Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I would be in favor of it even with manual controls added, getting stuck on things becomes one less thing to worry about when the going gets hectic.

Though obviously there are performance implications, and it's not worth if it it's going to introduce a considerable decrease in quality of life.

Why can't the piloteer of the pilot with all his neurons plot a course?

There are two separate issues here.

It is no secret that the collision models of objects in space are often considerably different than the rendered model. In my case, this has cut several engagements short before they had begun, where portions of asteroid or collidable objects looked passable but were not.

The second issue is the flawed AI navigation. I have warped inside of structures and found myself spending half an hour bumping trying to find my way out of the interior of a texture. Safe logging fixed this one. Also the way sub-warp vectors are calculated makes no sense. If I adjust my preset orbit distance from 2500 to 2000, the ship should angle in and tighten orbit, not stop completely and reverse direction.

We always had manual piloting, or at least for the 5 years I have been around they just made it available in a different form recently by adding the key board to the equation.

As far as ship automatically calculating a path around objects to get to a place they can warp from I say no way. I want control of which direction I go to clear an obstacle and besides that it really is extremely easy to find your way around.

If you want to learn more than you ever wanted to know about colliding with objects get out in a cloaked ship and move around objects like asteroids, gates, other ships and stations since the same collision spheres that de-cloak you are the ones that cause the problem the OP is talking about it can be eye opening and educational.


Seen a lot of odd behaviors using autopilot or orbits but never this one, interesting.

ITT: Autopilot isn't enough we also need autofight autoevade and autoeverything else.

OP really needs some autothink™

A: They do have mass, frigates can only bump freighters if they go really really fast with oversized propulsion modules.
B: The mass of these ships is so large that thrusters that aren't scaled to par with the main engines won't have any effect, its like a drop of water on the niagra falls. we'd need engines like the main engines pointing in all directions on the ships, and it would rather spoil the designs. Not to mention that the ships actually just use one set of engines in real life, they just point the engines in the opposite direction of where they want to go, then turn again and firing engines again, this way they only have to lug around one set of engines instead of 6.