The Pioneer development team are pleased to announce the release of Pioneer Alpha 30. This month we have beautiful new atmosphere, lighting and terrain effects, a rewritten autopilot that now allows you to intercept other ships and fly in formation (and pirates to catch you!), and the introduction of our new purpose-built model engine, SGModel. Full changelog and builds for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (32 & 64-bit) are available from the download page.

New features

• New model system (SGModel) (#1676, #1208, #813, #1852, #1914)
• Rotation damping icon and control on the panel (#1842, #1837)
• OSX: Hold the option key down when launching pioneer.app to launch the model viewer instead (#1803)
• New volcanic surface effects on some planets (#1782)
• New and improved autopilot (#1812)
• Improved atmosphere rendering: scattering, sunsets, thinner fogs and ground lighting fixes (#1888, #1891)
• Russian translation (#1899, #1713)

Minor changes and tweaks

• Don't allocate projectile geometry for every projectile. Huge performance increase during combat (#1822)
• Main menu now has keyboard shortcuts again (#1821)
• Player's name now updates during editing in Personal Information view (#1845)
• Rondel system moved further away from Sol and surrounding stars (#1861, #1815)
• Star fade-in has been adjusted to make stars less visible in daytime (#1881)
• Some missions now state the distance to the target system (#1886, #1909)
• Try harder to find a populated homeworld for a faction (#1860, #1792)
• Clicking cancel from the Load dialog now returns you to the game (#1847, #1325)
• Bulk ships are now only placed at orbital stations (#1890)
• Improve building self-shadowing and lighting (#1898, #1811)
• Low/medium/high orbit altitudes reduced to be more likely to fit in object frames (#1903)

Script changes and model changes

• New attribute StarSystem.explored (#1793, #1797)
• Custom systems can now define gravpoints (#1701, #1074)
• Added attributes in space/ground station models info table: ship_launch_stage, parking_distance, parking_gap_size (#1812)

Fixes

• Interpret galaxy density bitmap as unsigned values (#1818, #1813)
• Invert mouse cursor movement in rear view (#1820)
• Missions no longer vanish from view when other missions are completed (#1824, #1826, #1854, #1856)
• Fix crash when switching away from settings screen after death (#1844, #1698, #1742)
• Move SystemView time control buttons above the dash to work around input priority problems (#1853, #1851)
• Fix occasional bug that could leave a trailing slash on some filesystem paths (#1843, #1486)
• Fix division-by-zero bugs in missile AI (#1873, #1872)
• Fix loading of player's criminal record and fines (#1877, #1874)
• Selected systems are now always shown in the sector view (#1864)
• Fix crash bug in Lua function SystemPath.DistanceTo
• Fix long-broken mouse flight under Linux by disabling DGA. Set config option SDLUseDGAMouse=1 to revert to old behaviour (#1892, #5)
• Fix system info view to ignore irrelevant mouse wheel scroll events (#1894)
• Don't toggle labels and rotation damping while console is active (#1897, #1364)
• Don't save/restore GL_POINT_BIT attribute, it breaks GL state on old Intel chips
• Update all material light components when applying a material (#1908, #1887)

UI changes

• Improved appearance of Dropdown widget (#1789, #1766)
• Fix layout of non-contributing widgets inside pack boxes (#1789)
• UI widgets can now have keyboard shortcuts (#1821, #1841, #1840)

Internal changes

• Improvements in text rendering performance (#1791)
• Move MSVC headers and libs to pioneer-thirdparty repository (#1807)
• Removed legact MissionStatus code from core (#1824)
• Optimisation in access to ship type information (#1827)
• Add support for high precision timing and floating-point exceptions (#1836, #1846)
• Enable floating-point exceptions during AI processing (#1838)
• Lua methods can be marked "protected", stopping them being called by user-supplied scripts and mods (#1706, #1869)
• Rotation damping code cleaned up (#1866)
• Various minor cleanups (#1867)
• Allow point sprites to be rendered with different alpha blending modes (#1880)
• Unknown tokens for Lua translations are no longer treated as errors (#1865, #1862)
• Rename terrain noise macros to avoid global namespace polliution (#1883)
• Various code improvements in frame handling and other things (#1812)
• Cleanup SectorView system index usage (#1884)
• Split FileSelectorDialog and LoadGame/SaveGame out of GameLoaderSaver (#1847)
• Font optimisations and support for language-specific font overrides (#1899, #1907, #1904)
• Avoid use of strtof, it doesn't exist on MSVC (#1905)