[New Player Trap] Exiting ship while moving

[ProPeach]

There have been quite a few players on Discord, Reddit, or the Steam forums who have lost their unsaved WIP ship by exiting the controls when the ship is in Lightcuise mode. As an experienced player there are a couple things you can do to get your ship back like saving it and respawning from the entity menu, but that only works if you don't spawn another ship to try and chase the first, and a new player often doesn't have this knowledge.

Some possible solutions, I'm sure others have some ideas as well -

• Warning message/confirmation check when leaving the yoke during lightcruise, if the ship is not in autopilot. As simple as tapping F so can be bypassed quickly if the player actually wants to do it (not very elegant as it effects players lifelong experience to fix an often one time problem)

• Standing inside a ships boundary box locks the players movement to that ship, like early builds of Skywanderers (I remember the little padlock icon!)

• Ships in Lightcruise slow down to a stop relatively quickly when not piloted (within 30 seconds or so), that way players can teleport to the ship after it has stopped even if it doesn't have a gravity generator on board - I think this is the most elegant, although it does require players to have knowledge of the teleport menu and F3 option for all ships

Hope this helps, I know it can be tough to pin down new players troubles

[tsunamayo]

@ProPeach Ho yeah the dreaded I lost my ship... I will just simply forbit to exit the ship if there is no gravity field around, giving a warning message so they learn about gravity field too. I dont want to do B as it is confusing to get collected by a passing hovercraft on the ground ect. And the last solution wont cut it like you said. That being said I will add a menu with the list of all player entities, so you can teleport to them or unspawn them. Thanks

[ProPeach]

The new menu options sound great! Especially if you can also save the entity on that list too, I suppose at that point all we need to do is get the word out that the menu exists.

Edit - Any chance of having a search bar in the player entity menu list too? It seems almost randomly arranged

[DonitaStark]

i dropped to space lightcruise when i stand up from pilot's chair, i was using vanilla ships that game have. im ok at npc ships, i can walk in when they move. but supercrise has something to do with it.

[mossymossmoss]

On a similar note, I currently find that whilst autopilot is engaged and the ship is under lightcruise, if I exit my seat, I'm just left in space as the ship accelerates away, didn't exit and ports, jump out or otherwise, it just didn't carry the player with it whilst moving