This is in response to the couple of people who are interested in doing art, perhaps even leading the direction it can go in.

For programmers there's a path which involves creating a GitHub account, forking the Pioneer repository, creating branches, configuring remotes, making commits and submitting Pull Requests.

For Artists and scripters there's another way which is hopefully preferrable for everyone! 😀

To follow this "tutorial" you'll need at least a way of creating ".zip" files, on Windows I use the 7-zip program.

This example is being written for Windows but the ideas are broadly transferrable even if the exact file paths and locations aren't.

You can create a "mod" for Pioneer.

There's links to a few existing mods if you follow that link but they're very simple things:

• They're just zip files containing some directories and files,
• Their contents are "Added" to Pioneer unless replace something like a script, ship, texture, etc,
• They use the same directory structure as Pioneer.

The example that most are enthusiastic about is adding a new ship ( http://pioneerwiki.com/wiki/Making_your_first_ship ) which is the first step on the long road to a total conversion! 😀

To start with we want to make this task easy for ourselves so lets try the following to create a "mod" called "myfirstship":

• Go to wherever you've extracted your Pioneer download to,
• Open the folder "data" and look down the folder names as there's two we're interested in,
  • "ships" and "models",

• open the "ships" folder,
  • copy and rename the file "wave.lua" to "myfirstship.lua",
  • open the file in a text editor and change the following lines like so
    • from: name='Wave Heavy Hypersonic Fighter'

    • from: model='wave',

    • To: name='My First Ship Tutorial'

    • To: model='myfirstship',

  • ​save your changes to the "myfirstship.lua" file,

  • now go back up to the data folder,

• open the "models" folder, then the "ships" folder,
  • copy and rename the folder "wave" to "myfirstship",
  • open the "myfirstship" folder,
  • rename the file "wave.model" to "myfirstships.model",

• Now run Pioneer with the parameter "-mv myfirstship" so the command line should look like "pioneer.exe -mv myfirstship" this will open it in the modelviewer mode so you can see if everything has worked.

If you run Pioneer as usual then you should be able to go to the ship yard and buy your very own "My First Ship Tutorial" spaceship. Of course it will look like the Wave heavy Hypersonic Fighter, and it wll handle like it and be like it in every possible way because it's a perfect copy of it 😉

If you want to make it look different so it's easier to spot then a quick thing you can do is edit the texture "wave.png" in your "/data/models/ships/myfirstship/" folder, perhaps just paint the white a bright red or something which will make it easy to tell that you've changed it.

Obviously we're not done turning all this effort into a mod yet, we've just copied a ship definition ("myfirstship.lua") and the model data for it.

So lets open a new folder window (if on Windows) and:

• Create a new folder somewhere you won't lose it, "My Documents" for windows users or the home folder on Linux etc, call it "tutorial" this time (to avoid confusion),
• In this folder create two more called "ships" and "models",
• With the "models" folder create another folder called "ships",
• by now you should have something that looks like:
  • /tutorial/ships/
  • /tutorial/models/ships/

• now you're going to _move_ the "myfirstships.lua" file you edited earlier out of the "/pioneer/data/ships/" into the folder "/tutorial/ships/" folder,
• next you must _move_ the folder "myfirstship" from "/pioneer/data/models/ships/" to "/tutorial/models/ships/",
• now create a "readme.txt" file in the "tutorial" folder and add your name to it for now,
• Add everything inside the "tutorial" folder to a zip archive - to do this with 7-zip just selected everything inside the tutorial folder, right-click, open the 7-zip submenu and choose the "Add to archive",
• Make sure that you choose to use "zip" compression and call the archive "myfirstship.zip".
• Finally, put the file "myfirstship.zip" into the "mods" directory - this IS NOT usually where you extracted the Pioneer download.
  • On Windows it will be in a folder under your "My Documents"/"Documents" directory for example:
    • "/My Documents/Pioneer/mods/"

• Now double check that you really did MOVE the files and folders, i.e; go back to where you first copied the wave files and folders and make sure that there aren't any "myfirsthip" files or folder there because they should now all be inside the zip file (and safely backed up in the "tutorial" folder).
  • The reason this step is important is that you might have made a mistake with the zipping process and the mod is actually now broken, however it will look like it works because the original files are still being found by Pioneer in it's own data directory.

• Finally, the mod should have been packaged up into a zip, it should be in the "mods" directory, and you've made sure the Pioneer data folder is clean.
• Run Pioneer and make sure your mod works.

That's a pretty exhaustive description, including things to double-check and lines to edit.

I've typed it out from memory too so if people could comment and check it for me I'll edit it to make sure that it's correct.

There are many steps that take just a second or two and lots of bits you can skip once you know what you're doing.

You can have as many ships within a single mod as you like, this technique just gives you a copy of the Wave to edit and play with.

You can, and should, replace it with your own mesh and edit the parameters it uses for thrust and equipment etc.

So how does this get my ships into the Pioneer download?

Easy, you create your mod, test it, try it out, share it via this forums download area so that others can play it, respond to criticisms to improve it and then ask the Core Team to include it in the main distribution.

This is basically the same process that we go through for programmers submissions but without having to understand Git and GitHub.

It's also more direct to players and fans of the game who often use several mods together to make Pioneer play how they want it too.

Speaking of criticism, let rip on this please 😀

Andy (aka FluffyFreak)