Space Engineers: Testing Automation's "Follow Player" Feature
41Given the potential for this feature to be useful in recording SE machinima, I decided to try it out and see how it handled something like the old Banana Pancake from Relaxing Survival. After doing a quick thruster replacement with Spacebar's thrusters and disabling all the onboard Bobs (some sort of major hit to game performance you have that many enabled on a small grid, regardless of walk/fly mode), I found that its terrain avoidance is... passable, though it does get hung up on some terrain despite terrain avoidance... also had to turn OFF precision mode or it would just sit there and do nothing... and it does have a bit of lag when it comes to actually following. There's more, but you'll see it in the video.
In its current state, I don't think it's quite ready for machinima use - the flight paths are a bit too erratic with rugged terrain and the time delay means it doesn't work well for pursuit-style filming. On the other hand, it's a step up over the recording feature, considering the inaccurate nature of tight flight paths with that system from the randomization of physics interactions built into the game.
For reference, this is a lightly modded world, with just enough mods to paste the Banana Pancake in with all of its blocks and be functional. Hover engines were turned OFF for the AI grid, since I expect wings/hovers might not play well with the AI anyways. Otherwise it's the vanilla game's moon starter base.
I'll give them a B- on this feature. Above average, but it will definitely need a tutorial to help players learn how to set them up. Also, the follow distance is misleading, as it's also the *avoid* distance. I would strongly suggest a better setup would be to have a "maximum" and "minimum" follow distance or a checkbox that turns off the AI follow actions if the targeted player is in a cockpit on the grid. Otherwise, the value of it is diminished for use as a "follow me and carry all my stuff" AI bot because it runs away from the player when they try to get something out of it!
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