Any plans for an autopilot?
TL;DRAn internal autopilot already exists and drives AI flight and automated landing, but there are currently no plans for a player-authored autopilot to fly a planned route.
So we actually already have an autopilot, but it's not for player use, I guess. We use an autopilot for all of the AI flight. So we have this internal autopilot where you can queue up commands and the ship will go and execute them. And the flight AI team uses that to control the ships. We do sort of use it, I guess, for the automated landing to an extent.
Yeah, that's true. The automated landing and takeoff uses the same autopilot. And for small ships, single seaters, it's like, you should really be doing that yourself. For multi-crew ships, I would imagine you'd task one of your AI crew members to fly. So yes, it would be doing autopilot, but it's by proxy: there's an NPC in the seat.
There's no plans currently for a player-authored autopilot, like, I'm going to sit in my ship and plan a route and then sit back and watch it fly. We don't have any plans for that.
Even on the big capital ships, you would plan your route, but it then sends it to the helmsman: go orientate to this direction for this amount of time. Now change to this one.