6.0 HF4: still a pain to move big ships through systems

[bitsbytes]

Please improve the implementaion / fix the issue that faar too much player time is being spoiled for no reason, thanks.

In fleet operations, it still takes too much time to travel from one system to another.
A lot of time is wasted before the big ships, XL and possibly L, finally jump to the next system.

Approaching the next system involves unnecessary and lengthy steps. From memory, yesterday evening I had no nerve anymore to continue with the game:

Firstly, the ship warps to the next gate and stops about 50km before the gate, which is imprecise.
Secondly, the ship slowly aligns to the gate and warps. This takes time as the engines need to start moving the ship.
Thirdly, instead of warping to the spot behind the gate, the ship stops in front of the gate and is unable to jump.
Fourthly, the course is adjusted again, which the ship does slowly.
Fifthly, the engines warm up to fly 1-2km behind the gate. Finally, the big ship re-aligns and needs to move to a certain position behind the gate, which takes a while.

Developers at EGOSOFT, this issue has taken too much time to resolve and has persisted for years.
Although you have been trying to address the issue, you have not entirely solved it.

Whats also strange / a certain imbalance here: I observed that when you jump into the next system, you land 50km away from the gate.
But it is not possible to jump into the next system in a much more efficient way?

Here is what I would suggest doing, after you jumped e.g. into the new system:
1. first/quickly align the ship to warp to exactly the position near the gate where the ship is able to jump into the next system
Suggested: around 5 km behind the gate so that there is no collisions with small ships in front of the gate
2. After arrivel start the jump sequence
3. Arrive at the new system in approx 5km distance to the gate into the direction of the next gate (exclude highways as location to avoid collision)

[CBJ]

Without a savegame, or any of the other information requested at the top of the forum, there is nothing we can investigate.

[bitsbytes]

I do not think that a specific savegame is needed for troubleshooting. Its an unmodded game that I started with 5.x if I remember right.

The reason why I think that is, because the way that big ships fly and traverse systems is primarily determined by the *program code*,
not by a specific save game or which game start I choosed (read now through your requirements for a bug report, some make sense, but I think not in this case).

Additionally I will take the Colossus Angreifer out of the fleet, so that you do not think that this is related to a specific fleet setup.
I will make notes how long the single actions take and where I see major issues.

So the flight behaviour and waste of time near gates should be reproduceable by anybody
- with 6.0 HF4 and
- taking a Colossus Angreifer and e.g. flying from "Ianamus Zura IV" to "Zweiter Kontakt II Unruheherd"
via the northern route (via Profit Center Alpha / Stiller Zeuge / Argon Prime).

I noticed already that something changed in the code between 5.x and 6.x:
- turning the ships nose "down and up" after jumping into a system and before entering "warp" to fly to the next gate has been removed
- that jumping into the next systems let you come out 50km behind the gate.
Which creates other issues that you need to wait for the big engines to warm up, the warp to the gate and then the usual 2-3x repositioning
- flying through Aragon prime too a very suboptimal route crossing the highway and stopping around 50km before the next gate
You ask yourself, why didn't the ship fly to the gate and stops in 50km distance...

But what has been done is not enough.

[bitsbytes]

I started now the way back with the Colossos Angreifer from "Zweiter Kontakt Unruheherd" to "Ianamus Zura II" in order to repeat the flight like yesterday.
I made many notes and it took me 2 DIN A4 pages to protocol and document the 45 min flight over 6 systems (~8min per system).
During the flight and making notes it was clearly evident how unefficient and unnecessary time consuming the flight is and how crude/bad the algorithms are.

The biggest time consumers
- after jump the ship there are several things which are extremely unefficient and simply too timeconsuming and annoying
- turns between 90-170° to the right and then to the left (or vice versa) although only a small correction of course vector is required (maybe 10-15°)
- then it starts the warp engines too early and needs to stop the engines, because the ship didn't reach the final course vector yet
- then it has to start the engines again which costs another around 20 seconds

Instead of warping completely to the next gate and jumping, the flight is interrupted several times
- sometimes even in the middle or 2/3 with the usual time for adjusting the course vector and having to start the warp engines again
- then very often the ship stops around 50km in front of the gate, then the usual time for adjusting the course vector and having to start warp engines again
- then you are landing approx 7 km before the gate and the ship approaches slowly the gate
- tries to get begind the gate
- approx 3km behind the gate the ship puts the nose up to navigate the ship to the center axis of the gate
- the the ship turns again to align with the center axis through the gate
- well and then FINALLY the ship jumps

It happened only one time in the Hatikva System that the system stopped only one time in the middle of the system, but then warped directly behind the gate in one sweep and immediately warped. Hey, this should the default!

At the destination system the fleet stopped at about 2/3 of the way to the destination point at a station and then approached to it.
It puts up questions again, why it doesn't proceed with the warp up to the point.

The way back without fleet was not better, I documented the flight back through two systems and then was too annoyed to continue because documenting this simply takes me too much time.
I am already your Beta Tester for this game and all DLCs since over 4 years.
I am really fed up with this game.

From love & hate it turns now more to hate, because I have no understanding after 4 long years, that the code quality and playability of the game is still so bad.
It is unbelieveable in what bad shape the game is after so many years.

And now please go ahead and test whatever you want, but do not spoil my time further by requesting unnecessary things as it is like I though already.
You do not need any savegame to onserve the too time consuming flight behaviour which only does one thing: completely sucks.

I am really tired and dissapointed of this game. It could be so wonderful, if the people would make it playable.

I have no chance in the evening to make any maneuver when it turns out that such things simply cost too much time and nerves because of all these longstanding bugs.