This is alpha quality software. The game is unfinished, and one of the least finished parts is trade. Gameplay will come in time; for the moment, it's mostly eye candy.

The easiest way to make money is to press Ctrl+M.

Seriously!!!

lol

I will try that, but I don't want to ruin things by getting all I wanted straight away.

I was going to ask for an alternative trade route.

But that seems to be out of the window now 😉

Oh No!!!

I have just tried that and it works.

It's spoilt the game ;-(

I will not play it again until That cheat feature has gone, and there is more fair trading to be done......

You could try Oolite while you're waiting... plenty of fair trading in that, and some very nice graphics too.

It's not Frontier-like though... it's Elite-like!

Brianetta? Would it be possible to re-instate the good old Barnard's to Sol run from the original Frontier for the older players amongst us? It was deadly dull and you would never make a fortune but it at least got you started. 🙂

Oh, and welcome to the SSC Hady 🙂

Geraldine! How could you? I designed that system.

It's based on real life knowledge of the star. It's one of the oldest stars in the galaxy. It's small, dim, and rotates very slowly. It's unusually active for a star of its age. Most importantly, it definitely has no large planets, and it's looking increasingly unlikely that it has small ones. Given its age and high speed (it's fairly belting along), the most reasonable hypothesis is that it is completely alone.

Well, except for the two prison colonies.

Asteroid belts? It's gotta be a virtual certainty that even in systems without planets there gonna be rubble and some bigs lumps at that 🙂

[*:yjwsf8xr]No. There's no evidence of cold debris or a dust disk, and Barnard's Star has very low metallicity, indicating that the materials just aren't there. If they are, they certainly manage never to pass between the star and us.

[*:yjwsf8xr]Rubble? Have you any idea how sparse our own asteroid belt is? The average separation in the densest parts of the asteroid belt is

millions of miles.

😆 I was not suggesting you change the system itself, just the ability to have a modest trade route for new players to cut their teeth on and yes fluffyfreak, asteroids with bases, perhaps with mine-able resources on the other asteroids later on. Basically Barnard's Star could in the future, be made as a training ground of sorts for new pilots, not only to teach the basics for trading and making profitable runs, but also basic flight control by way of navigating between the asteroids, gunnery and scooping up the resources blasted off those lumps of rock.

As for the lack of observable asteroids around Barnard's, perhaps we are looking directly down on it's orbit, therefore there would never be anything crossing in front of the star relative to us. You are correct though about the distances between the various asteroids. Perhaps there could be tight clumps of smaller asteroids grouped together by their own weak gravity wells?

There's no evidence of any but then our ability to detect anything that isn't edge on, occludes or satisfy's a number of other unlikely conditions does mean that all we can say about Barnard's Star comes purely from it's stars visible properties.

...oh yeah, and it's a game 😛 😆

We can't detect many things, quite correct. We can, however, exclude a number of things by other means, regardless of whether we could make a positive detection. It's a dead cert, for instance, that there are no massive planets (nothing as big as our gas giants) because that star is not very massive, and we'd see it wobble as they went around.

As for it being a game, well, there's just not much trade to be had at a prison colony...

I'd suggest that a far better trade route would be Rigil Kent to Proxima Centauri. They're so very close to each other that trade would be very quick, as well as easy.

I found 2 systems are very close together (2.75 LY). They are called Beana and Bemi and are both on the dial 2 5 -5.

With the illegal trade in their goods, you can quickly monetize

SPACE NERD ALERT!!

lol im kidding I lOVE a good ol fashion astronomy debate

this could be true 🙂

They're called bigger asteroids. Sometimes, they're minor planets. (-:

That's physics, alas. Either they fall together, or they go their separate ways. The exceptions are ring systems (and even then, probes have gone through some of Saturn's without managing to hit anything) and possibly Lagrange points - but you'd need stronger gravities than any in Sol to make it obvious. Jupiter's Lagrange points have asteroids orbiting them, but they're scattered over almost as much space as the asteroid belt.

The problem here is that gravity is a really weak force, and for attracting small objects together it's next to useless. Getting two asteroids to affect each other gravitationally is about as easy as getting two people's gravity to affect each other on the street. Theoretically, we know it happens, but it's way too small an effect to measure.

I resorted to downloading the demo of Evochron Mercenery.

Just to see what it was like, because you can land on planets, trade, fight, mine etc etc.

I played the demo for about 15 minutes and was so glad that I did not buy it.

Proper arcade game.

Absolute crap.

No sense of being in space, too much space junk, rubbish radio chatter, low res planet graphics... A big NO NO

Pioneer is the way forward.

Once completed I am sure it could be put up for sale, and will out sell any other space sim.

It really is amazing already.

I flew to Venus, and landed on the darkside, just because I could.

There is no point in me going on about clouds in the game, because I am sure it has been covered already, many times.

I am disappointed about that money cheat though. Wish you would not of told me.

All I can say is keep up bringing on those updates.

Once it is complete, I would not hesitate to donate or buy the game.

I have been looking for frontier since I built my first PC back in 1999. I have pretty much stumbled across pioneer, and am glad that I did.

Are there any nebula clouds in the game ?

To add a splash of colour to the otherwise black void of space 😉

Another question.

When you set your autopilot and make way!

Why does your ship turn around half way through the journey?

I end up facing the wrong way.. lol

I did not like elite.

Last time I played that was in 1985 on my Acorn Electron.

I got hooked on frontier when I saw my mate playing it on his Amiga 1200 some 7 or so years after.

I had to get an Amiga and buy Frontier.

It was the freedom of movement, and the detailed planets that did it for me.

I have never liked space combat. Spinning around trying to kill a guy that is simply much better at it than you.

Trading Exploration and mining was always my forte.

It's from before i joined but:

1) no colourful Nebulae - the ones you see from Hubble etc are false coloured to highlight areas of interest that are beyond human vision and amuse the public.

2) the ship turns around because the main engines are facing backwards so slowing down happens faster if you turn around and use them which shortens journey time 🙂

PS: I actually would like colourful Nebulae etc as an option simply for people who are playing it and like to see that stuff - but it's extra work for someone to write it and maintain it and it does go against the general ethos of the rest of the development. In short, I doubt anyone will add it anytime soon.

Hady, Pioneer is free software. Feel free to sell it yourself, if you like - it's one of the freedoms we have given you!

If you don't want to play Pioneer until the cheat is gone, you can always do what the rest of us do: test it. We're always grateful for clear bug reports, with enough information for us to repeat the problem. Also, your feedback from testing can help shape the game itself. Don't be afraid to make informed criticism.

But it was you Brianetta that told me the cheat 😆

I so wish I was able to do computer programming, as talented as you have produced.

My last attempt at this was using BASIC back in the 80s

Here are a list of bugs I have noticed, since you need to know.

. Joystick control has a mind of its own, even after calibrating it. It seems to forget the calibration. Mouse is much better. At least you can fly it stable.

. When I was in low orbit around Venus, the planet flashed on and off, but only the one occasion !

. A 3D cockpit would be a real bonus, specially one which you could rotate your hear around with your joystick POV. But I know that is a difficult task.

. From outside the spaceship there should be no sound (Vacuum of space an all that)! Inside is fine 😉

. Clouds on Planets, or rudimentary cloud layers for now !

. A nice touch would be a few passing spaceships, after all there would not only be me travelling about in this impossible scenario, because it could never possibly happen in real life. EVER

Thus far that is all I can fault.

Your present work is sterling, and I cannot emphasise how much it is appreciated by not only me, but hundreds of others who are just discovering Pioneer.

Your work is pure genius, and I am sure it is going to become a legend.

Move over David Braben. For your work has been developed on, and massively improved.

By the way.

My system is

Intel 4.8 processor

8 GB of ram

Gefore GTX 560 Gold edition card

GS800 PSU

2 x 150GB raptor HD running in RAID 0

So I can crank everything up to the max, and it still runs at 140 FPS at 1280x1050

😎