those last shots are looking good good good

I'm just barely awake so am posting this before I forget, couple of nice views across a Martian crater that NASA have just released.

You can probably find the hi-res versions straight from NASA but I'm off to bed 🙂

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/new-pictures-of-huge-mars-crater-emerge.html

Posted because I think the Mars work that s20dan has done is getting really close to the real thing.

night!

One of the guys on IRC has a working heightmap for mars so we might be getting even closer soon 🙂

Some new mountains and rock patterns for Earth:

[attachment=889:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-09-03 02-27-34-51.jpg]

[attachment=888:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-09-03 02-28-48-50.jpg]

[attachment=890:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-09-03 04-54-02-00.jpg]

A few more Earth pics with some tweaked textures/patterns.

[attachment=891:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-09-03 06-31-05-28.jpg]

[attachment=892:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-09-03 06-40-43-29.jpg]

A very very early peek at something s20dan and I are working on:

That's "terrain" on a star. So far its just early experiments; you _might_ see this in alpha 15 if it works out. At this point we're thinking that a gas giant type of terrain (so colour only, no height variance) with some light-emitting material should make good first cut.

🙂 Another experiment..

[attachment=896:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-09-05 04-24-37-39.jpg]

[attachment=895:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-09-05 04-19-17-53.jpg]

Getting there..:

<img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_eek.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':shock:' /> WOW, love those plasma textures. They will look great when it's all lit up. Do you think prominences will ever be added in the future?

Bear in mind that this terrain will be very bright; just as with real stars, you're unlikely to see the detail without a serious filter. We can assume that the space ship has such a filter.

Such a filter would hide any protuberances, as well as background stars, planets, etc, since they're relatively very dark. Unless we add unrealistically bright ones.

For now we can assume it has some kind of dynamic filter 😉

Here's a clip orbiting a star quite close :

We'll probably try at some point to do something like this 🙂 But to do it properly probably needs a nice shader with some noise.

Wow! When I think things are about as good as can be, you come up with something substantially better! 😀 Pioneer is like an addictive drug, in a way. One scores the latest alpha, or even better the latest nightly build, and it's great! Then you see that the next version is going to be even better so you can't wait to download that. Over and over again with a better and better high each time! 😆 Fortunately, the only side effects I experienced are mental exercises, attempting to add a bit of flavor to the batch, resulting in slightly improved brain function and a feeling of intimacy with complete strangers who happen to share the same addiction. 😉

I like the star textures a lot, but I think that you'll have to include prominences, or use the default Pioneer star glow thingy to make it work.

I noticed a new Milky Way band. It's a slight improvement. Less artificial looking than the last.

Also, nice music. Schubert?

Hehe thanks, good ear it is Schubert Symphony No. 8.

Yeah that vid was taken before any of the old star shaders had been re-activated like the halo and the spikes, it was just a terrain shader and some bright colours passed to the shader. Rob recently reactivated the spikes and halo for regular shaders and I just had a mess around with HDR and managed to get that working too :

Now, that's hot! With the proper shimmer applied, yikes! One thought, the hull temperature appears to be nominal. Does the proximity to a star affect this? If not, it should.

(putting on my shades) 😎

It will. Up until now stars have pretty much been a giant no-op as far as gameplay is concerned. We'll start adding in atmospheric effects, heat, etc once this work starts to settle.

I think s2odan had his ship specially equipped with unobtanium heat shielding for those beautiful shots <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />

http://en.wikipedia....iki/Unobtainium

The very words I used last night!

I provided a saved game file with a near perfectly circular orbit at 700,000km from Sol's centre, but s20dan's orbital skills aren't far off my own, and the video was filmed from his own orbital approach.

The surface if the Sun is now, for all practical purposes, a solid surface. I don't believe it allows landing, but even if it did you wouldn't be able to do so. A powered descent from this orbit can't be done (the engines just can't kill off all that speed). The only chance would be an insanely long powered descent from outer space, which might work, but only if we continue not to require fuel.

Getting down here from the autopilot's medium orbit (it blankly refused to try a low one) required between three and four hundred km/s delta V, and that's the most fuel efficient approach there is.

I was playing around with the shaders again last night, Trying to fake some different effects.

So this is like the square of a glow... basically its more dependant on the colours around it so light colours glow lots more than dark which gives the flame-like halo:

[attachment=897:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-09-06 04-36-29-97.jpg]

here's a clip:

Following a post on the Frontier Forum in my "Pioneer" thread, someone asked if it would be possible one day to convert Frontier save games into Pioneer ones. I think it would be difficult to say the least. However perhaps a "Buffet styled" editor might be about to do the job instead? Does the devs think that such an editor might exist one day? If so, it would be easy to just copy your stats from Frontier over to a new Pioneer save game. This is not a feature request, just asking if it could be a "maybe" one day. 🙂

Thats quite an interesting idea. It would be difficult in the sense that we no longer have an exact clone of the game, there will likely be more factions and already the galaxy is a different size and shape with different systems. I don't seen any reason why a buffet style editor couldn't be used or created in the future, although it might not even be needed. If save files were to be kept in a more easily understandable form then it would simply be a matter of editing that file with notepad 🙂

Save game conversion is never going to happen - the two games are just too different. I'm not sure exactly what Buffet is, but I can guess. That's feasible, but if all we want is the ability to edit ship stats then a Lua script is the right way to do it. Scripts can already change the ship registration and colours and modify equipment and cargo. Once #404 is implemented it'll be possible to change ship type from script as well. Is there anything significant that is needed after that?

Thanks for the input guys! 🙂 Yes I guessed that a straight conversion couldn't happen as even the game's universe is starting to divert from Frontier's original one, not to mention all the other things too.

Buffet is the rather cool editor for FFE3D. It works by modding a save game while it is active in memory and not the game itself. Anyways I will put your answer down on the Frontier Forum as a maybe then, using scripts?

Some random star shots:

[attachment=907:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-09-15 17-57-23-06.jpg]

[attachment=906:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-09-15 17-50-34-55.jpg]

[attachment=905:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-09-15 17-49-21-82.jpg]

For comparison:

more pics:

[attachment=908:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-09-15 18-18-26-09.jpg]

[attachment=909:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-09-15 18-24-53-86.jpg]

Your definitely heading in the right direction with this s2odan! <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' /> That last one,.....the brown dwarf <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_eek.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':shock:' /> With a little tweak here and there and you could turn that into a Neutron star! I have only one thing to say..............

I did this today. To pretend to load a Frontier save, the only thing I can think of is a way to teleport the player object into any arbitrary system. This would also let us mess about with Thargoid transporters...

A nice new way of adding snow and ice areas on mountains :

[attachment=917:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-09-21 05-03-27-63.jpg]

[attachment=918:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-09-21 05-01-48-64.jpg]

[attachment=919:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-09-21 05-02-15-39.jpg]