The Jumping Dilemma

[VRipper]

So, by now I think everyone's come across one or more discussions on introducing an autopilot into the game. Let's face it, jumping between systems on long journeys is neither fun nor engaging, there's no denying that.

However, I do get that introducing an autopilot would likely just turn Elite Dangerous into a game in which people just do other things while the game plays itself.

Now, an alternative that I occasionally see people bring up would be to just give people something to do, something to alleviate the tedious and repetitive task of slightly moving your mouse and pressing "J" over and over again.

I know that the developers likely don't read the Steam discussion forums, but either way, I'd like to know what other people would think about the ability to play simple mini-games, like Snake for example, on one of the ship panels.

[morph113]

Maybe for supercruising, when you supercruise to a star or planet hundreds of thousands of LS away. For jumping I don't see the need or how that would be practical. 15 seconds you spend in the loading screen, 30 seconds you navigate around the main star manually to your next destination, then 5-10 seconds to jump. I don't see why I would want to play a minigame during maybe 30 seconds downtime.

For long supercruises where you do absolutely nothing it would indeed be kind of cool to have some kind of minigame. But It's not really important, I usually just alt-tab out of the game and go to reddit or watch youtube or whatever.

[VRipper]

Originally posted by morph113:

Maybe for supercruising, when you supercruise to a star or planet hundreds of thousands of LS away. For jumping I don't see the need or how that would be practical. 15 seconds you spend in the loading screen, 30 seconds you navigate around the main star manually to your next destination, then 5-10 seconds to jump. I don't see why I would want to play a minigame during maybe 30 seconds downtime.

For long supercruises where you do absolutely nothing it would indeed be kind of cool to have some kind of minigame. But It's not really important, I usually just alt-tab out of the game and go to reddit or watch youtube or whatever.

Fair enough.

[Turd Ferguson]

I've always thought Pokemon Go! would be a great minigame to play in supercruise....we kind of already have someting similar with materials collection, so I know the foundation to implement it is already there.

[TehJumpingJawa]

Hell no.

I completely agree jumping is tedious.
I also completely agree that autopilot is not an ideal solution; it's treating the symptom, not the cause.

The cause is simple; jumping isn't engaging gameplay.
The solution is equally simple; make it engaging gameplay!

For it to be engaging gameplay, it has to be challenging & diverse, with a risk/reward tradeoff.

My suggestion is something along the lines of:

- Make witch-space navigable, with hazards for the player to avoid.
- Get rid of jump range limits; you can jump as far as you like, it just means you have to survive longer in witch-space.
- scale the length of time in witch-space, and its difficulty, such that:
- short jumps (~20ly) take ~10 seconds, and your aim is to avoid taking damage.
- long jumps (~500ly) take ~1 minute and are dangerous; damage minimisation is the goal, though death is possible.
- extreme jumps (~10000ly) take ~5 minutes, heavy damage is certain, death is likely.

Do you give equipment to mitigate the dangers of witch-space? or do you leave it entirely in the domain of player skill?
That's a question for play testing.

Precisely what makes witch-space dangerous?
No idea; that's for designers & artists to dream up.

[morph113]

Originally posted by TehJumpingJawa:

Get rid of jump range limits; you can jump as far as you like, it just means you have to survive longer in witch-space.

Yeah, how about no? Thankfully FD will almost certainly never change how jumping works or do a silly change like being able to jump to the other side of the galaxy with 1 jump. It would make exploration and traveling long distances meaningless. The would be no sense in scale of the galaxy if you can cross it with 1 jump. Even if that jump is risky and would take 10 minutes or 30 minutes.

[TehJumpingJawa]

Originally posted by morph113:

Originally posted by TehJumpingJawa:

Get rid of jump range limits; you can jump as far as you like, it just means you have to survive longer in witch-space.

Yeah, how about no? Thankfully FD will almost certainly never change how jumping works or do a silly change like being able to jump to the other side of the galaxy with 1 jump. It would make exploration and traveling long distances meaningless. The would be no sense in scale of the galaxy if you can cross it with 1 jump. Even if that jump is risky and would take 10 minutes or 30 minutes.

*sigh*

It's an idea; a starting point; a draft.
Nitpicking on petty balancing really is quite silly.

Ask yourself the overarching question:
What does having finite jump ranges accomplish?
Answer:
Repetition.

Repetitive tasks become boring to the human brain; it's part of our biology, and why we build machines.

So either:
1) You concede that a core part of your game is boring
2) You automate it via an autopilot
3) You do away with the repetition, substituting it with something else, e.g. varying difficulty.

[Frank K]

Jumping is part of the game. I challenge myself to be as time efficient as possible. Jumping efficiently IS the mini-game to get good at, just like lining up the toaster slots perfectly coming out of SC at stations. Maybe because my factions comms channel is so active and entertaining the jumping doesn't seem that tedious.

[morph113]

I rather prefer the repition of jumping rather than being ablet to jump everwhere I want with just 1 jump. It would completely kill exploration which is a vital part of ED. It would ruin the way the scale of the galaxy feels. Tanks, fuel limpets or fuel scoops would be redundant. The fuel rats would have to close down their business probably as you could always just make 1 jump to wherever you want to go. There is also a sense of "pride and accomplishment" (yeah I hate to use EA's words) for managing to travel through the galaxy. But yeah, thankfully FD will never make such a change because it would pretty much ruin many parts of the game.

Autopilot is also out of the question and they already confirmed that they will never implement an auto pilot since they don't want that the game basically plays itself. With an auto pilot people would just set Beagle Point as target, leave the PC running and the next day check back and your ship has made it to beagle point without you doing anything. I mean while we are ad it, why not also automate system scanning as well?

I mean within the bubble you can already reach most systems with just a few jumps, that takes a few minutes tops. And if you want to explore the galaxy then you simply have to live with the time investment and repetition of jumping.

[White Prime]

Originally posted by morph113:

Maybe for supercruising, when you supercruise to a star or planet hundreds of thousands of LS away. For jumping I don't see the need or how that would be practical. 15 seconds you spend in the loading screen, 30 seconds you navigate around the main star manually to your next destination, then 5-10 seconds to jump. I don't see why I would want to play a minigame during maybe 30 seconds downtime.

For long supercruises where you do absolutely nothing it would indeed be kind of cool to have some kind of minigame. But It's not really important, I usually just alt-tab out of the game and go to reddit or watch youtube or whatever.

You've got all that UTTERLY backwards.

[ALPHA_65]

it should have a coordenate system that you could jump specifically where you wanted instead of traveling through the whole system. when a system has two star normally you have to travel to the second star although you have selected this second star on the map. put something like star wars they jump to a specific coordenates. maior parte do tempo que eu jogo é a fazer saltos que demoram muito tempo que se torna aborrecido . It's my opinion because otherwise the game is good

[Fix]

I agree with jumping to specific stars in systems, within your normal jump range - Could be justified with them having to be a certain mass... AND that you would have had to have 'been there already' at some point.... but autopiloting a core part of the game is very risky for FD and not likely to happen.

You could probably make a macro though if you have a keyboard with the keys to do it and take some of the pain out of jumping.... I might try that myself actually.

[HamakiBCN2]

Originally posted by TehJumpingJawa:

Hell no.

I completely agree jumping is tedious.
I also completely agree that autopilot is not an ideal solution; it's treating the symptom, not the cause.

The cause is simple; jumping isn't engaging gameplay.
The solution is equally simple; make it engaging gameplay!

For it to be engaging gameplay, it has to be challenging & diverse, with a risk/reward tradeoff.

My suggestion is something along the lines of:

- Make witch-space navigable, with hazards for the player to avoid.
- Get rid of jump range limits; you can jump as far as you like, it just means you have to survive longer in witch-space.
- scale the length of time in witch-space, and its difficulty, such that:
- short jumps (~20ly) take ~10 seconds, and your aim is to avoid taking damage.
- long jumps (~500ly) take ~1 minute and are dangerous; damage minimisation is the goal, though death is possible.
- extreme jumps (~10000ly) take ~5 minutes, heavy damage is certain, death is likely.

Do you give equipment to mitigate the dangers of witch-space? or do you leave it entirely in the domain of player skill?
That's a question for play testing.

Precisely what makes witch-space dangerous?
No idea; that's for designers & artists to dream up.

The first problem that comes to mind is that what we call Witchspace is in fact nothing more than a fancy loading screen, a scripted animation that runs in a loop while you connect to the server instance in your destination. Most of the game (certainly not the flight mechanics) isn't even running at the time.

Which means that, if they did that, each jump would take twice as long: first the after the mini-game, you'd still have to go thorugh the 45-60 seconds instance loading animation.

Not a problem for those 500+Ly, but it would make those 20ly jumps way, way worse than they're already.

[Kendall]

Originally posted by VRipper:

So, by now I think everyone's come across one or more discussions on introducing an autopilot into the game. Let's face it, jumping between systems on long journeys is neither fun nor engaging, there's no denying that.

However, I do get that introducing an autopilot would likely just turn Elite Dangerous into a game in which people just do other things while the game plays itself.

Now, an alternative that I occasionally see people bring up would be to just give people something to do, something to alleviate the tedious and repetitive task of slightly moving your mouse and pressing "J" over and over again.

I know that the developers likely don't read the Steam discussion forums, but either way, I'd like to know what other people would think about the ability to play simple mini-games, like Snake for example, on one of the ship panels.

They could always just make an auto-jump slot that you could (at your option), buy an auto-jump computer for. It would be optional. If you don't like it, don't buy it.

[semidomestic]

Originally posted by Frank K:

Jumping is part of the game. I challenge myself to be as time efficient as possible. Jumping efficiently IS the mini-game to get good at, just like lining up the toaster slots perfectly coming out of SC at stations. Maybe because my factions comms channel is so active and entertaining the jumping doesn't seem that tedious.

EXACTLY!
Besides, by the time you exit out of your mini game or autopilot, you've been interdicted... unless you propose they do away with interdictions too.
What would really be nice is another FSD engineering option to travel faster in supercruise.

[Team Triss]

If you really hate jumping that much, why not just do something else?