idea: variable autopilot

[l0mars01]

oftentimes, I will park at a star, turn off all equipment, and recharge with a solar panel. this can take a LOOOOONG time with a HUEG generator and I hate to wait.

solution? animated suspension. autopilot already puts you into animated suspension. how about controlling the rate or duration of suspension? you could program the duration of your sleep or maybe program the ship's computer to trigger a 'wake up' command to an event you can specify, like the ship obtaining full charge. if you want to have fights in rapid succession, you can set it to trigger on an enemy presence. of course, the game should still play itself out while you sleep, so you wake up with a fully charged ship and a number of hostiles waiting for you, depending on how long that took.

[Betelgeuse]

I would love to have a seperate autopilot mode where it turns off when there is an enemy on radar. Mostly for going between planets early in the game where your shields can take much and a random encounter can kill you.

[l0mars01]

I was thinking something along the lines of a single autopilot, but with controls to configure it. Controls to adjust the rate it skips time (to slow it down to no suspension or speed it up however much you want, including total suspension) for continuous gameplay like the current autopilot. And controls to schedule a time or trigger event to return to manual pilot. If you set autopilot to total suspension, then returning to manual pilot on low fuel and any event or time of your choosing should be mandatory (so you eventually wake up). Or for FUNY TIEM that could be optional and people SLEEP FOREVER. To skip to an event or time, you instruct the ship when to return to manual and set autopilot for total suspension.

[goat not sheep]

People sleeping forever is just... well...it's ok if you display a "are you sure" message. Then it's like: bob has been killed by sleeping forever in his ship, while it's ship was too close to a star, it(the star) blew up"

[Dosgamer3]

Then it's like: bob has been killed by sleeping forever in his ship, while it's ship was too close to a star, it(the star) blew up"

I say use the already-there autopilot with the 'a' key, and the programmable autopilot with the 'A' key.

[Karl]

This seems too complex for the reward. Why not just have the autopilot automatically turn off if you get attacked? (i.e. If your ship takes damage, the autopilot turns off.)

Also, recharge times are there for a reason... being able to "autopilot out" of a recharge seems rather cheap and cheating-like to me. And if the recharge rate is insanely slow then I think it makes more sense to adjust the item's statistics then to speed up the autopilot as a workaround.

[goat not sheep]

Autopilots disable when attacked? It might be...a bit too late.

[l0mars01]

It's not really that complicated. MY DESCRIPTION may have been complicated... It's really 2 features:

1. arbitrarily speed up the game
2. skip arbitrary amounts of game time

Let anyone figure out the best way to implement them.

Disastrous, cheating-like gameplay issues aside, I can tell you why it would be nonsense NOT to include these features. According to the Captain's Primer (http://www.neurohack.com/transcendence/Primer.html), the Transcendence universe has and the people in it commonly use animated suspension (see autopilot). With computers present in the Transcendence universe and on-board the ship, automation is only natural. The computer could perform a few tasks, like return to manual pilot or wake up the pilot, when a hostile blip appears on radar or when the ship's sensors detect the fuel capacity is full/low. Hence, due to animated suspension and automation, feature 2 is reasonable.

And if it's not implemented, anyone can leave the game running and return later, maybe after a few drinks, which they basically do anyway.

[Karl]

I meant that having a configurable autopilot seems too complicated. I suppose a button for "ultra-speed" autopilot would be non-complex and doable. (ex: If you hit the autopilot button a second time, time now passes twice as fast as before.)

By the way, what's the current "time speed" of autopilot right now?

[l0mars01]

Maybe default to the current autopilot. And adjust autopilot through a menu (maybe a submenu of the ESC menu). The menu would let you check/uncheck events to return the ship to manual pilot, check/uncheck hibernation mode, and maybe adjust the rate the game skips time. You could have + and - speed up and slow down the game on the fly.

[goat not sheep]

There's already a pause button...