Please do bear in mind that this is alpha software. Absolutely no real work has been done on the economic or political parts of the game, so trade, factions and so forth are all just placeholder stuff. Military missions don't exist yet. Neither do military ranks, for that matter. The old trade routes from Frontier will probably never exist in this game, because the stars are different.

The use of water as propellant is extremely new to Pioneer. Alphas prior to 20 didn't have any sort of in-system fuel at all. The water was an arbitrary choice; to begin with, there was no means of refuelling using water. Your refuel button is on the cargo screen should you need it. Personally, I don't carry any extra water at all, since the automatic refuelling done in ports is enough.

Docking animations will be speed-up-able soon.

As for explanations, etc... well, we need a volunteer to write the manual. Are you that person?

i had once the idea (and is still lurking in the back of my mind) to setup a Pioneer for lower specced machines, perhaps even portables.

imo the main FPS killers are textures and the wavefront .obj based models.

scripted geometry without any textures runs much smoother.

things like fractal terrain generation and postprocessing are additional chocks.

you can try to test yourself what the use of only scripted geometry without any textures will help.

just remove all ships except the ones TomM made once and try to use a untextured "Ladybird Starfighter" (i can help you).

remove also all buildings except the original city buildings even contributed by TomM and perhaps one or two i made in the very beginning, i should still have them untextured or i can revert them easy.

it would surprise me, if we couldn't gain a few FPS through that already.

of course it will look quite different, and you won't have many ships neither a lot of different buildings.

but perhaps i can change some of the scripted models i have in store to fit them to a "textureless" pioneer.

Certainly they're a contributor when there's plenty of models on screen. Other significant contributors are terrain generation, text rendering and scripts.

I've already been thinking about the story elements that belong in the manual. I've found a copy of the FE2 manual and I'm swapping bits out and putting new bits in. Once I get it to semi-interesting stage i'll do a pull request or whatever so people can have a nosy.

@robn

yes, but this is out of my control, but i can do something, perhaps another will contribute something else.

anyway i found it a interesting thing to reduce it to a more "basic" state.

that's also to leave away the shading for the terrains, just as in FE2, placing of buildings resp. building arrangement's will be far easier.

like in FE2 you won't notice if they are over or under the surface, except you rough land somewhere in the city and your ship is above or under the buildings.

streets, parks, pools and all this nice little things could be placed in a reasonable way in arrangements (city tiles).

of course it reduces all the nice gfx we like and which are common standart, but i would also like to see a pioneer on a handheld or phone.

that also came back to my mind when i read a article on frontier forums from one who liked to play GLFrontier on his handheld.

i immidiatly thought how great it would be to play Pioneer on a handheld.

[/hr]

unshaded terrain will be optically a disadvantage, but on the other hand it would be far easier to make cities.

something i'm by myself not sure which i would like better, shaded terrains or cities with streets and parks, which look like they would be leveled even when they are placed on a hillside.

but this needs also a change in how cities get placed, not longer by terrain, instead of that all levelled to the height of the port.

at least i would like to experiment with that.

in extreme situations it will look unfortunately very bad, you would probably see parts of the city hanging in the air (e.g. the "flying stations" in FE2 on planetoids).

while ok, it's up to me to work on the city tiles and untextured scripted geometry, i can already disable the shaders and see what's the result.

i guess it will look just as simple as FE2, with some extra extras 😉

none of FE2's objects is shaded but due to some tricks they look like, but in fact all is transparent.

thats why you see text even when it's under the shiphull, you see a ship into a ship when it's drawn later.

[attachment=1115:Bildschirmfoto 2012-02-21 um 09.27.06.png]

fantastic occasion and a good size comparison, a cobra3 and a lynx which is placed in fact into the LRC.

the LRC is a GIANT and larger then any spacestation in FE2

if you compare the distance of the cobra to the lynx (1.75km), then the LRC is about 4km in height, length i can only guess something above 50km.

a giant flying city, with at least 50'000 residents.

you can also see that by the city buildings placed on the surface, they are the same as the ones you see as industrial parks in cities.

the lynx compared to the large station

or "a case of a bad parked ship" 😆