Full screen can be enabled in the settings. You'll need to restart the game after changing the setting.

What do you mean by "warp around the galaxy"?

Can you describe exactly what you steps you took to crash into Mars? The regular autopilot modes shouldn't crash you into planets except under a couple of specific cases that are understood and will be fixed soon. You might be doing something wrong, or you might have found a bug. A fuller description would help us to figure that out.

Thanks for trying Pioneer!

I think I came out of a high speed warp and then crashed into the planet by going manual. Im not sure how to travel around though. Tonight I when to another system close by and was stranded around this planet. I assume low fuel is at fault. A few questions:

What is starting a game at debug point?

How do you get more fuel to be able to fly further out?

Im not much into combat or a story mode and would like to explore the galaxy planet by planet.

Thanks for a great game!

Currently there's no fuel limitation for in-system travel, so low fuel will never be a problem. You do however need fuel for hyperspace jumps. You can buy more on the commodity market at any starport.

"Debug point" is a convenience for developers. It'll do whatever setup is required for whatever the developers were testing at the time. Alpha 9 has you near New Hope in Epsilon Eridani with an enemy ship bearing down on you, which was what jaj22 needed for his combat AI work. Alpha 10 might very well have something different. There would be no such option in the finished game, whenever that is.

Right now, if you just want to fly around and explore your best bet is to hit Ctrl-M a lot. This is a debugging thing that gives you $100000 each time you press it. From there you can buy yourself a huge ship, fill it with fuel and do as you like.

Hi,

Thanks for a fantastic game! I too am having problem on having Ctrl-F11 start full-screen, both on Alpha9 and latest nightly (e71494f), Ubuntu Lucid.

What are these settings and where can they be found? I tried pressing all buttons in-game, Ctrl-S is apparently turning GLSL shader off.. And grepping through the files doesn't give much:

(Btw, just wanted to mention that I too am "not much into combat or a story mode", just want to fly around without any battles on autopilot 🙂 Ok possibly sometimes fly around asteroids manually, and try to avoid them - and possibly do some mining 🙂 In fact, I thought it would be great if one could script a "tour" between different stations, and have it loop/repeat non-stop, possibly speeding time when you're in plain ol' boring space, and slowing down when you're near some planetary features, leaving the engine noises as they are... something like a screensaver mode, I guess 🙂 But, something like that may even be possible through the Lua script engine, right? )

In any case, thanks for a most fantastic game - I don't know why the website says "Pioneer isn't ready to play yet"; as far as I'm concerned, it already has everything I need 🙂 !!

Some settings, including the full-screen option, can be found by pressing Escape while in-game. For any others you can check your config.ini. On Linux its in $HOME/.pioneer.

They're interesting ideas. I hadn't much thought about a scripted "tour" other than what might be necessary for an intro movie. It'd certainly happen via the Lua script engine. Its a long way of though.

I don't think there will ever be an actual "story mode". If there ever is some coherent set of missions of the kind in FFE they'll certainly be optional. As for having no combat, as I said earlier, its easy enough to remove the scripts manually for now. Its also possible right now to write a script that continuously hands you money and fuel so you never have to earn cash and/or refuel to keep flying.

Something I've been thinking about for the future is having a kind of mod/addon manager which you can use to disable scripts through the game and perhaps even search/download scripts, much like extendable games have. I can see it being quite possible there to install an addon that disables ship spawns and hands out fuel.

Because by your own confession, you only want pretty sights to see which right now we have in abundance! 😉 Some day soon everything will be as polished as the terrain engine, and then the game will have something for everyone 🙂