In this instance, it's a feature which can be painlessly removed from the game. We don't have any Thargoids, friendly or otherwise; Pioneer is a Frontier-inspired game, not a First Encounters-inspired game.

It's not blasphemy. We do plan to have crews in ships, and when we do we want them to serve a useful purpose, not just be lazy oiks required to counter-balance the player's obese mass or whatever. Anyway, one thing that a crew member might have is a qualification in drive servicing. Pioneer isn't as yet as awesome as it's going to be, let me tell you. (-:

Thank-you for your reply. That sounds like a fantastic solution and totally fits in with the Frontier style (as I understand it). I was afraid that the inability to explore indefinitely might have been considered a "feature" of the original and, as such, off the table for inclusion in Pioneer.

Episodes 5+ in production today. Will hopefully have them uploaded and processed within this 24 hour period. Sorry for keeping you waiting!

Episode 5 is up!

Episode 5 went down very well with my cup of tea and biscuit just now. I'm loving this series, great work!

Some notes!

* Sol didn't move much while you were hanging around Mercury with the timeaccel on because you chose a terrible planet for it. It was something like ~60 days rotation period and ~80 days orbital period? Even at max timeaccel that's going to take a while.

* The planet "tilted" at higher timeaccels because set-speed locks your position relative to the body but not your orientation. We've been discussing the idea of locking the orientation as well, but it has some peculiar behaviour if the reference body is rotating quickly, as is the case with a space station. More thinking is required.

* Venus is suffering from terrain brokenness just like Neptune. We significantly restructured the terrain engine for alpha 17, but our testing was apparently not as thorough as it could have been. Alpha 18 should improve the situation.

* We have a long-standing feature request (#82) for removing the hud. The UI code is poorly structured right now which makes this quite difficult to achieve. Restructuring/rewriting that code is happening very slowly, and once its done it'll make this kind of feature trivially easy.

* There's also quiet plans around for a free-roaming screenshot camera. No idea when that will happen, but I think that's something you'll like.

* Barnard's star is "boring", but might have made a good stop because (iirc) you've not visited a space station yet?

* The gas giant in 70 Ophiuchi is orbiting the binary pair, rather than just a single star within it. The A,B a designation tells you that - 'A,B' refers to the binary pair as a whole with the 'a' denoting the first object, as normal. I'm looking forwarding to seeing the view from there.

Finally, can I suggest you link each episode from your original post? It'll make it much easier to find the new ones or the whole set for people that come later.

Looking forward to episode 6! 😀

Yeah I figured Merc wouldn't be good to watch the sun when i checked it's stats but I felt it was worth a try anyway.

True, I havent visited a space station yet, but we'll get to one soon I'm sure.

Very excited about the Hud, and yes I will link the vids in the original post.

Yeah Mercury is almost tidally locked, it made me chuckle when you were waiting for a sunset 🙂

Anyway keep it up dude, I really like them and actually find myself anticipating the next episode

Cheers.

Glad you all can put up with my bumbling through space. I obviously wouldn't make the best astronaut at the moment. But that's what games are for right?

Next ep will be coming out sometime tonight hopefully.

Thanks for watching!

Episode 6 is up! I messed around with the brightness in editing, hopefully you'll be able to see everything this time. Youtube really screws up the darkness.

(Link also added to original post)

I'll take the brightness down one notch for the next episode and it should be perfect.

In fact, I will re-post this Episode if it bothers enough people. Otherwise, I'll just move on to Ep 7.

Also, I'm wondering what your opinion is on music. Should I be playing the in-game music (at a low level so you can still hear my commentary)? Should I play some background music of my own choice (I have a good selection fit for this type of thing)? No music at all? Or more random TV shows on in the background?

I'll probably test some of these options out in the upcoming episodes.

One of my all time favorite Pioneer vids was an early one by King Haggis of Alpha 3. He got the music so right in this vid and served as an introduction to the game for a great many people, oh and it's up to 130 likes with zero dislikes by the way 🙂 . I do hope he makes another 😎 Perhaps watching it could give you ideas? Here is a link

I remember watching this one before deciding to download. Great input, I definitely have some stuff like this I can play or add later.

You found some really nice planets in ep6. Sol and Epsilon Eridani don't really show off what the terrain engine can do (apart from the bugs) but I don't get out past them much because these days I'm only starting the game to test some bugfix or UI work or something. Nice to see things are still looking good out there!

By the way, not all the devs are manual flight heroes. I'd be useless without the autopilot 🙂

You asked about star types. The types are the Harvard Spectral Classification. Everything you ever wanted to know about how stars are classified can found on the Wikipedia page on stellar classification.

As you've noticed, star draw is a problem at distance. That flicker and/or invisibility is apparent at around 20-30AU from the star. The flicker is a bug, but the stars being entirely invisible is a bit harder. I broke it a few weeks ago (for good reason) but the fix is .. weird. I need to think about it more.

One bit of advice I'd give, is to use the front view from your ship as the camera when in orbit. It gives you much more control, and the physics engine doesn't care which way you're facing while you fall along an orbit.

Episode 7 is up! Lighting is a bit better on this one. Link being added to original post too.

Thanks for watching!

Nice one dude, I enjoyed episode 6 last night.

Btw, RE star classes, yeah it was mentioned, but there's a really simple way to remember them and what they are, basically the classifications just mean the colour and they are in order of brightest to weakest:

"Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me."

O : brightest and hottest, purple/white

B: blue/white

A: white

F: white/yellow

G: our very own sun is a type G star, G stars are yellowish or sometimes greenish, our own star has a green tint, Plus its an example of how a star can emit a different colour of light primarily to the actual colour you see.

K: orange cooler star, these have a cool fire-like terrain in Pioneer

M: coolest/coldest actual star class, red to orange, these can have cool terrains too.

Oh yeah there's also stuff like the White dwarfs ( D class) and Brown dwarfs ( L or T class IIRC) However in Pioneer you will only see those two referred to be their name, not a letter.

Im gonna watch episode 7 now 🙂

Cheers.

Edit: Oh look I thought I was being clever, but it turns out it already mentions that nice phrase on the wiki page Rob linked to 🙂

He did didn't he, it was nice to see the old Desert planet terrain in-use again on that hydrogen atmosphere world and actually looking right. 🙂 (Thats among the oldest terrains we have)

The sun-rise on the co2 world was rather spectacular too 🙂

Episode 7 does not disappoint 🙂 Thats a lovely sun-rise at the end.

Glad you enjoyed it!

Shameless plug: I've been uploading BF3 vids, give those a look if you're at all interested.

Hey everyone,

Sorry I havent posted any new vids recently. There has been some IRL shit going on. I am also going out of town for christmas for about a week, however I will have a laptop there to still play and record. Tonight I will be recording a bunch of episode so I can have a surplus to show you guys while I'm gone if I end up not being able to make the videos. The only downside to this is there will be a stretch of episodes where I don't have your input between shows. That's ok tho, at least there will be more vids up!

Starting work now, first vid will be up in a few hours.

Episode 8 is up!

I've been thinking about writing code for the last couple of hours. Its now 10:15pm and this appears. Guess that's my evening done, cheers 🙂

Haha, glad I could help end your night on a good point. It's 5am for me, I'm about to get on a plane. Hopefully I'll have a new video out by the end of the night (in my time zone).

have these videos given any of the programmers any inspiration