It's ~600ly from Sol, in sector [-63,26,-34]. And it seems to be inhabited!

Sweet, I knew it was about 550ly away. It's one of the brighter stars becasue it's so much bigger than most (it's like 10,000 times bigger than Sol?). We can't see it from out latitude in Seattle (I think) so I have no idea how the 6 year old even knows about it. What are they teaching kindergarteners these days?

Antares is red, and gets it's name because it looks alot like Mars (Ante and Aries).

Note to self: I gotta check out Wawawa while i'm in the vicinity. Hmmm. maybe not, it sounds like it might be full of Orks.

Doh, it's "-34" i copied it down wrong and got lost.

Did I mention I die alot? This latest death had particular pathos. I missed earth coming back from Neptune (my kid loves Neptune, and when he suggested it, I said sure. I forgot to load up on fuel, and well, ran out of fuel. I wasn't able to slow down and we sailed right by Earth. It was sad becasue we were so close, and then we zoomed right by. My kid asked me "where are we going now?"

Here's a movie I want to reccommend, I think it's called "Man on a Mission", and it's about Richard Garriot (personal hero of mine) and his trip to the international space station. Even if you dont know who RG is, it's still a great documentary about a space tourist.

Now 145 light years away from Sol, and I'm in another sticky spot.

Highlights along the way have been Cotten's Grave, the first extra solar populated world I encountered. Roach Starport in G707 -4,-1,-4, which was not as scary as the name implies. Anin, a liberal democracy in -8,3,-7 was great, kinda like visiting Amsterdam. My favorite world so far though is Hsuworld in -14,10,-6. I called it the Leopard planet, and had to go get my wife so she could look at it. She said we could move there, then I told her with it's gravity of almost 4 g's she would weight almost 500 pounds, so we are not moving there.

but this is the sticky spot. I took a gamble that I could easily buy more hydrogen fuel for my trip there, so I used up all I had getting to Hsuworld in the Cear system. Then I found out that my autopilot couldn't navigate the system, so I moved inwards a few million kilometers and the autopilot was able to get an angle it could approach Hsuworld on. I used up almost all my fuel getting to this beautiful leopard print planet, and then was dismayed to discover my autopilot balked, saying it couldn't compensate for the local gravity (3.8 or something). I had to land, since this was the only starport in the system and I was out of fuel.

2 days later, I was safely on the planet (despite having to die like a million times. What worked for me was pointing directly away from the starport and backing dowin into the port with the "k" key and setting autopilot to maintain speed 0.

I also jettisoned my cargo, so lighten my load to make it easier to land. but Wow, what an adventure. Most beautiful planet ever, but i didnt' stay around for sightseeing.

wow, this is going to take a while. We're in the Caness system -18,15,-7. It's so unusualu I had to check this out, and probably doom the ship and crew a dozen or so times doing it. Caness has no star, just 3 brown dwarfs, two that swiftly swirl around each other in a circle within the orbit of Caness C, the planet we are heading towards. There's a port there, McDonald Orbital. Caness C is about 660 au out, even at 1/10th lightspeed, it's going to take a while to get there.

I never saw a system like this one before, it's kinda creepy. There's no real light souce, and everything is covered in a ruddy red ambiant glow. Even at highest speed setting, I think it's going to take about 3 hours to get to this moon orbiting the brown dwarf.

Heh, its like reading a journal from an actual deep space traveller. I'm actually left wondering what happened next.

Well, one thing I heard about McDonald Orbital is that the fries are fairly good. They're covered in a ruddy red condiment. <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_razz.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':-P' />

Actually Derrick, I'm rather surprised you picked the flowerfairy. It's such a simple programmer's model. I'm thinking of texturing and detailing it a bit after I'm through with the spacestations. That is, if somebody that worked on commercial games doesn't do it first. <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />

hmmmm.... I really like how the mod system is set up for Pioneer (just throw a .zip file into the mod directory?) Are there UV co-ordinates for the Flowerfiary already? (I havn't looked into any .lua files in a while, as my mother in law has been visiting us the last week or so)

Traveling 1/10th lightspeed did not work. I burnet too much fuel and wasn't able to slow down and still have fuel for docking. so re loaded, and this time only accelerated to about 5% LS, 9k m/s. did the burn april 4th, then a slight course correction and deacceleration in Auguest, arrived at the station on Sept 26th. A long trip.

McDonald station orbits an ugly red planet, on the opposite side of the planet is another orbital called Joyner. After refueling at McDonald I went over to Joyner to check it out. I felt like I was really getting the hang of manuvering around in system. At Joyner I saw there was a notice in the bulliten board, some urgent package of perishables needs to be taken to Carrol, the 3rd starport in the system, only 650 au away.

Pluto is about 40 AU out from the sun, to give some perspective on how far flung these 3 brown dwarf star are.

So being a glutton for punishment I took the job and now am heading out for another 6 month trip across Caness -18,15,-7

As an aside, I feel that I should mention that the speed of light in the Pioneer universe is infinite. You know, just in case you wonder why 300,000km/s isn't treated specially.

Did you ask how soon those perishables had to get there? If you don't make it by the deadline you won't get paid.

The Flowerfairy is in data/models/ships.lua along with the Ladybird and Interdictor. Putting the textures on the Ladybird was the first thing I was able to to in Pioneer. It's not great but it's better than no textures at all. It was quite the learning curve for someone with no experience in this area whatever. As for the uv, well the ship is made out of primitives, quads and such. Here's a link to where potsmoke66 explained how to place a texture on a quad.

http://spacesimcentr...er/page__st__80

The whole thread is worth reading. There have been two forum migrations since that was posted, but some of the pictures are still there.

I was thinking of using/modifying the textures of the Sidewinder because the hexagonal pattern with a different colored center kind of looks like a flower pattern and could have inspired the ship's name, but that's just my idea.

Hope you get to Carrol before that stuff spoils! <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_biggrin.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':D' />

I took off from Joyner station in Caness in late September, and I took that mission to bring perishables to Carrol city on Harding's Rock, 650 au away from Joyner. GThe client wanted the delivery to be in a week or something, and I thought at the time I was going to spend probably 3 or 4 days just acceleration towards Carrol orbiting an angry looking brown dwarf star.

The trip was worth it, but the client wasn't happy at all. We arrived in January, I was getting better about fuel conservation and acceleration) I think I waspaid 750, which is like 500 less than we had initially agreed upon. I loved the planet Harding's Rock, it's like a red spongey planet full of craters. One especially large and oval crater caught my eye and I spent some time flying around it. The whole planet is bathed in a red twilit light from the 3 dwarf stars. There's nothing out there when you look outside the spaceship, just stars and when you get close those very mean looking brown dwarf stars.

next was Faphi, which was a releif since it has a big yellow star, and i hadn't seen a proper star in days. Faphi's Green starport wouldn't let me land. Even when I had a delivery mission from a near by base. (that was a fun trip, we did it like a jet plane, a short 900 km hop from one city to another on the planet. I tried to land anyway, and they tried to shoot me down.

it's also the first system under control of The Empire that i've encountered. Who are they, and how do I find info about the factions ingame?

I didn't think factions were implemented in the game yet. I'd love to see some pictures of the planets you're visiting. It would make this a really cool journal! <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_biggrin.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':D' />

Factions don't really exists. The game knows about things called "Federation", "Imperial", "Confederation of Independent Systems" and "Independent" but right now they're little more than randomly-selected text. But don't let that stop you imagining it means something, because I'm enjoying this thread <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

Well, I couldn't find my way out of the maze of stars around Greedio -48, 13, -18. Every space station would deny us entry and we barely made it back to MJBN 448, the last place we could really fuel-up. While backtracking, I was thinking maybe the flowerfiary isn't the best ship for a pan-galactic tour (It's a great ship for the Earth to Moon fruit and radioactive waste run). I'm choosing the Asp Explorer, fitted out with 10 cabins and a laser. (It's my first laser, my ships are almost always space tour-ships, or luxury liners), and a military class 4 hyperdrive. I had to ctrl-m a few times to get it, and I'm leaving Earth with about 20 Grand in cash.

With Alpha24, I loaded up my save game, and it seemed to work fine, but I didn't want to risk it crashing later, so I started anew. I checked and Antares is still in the same place.

As luck would have it on the bullitin board are ten people who want to go to Barnard's Star

on the way I stopped off at my house. I landed on the hill in Seattle that I live on, and Wow, I gotta say the view was pretty much what you'd expect. All the mountains are in the right place (the lake looks a little small from orbit, but it's a small lake). Everything looked a little squat though, i figure this is because the external camera is at a 120 degree field of view or something? Is there a way to set the angle of view to 60 degrees?

Into your config.ini you can change your FOV, It is under documents folder in a variable called verticalFOV or something like this. In my 16:9 laptop I ever change it from 65 to 35 or 40. I like it in that way, to me It makes the planets even more glorious and huge.

They wouldn't let you land because there was another ship occupying the space port. If you wait around for a few hours they'll eventually take off and you can get landing clearance.

Ahh, so that's it... i thought it was maybe a faction thing, ok good to know.

Pioneer is effecting my driving. (the only other game to do that was GTA 4) I found my self accelerating fully halfway down the quarter mile alley to my garage, then deaccelerating the last half. At least I didn't turn the car around 180 degrees to do it. Just happened sub-conciously.

I spent a few wonderful days in the Altair system. 5 gas giants, I think 3 of them have ring systems, and each is different. I was inspired to take some screenshots (by going into windowed mode and hitting the print screen button on my keyboard and copying into photoshop. Is there an easier way to take a screenshot?)

I played around with making some adverts (I'm trying to find the simplest things to start modding with). The only adverts I found were coolcola.png and some others in the adverts directory, all about 128x128 pixels. So here is my first one, part of the "Ahh.. Altair" Altair tourism marketing campaign. It looks like it's cabable of having animated adverts?

i like that advert <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

you should be ble to save a full screen screenshot by using CTRL+PrintScreen. it should save a .png into the screenshots folder in your user/documents/pioneer folder....