Fix the Autopilot

Ren shared this feedback 27 days ago
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TLDR: Make autopilot properly calculate deceleration.


So, the autopilot system for recorders and remote controls functions extremely poorly. I'm unsure if it's due to using it in a gravity well, but that really shouldn't matter.

For a start, the autopilot on most ships don't seem to properly take into account the inertia of the craft when attempting to slow down to properly align with a waypoint. This makes ships 99% of the time almost never reach their waypoints or at the very least take 20x longer than is needed if proper calculation was implemented. I've spent countless hours testing this system on a planet, and I would be more than willing to show recordings of proper waypoints and testing. The autopilot in the game needs a desperate rework.


The autopilot system should already know things like the weight of the craft, the current velocity of the craft, the XYZ location of the destination GPS, the location of the thrusters relative to the remote control/AI move block, the pitch/yaw/roll of the craft, and the time to actually reach the destination. Yet even with all of this information, the autopilot will still find ways to either miss the GPS destination point or spend so much more time than is needed to reach the position.


Based on my testing, it seems that the component that is most critical to fix is the implementation of timing the ship's movements to properly calculate when it should decelerate. I do not know if there's anything that has been overlooked in my analysis, but I know I'm not the only one experiencing this problem with the current system.

Also on a side note, please do not blame the ship itself for the poor autopilot performance, because that shouldn't matter at all in 90% of cases. If the ship can fly and has thrust in all directions, it should be good enough to use autopilot without problems. Of course there are also things the user can do to deliberately mess with the autopilot, such as activating the autopilot at a time where the autopilot can't actually adjust quickly enough to reach the GPS point, or slow down fast enough due to the limitations of the craft, but these are exceptions from the normal behavior (or rather they should be, because currently a craft will often overshoot anyway).

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I've confirmed this issue is mostly due to planet gravity. In space, autopilot is wonky especially when it comes to using collision avoidance, but it performs far better in space than on planets.

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