The Pioneer development team are pleased to announce the release of Pioneer alpha 13. Builds for Windows, OS X and Linux are available for download from the download page. This release features performance improvements in load time, terrain rendering and station menus as well as new music, visual improvements and the usual pile of tweaks and fixes.

New features

* New song 'spacegroove' (#267)

* Caching of models and textures on startup, reduces loading times (#271)

* Separate hyperspace target from selected system in sector view (#269)

* Charon a moon of pluto (#276)

* Gas giants overhaul, 5 new gas giant colours/terrains implemented (#276)

* Atmosphere selection changed, planets can have a more varied atmospheric composition (#276)

* Planetary rings are more varied and come in various colours (#276)

* Fractal texture to increase terrain detail and simulate planet surface materials (#291)

* Mute buttons for each volume setting that actually stop the sounds instead of just playing them quietly (#284, #270)

* New Lua events onShipLanded and onShipTakeOff to inform scripts when a ship lands and takes off from a planet's surface (rough landing) (#295, #297)

* New Lua method StarSystem.GetBodyPaths to get paths to all bodies in a system (#313)

* Outline overlay text (eg world labels) for improved visibility (#325, #314, #258, #39, #349)

* Make the "video link established" text disappear after a few seconds instead of flashing constantly (#319, #326)

* Support for translated strings; first language is German (#332)

* Name & title/occupation overlaid on station faces (#346)

* Added 'Inconsolata' font for debug and (later) console text (#343)

Fixes

* Move sector view to current system on first open (#262)

* Check hyperspace validity at hyperspace time, fixes erroneous jumps to Sol (#269)

* All sounds effects now honour the sound effects volume slider (#256, #280)

* Don't play ambient sounds if sound is disabled (#286)

* Fix supermassive black hole mass & radius (#303, #112)

* Reorder the star type list such that white dwarf stars will only ever be paired with white and brown dwarfs (#304)

* Lua methods Ship.GetEquip and Ship.CanHyperspaceTo now return string constants as documented (#305)

* Lua method Ship.AddEquip now adds as many items as possible if there is not enough room for the requested amount, as documented (#309)

* Use of Lua method SystemPath.GetSystemBody would result in a crash on exit (#311, #312)

* Fix occasional crash when station menus are still live in memory after launch (#259)

* Enable GL extensions earlier in shader compilation to conform to shader spec (#329, #330)

* Fix occasional crash on game load (#331)

* Fix terrain jitter (#179)

* Support extended ASCII characters in texture fonts (#338)

* Make sure all bodies have a minimum radius of at least 10km (#321, #301)

* All city models checked and proper collision meshes added, drastically improving city rendering performance (#348)

* Fix crash when music changes while in hyperspace (#345)

Internal changes

* Merged SysLoc and SBodyPath into a single SystemPath class (#261)

* Refactored SectorView to use SystemPath internally (#262)

* Tweaks and improvements to several terrains (#276, #291)

* GUI widgets now have a minimum size, used for better dynamic layout with variable-size containers and widgets (#279)

* Rewrote station menus and refactored several GUI elements to have better abstraction and consistency (306)

* Debug output now shows terrain vertices and font glyphs per second