaxy maps or reading in-game lore/info rather than having to switch back in time for the for the supercruse slow-down.

On the other hand I don't use the docking computer as I expect it will be faster, safer and more interesting for me to dock manually.
However, I don't have any problem with the docking computer being in the game, or people using it.
(So I am not going to start a "The docking computer needs to be removed from the game because it is a magic I win button, which ruins immersion and is for lazy people" thread for example).
 
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