@@Splitsie you do an amazing job. Just discovered this game a few days ago. I have tons of ideas and your tutorials and explanation help me execute them easily. Thank you
Just dropping a comment here that even 4 years later this video still applies and is being used by people like me to build drones. Thanks for making awesome content Splitsie!
2019 here, i have never made drones before but i would love to see this updated with maybe covering how to do a utility drone like a wielder or a resource collector (drills). you are the best, thank you for all the support on this game!
Isn't it 2020 now? :P I'm hoping to look at the autopilot scripts that are out these days and do some videos on them, but finding the time between my other projects is my challenge at the moment :/
Easy fix for a remote way off center of your connector is to have a docking approach to your docking approach to ensure the drone approaches from the same direction every time. You can have multiple approaches if needed, then a final approach, lastly with the landed waypoint. You might do this anyway if docking in a hangar bay.
Couldn't you potentially set it up so that at the approach it's speed is slower than the other markers? Make docking more smooth even with precision mode off? Would allow you to increase the over all speed so your drone can have the most efficient coverage of the area (as long as its slow enough to still shoot and kill hostiles). Also my friends and I set up a small/medium sized drone to go between our 4 different bases, so if one of us needed something the others hand plenty of we could share whatever we put in our specified connector. Basically we had one friend near a lake so he gave us loads of ice, another near a huge uranium deposit to give us ingots when we needed, and another near iron and other precious metals. The last guy was in space so we didn't set up a gps for the drone out there, but every once and a while he would come down and deliver platinum.
We actually did that a while ago but for some reason kept having issues (might be resolved now) We had an orbital drop station juuuuust in the gravity well of the planet completely straight up from the lake and had a 5-5 large block area where the cargo would land in perfectly every time with parachutes. The problem we had was that for some reason after welding the blueprint we made of a cargo drop package and disconnecting it, the whole station would lose its "station" value and become a ship again. Then it would just fall on to the square on the lake and make a big mess. We haven't tried it in a while though.
If you have asteroids on you could try to find one within the gravity well, or place your station on an asteroid just outside it and use the autopilot to get the drop pod into position. Once in position just use the parachutes for the rest. It'd be a bit more expensive but should be more reliable :)
The orbital location was kinda last minute/secondary. We made the lake base first, then decided whatever is or isn't straight up from the base is where we build. But yeah preferably building one into an astroid just in the gravity well. The way we had the orbital set up was just a hole (hanger doors) in the floor of the station that opened up after the cargo pod was built and loaded with whatever was needed. We set it up so that from the planet you could remote control the whole station and and tell the blueprint projector to turn on and welders/build repair bots for this case, then when its done it's automatically attached to the connector, loaded with whatever we wanted, floor opened up, then the pod was disconnected and dropped to the landing pad that was about 20 meters from our lake base. It landed on the pad in nearly the same spot every time, maybe a few meters in a given direction. I'd like to revise it and make it potentially land on a connector and attach when it makes landfall. But that might be wishfull thinking for Space Engineers.
If the pod's powered you could just set it up like the one I made in the video, but if it's unpowered I think you'll have a very tough time of things. Impressive you were getting it to drop within a few meters as it was though :)
To adjust the speed of the drone you have 2 basic options. 1. Use a secondary remote control fro docking only. This would be fairly simple to set up and relatively cheap. But you'll need one for every docking location. So it's a bit limited. 2. Use timers. You'll need four additional timers. Two to reduce speed for docking and two to increase speed again. In this setup a timer will continuously reduce the speed of the drone. The other timer will stop that process after a few seconds. The timers can be triggered by either the remote control it's self or by a sensor. A third option is to use a programmable block if you want fine grain control over the speed of your drones. If you choose that route you'll either need to find something on the workshop or learn a bit of C#. C# is the scripting language used in SE programmable blocks.
Great Video Splitsie, nice simple intro to drones and their uses. I've experimented with them a few times myself, mostly cargo drones that will fetch supplies form a mining outpost (Scripts to load them at the outpost and a sorter to unload at the mainbase) but I tried some defence drones too, though I added sensors so it could chase the target, first sensor was all directions as a basic "Is there a target in range" which turned off the autopilot (and back on again once the sensor wasn't detecting the target anymore) and then a sensor on each side tied to overriden gyroscopes for the turning / chase behaviour. It worked pretty well actually.
Thanks! I like the idea of using sensors to enhance the drone to make it chase targets, I might have to look into setting something up like that so I can teach that sort of behaviour too, it'd be pretty cool if more people knew how to do that stuff and see what they come up with on the workshop :)
@@starmada105 this method requires lots of cargo space and raw materials have a huge impact on weight... Keeping this big ship up in the air will costs more thrusters and more power. Not to mention if the drone is getting hit and destroyed while hoovering over the base.... you know what happens
Better idea, just put the solar panels on a mini-station and use batteries instead of reactors by extending the delay. Have multiple connector points, and have it extend very high. You wouldn't even need defenses- the drones themselves would do the job for you. Put something like a mining drone and an assembler there, use Rdav's mining script, and you have yourself a self-sustaining base.
I'm a few years late, but this tutorial is excellent. As are many of your others. I just found this game and am enjoying it quite a bit. Your content is a large part of understanding this complex game
a few things: 0) nice and informative video 1) i'd recommend using the "approach" marker as first point in the route, to avoid any collisions with the base and an earlier ability to turn the avoidance on. 2) i'm not sure about the relevance of the order of the stuff the sorter is allowed to pull. it may set priority, which would be good: the sorter could fill itself up with ammunition and let the reactors pull uranium for themselves (if enough ammo is stored in the base). if it doesnt however, it will end ep the other way around and empty the uranium of the entire base, leaving the turrets to pull for themselves
I don't think there's any need for the order on the sorter to be set a particular way, in the tests I did it was able to pull everything into the system in a few seconds regardless of volume so it should work. As for stealing all the uranium from the base, I didn't notice that being a problem but to be safe you could place a sorter before your base reactors in order to allow only one way flow. The reason I used the sorter on the ship is that the guns and reactors pull things very slowly compared to the sorter so this system ensured maximum refueling in the shortest period of time :) Your point on the markers is a good one though, I really should have made the first patrol point much closer to the dock :P
You are right that automatically docking is simple when the drone connector, the base connector, and the remote control are in a straight line for a direct approach. Valuable information and one of the most frequent 'gotchas' that people mess up. It is also important to know that the remote control's piloting skills get derpier the further away from the drone's center of mass it is mounted. If mounted off the center of mass, it may take a long-ish time making incremental adjustments to keep the remote control block on a waypoint (or continually stop turning, move the drone sideways so that the remote control block goes back to that waypoint, and start turning again over and over) whenever it needs to turn to head for a waypoint in a different direction. Incidentally wouldn't it be better to "stuff" uranium into the reactor only, which can hold a limited but still excessive amount, rather than stuffing the entire conveyor junction full, which can hold a whole LOT more uranium than you want to risk to incoming attackers? Also, it's hard to imagine that this needed more than two reactors; why are there six?
The alignment is one of those things that seems so simple, but only after you work it out. Definitely makes the derpy autopilot ever so slightly less derpy :P It needs that many reactors because atmo thrusters are very power hungry, each small grid small atmo thruster needs 1.5 small reactors to power it at maximum thrust, so the six ensure that it won't max out on power draw while lifting and moving forward/sideways :)
Great video, thanks! I wish I had watched it earlier tho. I've spent several hours in stress and despair trying to set a waypoint for my drone by floating my engineer above the connector, setting a waypoint, sending my drone to dock, visually estimate the discrepancy with where the waypoint should have been, re-set it and try again in a loop :) Landing the drone and setting the waypoint from the navigation mode just changed my life :))
You first land the drone manually and then enter it's navigation mode and set the waypoint from it. This way it'll be set according to drone's autopilot and this way it'll land precisely that way. It was a long time since I watched this video now, check this moment in the video yourself, it's pretty cool and easy to reproduce
Thx for the video it helped explain a lot of what I’ve been doing wrong. Now with this information I can use drones to trans supplies without having to be there, space engineers has come far and your videos with how to properly build and command drones just made it better. Thx I hope you keep giving good tips for us noobies to this game
If you run into problems with the drones, there are some fantastic scripts out there that can help with some of the bits where the vanilla autopilot struggles (I can't think of the names of them right now but should be found on the workshop by searching for auto-docking/autopilot etc) :)
Solution for not centered remote controls: Add one more gyro and make the "Dock" possition activate it. Set the gyro on overwrite which will make the ship rotate. Set the connector's magnetic force to a higher degree and Voila! You can even add an aditional timer block for convenience
That could work I suppose, I fear that level of complexity when dealing with the vanilla autopilot though as it always seems to have a different idea on what it wants to do :P
After considerable time building yesterday I thought I'd share some tips I learned: -Placing the docked waypoint about 1m above the connector got me much more consistent results -I found it best to have the autopilot disengage as soon as the docked GPS marker is reached -To use this with batteries, when you dock have an action set to turn recharge on/off, then 0.5 seconds before undocking set discharge on/off I also have landing legs on my drone so it can go park itself when not needed - the drone has no problem flying with the legs in the retracted position (on single player at least)
Wohoo! Just what i needed. And the new Update is amazing by the way. You should redo the Video where you tested what block you should have under your Ship
You have created a great channel Splitsie, keep up the good work! Do you know it there is a way to do “relative” coordinates? A mining ship or truck could have a waypoint in front of a cliff and then, say go north this distance or this time, then drop off load and each loop would add to that distance or time to drill deeper into the cliff. I guess one way of doing that is telling to turn on forward thrusters or turn wheels forward for certain amount of time and just hope that it stays right side up lol. Or if a ship had drills on the bottom it could go to way point and turn off (or lower) up thrusters and just let gravity take it down, cargo full, go back to waypoint... So I guess my question would really be about adding time on timers each cycle or how to use “cargo full” to move on to next step? Thank you!
You could mount those turrets facing downwards. I think that would help them with target acquisition. Also, if you're into mods, you could use energy weapon turrets instead. It depends on the mod, but I know at least one that doesn't use any ammo at all, just power. That would be rather useful for a defense drone as it wouldn't require you to constantly insure that it has ammo available. Combine that with the transmission power mod, and you'd actually never need to dock the drone at all. :)
Where's the fun in that? ;) I like having the challenge of getting it functional given the constraints of needing fuel and ammo. Also, the reason I mounted the guns in the position they're in was because making a design with downward mounted guns was much larger, and less flexible given it would be completely unable to protect itself from aerial attack :)
I watched the first video when I was like 11 and stuck a bunch on warheads on top and turned colision off to make an effective missile but you would need a waypoint to fire it
You could potentially just add another waypoint, acting as a pre-approach similar to what you use for landing strips. This way, the Remote Control block will always have the exact same facing and should always land in the exact same position.
Also, in regards to the guy asking about a mobile carrier with 'moving' GPS markers... how about something similar for antennas? That way you could place an antenna near the docking port on your carrier, and have the drone use that (moving) antenna as a marker and an offset to that to actually be able to dock automatically with the carrier regardless of where it is. This would not only help in THAT way, but it would also allow you to make a drone carrier with relative waypoints setup all around it so it could launch drones that would fly around and protect the carrier wherever it was... now THIS would be awesome!
Some sort of more complex offset would be incredibly handy. You can improve things by having a pre-approach waypoint but it's not as reliable as I'd like which is why I went with this design. Hopefully I can figure out a way to improve it as you really need that for space docking.
Hmm...perhaps in space, keep the same basic design, but rotate the remote control block so that the connector is the ship's "nose." When it's time to dock, the drone will always be flying in its forward direction from the Dock Approach to the Dock, so its connector should then be pointing towards the station's connector.
the problem with that idea is for some reason even with the connector in the nose while in space the ship has some very odd behavior where it rotates around the way point even when it does not need to you can line up and approach a way point and the auto pilot will still rotate away from it for no apparent reason I am still trying to track down the reason for that but once I get it working i will be letting splitsie know about the work around to make it work in space he makes better tutorials then I do and will be able to explain it better once it gets figured out.
That is awesome! With reactors though, 1kg of Uranium will last for a LONG time from what I have learned. I am two months old. I know this is late as hell, but thank you for all of your videos! I have learned so much. I would like to think that you get a lot of thanks for what you do, but I know humans, so a lot will take the info and never say thank you. I have worked many thankless jobs, commercial deep sea diver, computer tech and network engineer, deputy Sheriff, paramedic. I always remember to thank people for what they do when I interact with them, like delivery drivers, Truck drivers, Ubers, ER staff not just the doctors, police, fire and rescue. For without people who help, learn and teach and provide the services that we take for granted, we would still be pounding rocks together. So again Sir Splitsie, from the bottom of my heart, Thank you kindly for what you do! 😇❤️🫡🫡🫡🫡
Could set something up where there is a defence station in space that you want to defend and resupply (not your base where all your resources are stored) then could be sending a small cargo ship between the base and the point (docking and leaving resources) which the defence drone can then use if necessary. Could therefore have a whole automated and resupplied space station away from home
thanks for the video, this is amazing. one thing i cant figure out is can you set a specific value on the increase and decrease speed in the actions? it seems like each one you put acts like you hit the button for it, making it go 5 points in the direction you picked. I noticed i need to use speed limit 1 for a gentle landing. so that is hard to manage when wanting to give it gas for long straights. especially when if you accidentally have it go 1 to many times in either direction, it will reset the value you put to 0 or 100, making you not possible to get 1 again cause of the 5 increments. a 2nd note, if i put armor blocks around the remote block, they act like objects in the way when its using collision avoidance. how could i protect the RC block to use this mode? any ideas?
I think I made this quite a while before those drones he used (not having watched his stuff since back in the days he played with Sage so I could be wrong), but for a really basic drone with side mounted turrets it's not surprising that two creators who've spent a long time in game would end up with similar designs as there isn't much flexibility there
My friends consider me skynet and thank you from this I am bad at making them land and shut off this helped me be even more scary I never used the point things to do
This is a nice part of the game. Now I wonder if it would be possible to make such patrol drones, with lets say 50m grav gens, in space to collect space debris from fallen pirate or other wrecks. Is it possible to let the drone detect the presence of debris so it can use its grinder and let it automatically start it's grinder? Or should I just look into a way to drag it all to a depot where it deactivate the grav gen so the debris falls in the grav field of the depot?
Sadly I don't think you'd be able to do either of those things, artificial gravity doesn't affect blocks except for artificial mass blocks and making a drone that detects grids and grinds them down while it might not be impossible, would need some very clever scripting using cameras to detect the grids and some sort of behaviour to cope with the fact that the grinders push other grids away from the ship as you collide with them. It's well beyond anything I'm capable of, I know that for sure :P
Great job you explain it better then i could lol also im working on a new design that should be able to work in either space or gravity getting it to work in space has been a headache but i think ive almost got it.
yea I came up with a new ship design that should work in both gravity and space but for some reason when its approaching a way point in space it turns away from it for no apparent reason and is skipping the middle way point but ill keep at it just like i did with the planet gravity version
just had one successful space dock so looks like i am on to something i am going to keep testing it to make sure I have got all the bugs worked out but it looks like i am getting it figured out.
Looks like its working soon as i can get to a place with electricity and no interruptions ill do a video for you to look at showing how i got it to work
I bet if you set your "approach" waypoint to be closer to the connector, the drone will spend less time accelerating, thus, the speed when it actually contacts the connector will be less. I am not sure if it's possible, but you could set up some wheels with a nice soft configuration on the bottom to absorb any sort of impact. For light drones you wouldnt need big wheels I bet.
It probably would, but if you set it too close the drone just gets confused and fails to connect, there's a sweet spot there, but I never quite worked out the exact limits of it
It's really cool that you can do this kind of stuff in SE, but I don't really think it is something that I would personally use. Mainly because I very rarely play with wolves enabled. It may be good though if your on a planet with spiders.
Wall is enough to stop* 'unwanted visitors', drone is a REAL overkill in this case... a base on pillar is best approach no wolfs/spiders stuck in walls corners...
There's always plenty of ways to deal with problems in SE, that's the best part of it. I for one enjoy over-engineered solutions that look cool, are fun to set up and still manage to meet their desired function :)
Reactors oh dear ! Overengineered is 'very' fitting... But according to signals You send out... It won't work... - Most of wolfs will just run somewhere and de-spawn (as seen) - You have nothing to power it with I see those advertising leaflets already ! Anti-wolfe drone, perfect for planetside security ! PS: Especially for some one who wanted a challenage and removed uranium, from His/Her survival xD or just started and is low on resources !
You could use it, instead of to fight hostiles, to fly between your base and dig sites so if you're mining a whole lot of uranium/ice/iron/etc. you just dump it in a cargo container and the drone does all of the transporting. No more dealing with weight (supposing your drone can handle it) or making multiple trips.
Is there no mechanism (besides limiting time docked) that limits the amount of ammo and fuel it'll store over time (besides max fuel/ammo capacity of the blocks)? It seems over time that it'll either accrue up to max capacity or will occasionally run out of fuel or ammo.
I feel like batteries are more appropriate for drones like this one. You'll have to extend the time period it sits docked, but overall it should require much less micromanagement than a reactor-based ship. I can't think of any way to prevent the drone from taking much more uranium than it needs without doing something extremely complicated.
One option would be to have a separate storage and production system that's for the drones only, have a refinery working on uranium ore and an assembler producing ammunition. If this system is separated from the main system (either by sorters or physically) then you'd end up with only the amount of fuel and ammunition you choose to make. If you didn't want the separate refinery, the battery option would certainly be the way to go though, you might need an extra timer to have the battery switch to recharge mode and so it always gets the power as I'm not sure the system will lock to the base if you have it turn the battery to recharge on the same process. To be perfectly honest about this thing, it was never intended to be the most practical response to dealing with dogs, just a fun way to get a drone that serves at least some ongoing purpose :)
with a few extra timer blocks you can do a lot of complex things with drones but the more functions you add to it the harder it gets to get ever thing set up correctly and more chances for it to bug out when reloading the world though with this new update some of those bugs might not be as problematic now hopefully.
That's a really good point Mac, the timers do seem to misbehave on load every now and then. It sort of adds a fun challenge though, make something functional with the fewest timers possible - not a challenge I'm likely to win any time soon, efficiency is not my strong suit :P
Cool thing. Will try to make an auto lander, so I don't have to fidgit with landing my ship, of Splitsies design, on my connector. As of now I have an expendable drone to test it out that is herpy derpy. Have seen this clip again and have come up with things to tweak to hopefully be successful.
Unrelated to automated drones, I've been cheeky and made a "Retrieval Drone" for Unknown Signals, been funny sending it out to lazily bring me my free goodies xD
@Splitsie, do you know if stacking sorters multiplies their effect as in if you use 2 junctions and place sorters on 4 sides of one and join them with conveyor elbows to the other junction do they "suck" 4 times faster than without a sorter at all? Or does it not matter how many sorters you have they only increase the movement of materials 1x no matter how many there are?
It's a much more complex setup that's never been quite as reliable when I've done it. That's why I stuck with vertical here, wanted to ensure I was showing people the most reliable method I'd found :) I plan to include something along those lines in the next video on autopilot though
ok, at Approach 1 turn guns off, MUCH less chance of shooting your base. Then you need it to go to an "Approach 2" before waypoint 1(after docking), Turn guns back on. (I ALWAYS play with friendly fire ON, it makes one be more careful about such things.)
1. This is so awesome. Had my computer be able to survive the requirements I will be playing with this drone concept 24/7. 2. I was thinking what will happen if the traffic is huge. Obviously you don't build hundreds of these (actually a dozen is quite too much considering they might get too energy and ammo hungry), but if you disengage collision avoidance wouldn't the following drone crash onto the drone that is feeding itself with uranium and ammo? Although I can see this being solved by careful route management and more than one charging docks. 3. Things that are slightly irrelevant; is it possible for a machine (say, humanoid mech or an atmospheric fighter-like object) to rotate itself and change its direction without making it like a symmetric block with turrets? Maybe useless but still a fun idea. 4. How is this thing going to fare on space?
If you had lots of them you'd probably need to script something to force them to stick to a timetable, unfortunately you need to have collision avoidance off in order to dock - otherwise it just stands off from the connector to avoid colliding with it :P The drones have a forward heading which is based off the remote control block, I just built this one symmetrical to fit with its function - you could make it any shape, but if you want it to be easy to connect to a base you'll want the remote directly over the connector and the centre of mass to be somewhere pretty close to that point as well :)
Hello Splitsie I followd everything. The info is great. 1 problem i have to fix because the drone have problems to dock ad the docking station. The remote control forward direction i have to change to down. Then the drone dock like in the movie. (Sorry for my english, it is not so good.)
Can we setup a route in space to bring ore back from other astroides to the main astroide base in space? let say we find a big astroid with large amount of iron, setup a battery/solar panel and a large cargo container, and we would fill up the large cargo container. The drone would transfer the ore to main base and deliver it and fly back again. Does not need to carry much if it's flying 24/7.
That would be achievable, in fact I might be working on something a little bit similar to that - I don't want to make promises as to when it'll be ready to show off, but hopefully I'll get it reliable enough soon :)
You could possibly do something with hydrogen (engines not thrusters, since the autopilot can't cope with hydrogen thrusters), but I've not continued the autopilot tutorials since I kept running into bugs that meant things would work once and never again without any method to fix them, so I would spend hours working on something just to meet another dead end :( Except for very basic stuff you need to use scripts to make the autopilot work reliably
Yeah, that's certainly a very good solution, but I wanted to come up with an all vanilla solution - I know scripts are technically vanilla but you get what I mean :P
Thanks, I've actually done a tutorial on sensors before, but I don't think that's what you meant :P I was actually thinking of taking it into space to attempt some docking of a cargo transport drone, the lack of gravity will make things a little more challenging :)
Splitsie yes. I tried to apply it to my mining drone for docking and undocking. The lack of orientation prevented me from docking. However i modified it as a sort of return home autopilot. It flys out to approach then turns off collision. Once it flys to the dock it turns the first timer on. This timer turns throwout on which has stone whitelisted, then starts undocking timer. The undocking timer has a 30 second delay which gives time for the ejector, then it turns collision avoidance back on. I will link a screenshot of how it looks after running through it all. Ready to go out mining again!
My ship doesn't even approach the waypoint directly it does whenever is out in deep space but when my waypoint is just a couple blocks away from my base it doesn't even come close to the waypoint before it stops And yes collision mode is off and precision mode is on
Hopefully in the next 2 or 3 weeks, I'm working on something with Meridius IX (the guy who's made all the planetary pirate spawns possible) and if that goes well it'll be coming out this week or next so I'd hopefully follow that with the 3rd part on autopilot which will be docking in space :)
Ok, I love the idea, and it gave me an idea! I want to build a drone like that to haul my ore from a container at the mines that I build, back to the base so i can just mine it and then load it into the container for the drone to move it. My question is though what setting would i have the sorter set to for it to drop it off at the connector back at base? I think i should have to have 2 connectors and set them up individually at each point so i can have a sorter on each to drop off and to pick up at points depending on where it is at the time. I know the one to pick up needs to be set at collect all, so that is get all the ore i put into it, but the one where it drops off, how do i set it up?
Having two connectors is an option and probably not a bad one as you may need multiple remote control blocks to get the autopilot to work reliably (one remote for each direction). Either way you choose to set it up though, you can have a sorter on the base set to pull all the ore from the ship and if you have a single connector on the ship have two sorters attached to the ship connector. One will pull ore in from the mine site, the other will be switched off when that's happening. The second will allow ore to flow back through and it will be turned on for the homeward bound trip, with the other sorter turned off at that point. I haven't tested it but a system like that should work :)
Considering you are probably using a mining ship to do the mining it might be worth adding a second connector to the top of the drone that you can land on and unload through and when you let it loose it'll unload through the connector at the bottom.
You can turn the autopilot off and on anywhere in the sequence and it'll remember where it got to. So only one needed. You can then switch on collect all at the mine and let the refineries or TIM drain the ore at the other end.
That's true, I've found it can get a bit messy with reloads mid cycle though. It's intermittent whether that happens though so I can't seem to reproduce the problem properly :(
I don't use the small landing gear case I have to lose leave the game it won't be there when I get back unless it's charged I take and put a small connector on top of a big connector and drop it welded up go inside then I go inside and lock the big one to the small one that way whatever I'm doing gets charged and I can feel it at the same time without having to move it or put fuel in it
Can we create a ship that can read our GPS coordinates, or somehow we can send it to it, so it starts flying from it's position inside a hangar and land on our position at the range of its antena of cource?
As long as you're within antenna range so you can access the drone, this should be possible. Set up your drone to have some fixed launch waypoints, create a new waypoint at your location, remote access the drone and add that waypoint to its list. Then activate the autopilot and wait for your taxi to arrive :)
I doubt I’ll get a reply here but I’ll ask anyways, I’ve got a drone based of hydrogen and I have a similar path set up but when the drone gets to the “approach” stage it rotates and looks at the connector so that the connector is now facing far away from the bottom of the ship like it’s supposed to. This is also in outer space
Regarding placing the remote control "directly above the connector", don't you instead mean have it centered on the connector (assuming looking top down on the connector's conveyor port? For instance, couldn't there be any number of intervening blocks between the connector and remote, just make sure to have it centered on the connector? Being centered seems the important thing, not how close vertically to the connector the remote is (but what do I know, this is all new to me anyway...).
Space docking to connectors is an absolute nightmare with the autopilot, I've still not been able to come up with a reliable system, though there are some scripts that can handle it
Could you save a little power by using hydrogen thrusters for the downward thrusters to make the autopilot happy, just leave them unfueled since as you said they won't be needed?
Sadly the autopilot doesn't play nicely with hydrogen thrusters, it's a bug that's been a problem for a while and doesn't look like it'll be fixed any time soon so you're best off with ion or atmo for all your AI craft :(
Could you do a revised version with drones in zero g? I've followed your steps, but it faces the connector in zero g, and just bumps into it. Thanks! Love all the videos
Nope because I've never gotten them to work consistently :( I'd suggest having a look at the PAM (Path Auto Miner) or SAM (Sam's Autopilot Manager) scripts on the workshop as one of them may be able to do what you need far more reliably than the vanilla autopilot
That's something you can do in creative mode only, I've done a tutorial that covers creative mode stuff like that which is done by pressing ctrl as you place and drag
any chance there's been some significant changes since you made this? i've spend the better part of a few days trying to get autopilot to function - not even for a full drone, just automatically bringing me in to the right spot to connect, and the best i've managed to get is to come in to the right general area, usually involving a crashing, and almost never actually ending up quite where it should be. remote added to a pre-existing mining vessel. placed it directly above the connector, with orientation matching the cockpit properly. put ship onto the connector so it turned yellow. made a docking waypoint, flew it straight up, made an approach waypoint. speed limit is currently 5, precision mode is on, collision avoidance off. there's nothing that should complicate matters in terms of timers: no timers, no actual docking commands, no actions on the waypoints: just straight up trying to get it to make the approach and reliably position itself so the connector goes yellow and... it just doesn't. in most cases it flies too low and then tries to pull it's own connector through the base connector (neither are flush-mounted), or wiggles back and forth like it's dancing while approaching the docking waypoint. i've tried turning things off and on again (the block, the whole ship, the game) i've made the waypoints both while in the cockpit and while controlling it remotely, in case the precise waypoint location varies from that when i make new waypoints, i remote the old ones entirely, and remove and add the new ones, to be absolutely sure it's using the correct ones this is driving me quite insane.
Is this on a planet or in space? And are you using hydrogen thrusters? The reason I ask is that I was never able to get this to work in space, and the autopilot just doesn't like hydrogen thrusters. The other thing that's easy to miss if you've modified an existing craft is if you've added any downwards thrust to go in the same direction as gravity. The autopilot has always been quite temperamental though, it might save your sanity to have a look at some scripts like Sam's Autopilot Manager to be able to handle the docking and such :)
@@Daemonworks Dang, was hoping it might be something simple. Sadly after making these tutorials and attempting to make one on building something that could go from planet to space I came to the conclusion that scripts really are the only way to go if you're messing with autopilot and want something at least mostly reliable :(
At 11:31 you add the disconnect to the timer hotbar, and then do something to swap the disconnect to position 1 and the autopilot back on to position 2, but don't say what you did. I'm guessing this is a hotkey like control-left arrow, is it? How does the hotkey know what you are swapping?
I can't remember exactly but I may have just edited the part out where I corrected the position. As far as I'm aware there's not hotkey for moving the position of a hot bar item
09:30 I think i would have set the first waypoint to Main Dock Approach, so that it always moves clear of the station before proceeding in the route. Can you add a program to re-dock after a certain time? Can you have multiple remote control docs for different "states"?
@@SplitsieI mean having a "remote control - job" and "remote control - redock". If it runs out of ammo or spends x amount of time, switch off "job" and turn on "redock".
That would almost certainly require scripting to achieve since timer blocks have no way of collecting that info and acting on them. You'd need a script checking that information
This is small grid, so no interior turrets as they're only large grid. The reason I went with uranium was that it was easily available at the time this tutorial was made and was far simpler for refuelling than a battery. You would have to change the timing quite a lot to make a battery powered drone and ensure that on each loop it collects enough charge while it's connected not to end up running out eventually
so i was wonder if there is a way of automatic drone building? In survival even with projector it takes time and u gotta run back 'n forth for resources. so i come up with projector and welders tools near projected drone from bp. But they do not weld it. Seems like welders weld only started block. So basically i have to start each block with manual weld and only then they are continue to finish it. Is there a way to fix it?
The way grid based welders work is that they'll complete the placed blocks before placing any others, if you're missing components of one of the placed blocks they won't place new ones until you provide those materials. The range of small grid welders is fairly short so may not penetrate far into a build so you usually need piston actuated ones that build your stuff gradually from end to end
I know this is not exactly recent, but I can't get my drone to dock. It touches down but instantaneously moves off. It appears that the 2 second delay of timer 1 triggers after the drone moves off again. I am trying to make cargo ferrying drone and it runs back and forth through the way points but never docks long enough to load or unload the cargo. I'd appreciate any help.
I'd suggest using scripts instead, the vanilla autopilot has become worse since the days of this tutorial but the scripts like SAM (Sam's Autopilot Manager) and PAM (Path Auto Miner) have become better and better and can apparently handle locking to connectors quite well :)
Both of those would require scripts and are something I plan to make a tutorial on in the future, but I'm not expecting it'll be very soon since I'm currently working through my beginner tutorials and remaking them, but it's certainly something I want to work on :)
@@Splitsie However, I think what you describe in this video would provide the basic layout for a drone cargo transport - fly to remote mining base, which might already have an automated rotor/piston based drill which empties into a cargo container, pick up ore from the container, fly back to the base to offload for the refinery(ies).
Im happy someone posted an in depth manner of docking via drone. Im having an issue however, when I try to use a mining drone in space, auto pilot is selective for when it wants to work. If I have a back and forth waypoint it works fine, but if I attempt to include any waypoint that includes docking, the ship rotates and refuses to budge. Is that a bug or am i doing something wrong with the remote control?
I'm assuming it's a bug as I'm experiencing the exact same issue which is why I haven't been able to do any more of these autopilot tutorials :( I have come up with a bit of a dirty solution that works most of the time so I'll try to post it in video form soon if I can get it a bit more reliable - I'm basically using a waypoint that's close to the connector then using thruster override and a timer to switch off the autopilot in order to get it into place. The point I'm stuck with is that the autopilot then needs to be manually reset or it won't work... if I can get that part fixed I'll make a video of how I've done it :)
Splitsie Eesh. That makes me sad to hear others are experiencing it and its not my own stupidity. As I recall this was a major issue just 3 years ago around the time the feature came out. Ill post it in a bug report and hope they patch it. Resetting the autopilot constantly is going to be pain because it removes the purpose of the autopilot :( thanks again fot the intuitive tutorials mate. Pray they fix it soon.
Is there a way to limit how much uranium and ammunition it takes on, so it doesn't fly off with the whole base supply, but without having to manually add the missing amount of fuel and ammo? Like a predetermined limit.
Ah, glad you found the answer. Sadly I'm not sure of a way to do it without scripts, so if you're on a server it may not be possible if they don't have them enabled
I honestly don't know how old this was, but I think I recorded it before the multiplayer update. Despite that, as far as I've experienced there's no big difference - other than the placement of a couple of buttons and having to use Shift+K to access the control panel of the drone
You'd need scripts to be able to do that, and with the update to all that side of things I'm not sure which of those might or might not be working at the moment :(
hey, i built a similar drone like this but in space. keep having problems for it to make it to the correct waypoint for some reason and then docking it wont orientate to back up into its docking spot
Doing this in space is a LOT more difficult, the drone doesn't care about orientation at waypoints, it will only dock nicely in a planet's gravity well because it has a means to determine orientation there. This was why this series didn't get finished, I tried for a long time to get a vanilla drone to work and dock in space, even tried a couple of scripts available at the time and it wouldn't reliably dock. There have been a lot of autopilot scripts worked on since that time though and it may be worth looking through some of them, one called SAM (Sam's Autopilot Manager) has seen some recent upgrades and might be worth a look :)
no, but you can use the script to communicate the carrier location to the drone via antenna, and the drone would use a programmable block to dynamically set the next waypoint in the control block.
Yep, there are a few scripts that try to do things like that. I've been waiting till after the update and for the scripters to update their scripts before I go looking into that stuff too closely :)
It was released yesterday, a massive update to the physics behaviour and the modAPI as well as allowing programmable blocks to run themselves without using timer blocks
Is there a way I can program a Drone to fly X meters, and stop? Additionally, is there a method you can use to control multiple drones manually (IE have many drones on the same control frequency?). Thanks for any feedback
To do that sort of thing you'll need to use scripting since the vanilla autopilot can only be used to fly to GPS locations. I think there are some fleet command scripts out there as well, though I haven't messed around with any yet
It's a pretty basic design with just two guns on each side and a connector on the bottom, so I'm not surprised they ended up with one that looked like this
![Twenty One Pilots - “The Line” (from Arcane Season 2) [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/E2Rj2gQAyPA/mqdefault.jpg)
It’s refreshing that there’s a RUclipsr actually explaining how on earth you play Space Engineers :)
I do what I can, though finding the time to cover stuff properly gets difficult sometimes :/
@@Splitsie you do an amazing job. Just discovered this game a few days ago. I have tons of ideas and your tutorials and explanation help me execute them easily. Thank you
Yes I agree
@splitsie I am actually on Xbox and you have helped me more than anyone else
Lies he laying a foundation for you to develop your own playstyle
Just dropping a comment here that even 4 years later this video still applies and is being used by people like me to build drones. Thanks for making awesome content Splitsie!
Thanks, It's really quite cool that the basics of SE haven't had to change in all that time through all the updates :)
@@Splitsie Automation update has entered the chat
2024 here (Circa the "Contact" update) and yes, these guides are still insanely helpful.
2019 here, i have never made drones before but i would love to see this updated with maybe covering how to do a utility drone like a wielder or a resource collector (drills). you are the best, thank you for all the support on this game!
Isn't it 2020 now? :P
I'm hoping to look at the autopilot scripts that are out these days and do some videos on them, but finding the time between my other projects is my challenge at the moment :/
@@Splitsie Don’t overwork yourself
@Splitsie Isn't it 2021 now?
Pretty sure its 2021
@The life of Jackson yeah it is now. :)
I've been going through all of these videos and it has drastically made the game more understandable and enjoyable. Thank you
You really deserve more likes and views. Keep the videos up please.
Thanks :)
Subscribers, as well; you've got some of the most in-depth SE content on RUclips!
I was just about to say he should have 100,000 subs already.
Viper and subs
Like 5 trillion
Easy fix for a remote way off center of your connector is to have a docking approach to your docking approach to ensure the drone approaches from the same direction every time. You can have multiple approaches if needed, then a final approach, lastly with the landed waypoint. You might do this anyway if docking in a hangar bay.
I'm BRAND NEW to this game and your tutorials are a life saver. Because of this video for example I got one of these drones to work out of atmosphere
Awesome, getting the drones to work is no small feat 🙂
Couldn't you potentially set it up so that at the approach it's speed is slower than the other markers? Make docking more smooth even with precision mode off? Would allow you to increase the over all speed so your drone can have the most efficient coverage of the area (as long as its slow enough to still shoot and kill hostiles).
Also my friends and I set up a small/medium sized drone to go between our 4 different bases, so if one of us needed something the others hand plenty of we could share whatever we put in our specified connector.
Basically we had one friend near a lake so he gave us loads of ice, another near a huge uranium deposit to give us ingots when we needed, and another near iron and other precious metals. The last guy was in space so we didn't set up a gps for the drone out there, but every once and a while he would come down and deliver platinum.
We actually did that a while ago but for some reason kept having issues (might be resolved now)
We had an orbital drop station juuuuust in the gravity well of the planet completely straight up from the lake and had a 5-5 large block area where the cargo would land in perfectly every time with parachutes.
The problem we had was that for some reason after welding the blueprint we made of a cargo drop package and disconnecting it, the whole station would lose its "station" value and become a ship again.
Then it would just fall on to the square on the lake and make a big mess.
We haven't tried it in a while though.
If you have asteroids on you could try to find one within the gravity well, or place your station on an asteroid just outside it and use the autopilot to get the drop pod into position. Once in position just use the parachutes for the rest. It'd be a bit more expensive but should be more reliable :)
The orbital location was kinda last minute/secondary.
We made the lake base first, then decided whatever is or isn't straight up from the base is where we build.
But yeah preferably building one into an astroid just in the gravity well.
The way we had the orbital set up was just a hole (hanger doors) in the floor of the station that opened up after the cargo pod was built and loaded with whatever was needed. We set it up so that from the planet you could remote control the whole station and and tell the blueprint projector to turn on and welders/build repair bots for this case, then when its done it's automatically attached to the connector, loaded with whatever we wanted, floor opened up, then the pod was disconnected and dropped to the landing pad that was about 20 meters from our lake base. It landed on the pad in nearly the same spot every time, maybe a few meters in a given direction.
I'd like to revise it and make it potentially land on a connector and attach when it makes landfall.
But that might be wishfull thinking for Space Engineers.
If the pod's powered you could just set it up like the one I made in the video, but if it's unpowered I think you'll have a very tough time of things. Impressive you were getting it to drop within a few meters as it was though :)
To adjust the speed of the drone you have 2 basic options.
1. Use a secondary remote control fro docking only. This would be fairly simple to set up and relatively cheap. But you'll need one for every docking location. So it's a bit limited.
2. Use timers. You'll need four additional timers. Two to reduce speed for docking and two to increase speed again. In this setup a timer will continuously reduce the speed of the drone. The other timer will stop that process after a few seconds. The timers can be triggered by either the remote control it's self or by a sensor.
A third option is to use a programmable block if you want fine grain control over the speed of your drones. If you choose that route you'll either need to find something on the workshop or learn a bit of C#. C# is the scripting language used in SE programmable blocks.
Great Video Splitsie, nice simple intro to drones and their uses.
I've experimented with them a few times myself, mostly cargo drones that will fetch supplies form a mining outpost (Scripts to load them at the outpost and a sorter to unload at the mainbase) but I tried some defence drones too, though I added sensors so it could chase the target, first sensor was all directions as a basic "Is there a target in range" which turned off the autopilot (and back on again once the sensor wasn't detecting the target anymore) and then a sensor on each side tied to overriden gyroscopes for the turning / chase behaviour. It worked pretty well actually.
Thanks!
I like the idea of using sensors to enhance the drone to make it chase targets, I might have to look into setting something up like that so I can teach that sort of behaviour too, it'd be pretty cool if more people knew how to do that stuff and see what they come up with on the workshop :)
Think of this on a larger scale...
A solar powered drone constantly charging so you only dock for ammunition
That would be a much larger scale, I think you need a fair few panels to keep a ship flying, be pretty cool though :)
Or an assembler to infinitely produce ammo
@@starmada105 waow this is fantastic idea :D
@@starmada105 this method requires lots of cargo space and raw materials have a huge impact on weight... Keeping this big ship up in the air will costs more thrusters and more power. Not to mention if the drone is getting hit and destroyed while hoovering over the base.... you know what happens
Better idea, just put the solar panels on a mini-station and use batteries instead of reactors by extending the delay. Have multiple connector points, and have it extend very high. You wouldn't even need defenses- the drones themselves would do the job for you. Put something like a mining drone and an assembler there, use Rdav's mining script, and you have yourself a self-sustaining base.
I'm a few years late, but this tutorial is excellent. As are many of your others.
I just found this game and am enjoying it quite a bit. Your content is a large part of understanding this complex game
Thanks, I'm very happy they're still useful :)
I find your videos informative and professional keep up the good work. 👍
Thanks, that's what I aim for with the tutorials :)
hi. watched this entire series. just brilliant. you have a nack for walking the complex stuff through in easily understandable steps..... thanks
Thanks and you're very welcome :)
a few things:
0) nice and informative video
1) i'd recommend using the "approach" marker as first point in the route, to avoid any collisions with the base and an earlier ability to turn the avoidance on.
2) i'm not sure about the relevance of the order of the stuff the sorter is allowed to pull. it may set priority, which would be good:
the sorter could fill itself up with ammunition and let the reactors pull uranium for themselves (if enough ammo is stored in the base). if it doesnt however, it will end ep the other way around and empty the uranium of the entire base, leaving the turrets to pull for themselves
I don't think there's any need for the order on the sorter to be set a particular way, in the tests I did it was able to pull everything into the system in a few seconds regardless of volume so it should work. As for stealing all the uranium from the base, I didn't notice that being a problem but to be safe you could place a sorter before your base reactors in order to allow only one way flow.
The reason I used the sorter on the ship is that the guns and reactors pull things very slowly compared to the sorter so this system ensured maximum refueling in the shortest period of time :)
Your point on the markers is a good one though, I really should have made the first patrol point much closer to the dock :P
The answer to pulling stuff from the base might be to use TIM and then just name the reactors and guns correctly to have TIM fill them.
You are right that automatically docking is simple when the drone connector, the base connector, and the remote control are in a straight line for a direct approach. Valuable information and one of the most frequent 'gotchas' that people mess up.
It is also important to know that the remote control's piloting skills get derpier the further away from the drone's center of mass it is mounted. If mounted off the center of mass, it may take a long-ish time making incremental adjustments to keep the remote control block on a waypoint (or continually stop turning, move the drone sideways so that the remote control block goes back to that waypoint, and start turning again over and over) whenever it needs to turn to head for a waypoint in a different direction.
Incidentally wouldn't it be better to "stuff" uranium into the reactor only, which can hold a limited but still excessive amount, rather than stuffing the entire conveyor junction full, which can hold a whole LOT more uranium than you want to risk to incoming attackers? Also, it's hard to imagine that this needed more than two reactors; why are there six?
The alignment is one of those things that seems so simple, but only after you work it out. Definitely makes the derpy autopilot ever so slightly less derpy :P
It needs that many reactors because atmo thrusters are very power hungry, each small grid small atmo thruster needs 1.5 small reactors to power it at maximum thrust, so the six ensure that it won't max out on power draw while lifting and moving forward/sideways :)
Awesome! I've been trying to get that sort of thing to work for a while now lol.
Thanks :)
I'm finding the autopilot is actually quite fun to mess with now that I understand it better myself
Great video, thanks! I wish I had watched it earlier tho. I've spent several hours in stress and despair trying to set a waypoint for my drone by floating my engineer above the connector, setting a waypoint, sending my drone to dock, visually estimate the discrepancy with where the waypoint should have been, re-set it and try again in a loop :) Landing the drone and setting the waypoint from the navigation mode just changed my life :))
Sergey Ivanov how do you set a waypoint dude?
You first land the drone manually and then enter it's navigation mode and set the waypoint from it. This way it'll be set according to drone's autopilot and this way it'll land precisely that way.
It was a long time since I watched this video now, check this moment in the video yourself, it's pretty cool and easy to reproduce
Thank you for uploading this because I now have another idea. But sadly/frustratedly I can NOT play right now.
Nicely done tutorial really helpful! I now got a defense drone
Thanks, they are quite fun to have :)
Splitsie fun to se that you respond to your old videos to!
Man I just love your defender.Just amazing video.
Thank you :)
Thx for the video it helped explain a lot of what I’ve been doing wrong. Now with this information I can use drones to trans supplies without having to be there, space engineers has come far and your videos with how to properly build and command drones just made it better. Thx I hope you keep giving good tips for us noobies to this game
If you run into problems with the drones, there are some fantastic scripts out there that can help with some of the bits where the vanilla autopilot struggles (I can't think of the names of them right now but should be found on the workshop by searching for auto-docking/autopilot etc) :)
Splitsie thx man it helps a lot
Splitsie also I’ve been trying to join your discord but the link is exspired
Ok never mind it works just fine
Here's an idea: adjust the speed when its at the approach and re adjust with the timer
Solution for not centered remote controls: Add one more gyro and make the "Dock" possition activate it. Set the gyro on overwrite which will make the ship rotate. Set the connector's magnetic force to a higher degree and Voila! You can even add an aditional timer block for convenience
That could work I suppose, I fear that level of complexity when dealing with the vanilla autopilot though as it always seems to have a different idea on what it wants to do :P
Thats pretty cool. Making the way points lower would probably help with killing the wolves as well.
nice ty, i kinda knew how these worked but thought i may as well look up some videos to get a more in depth detailed explanation
Thanks glad it helped :)
After considerable time building yesterday I thought I'd share some tips I learned:
-Placing the docked waypoint about 1m above the connector got me much more consistent results
-I found it best to have the autopilot disengage as soon as the docked GPS marker is reached
-To use this with batteries, when you dock have an action set to turn recharge on/off, then 0.5 seconds before undocking set discharge on/off
I also have landing legs on my drone so it can go park itself when not needed - the drone has no problem flying with the legs in the retracted position (on single player at least)
Wohoo! Just what i needed. And the new Update is amazing by the way. You should redo the Video where you tested what block you should have under your Ship
That's not the only one, I think I need to re-do a bunch of the physics tests. Time to go smash things! ;)
You have created a great channel Splitsie, keep up the good work! Do you know it there is a way to do “relative” coordinates? A mining ship or truck could have a waypoint in front of a cliff and then, say go north this distance or this time, then drop off load and each loop would add to that distance or time to drill deeper into the cliff. I guess one way of doing that is telling to turn on forward thrusters or turn wheels forward for certain amount of time and just hope that it stays right side up lol. Or if a ship had drills on the bottom it could go to way point and turn off (or lower) up thrusters and just let gravity take it down, cargo full, go back to waypoint... So I guess my question would really be about adding time on timers each cycle or how to use “cargo full” to move on to next step? Thank you!
As I was watching the first video, I was thinking that a patrol drone would be great...and here we are!
I'm still working on a reliable cargo drone, hopefully it'll be soon... If I stop running into bugs :/
On docking approach you should add an action to turn off turrets, then back on when it takes off.
You could mount those turrets facing downwards. I think that would help them with target acquisition. Also, if you're into mods, you could use energy weapon turrets instead. It depends on the mod, but I know at least one that doesn't use any ammo at all, just power. That would be rather useful for a defense drone as it wouldn't require you to constantly insure that it has ammo available. Combine that with the transmission power mod, and you'd actually never need to dock the drone at all. :)
the problem is there aren't any ammunition free energy weapons with small grid turrets, but I do enjoy the GSF ones!
Where's the fun in that? ;)
I like having the challenge of getting it functional given the constraints of needing fuel and ammo. Also, the reason I mounted the guns in the position they're in was because making a design with downward mounted guns was much larger, and less flexible given it would be completely unable to protect itself from aerial attack :)
I will just leave this here.
steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=913759409
Hirmh... Fair point. As for the turrets, you could always mount upward facing ones as well. :P Never enough Dakka and all that.
Thanks for the help and your vids
You're very welcome :)
I watched the first video when I was like 11 and stuck a bunch on warheads on top and turned colision off to make an effective missile but you would need a waypoint to fire it
The Remote block should have been given a center offset setting (and orientation) option, so the position of the block does not matter.
You could potentially just add another waypoint, acting as a pre-approach similar to what you use for landing strips. This way, the Remote Control block will always have the exact same facing and should always land in the exact same position.
Also, in regards to the guy asking about a mobile carrier with 'moving' GPS markers... how about something similar for antennas? That way you could place an antenna near the docking port on your carrier, and have the drone use that (moving) antenna as a marker and an offset to that to actually be able to dock automatically with the carrier regardless of where it is.
This would not only help in THAT way, but it would also allow you to make a drone carrier with relative waypoints setup all around it so it could launch drones that would fly around and protect the carrier wherever it was... now THIS would be awesome!
Some sort of more complex offset would be incredibly handy. You can improve things by having a pre-approach waypoint but it's not as reliable as I'd like which is why I went with this design. Hopefully I can figure out a way to improve it as you really need that for space docking.
Hmm...perhaps in space, keep the same basic design, but rotate the remote control block so that the connector is the ship's "nose." When it's time to dock, the drone will always be flying in its forward direction from the Dock Approach to the Dock, so its connector should then be pointing towards the station's connector.
the problem with that idea is for some reason even with the connector in the nose while in space the ship has some very odd behavior where it rotates around the way point even when it does not need to you can line up and approach a way point and the auto pilot will still rotate away from it for no apparent reason I am still trying to track down the reason for that but once I get it working i will be letting splitsie know about the work around to make it work in space he makes better tutorials then I do and will be able to explain it better once it gets figured out.
That is awesome! With reactors though, 1kg of Uranium will last for a LONG time from what I have learned. I am two months old. I know this is late as hell, but thank you for all of your videos! I have learned so much. I would like to think that you get a lot of thanks for what you do, but I know humans, so a lot will take the info and never say thank you. I have worked many thankless jobs, commercial deep sea diver, computer tech and network engineer, deputy Sheriff, paramedic.
I always remember to thank people for what they do when I interact with them, like delivery drivers, Truck drivers, Ubers, ER staff not just the doctors, police, fire and rescue. For without people who help, learn and teach and provide the services that we take for granted, we would still be pounding rocks together.
So again Sir Splitsie, from the bottom of my heart, Thank you kindly for what you do! 😇❤️🫡🫡🫡🫡
that is definately what i need
Could set something up where there is a defence station in space that you want to defend and resupply (not your base where all your resources are stored) then could be sending a small cargo ship between the base and the point (docking and leaving resources) which the defence drone can then use if necessary. Could therefore have a whole automated and resupplied space station away from home
Absolutely, it's not the most reliable part of space engineers but the things you can do with the autopilot are still pretty cool
one idea would be to deploy 4 to 10 drones per asteroid and see how they handle things (mostly space pirates).
thanks for the video, this is amazing.
one thing i cant figure out is can you set a specific value on the increase and decrease speed in the actions?
it seems like each one you put acts like you hit the button for it, making it go 5 points in the direction you picked.
I noticed i need to use speed limit 1 for a gentle landing. so that is hard to manage when wanting to give it gas for long straights.
especially when if you accidentally have it go 1 to many times in either direction, it will reset the value you put to 0 or 100, making you not possible to get 1 again cause of the 5 increments.
a 2nd note, if i put armor blocks around the remote block, they act like objects in the way when its using collision avoidance.
how could i protect the RC block to use this mode?
any ideas?
LSG(last stand gamer) use the auto pilot to make his drone move to the target too. You got almost the same design and paint like him.
I think I made this quite a while before those drones he used (not having watched his stuff since back in the days he played with Sage so I could be wrong), but for a really basic drone with side mounted turrets it's not surprising that two creators who've spent a long time in game would end up with similar designs as there isn't much flexibility there
Thx bro really good video keep it up
Thanks :)
My friends consider me skynet and thank you from this I am bad at making them land and shut off this helped me be even more scary I never used the point things to do
Glad it helped ;)
This is a nice part of the game. Now I wonder if it would be possible to make such patrol drones, with lets say 50m grav gens, in space to collect space debris from fallen pirate or other wrecks.
Is it possible to let the drone detect the presence of debris so it can use its grinder and let it automatically start it's grinder?
Or should I just look into a way to drag it all to a depot where it deactivate the grav gen so the debris falls in the grav field of the depot?
Sadly I don't think you'd be able to do either of those things, artificial gravity doesn't affect blocks except for artificial mass blocks and making a drone that detects grids and grinds them down while it might not be impossible, would need some very clever scripting using cameras to detect the grids and some sort of behaviour to cope with the fact that the grinders push other grids away from the ship as you collide with them. It's well beyond anything I'm capable of, I know that for sure :P
Great job you explain it better then i could lol also im working on a new design that should be able to work in either space or gravity getting it to work in space has been a headache but i think ive almost got it.
Thanks Mac :)
Good luck with the space docking, that's a horribly painful thing to get working
yea I came up with a new ship design that should work in both gravity and space but for some reason when its approaching a way point in space it turns away from it for no apparent reason and is skipping the middle way point but ill keep at it just like i did with the planet gravity version
just had one successful space dock so looks like i am on to something i am going to keep testing it to make sure I have got all the bugs worked out but it looks like i am getting it figured out.
Awesome! that's really nice work :)
Looks like its working soon as i can get to a place with electricity and no interruptions ill do a video for you to look at showing how i got it to work
I bet if you set your "approach" waypoint to be closer to the connector, the drone will spend less time accelerating, thus, the speed when it actually contacts the connector will be less. I am not sure if it's possible, but you could set up some wheels with a nice soft configuration on the bottom to absorb any sort of impact. For light drones you wouldnt need big wheels I bet.
It probably would, but if you set it too close the drone just gets confused and fails to connect, there's a sweet spot there, but I never quite worked out the exact limits of it
It's really cool that you can do this kind of stuff in SE, but I don't really think it is something that I would personally use. Mainly because I very rarely play with wolves enabled. It may be good though if your on a planet with spiders.
It can also give the appearance that there are more people at your base than there are. It can be a decent deterrent in PvP multiplayer servers.
Wall is enough to stop* 'unwanted visitors', drone is a REAL overkill in this case... a base on pillar is best approach no wolfs/spiders stuck in walls corners...
There's always plenty of ways to deal with problems in SE, that's the best part of it. I for one enjoy over-engineered solutions that look cool, are fun to set up and still manage to meet their desired function :)
Reactors oh dear !
Overengineered is 'very' fitting...
But according to signals You send out... It won't work...
- Most of wolfs will just run somewhere and de-spawn (as seen)
- You have nothing to power it with
I see those advertising leaflets already !
Anti-wolfe drone, perfect for planetside security !
PS: Especially for some one who wanted a challenage and removed uranium, from His/Her survival xD or just started and is low on resources !
You could use it, instead of to fight hostiles, to fly between your base and dig sites so if you're mining a whole lot of uranium/ice/iron/etc. you just dump it in a cargo container and the drone does all of the transporting. No more dealing with weight (supposing your drone can handle it) or making multiple trips.
Is there no mechanism (besides limiting time docked) that limits the amount of ammo and fuel it'll store over time (besides max fuel/ammo capacity of the blocks)? It seems over time that it'll either accrue up to max capacity or will occasionally run out of fuel or ammo.
Not without using scripts sadly :(
My intent was for it to be controlled by how much you leave in the connector our just let it be completely full
TIM can handle the supplies: it is a scrip, it can manage the base, ores, assemblers, refineries, etc
VERY NICE
Thanks :)
I feel like batteries are more appropriate for drones like this one. You'll have to extend the time period it sits docked, but overall it should require much less micromanagement than a reactor-based ship. I can't think of any way to prevent the drone from taking much more uranium than it needs without doing something extremely complicated.
One option would be to have a separate storage and production system that's for the drones only, have a refinery working on uranium ore and an assembler producing ammunition. If this system is separated from the main system (either by sorters or physically) then you'd end up with only the amount of fuel and ammunition you choose to make. If you didn't want the separate refinery, the battery option would certainly be the way to go though, you might need an extra timer to have the battery switch to recharge mode and so it always gets the power as I'm not sure the system will lock to the base if you have it turn the battery to recharge on the same process.
To be perfectly honest about this thing, it was never intended to be the most practical response to dealing with dogs, just a fun way to get a drone that serves at least some ongoing purpose :)
with a few extra timer blocks you can do a lot of complex things with drones but the more functions you add to it the harder it gets to get ever thing set up correctly and more chances for it to bug out when reloading the world though with this new update some of those bugs might not be as problematic now hopefully.
That's a really good point Mac, the timers do seem to misbehave on load every now and then. It sort of adds a fun challenge though, make something functional with the fewest timers possible - not a challenge I'm likely to win any time soon, efficiency is not my strong suit :P
Cool thing. Will try to make an auto lander, so I don't have to fidgit with landing my ship, of Splitsies design, on my connector. As of now I have an expendable drone to test it out that is herpy derpy. Have seen this clip again and have come up with things to tweak to hopefully be successful.
Unrelated to automated drones, I've been cheeky and made a "Retrieval Drone" for Unknown Signals, been funny sending it out to lazily bring me my free goodies xD
Greetings! Love the tutorials. Have you done the cargo drone tutorial?
Nice vid! keep it up!
Thanks Pablo :)
Nicely done. :)
Thanks :)
@Splitsie, do you know if stacking sorters multiplies their effect as in if you use 2 junctions and place sorters on 4 sides of one and join them with conveyor elbows to the other junction do they "suck" 4 times faster than without a sorter at all? Or does it not matter how many sorters you have they only increase the movement of materials 1x no matter how many there are?
Very Cool
Thanks :)
I built it today in my world, cheap but effective good to use with Sapple's thunderbird destroyer.
How to dock horizontally
It's a much more complex setup that's never been quite as reliable when I've done it. That's why I stuck with vertical here, wanted to ensure I was showing people the most reliable method I'd found :)
I plan to include something along those lines in the next video on autopilot though
ok, at Approach 1 turn guns off, MUCH less chance of shooting your base. Then you need it to go to an "Approach 2" before waypoint 1(after docking), Turn guns back on.
(I ALWAYS play with friendly fire ON, it makes one be more careful about such things.)
That's certainly one form of super hard mode, I don't trust the automated weapons enough to risk the huge arrays of solar panels I typically build :P
1. This is so awesome. Had my computer be able to survive the requirements I will be playing with this drone concept 24/7.
2. I was thinking what will happen if the traffic is huge. Obviously you don't build hundreds of these (actually a dozen is quite too much considering they might get too energy and ammo hungry), but if you disengage collision avoidance wouldn't the following drone crash onto the drone that is feeding itself with uranium and ammo? Although I can see this being solved by careful route management and more than one charging docks.
3. Things that are slightly irrelevant; is it possible for a machine (say, humanoid mech or an atmospheric fighter-like object) to rotate itself and change its direction without making it like a symmetric block with turrets? Maybe useless but still a fun idea.
4. How is this thing going to fare on space?
If you had lots of them you'd probably need to script something to force them to stick to a timetable, unfortunately you need to have collision avoidance off in order to dock - otherwise it just stands off from the connector to avoid colliding with it :P
The drones have a forward heading which is based off the remote control block, I just built this one symmetrical to fit with its function - you could make it any shape, but if you want it to be easy to connect to a base you'll want the remote directly over the connector and the centre of mass to be somewhere pretty close to that point as well :)
Hello Splitsie
I followd everything. The info is great.
1 problem i have to fix because the drone have problems to dock ad the docking station.
The remote control forward direction i have to change to down.
Then the drone dock like in the movie.
(Sorry for my english, it is not so good.)
Can we setup a route in space to bring ore back from other astroides to the main astroide base in space? let say we find a big astroid with large amount of iron, setup a battery/solar panel and a large cargo container, and we would fill up the large cargo container. The drone would transfer the ore to main base and deliver it and fly back again. Does not need to carry much if it's flying 24/7.
That would be achievable, in fact I might be working on something a little bit similar to that - I don't want to make promises as to when it'll be ready to show off, but hopefully I'll get it reliable enough soon :)
Super sweet
Thanks Mick :)
Could you do an updated one with out using uranium?
You could possibly do something with hydrogen (engines not thrusters, since the autopilot can't cope with hydrogen thrusters), but I've not continued the autopilot tutorials since I kept running into bugs that meant things would work once and never again without any method to fix them, so I would spend hours working on something just to meet another dead end :(
Except for very basic stuff you need to use scripts to make the autopilot work reliably
you could also use the TIM script to ensure the drone gets it's fuel and ammo
Yeah, that's certainly a very good solution, but I wanted to come up with an all vanilla solution - I know scripts are technically vanilla but you get what I mean :P
Hey Splitsie this is a great tutorial! next is sensors right? ha ha
Thanks, I've actually done a tutorial on sensors before, but I don't think that's what you meant :P
I was actually thinking of taking it into space to attempt some docking of a cargo transport drone, the lack of gravity will make things a little more challenging :)
Splitsie yes. I tried to apply it to my mining drone for docking and undocking. The lack of orientation prevented me from docking. However i modified it as a sort of return home autopilot. It flys out to approach then turns off collision. Once it flys to the dock it turns the first timer on. This timer turns throwout on which has stone whitelisted, then starts undocking timer. The undocking timer has a 30 second delay which gives time for the ejector, then it turns collision avoidance back on. I will link a screenshot of how it looks after running through it all. Ready to go out mining again!
here it is
steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1214387447
02:55 Great! ... so where do I get the uranium from? :D
Asteroids from space.
When I was watching the last video this came up funny huh. Yes indeed spitse
That's some handy timing :)
cool. what about using remote on auto to dock in space? no grav there to tell it how to turn or do i miss something?
My ship doesn't even approach the waypoint directly it does whenever is out in deep space but when my waypoint is just a couple blocks away from my base it doesn't even come close to the waypoint before it stops
And yes collision mode is off and precision mode is on
Any ideas when part 3 will be coming out? Im finding this drone series very useful.
Hopefully in the next 2 or 3 weeks, I'm working on something with Meridius IX (the guy who's made all the planetary pirate spawns possible) and if that goes well it'll be coming out this week or next so I'd hopefully follow that with the 3rd part on autopilot which will be docking in space :)
Ok, I love the idea, and it gave me an idea!
I want to build a drone like that to haul my ore from a container at the mines that I build, back to the base so i can just mine it and then load it into the container for the drone to move it. My question is though what setting would i have the sorter set to for it to drop it off at the connector back at base? I think i should have to have 2 connectors and set them up individually at each point so i can have a sorter on each to drop off and to pick up at points depending on where it is at the time. I know the one to pick up needs to be set at collect all, so that is get all the ore i put into it, but the one where it drops off, how do i set it up?
Having two connectors is an option and probably not a bad one as you may need multiple remote control blocks to get the autopilot to work reliably (one remote for each direction).
Either way you choose to set it up though, you can have a sorter on the base set to pull all the ore from the ship and if you have a single connector on the ship have two sorters attached to the ship connector. One will pull ore in from the mine site, the other will be switched off when that's happening. The second will allow ore to flow back through and it will be turned on for the homeward bound trip, with the other sorter turned off at that point. I haven't tested it but a system like that should work :)
:)
I love your videos by the way!! Thank you, i hope to get to a server that I can be stable and make some of the things you show us!!
Considering you are probably using a mining ship to do the mining it might be worth adding a second connector to the top of the drone that you can land on and unload through and when you let it loose it'll unload through the connector at the bottom.
You can turn the autopilot off and on anywhere in the sequence and it'll remember where it got to. So only one needed. You can then switch on collect all at the mine and let the refineries or TIM drain the ore at the other end.
That's true, I've found it can get a bit messy with reloads mid cycle though. It's intermittent whether that happens though so I can't seem to reproduce the problem properly :(
How to build on top of half block like the sorter? Did it require mods?
I don't use the small landing gear case I have to lose leave the game it won't be there when I get back unless it's charged I take and put a small connector on top of a big connector and drop it welded up go inside then I go inside and lock the big one to the small one that way whatever I'm doing gets charged and I can feel it at the same time without having to move it or put fuel in it
Can we create a ship that can read our GPS coordinates, or somehow we can send it to it, so it starts flying from it's position inside a hangar and land on our position at the range of its antena of cource?
As long as you're within antenna range so you can access the drone, this should be possible. Set up your drone to have some fixed launch waypoints, create a new waypoint at your location, remote access the drone and add that waypoint to its list. Then activate the autopilot and wait for your taxi to arrive :)
Yeah, thanks for the advice. I will try it.
Can the vanilla autopilot be used to fly to an enemy? Like how they shoot wolves, but flying to them instead?
I doubt I’ll get a reply here but I’ll ask anyways, I’ve got a drone based of hydrogen and I have a similar path set up but when the drone gets to the “approach” stage it rotates and looks at the connector so that the connector is now facing far away from the bottom of the ship like it’s supposed to. This is also in outer space
Regarding placing the remote control "directly above the connector", don't you instead mean have it centered on the connector (assuming looking top down on the connector's conveyor port? For instance, couldn't there be any number of intervening blocks between the connector and remote, just make sure to have it centered on the connector? Being centered seems the important thing, not how close vertically to the connector the remote is (but what do I know, this is all new to me anyway...).
Yep, you're completely right. That's what I meant but should have said it like you pointed out :)
What about in space. When it isn't aligned to gravity? Say if it slightly rotated. And the connector was on it's side?
Space docking to connectors is an absolute nightmare with the autopilot, I've still not been able to come up with a reliable system, though there are some scripts that can handle it
Could you save a little power by using hydrogen thrusters for the downward thrusters to make the autopilot happy, just leave them unfueled since as you said they won't be needed?
Sadly the autopilot doesn't play nicely with hydrogen thrusters, it's a bug that's been a problem for a while and doesn't look like it'll be fixed any time soon so you're best off with ion or atmo for all your AI craft :(
Could you do a revised version with drones in zero g? I've followed your steps, but it faces the connector in zero g, and just bumps into it. Thanks! Love all the videos
Nope because I've never gotten them to work consistently :(
I'd suggest having a look at the PAM (Path Auto Miner) or SAM (Sam's Autopilot Manager) scripts on the workshop as one of them may be able to do what you need far more reliably than the vanilla autopilot
Is there a way to make a total random drone where it just randomly floats around your base
How are you placing more blocks at the same time? I also would like to make that line.
That's something you can do in creative mode only, I've done a tutorial that covers creative mode stuff like that which is done by pressing ctrl as you place and drag
any chance there's been some significant changes since you made this?
i've spend the better part of a few days trying to get autopilot to function - not even for a full drone, just automatically bringing me in to the right spot to connect, and the best i've managed to get is to come in to the right general area, usually involving a crashing, and almost never actually ending up quite where it should be.
remote added to a pre-existing mining vessel. placed it directly above the connector, with orientation matching the cockpit properly.
put ship onto the connector so it turned yellow. made a docking waypoint, flew it straight up, made an approach waypoint.
speed limit is currently 5, precision mode is on, collision avoidance off.
there's nothing that should complicate matters in terms of timers: no timers, no actual docking commands, no actions on the waypoints: just straight up trying to get it to make the approach and reliably position itself so the connector goes yellow
and... it just doesn't. in most cases it flies too low and then tries to pull it's own connector through the base connector (neither are flush-mounted), or wiggles back and forth like it's dancing while approaching the docking waypoint.
i've tried turning things off and on again (the block, the whole ship, the game)
i've made the waypoints both while in the cockpit and while controlling it remotely, in case the precise waypoint location varies from that
when i make new waypoints, i remote the old ones entirely, and remove and add the new ones, to be absolutely sure it's using the correct ones
this is driving me quite insane.
Is this on a planet or in space? And are you using hydrogen thrusters?
The reason I ask is that I was never able to get this to work in space, and the autopilot just doesn't like hydrogen thrusters. The other thing that's easy to miss if you've modified an existing craft is if you've added any downwards thrust to go in the same direction as gravity.
The autopilot has always been quite temperamental though, it might save your sanity to have a look at some scripts like Sam's Autopilot Manager to be able to handle the docking and such :)
Earthlike planet, atmo thrusters, this is after i added a down thruster.
@@Daemonworks Dang, was hoping it might be something simple. Sadly after making these tutorials and attempting to make one on building something that could go from planet to space I came to the conclusion that scripts really are the only way to go if you're messing with autopilot and want something at least mostly reliable :(
Ah well. Can't say I'm too surprised given that they "came out of early access" while still being very clearly in early beta. Still fun though~
At 11:31 you add the disconnect to the timer hotbar, and then do something to swap the disconnect to position 1 and the autopilot back on to position 2, but don't say what you did. I'm guessing this is a hotkey like control-left arrow, is it? How does the hotkey know what you are swapping?
I can't remember exactly but I may have just edited the part out where I corrected the position. As far as I'm aware there's not hotkey for moving the position of a hot bar item
@@Splitsie Okay thanks. That makes more sense. I love that you edit videos. My upload is so slow that I rarely do.
09:30 I think i would have set the first waypoint to Main Dock Approach, so that it always moves clear of the station before proceeding in the route.
Can you add a program to re-dock after a certain time? Can you have multiple remote control docs for different "states"?
With scripts that may be possible, I don't think you can specify a particular waypoint with a timer though
@@SplitsieI mean having a "remote control - job" and "remote control - redock". If it runs out of ammo or spends x amount of time, switch off "job" and turn on "redock".
That would almost certainly require scripting to achieve since timer blocks have no way of collecting that info and acting on them. You'd need a script checking that information
Why gatlings? Would interiorturrets be fine too?
What about non uranium powerrd drone. That still easy to do?
This is small grid, so no interior turrets as they're only large grid. The reason I went with uranium was that it was easily available at the time this tutorial was made and was far simpler for refuelling than a battery. You would have to change the timing quite a lot to make a battery powered drone and ensure that on each loop it collects enough charge while it's connected not to end up running out eventually
@@Splitsie hmm.. maybe they are from a mod. but thanks for the reply. Just realised that the vid is a bit older.
so i was wonder if there is a way of automatic drone building? In survival even with projector it takes time and u gotta run back 'n forth for resources. so i come up with projector and welders tools near projected drone from bp. But they do not weld it. Seems like welders weld only started block. So basically i have to start each block with manual weld and only then they are continue to finish it. Is there a way to fix it?
The way grid based welders work is that they'll complete the placed blocks before placing any others, if you're missing components of one of the placed blocks they won't place new ones until you provide those materials. The range of small grid welders is fairly short so may not penetrate far into a build so you usually need piston actuated ones that build your stuff gradually from end to end
I know this is not exactly recent, but I can't get my drone to dock. It touches down but instantaneously moves off. It appears that the 2 second delay of timer 1 triggers after the drone moves off again. I am trying to make cargo ferrying drone and it runs back and forth through the way points but never docks long enough to load or unload the cargo. I'd appreciate any help.
I'd suggest using scripts instead, the vanilla autopilot has become worse since the days of this tutorial but the scripts like SAM (Sam's Autopilot Manager) and PAM (Path Auto Miner) have become better and better and can apparently handle locking to connectors quite well :)
Can you now show us how to make automatic mining drones and missiles
Both of those would require scripts and are something I plan to make a tutorial on in the future, but I'm not expecting it'll be very soon since I'm currently working through my beginner tutorials and remaking them, but it's certainly something I want to work on :)
@@Splitsie However, I think what you describe in this video would provide the basic layout for a drone cargo transport - fly to remote mining base, which might already have an automated rotor/piston based drill which empties into a cargo container, pick up ore from the container, fly back to the base to offload for the refinery(ies).
Im happy someone posted an in depth manner of docking via drone. Im having an issue however, when I try to use a mining drone in space, auto pilot is selective for when it wants to work. If I have a back and forth waypoint it works fine, but if I attempt to include any waypoint that includes docking, the ship rotates and refuses to budge. Is that a bug or am i doing something wrong with the remote control?
I'm assuming it's a bug as I'm experiencing the exact same issue which is why I haven't been able to do any more of these autopilot tutorials :(
I have come up with a bit of a dirty solution that works most of the time so I'll try to post it in video form soon if I can get it a bit more reliable - I'm basically using a waypoint that's close to the connector then using thruster override and a timer to switch off the autopilot in order to get it into place. The point I'm stuck with is that the autopilot then needs to be manually reset or it won't work... if I can get that part fixed I'll make a video of how I've done it :)
Splitsie Eesh. That makes me sad to hear others are experiencing it and its not my own stupidity. As I recall this was a major issue just 3 years ago around the time the feature came out. Ill post it in a bug report and hope they patch it. Resetting the autopilot constantly is going to be pain because it removes the purpose of the autopilot :( thanks again fot the intuitive tutorials mate. Pray they fix it soon.
I'm right with you on that one, sadly it does seem like these bugs have been around for a long time so I'm not going to hold my breath for a fix :(
Why is my ship pointing to the dock than lining up with the connector?
Is there a way to limit how much uranium and ammunition it takes on, so it doesn't fly off with the whole base supply, but without having to manually add the missing amount of fuel and ammo? Like a predetermined limit.
Never mind :) I read below that Tim's Inventory Manager script will handle it, and there are several others in the workshop as welll :)
Ah, glad you found the answer. Sadly I'm not sure of a way to do it without scripts, so if you're on a server it may not be possible if they don't have them enabled
what version of space engineers are you running?
I honestly don't know how old this was, but I think I recorded it before the multiplayer update. Despite that, as far as I've experienced there's no big difference - other than the placement of a couple of buttons and having to use Shift+K to access the control panel of the drone
So how does a battery drone work? I don't have uranium on triton apparently
Batteries will need to have longer timers set to keep them on the docking port to ensure they receive enough charge to keep flying
Great Vid, now how about the drone flying after pirates then returning to patrol.
You'd need scripts to be able to do that, and with the update to all that side of things I'm not sure which of those might or might not be working at the moment :(
thats not possible
hey, i built a similar drone like this but in space. keep having problems for it to make it to the correct waypoint for some reason and then docking it wont orientate to back up into its docking spot
Doing this in space is a LOT more difficult, the drone doesn't care about orientation at waypoints, it will only dock nicely in a planet's gravity well because it has a means to determine orientation there. This was why this series didn't get finished, I tried for a long time to get a vanilla drone to work and dock in space, even tried a couple of scripts available at the time and it wouldn't reliably dock. There have been a lot of autopilot scripts worked on since that time though and it may be worth looking through some of them, one called SAM (Sam's Autopilot Manager) has seen some recent upgrades and might be worth a look :)
Is it possible to anchor navpoints to a movable grid? Like building a carrier and make navpoints for docking ports.
no, but you can use the script to communicate the carrier location to the drone via antenna, and the drone would use a programmable block to dynamically set the next waypoint in the control block.
Yep, there are a few scripts that try to do things like that. I've been waiting till after the update and for the scripters to update their scripts before I go looking into that stuff too closely :)
what update? is there a massive update coming along?!
It was released yesterday, a massive update to the physics behaviour and the modAPI as well as allowing programmable blocks to run themselves without using timer blocks
yea, seems like the things will run faster now... Can't wait to see a warship with 10 drones orbiting around it :D
Is there a way I can program a Drone to fly X meters, and stop? Additionally, is there a method you can use to control multiple drones manually (IE have many drones on the same control frequency?). Thanks for any feedback
To do that sort of thing you'll need to use scripting since the vanilla autopilot can only be used to fly to GPS locations. I think there are some fleet command scripts out there as well, though I haven't messed around with any yet
@@Splitsie Great, thank you! I had a really cool idea but that proved to be the biggest hurdle lol. (PS, Really loving your Survival Maybe series!)
The drone in the thumbnail looks like a Laststandgamers drone from colony wars
It's a pretty basic design with just two guns on each side and a connector on the bottom, so I'm not surprised they ended up with one that looked like this
If the path way Is slanted would it still aline it's self properly
I've had great difficulty getting the vanilla autopilot to work with anything but a vertical connector :(