nice. downloading!

Thanks Tom. Just downloaded and will check it out tomorrow.

Congrats on the new programmer too. Shows real character to step aside like that, especially for something you almost certainly feel passionately about! Salut! 🙂

Nice one Tom.

There's a few things you missed from my branch though, a new ship and the newer icons by Jamie as well as some stat changes that fix the Lanner(engines are too small, it cannot take off) and few others. I just added changes by Luomu too which allow selecting of nav targets from the system info view.

EDIT//

I quickly compiled those changes into Alpha 8.1

* Luomu's Changes to allow selecting Nav targets from the System-Info view. No more aimlessly spinning round trying to find your target on entry to a new system 🙂

* Gave Lanner more thrust, it only had around 1.1 G empty.

* Viper more thrust, had same engines as Talon I assumed this was a mistake. As there is a weight difference of about 8-1 between them.

* Slowed Talon a little, it is still 60+G (down from 90)

* Changed Constrictor .lua so that the game reads the information correctly.

* Updated Icons by Jamie Grant.

* New ship Imperial Explorer.

Alpha 8.1

Don't forget the 8.11 FIX to correct planetary terrains and colours. :

http://pioneerspacesim.net/sites/defaul ... 8.11FIX.7z

Yes thats from the joystick support, since I have a gamepad with a trigger I assigned all axes to the trigger which does not need a dead zone, and that will stop the spinning without having to unplug your joystick or gamepad.

Thanks people! 😀 I saw JJ's name in the credits on Github. I was afraid I'd spilled the beans. Pioneer is getting more awesome every day!

Fantastic! Trying it now 🙂

Btw, what's the best way to contact Mr John Jordan to ask him about the photofits I'm working on?

I think JJ has had a hand in coding Pioneer in the past, as his name has been there for quite some time.

Anyway as far as I'm concerned JJ is pretty much a celebrity (I'm a fan) 🙂 We are in good hands.

That's not to say anything bad about Tom of course, he's done an awesome job!!!

But whether its Tom or John you are after, you will get them both on the Dev mailing list.

Welcome JJ, and thanks for JJFFE - been using it for years. Actually, been hacking it for years, removing the autopilot fudge fix from 2.8alpha7 and such. You see, I actually like to be turned into jello by decelerating from 57000km/s to zero in a microsecond. 😀

Wow I'm noticing a vast improvement with the graphical glitches with my ati card. Shaders are still acting a little odd, but whole planets aren't dissapearing when I get close to them anymore 😀

Cant wait to try it on my nvidea machine

Looks gorgeous with the ship models and the planet models all in HDR lighting splendor. Is it me, or is Epsilon Eridani G really modeled after a lemon? 🙂

But... bulletin boards are empty! Is everyone gone on vacation?

Will test it on a lowly ATI 3200 tomorrow, see how it holds up.

did you try upping the speed and waiting a couple of hours? That should populate the board

Whooohoooo! *faints*

having john jordan on baord will be a good move - well will be interesting to see where it goes very good job all round

This is good news. I really like the joystick support (it's a bit sensitive though). I've been buzzing over Io (which is a water moon now 😛 ) for a while with my X-52 Pro. I'll test the new alpha further this afternoon.

A big thanks to Tom for all the work he put in his Pioneer. I welcome John Jordan as the new Pioneer project leader. With the creator of the excellent JJFFE, surely Pioneer's future must be in good hands. With the coming of Pioneer and especially in its current state, the future for spacesim fans looks bright again. It's been a long while since there was anything decent to play regarding spacesims.

What an excellent release, this Alpha 8!

This is great news! What John Jordan doesn't know about the Elite games isn't worth knowing. Pioneer is indeed in safe hands. Hope he will pop over to the SSC to say hello. <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

Glad your still involved in the project though Tomm. Your contributions kept the dream alive and I thank you for that and for all the great work you have done thus far. <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

Finally, Alpha 8! Great list of new features too, downloading 8 and 8.1, thanks to you too S2odan <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_cool.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='8-)' />

Welcome to IO:

[attachment=487:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-01-30 15-37-20-30.jpg]

Yep I have no effing idea about that Kinghaggis. The code hasn't even changed for the planets. For some reason a totally incorrect terrain and colour have been picked for IO, Its pretty annoying for me as I spent many an hour lining up the terrain with the base placement... Grrr .

Btw, The Moon is still bright red, I added a change in december or early january to make the moon white and give saturn rings. I thought they had been added?

Your welcome Miss G. 🙂

Ah.. there you are you dirty stinking BUG..... :

You forgot this Tom:

In GeosphereStyle.cpp

Every Terrain and colour in the game will be wrong because of that.... Ok 8.2 on the way hehe.

Any other bugs that anyone has noticed that I can fix for 8.2?

I aim to please:

Its just that one change I made. Planets now have correct terrain and colour settings, however the bases now no longer line up with that Terrain.. To be expected I suppose, I'm surprised they stayed in-line for this many alphas.

http://pioneerspacesim.net/sites/defaul ... 8.11FIX.7z

Good to see Io back in the way it should be. It sucked that it had become a waterworld. Io and certain dead worlds are still the best looking planets in this game. I especially liked Io in alpha 6. For some reason, Io looked a bit different then when those weird pikey mountains were still around.

But I'm glad you put it back because I was just trying to find a way to ask without whining if you could please make Io look like Io again :D.

I still plan to refine all of those changes to the planets, just never get round to it.

I also need a list of anything that doesn't look quite right or things that could be improved upon, with regards to planet terrains or colours, that does not include lighting.

Kinghaggis, you are something of a connoisseur when it comes to the planets 😉 I would appreciate any input you have on them. I don't get to spend as much time playing Pioneer these days so its difficult for me to make the full assessment of terrains like I originally did.

But all the time I spend talking about it isn't going to get it done 😀 In fact Im going to have a fiddle with some numbers and see if I can get the small volcano function to work as well as the mega volcano function works.

They were a poor attempt at volcanoes 🙂 They were replaced by some much better large sloping volcanoes with calderas.

s2odan, do you have commit permissions to John Jordan's git repository, or are you working off a separate copy? It would be nice if you guys could keep all the bug squishes and improvements in one place. Right now I don't know if the clone I'm about to get off JJ's repository will have your fixes in it, or not.

They are seperate, only JJ has access to his repository. I could merge the changes into one branch, but I didn't want to be cheeky 🙂 I mean, maybe John is not ready to release his changes yet.

So all your changes still go into https://github.com/tomm/pioneer.git , but the official alpha8+ repository (which only JJ has write acces to) is https://github.com/jaj22/pioneer.git - at least for now. Correct?

Almost, my changes go here: https://github.com/s20dan/pioneer then Tom usually picks up the things he likes and adds them to his own, which is the master branch.

Their are other contributers too with their own forks.