Great news Robn! Looking forward to trying out those targeting tunnels 😎

Downloading now

Here's your first bug report. Stock alpha 21. Started a new game on Earth, flew to low orbit of Jupiter then selected low orbit of Neptune. At 31.46 AU the music stuttered, then the game crashed. It's happened twice now.

[attachment=1161:opengl.txt]

Curious. I'll try to remember to test later. To help me remember, could you put it on the issue tracker please? Cheers!

It's now issue #1173. Thanks!

Just tried that on mine and it was fine.

Notice to navigators: Caution on landing at Essar -3,15,1

Repair work on platform 1 avalanche 😉

Issue #1180

i don't know if our friends know what it is about, at least i have no idea.

can you post a screenshot please?

if you like to get the screenshot in the issue tracker, put it on a picture storage like "photobucket" and link it in the following way;


*optional placeholder name

Hello postmoke. Easy, flies and lands in Essar.

Or you can see here

It is unedited

One of the many dangers lurking in the galaxy.

The repairs will take a lot. Avoid this system or pay many $ shipyard.

aha

yes, a know problem and the reason why i placed all my stations pads 200m above the ground.

in certain cities where the spaceport is placed on a steep hillside it can happen that one or more pads are topped by the ground.

solution:

wait for a revision of pioneer where this problem is solved in general,

means perhaps a levelled ground around cities (which i would dislike a bit if all cities where placed on flat ground)

or try to replace the default stations with mine, they are usually placed high enough to avoid such situations (with exception for the sealed spaceport, i havn't tested it on steep hillsides yet. but i didn't expect complications, because as soon as the docking sequence is engaged the ship has no more collision checking and you could even place the docking bay under the surface without colliding the surface).

give me a little time and i will put them together in a suitable state, so you can use it to replace the existing stations.

one possible issue in advance,

they will lower the framerate somewhat (depending on your machine), first because they are textured, second because they use some animated models.

further limitations,

the sealed spaceport comes only with three docking bays and because it has only one lift but three bays the target will unfortunately point to the docking bay instead to the lift floor (height and position will be shown "wrong" when you dock manually), this is not my fault, it has been changed internally in the program to take the last stage as target instead of the first, something of the things that has been changed, of which i quite don't understand why (a very good idea perhaps 🙄 , which perhaps was ment for good but hasn't been thought to the end...).

[/hr]

to the ones who changed that: imagine what would hapen if i specified the docking bay position as waypoint for the autopilot - a hard crash landing.

that's exactly what you did when you take the last stage for the docking target, not useful imo.

of course the autopilot didn't recognize this and use only the given waypoints, but it's confusing for humans to have the target on the docking position instead on the geometry which releases the docking sequence, that's the important one to know, the position of the bay i don't have to know since as soon as the sequence is released i didn't control the ship anymore.

for the mushroom station it doesn't matters because you have four elevators, but i hope it will be replaced once with better looking ones (not especially mine).

further i have been told that the issue tracker has been released to avoid that such useless changes happen, but if you ask me -

i have seen a lot of imho useless changes which have been taken immediately into the game, without thinking of the consequences.

fortunately 😉 no one asks me...

That must have been an avalanche of mud! I love the way you sank down to the pad. 😆

i nnoticed since a while a empty model folder (in the mac build at least) named apollo 😉

is that a way to say "we would like it" or just a remnant?

i think, i say I THINK,

it was again one of those imho useless ideas to split the ship specs from the models.

do you really think it makes it easier?

do you think one, perhaps not very experienced user, will find that comfortable to place a new ship in several folders?

or is the goal to restrict user made mods from pioneer?

or to make it at least less easy?

is that such a problem for developers to scroll down in the script, or simply to search for a keyword?

or do you like to reach absolute control?

(pioneer is NOT your game neither it's mine, it's ours. means users in first degree, developers and modelers)

i didn't posted that to the issue tracker, because else i've been polluting it to much (again),

anyway whatever doubts i have, they will mostly be disregarded.

but can't you think a little of the consequences in advance?

can't you imagine a common users longings?

perhaps i'm the complicated one, but i didn't think so.

[/hr]

further i still wonder what exactly is so lunatic, when i fitted more then one drive?

or please let me have some lunacy, i'm a weirdo i know 😉

(sometimes a bono, sometimes a bozo)

if i havn't posted it here no one would have noticed it and i should have told it only per PM to some selected friends?*

please leave some to the users, they should decide themselfes how they like to play their PIONEER.

if they like to cheat, let them cheat, please!

i never have earned more laurels, as for my gathering and adding of some own hacks for frontier,

USERS LOVE THAT!

pioneer is a single player game...

if one feels to change my models for his longings i neither mind, feel free to do so and i'm also curious and like to see the result,

even when you pulled the inside out.

any other way i would feel is eager of me, you are free and you can do what you like.

pioneer is free and a user should be able to do with it what HE LIKES.

i don't like if others decide what i can do with my install of pioneer.

that's bossing and i don't like that.

one cool part of a scripting language is that you don't have to be a programmer to modify your game (and i'm pretty sure that this was the idea behind), please keep that in mind, or else you can code all in "C" and leave it up to you ore more experienced users.

i know it would be easy to restrict also using any other then a hyperdrive as "fake drive", but i would neither like it.

similar i did in good old FE2 and fittet as experiment anything as a drive to see if that get's me a little further.

i like to have quasi realistic flights as with the "atomic", but i also like to do sometimes something absolutely weird and leave the common gameplay.

(due to that it took me only a hour to get to the centre of the galaxy..., how many have been there at all?)

if such is possible with a simple hack, why not?

does such leave a scratch on your varnish? 🙄

to gave it by default a, let's say a communal look and feel, is self-evident, but apart from that...

or put it under a different licence, then you can have absolute control...

question:

where would we be without lunatics like me?

...perhaps sitting still in front of a abakus and play chess or backgammon

*this let's me think i should post the next "hack" really only to trusted friends, only to avoid that it will be restricted in the next release.

do you think that's cool?

[/hr]

in that spirit, enjoy this

No, it was not. The attributes of a ship are entirely separate from the model. They are being decoupled in the core in order to support the new model system that is being built.

Actually its only two folders.

The plan is to enable a user to drop a straight zip file into their user dir and have it just work, without even having to unpack it. We've been building out the infrastructure to support that over the last couple of months. The actual zip file piece is still missing, mostly because its not that hard and we have no immediate need for it.

Following that an in-game mod manager will be just a short step away.

You assume that's the only work we do. There's a hell of a lot of work going on to make things easier for users and artists to contribute to the game. This separation is part of that.

I'm not aware that anyone is looking for control. Every day there are many many people discussing short and long term goals for this game, trying to find a way to make into a complete, commercial-quality game that has something for everyone. Not every idea goes forward, but lots do with the agreement of those doing the work.

I am somewhat confused by your continued assertion that somehow you're the only one considering the needs and wants of our players. Have you simply never heard the continued demands from players on this forum, in the issue tracker, in IRC and in many other forums all over the internet for more interesting gameplay mechanics, more coherent ship and station design, a working economic and political system and everything else? I see you designing ships which in isolation are fine work, but have very little in the way of balance or cohesion, and contribute nothing to the other aspects that will, in the end, make Pioneer a game and not just a graphics demo.

My personal goal (one shared by many others) is that one day anyone will be able to download Pioneer and without any extras be able to play an exciting and meaningful role in the ongoing story of a vast galaxy filled with adventure and intrigue. And, when they get bored of that I want them to be able to pick from a huge selection of add-ons that add new missions, ships, gameplay mechanics and other things to give them whole new reasons to continue playing. Every single line of code I write or review, and every single design discussion I contribute to is done with that in mind.

You've been offered countless opportunities to contribute meaningfully. For whatever reason you have been unable or unwilling to do so. You often raise issues that are of interest you, and as I've always said before, they are considered and discussed. But more and more it seems that you simply want a platform to show off your models. And that's fine - no problem with that. You already have one - every version of Pioneer released so far. There's nothing requiring you to follow more recent releases, just as there's nothing requiring anybody who wants to use your work to stop using an older version.

It didn't work. The code only ever uses the first drive in the engine slot when computing engine characteristics.

Previous releases are there. The entire source code is there. Anybody is free to use older versions or take the whole code and go and make their own game according to meet whatever criteria they think good. In fact, I actively encourage this. Make sure you let us know too - I'd love to see what people come up with!

When have I touched your installation of Pioneer? Did I force you to change anything?

Actually that's not true. Lua is every bit as much a programming language as C++, and the complexity and unmaintainability of some of the models make it crystal clear that they were not written by a programmer.

None of us have any power to change the license even if we wanted to. And that's good for you - its that license that makes it impossible for any of us to take the game away from you or any other player.

LIKE IT!

certainly not.

not quite true, i've done it and was surprised myself (i know it hasn't worked in older releases rather alpha20 but at least in this build it has worked) 😉

but of course it's something "evil".

true, the place for this is here, i guess.

yes and no, ships like the "bloodrunner" or the "atomic" never ment to be in cohesion, ships like the "Typhoon", are straight to that goal.

even if i would like to see a complete "steam punk" pioneer.

i need to express my ideas each time i have some, sorry.

creativity isn't something you can control, else it's no longer creativity.

besides, what is a coherent style? i mean who decided it or is that written down somewhere?

facsimile elite ships only?

or like the "plattenbau" buildings all boring concrete jungle type?

choices are different, some like this, some like that.

personally i would like to see a pioneer without any elite ships, even when that would mean that many of my ships would disappear from it.

no, but i guess i look at a problem from as many as possible point of views and foremost i know what i like, many times (not always) i pointed it right.

i think i know for some parts what a common player likes, not only in a game like pioneer.

further i guess i dare to speak out loud what others perhaps only think in the back of their minds.

i'm neither fish nor bird, that can be (is) a problem, but i never wanted to be something else.

sometimes in any discussion i take a contrary position, just that at least someone counters.

people are sometimes confused by that and feel insecure because they might don't know what's the reason for.

conclusion; if you say yes, i will say no, even if that isn't my conviction.

a little bit... (not seriously)

fortunately?

it's true i'm not a programmer, but i see myself as a link between...

(over)complexity, true!

unmaintainable, hm..., i can't see that, but perhaps if pointed out, it could help.

or to tell (again) in other words, to get a "shoebox" running in pioneer you need nothing, really nothing only a few lines.

to have a ship that appears in different states, which is "alive", needs a little more and ends up in complexity, unfortunately but unavoidable in some way.

that scripted geometry comes out extremely complex is offense i guess, you have to find very different ways to do things which look in the end common.

e.g. no problem to stick a hollow cylindre into a body with a cad, to do the same with a scripted geometry, needs a lot more effort and uncommon ways to go.

if you have a better solution as i have for this, let me know.

anyway i chose often the latter way, even for .obj based models, the reason is simply the result, if i can't get rid of creases in the common way i choose the one i use also for scripted geometry (using transparent parts and models hierachy).

mainly and thats also true, i copied the way FE2's models was made, by using little tricks to let them appear so they please me.

yes, a cool piece of code, those new buildings, but sorry, exactly this they appear to me, boringly all the same, just as there would be only one architect in the whole galaxy.

we have millions of architects and many different styles, as well as we have a lot of brands and different cars,

why should our spaceships look all the same? is there only one "brand" in pioneers galaxy? certainly not.

i expect a lot of different styles in a sci-fi universe, airplane like, spheres, tubes, discs, and even boxes or irregular shaped ships (a "mechanical" race will build ships only by reasonability, think of the borg cube i.e. which already didn't goes far enough imo, i like "Perryverses Positronic-Biological Ships" shaped by all stuff the can inherit).

congruent is ok, conformity is tying me.

interesting for me to recognize sometimes that ships which i made but i didn't like to much myself beeing credited by users...

and sorry again, until i havn't seen many i like,

the "wave" is super! but needs a better landing gear imo, i would like to see more such ships, really (but fit a cool UC, please!)

the turtle is also a nice ship, even when it wouldn't be my choice,

i like s2odans python and panther (caribou), both have a cool appearance, one agressive like a predator the other simply BOLD.

the talon, a unique little fighter, i love it, could be a perfect default ship.

of course coolhands viper, but she's out of concurrence for at least two reasons, also the lanner is a fine ship else i wouldn't have converted it, but both are FFED3D ships, which i see personally like all FFED3D conversions rather as "placeholders" (not ment as criticism).

let's make a small list of ships i see as somewhat congruent a which give pioneer a unique look.

i guess we have already enough to choose from unlike 2 years ago.

this will exclude all FE2 ships 🙁 , no 😎

- wave

- turtle

- python (if named different perhaps, the design is very loose based on the original i feel)

- talon

- hammerhead (we need a transporter)

- caribou (i wont miss that bold one)

not yet included, but i see them as future contents

- typhoon

- gunboat (why not, we need some different classes, if really needed i can remove the colored stripes 🙁 )

- defender (if revisited)

personally i would like also

- shift (needs to be overhauled)

- hullcutter (to have a really complex script 😉 )

the rest by choice, of course i like most of the others i made, but i guess the listed ones are congruent more or less, ships like the "gul" or what i've been working on right now i see more as mod, anyway this reflects only what i like, i really wouldn't mind to get rid of my FE2 ships, not because they look bad, but because they are 99% Elite/FE2.

but i know also that i.e. tomm loves them very much.

and robn, thanx 😉 (for your patience)

something i have foreseen and fear of most...

this i see as a challange for me

this is easy as 1,2,3 to make in blender.

i know many would like the latter, to make and export animations from the CAD.

neither they like to fiddle around with ship specs or how the model is bind in the game.

unfortunately i do, i really like that, i like the challenge.

foremost i like the scripted animations, even when not all is possible i can do in the CAD and when it's 10x more work.

but it's exactly something i miss from some modelers, a real understanding how a animation works.

personally i guess one who understands the first example will make better animation even with a CAD.

really i have seen many nice models which i really like, especially in FFED3D, but with some exclusions most are animated poor.

i strongly believe it is because of the CAD, because you don't have to understand what stands behind.

to me a general problem of nowadays.

only a rough idea i had once,

imagine, it's possible to let that guy read any text, such can only be done with a scripted geometry

the rough shape could be replaced with bezier stuff, it would be also possible to generate different characters then (by randomly changing the size of the "bones").

THAT MEANS MODELLING TO ME!

if you dare, we could have a "Max Headroom" in Pioneer, including the tic.

such will never be possible with a CAD exported anim

but i can't do it alone i guess, i would need a team

and in first degree a dynamic modeling system,

further some people who understand that at least as much as i do.

this will set new standarts

I've posted before about why dynamic scripted geometry is a bad thing (hard to write, hard to optimise, etc) so I won't address it again. But I wanted to pick up on this:

That's probably the clearest indication of where our ongoing disagreements come from. You want something challenging, so a system that is more constrained but easier to use is undesirable for you. I want a game that anyone can work with and contribute to, so a system that is difficult to use is an obstacle.

No, that's not true. There's a lot of research being done into codifying facial structure such that it can be moved and manipulated (see eg Evaluating Face Models Animated by MPEG-4 FAPs [PDF link]. If we ever wanted to pursue something like this then we'd build a separate system to make it happen rather than trying to force everything through the regular model pipeline. Of course its only half the solution - we'd still need a system to decompose text and convert that into appropriate animation parameters, and we have to make it happen for arbitrary languages.

I honestly doubt we'll ever see anything like this in Pioneer unless it somehow becomes available as a commodity technology. Our brains know a lot about faces, so anything that does look like a face had better work pretty much like a real face or its going to look terrible. Part of the charm of the current facegen is that its obvious that they're caricatures, so its not a jarring experience. Other things like ships are less well known to our brains, so we're less likely to spot small problems with them.

Opps.. my fault - that must have been left behind when I was experimenting with my apollo eagle luna lander ship. It is on a personal branch of mine, but the folder structure looks like it is still there (it is definately not in the main repo).

I'll clean that up when I get home. 😳

It is safe to delete it, as it shouldn't be there.

i thought so 😉

besides, i would like to see it.

is it a scriptet geometry?

how do you launch the lunar lander, with a saturn? (decoupling, i think would be a problem)

even when i feel personally that pioneer isn't ment to do realistic spaceflights, but as a sidetrip it's a cool idea.

i have watched a clip of orbiter and i must say, no i wouldn't like it, it's to sophisticated for me.

you could do a favor for me, i can't compile pioneer on my mac, due to the fact that my machine refuses to install the needed libraries and i havn't the patience to hunt that error.

but i would appreciate the modelviewer in the mac build (next release) if that is possible, but i also remember that i couldn't compile the MV since a while in the windows build, perhaps you got the same problem?

and please forget the issue i posted last night, i'm a idiot, i have missed the changes to the adverts* and further i took the wrong version for comparison.

this has produced a big confusion. sober i'm good for nothing i guess** 😆

it's running fine now

*only curiosity, no criticism, what's the purpose of the tagging for the adverts?

**even a reason for my actual agression level, i hope it will change soon, because i start to dislike myself. but i will keep on staying sober it's better.

yes me, the "40 year old hippie" starts to lock away his pipe - perhaps a fruit of pioneer and all of thee.

It is on my list of 'things to do' with the OSX port. I need to have a rethink on how I package up the binary distro. Currently it is packaged up as a nice single .app folder, but adding the modelviewer as an .app it also needs access to the same data directory as pioneer.app.

I might have to seperate the data directory out of the .app folder but that just makes it 'messy' IMHO. (I like keeping things simple).

I'm currently away on business (hence why I'm quiet) but I'll have a closer look when I get back.

yet another question from "stupid" me,

i've read a while ago on the issue tracker (i guess) that you don't like to get sub-models from the "sub_models" directory called for building.

actually this is the case now.

what i wonder now what is the reason for it?

personally i feel it's a bit stupid (for me) to have models doubled, if i wan't to attach i.e. a scanner sub-model to a building.

well, i can tell you why i did that, i simply copied the behave of FE2, means the little scanner build from three bezier flats you see on the ships is a scalable sub-model and appears even as the terrestrial radar in cities.

as well as the buildings on the LRC are the industrial park you see in the cities, personally i think that's a clever thing.

keep it short and simple, though a idiot like me can understand it 😉

[/hr]

don't get angry, but i feel it all heads into a direction that in the end only "shoe-boxes" will work in pioneer.

really i feel it heads to solid meshes like ".X", with matrix animations and no more dynamic use of submodels.

i think, like some other changes that has happened, it's all based on the unwill of some to get comfortable with the LUA model system.

a promise, if it ever comes to that point, you finally get rid of me and i will never disturb you anymore.

that fear is also based on things like the absolut needless change of the UV for .obj*, this has lead (i repeat myself) that many of my models still look disranged.

actually the "viper x" is destroyed and it's hull is completely transparent (if it's still there at all) th adder is still textured wrong and i can't say what else to.

to me it's like someone likes to destroy all i've contributed to pioneer, please understand that such makes me a bit angry.

you can tell me FACE TO FACE if you dislike me and my models, that would be far better, i don't like sly things!

*well actually it is wrong now for righthanded models, but even if it would have been wrong before (which is not the case), it would have been better to left it "wrong".

as example, in the very beginning of electrical engineering the current flow has been set to a given direction (assumed from positve to negative) decades later it has been made proof that the current flow is vice versa, but to avoid complications it has been left "wrong". it doesn't matteres and our computers work fine even when the layout didn't reflects the true physical situation.

farther, i've been told that i have a low bus factor and that my models are unmaintainable for others, i still wait for a tangible explanation to what exactly is so complicated or unmaintainable, a reason why i opened the "let's point it out" thread here (no, it didn't belongs to the issue tracker).

if no one can tell me what exactly is "wrong", sorry, then i feel this is a raid against me and nothing else.

i've been also told that i'm, let's say excluded, from contributing because i don't fully participate via github or because i have no presence on the IRC channel.

well, many here know me as a kind guy who likes to help beginners, i don't mind much how experienced one is in a certain thing, i'm willing to help.

what i don't understand, why no one of you is interested to back up me?

I don't recall the specifics, but I probably just didn't like its ad-hoc nature. The general concept (a library of reusable parts) is fine.

You continue to say that without any data to substantiate it. If you could explain why you think that perhaps I could do a better job of allaying your fears.

Every other game out there manages to have beautiful models with great animations without the need to generate new geometry every frame. Why do you think a traditional pipeline won't work for Pioneer?

As I've stated repeatedly, the internals of the Lua model system is a mess. In its current form it relies on leaky GL state which makes it impossible to refactor to use the new renderer system (I spent three weeks on it; I know). The complex state transitions also make it very difficult to optimally batch geometry on the GPU, so there will always be a limitation to how much performance we can get out of the systems.

If there was something truly compelling in the Lua model system we could perhaps work to keep the changes to a minimum, but so far nothing particularly unusual has been done with it and as you say, no one is willing to get comfortable with the system. Without exaggeration I can say that I turn away an interested artist every few weeks. They come in with solid knowledge of 3DS or Blender, often with experience with modelling pipelines used in common 3D engines (eg UDK or Source), and some great ideas. The moment they're told that they have to write a script to get anything done, they leave because its outside of their comfort zone.

I don't want to turn these people away. They're keen, and we have an entire universe to fill - we need them. If we have a more traditional system, something that the entire games industry is familiar with, then we have a much better chance of attracting and retaining this kind of talent.

I have no desire to see you gone, but if that's what you end up choosing I would not try to persuade you otherwise.