i better shut my loose mouth...

but until it's fixed?

and if i only find that...

no i never said, or if so, it was a glitch, that it is a FE2 clone

... but one thing i'm sure tomm & JJ started it because of...

...and the many leaks of...

...and unsolved things of...

...and the many bugs of...

...and the possibilities given now...

...and perhaps even to "purge" FFED3D, who "stole" JJ's work...

it was a fun project, and i guess some see now a possible market for it* and fear copyrights.

i have no problems with that (market), but let's tell things by their name. (how you grab a snake, by the tail?)

i guess (no, I KNOW) Frontier.dev has less problems with that rather then you or brian.

I talked with them about pioneer at completeness of my first model, did you?

i am aware that lawyers are not bound to expressions of developers...

and even if i'm co-involved, i will be the first who would already spend 10 (no 50) SFr. for Pioneer, believe me!

i mean i lay out more for beer or such...

*me to

i know Frontier was very rigid in the case of frontier (no wonder, the company is named after it), but i guess they have changed their perspective a bit (only a bit) already.

are you flexible enough to do the same?

they have to exist even tomorrow and such a rigid attitude is bad for the business.

i can only WISH that pioneer get's more sole from it, but i never would like to miss certain ideas that stand behind both.

if i ever meet DB, i will ask him man to man...

i have nothing, absolutely nothing to loose, no job, no money, no (more) wife, no (more) children... the only thing i have is naked me.

arabs use to say: a mans a man, whatever happens... (with clothes on or off). that's a final wisdom, what can they take from me life? my faith? no!

you can throw me in the deepest darkest hollow, i'm still ME! and i can still do what i'm good in!

well it's in the nature of things, when rob has daytime i have nighttime....

let's assume the clock is a standard solar time, from which point measured ever, Greenwich? perhaps.

as example my above posted picture has also the "wrong" time, but only for GMT+1, for ~6 timezones from there it will fit, unfortunately it can fit only to one timezone, it's in the nature of things...

question, when located on epsilon eridani (new hope), which is then the "right" time(zone)?

maybe we should invest a standard galactical time. but still this would persist.

i guess not really needed, but a good question or idea, but read further.

orbit infos?

explain please, what do you mean by that? height we have already, standard orbit? (where a body stands always above the same location, like a telecoms satellite? ).

i guess not really needed, investigate it yourself, take it as a special mission 😉

or relative to a assumed meridian? (to get East and West?).

we (humans) have greenwich as 0, due to the fact that the world has been measured starting from there, but it could be anywhere else in fact.

if i had started to measure the world it would have started in glarus, perhaps, or in the gobi desert.... or even Jerusalem? why not it was in the ancient the so called center of the world (only for mediterranean cultures of course), if rob had started to measure it would start in melbourne, maybe. (leads back to the time zone problem)

humans need a given 0 else we can't measure.

question, where is 0° meridian on epsilon eridani (new hope)?

another question, where is north on epsilon eridani (new hope)?

you would need a (the) galactical coordinate system, in space you have no "up" or "down", neither "left" or "right", or north, south, east, west, at least the earthly coordinates won't work. a possibility would be relative to the systems plane, if there is one...

else you would have to take the galaxy and assume one, means, let's say from the earthly view referring to the plane of the galaxy. our north is north for the galaxy and our west is west for the galaxy. (take pioneers sector map as a guide and solution to that problem)

question, do you think "the little green men" would have then the same coordinate system?

well i know a somehow problem for mankind...

the "cross" when a ship is selected? marks exactly what you name it by, the vector of the ship you selected, the direction it goes, relative to you.

how i love such basic stuff... and i really do that's no downgrading you, these are common questions everybody had them once.

and the answers (or counter questions) are not grown on my turd.

Interesting. I don't think any significant work was done specifically on HDR during the last development cycle. There was plenty of work done on terrains, atmospheres and the background stars though, so they might be working together to make something extra nice. I'm glad you're enjoying it anyway 🙂

As an aside, which ATI card and driver version are you using? We have a known issue where the rendering breaks with HDR enabled but its only been observed on ATI cards with recent Catalyst drivers. I find it interesting that yours works, and wonder if you've got something different installed. More data will help us track this down!

Known issue. We know its not specific to ATI but we haven't been able to find the cause yet.

I'm afraid I don't know what you're referring to. Can you describe it in more detail?

Its always midnight somewhere 🙂 We did deliberately change the Earth start point to a daytime port in the hopes it would be slightly more interesting.

What kind of computer? Single or multi-core? The terrain engine is generally a bit slower/heavier since alpha 9, but I wouldn't expect that kind of slowdown on low terrain detail settings. Single-core machines however will struggle (though that could be improved with a bit of work.

I'm staring to wonder if perhaps you're a Linux user using the free Radeon drivers. That would explain why HDR is still working for you and why things are going so slow, as the free drivers have not really been optimised yet. I get similar glacial framerates when I use the free drivers, but with FGLRX everything flies along.

Interesting ideas. Please create a feature request.

In short, the green square shows the distance to the target, as does the "Distance to target" value in the panel. The green velocity indicator shows your velocity relative to the target, much as the white velocity indicator shows your velocity relative to the frame (actually it only shows direction of travel relative to the frame, while the speed is shown in the panel. The green indicator shows both).

In alpha 9 setting a navigation target would change your frame of reference to that target. It was decided that this wasn't really what was wanted, so it was changed so that the velocity indicator is always locked to the current automatic frame of reference. That produced more intuitive results for set-speed mode, but also meant that valuable information was lost for eg manual flight to a space station where you want to know your velocity relative to the station even though you're outside the station's frame. This led to the introduction of the green cross to show your velocity relative to the current target.

Thanks for the great feedback!

i fixed up a little clip which explains a bit the used markers in the HUD.

it was not easy to do so, the annotation system in youtube is a horror, especially for such short clips.

but i hope it's a help nonetheless.

some improvements on the hud markers are good im liking that direction

you mean the "targeting tunnel" ?

is really something i like to have to, it gives you a feel of speed and distance in manual flight especially with maximum time acceleration.

some find it annoying i like it, tastes are different even in this case.

and sorry if i assumed you would be a complete nube to space, but the daytime question was misleading my thoughts.

first i should HAVE know you by your nick 😳

second, next time i took a closer look to the rank 😳 😳

and perhaps i missed again, seems not to be MY day today.

Hi folks,

I've been away for a while. Busy at work and enjoying the nice spring weather when I'm home. I hate autumn and winter so those are the seasons in which I usually spend time behind my PC playing games like Pioneer. But I just wanted to say I played the new Alpha 10 for a while yesterday and liked what I saw. The new features are great!! Keep it up!

Well they show up fine on my Radeon 9550. I can't do shaders, perhaps there's a clue there.

Once the planet rings glitch appeared on previous alphas I tried switching shaders on and off but with no luck. I have not tried on alpha 10. I will make a try, thanks.

Greetings.

Is anyone else experiencing some problems with the autopilot? Specifically setting autopilot to go into orbit.

If you choose Low Orbit from the autopilot, sometimes it takes you to the planet then does a couple of routines before it settles and gives you manual control again, but other times it just zooms to the planet then appears to go into a loop where the ship faces away from the planet, gains altitude, levels up with the curvature of the planet and drops the altitude some before suddenly facing away from the planet and repeating the process. It seems to be about 50/50 whether it will go into this loop or not.

i'm really not sure if i like what is going on here

it seems we had never before such a bad and unstable pioneer,

but i forgot we should put that on the issues list and wait for cinderella...

I'm actually a little offended by these comments to be honest. I've spend the past month or so helping out and giving my time and skills to build something that I enjoy doing. I know there are other contributors who have spent far more time than I have who would be disappointed reading those comments.

I strongly disagree that this is such a bad and unstable pioneer. I think there are quite some significant improvements, with some new features that have been implemented. While we are working on Alpha11 there are some more things that are slowly being developed on (as well as bugfixes).

Yes, there are bugs. Please remember that it is alpha software, it is guaranteed to contain bugs and crashes. The whole point of having these alpha releases is for people to TEST and report to us any bugs or issues. We need to track these issues (which is why we want people to log them on the issues tracker). It isn't helpful if you are mocking the process.

/rant over

Alpha 10 seems much more stable than alpha 9 or the dev version. I have yet to see a crash. It seems like the best version yet to me. 😀

I am sure Gernot did not mean to cause you or any of the other devs offence. It could well be a translation error as Gernot is writing in his native German language. Certainly never think that your (or the other dev's) efforts are under-appreciated. I think all of you are doing an amazing job with the not so simple remit of creating one of the best space sims ever. 🙂

Thinking about cultural differences has given me an idea. Since Pioneer is being created bit by bit by people from around the world, why dont you devs put a little of your own culture into the game? Think about this for a moment. If we as a race ever manage to reach the stars, inevitably some of our culture will be with us on that journey. It would be great if the game reflected this. Also I think it would add a little diversity to the game too. 😉

Ah like the space shrimp, that you put on your space BBQ.... *silence* 😉

Or the fish and chip shop on the bulletin board, voted best chips in the district! The fish aint bad either...

Or the royal wedding : all the bulletin board posts are removed because everyone has a day off....

Poor jokes aside its a good idea. I suppose to show the world a bit of English culture we would really need a 'Job seeker's fund' in pioneer, if you have trouble getting work they could give you some credits 😉

I guess the Australian version of that is random dudes that walk up to you in the space station and try to take your cigarettes?

HAha perfect! the space council will also give you a free ship and fund your hydrogen fuel.

Actually.. a lot of the people the face-gen comes up with look like they came from the less..... fortunate end of the galaxy (and gene pool) 😆

I suppose all the beautiful people are famous and wealthy and can afford luxury cruise ships and don't need to work in a dirty space station...

About the multicultural universe:

the solution could be, as I commented time ago, some differences in city visuals, products, faces and clothes (specific races and fashion from system to system).

And Something Very close to a dynamic and rich and complex economic system that in near future we will have in Pioneer. 😛

Fish and chips? 😀 not bad idea at all, call it fish and chips or roast beef or the way english people cook (or does not cook vegetables)... 😀 or some kind of specific mineral.

Jokes apart. Specific Products sold on some systems or sectors...? Looong travels would be critical.

(And mining, and deep space substances recovery and.... artifacts and planet scanning... and maps.... and... well, sorry, that is another wish 🙂 )

Greetings!

the long term plans are good

Better said "long term wishes" Personal wishes from a poor "non developer" fan as me 🙂 Just my wishes.

I really like these ideas. For the faces, there are 2 more races coming soon. Although this will add cultural diversity, it won't be different between systems. I wouldn't really want to go as far as make more due to time restraints but I can certainly think about making various forms of fashion to suit different cultures. Perhaps (if this was frontier) the empire would wear very formal clothes, and the federation would wear more casual clothing. Anarchic systems could be inhabited by "rough" looking people, you know, like the generic leather jacket and eye patch kind of space pirate look. This is just a basic idea of how it could be, but I'm sure the idea could be stretched a long way! 🙂

I agree.

Actually specific human races or cultures from system to system would be irrational, and absurd in a massive galaxy originally populated from the earth. But specific clothes for factions is, if not a must have, a coherent feature if the game is faction based.

Greetings

I disagree with you here Gudadantza. I think cultures would become even more diverse given the distance between colonies. Physically people would also change due to environmental factors like the strength of the gravity their colonised planet has. For example (given a long enough time frame), people living on high gravity worlds would be strong and stocky in their build, while those on low gravity worlds would be taller and be more graceful in their movements. Even the day and night cycle or the temperature could have massive effects on how a colony and it's population acts. Architecture would be different too.

All that before you consider what people take with them from the mother planet Earth. I am not talking about colonising equipment here, instead I refer to morals, social norms; what people carry with them inside their heads that their culture on the mother planet has given them. 1000s of years of human history would not disappear overnight, nor should it ever as it is part of who we are.

But my original thought concerning cultural differences was related to trying to show how the game can represent the group effort that the devs from around the world have put into the game. It's a tricky thing to think about when you um..........think about it 🙂 . What makes a country different to that of one on the other side of the world. What's important, what's not. There are no general answers except that every country (and the people in it) have a particular way of viewing the world around them.

I am Scottish so what's important to me?

Mmmmmm......................Deep fried Mars Bars for New Caledonia! 😆

Well, with the "specific human races or cultures from system to system" I was reffering about the "guetto effect" or racial groups. this is, the population of the universe in an homogenic traditional ethnics colonization depending the system, in a traditional "earthcentric" point of wiew. some sectors only populated by Caucasians, other systems with asian... etc....looking at the huge galaxy like a planet or a continent.

But is true, I agree with you, but is a different approach: some groups could have been evolutioning in a different manner deppending the galaxy place during 1000 years. I agree. Thats the question we are speaking about 🙂 specific cultures.

In other games the solution for diversity were the factions. Call them cultural differences, different products and different city shapes, or "space haggis" 😀 . But I suppose the discussion is about "specific faces for each faction?"

Greetings !