Are there some issues with the currently nightlies ?

I see March 27th (Tuesday) is still the latest one.

No, I just haven't bothered building one because nothing new has been merged to master.

Confirmed. We're looking into it.

Fixed: http://twitter.com/#!/pioneerspacesim/s ... 6941344768

I rebuilt the build server earlier in the week and used a GCC 4.7.0 cross-compiler. Apparently its causing problems so I've reverted it back to 4.6.3. Thanks for the heads-up.

Definitely all working perfectly.

3 April - 9bbd302

The last week before feature freeze is usually the time where the user-visible stuff appears after receiving spit and polish, and this week is no exception. Two new things in the most recent nightly builds.

Thruster power modifier

Hold left-shift to drop thruster power to 25% for finer control. Hit F8 to bring up a menu to let you change the power level for really fine control.

Navtarget tunnels

An old favourite from Frontier. A "tunnel" effect to help you find your way to your target. Enable via the "Controls" tab in the game settings view.

Alpha 21 will freeze this Friday (6 April) and will be released next Friday (13 April).

"An old favourite from Frontier. A "tunnel" effect to help you find your way to your target. Enable via the "Controls" tab in the game settings view."

Could someone explain this in detail?

Excuse me. Many of us have not known Frontier.

When playing press the "Esc" key, or press the pause button twice.

This will bring up a menu with several tabs along the top that you can click on for different pages of options.

The option for the "tunnels" effect will be available under the one marked "controls" 🙂

This will only become available from the next Alpha build OR if you download one of the Nightly Builds which robn sometimes makes available. If you're running the last Alpha version released then it won't be available in that.

Andy

Oh and I should mention that it's only a visual aid to help you but that it is pretty iconic from Frontier 😀

Andy

In Frontier when you target anything in front view, you get a tunnel effect like that in the image above, and as you get closer to the target the square markers appear to come at you faster, very much like the white centre markings on a road or motorway.

Not too keen on them myself, but it is in Frontier like that.

Fluffyfreak and Skodyn. Thanks for the info, you are very kind. 😉

I use the git version is constantly updated and that change had not yet. There is intense activity in the last hours. 😆

Actually I installed and played my copy of Frontier for the first time last night, It was great to see the differences and made me realise how awesome this Pioneer project is in comparison 😀

Sorry if this sounds like a silly question, but If I download a new nightly can I still use my old saves without issues, or is it better to start a new game?

Only if you're lucky. We only change the save game format when we have to, but we don't guarantee anything.

The new features are very nice, but now that the thrust modifier uses F8, how does one disable object labels?

TAB will toggle them. Over time this will become a more general "show/hide HUD" option.

Robn, thank you so much for this! 🙂 This was one of the original features really missed 😎

Thanks! I just came back to say that I finally noticed that option in the controls tab. "Show/hide HUD" is something that many of us want, as I'm sure you know. You guys are awesome! Every week Pioneer comes closer to being my Frontier dream come true! 😀

We need a little help. The latest nightly sometimes exhibits a slight graphical glitch in the form of an oddly-flickering fuel gauge. It looks like this when it happens:

We know what causes it, and how to fix it, but although we've seen it we're having trouble reproducing it reliably enough to be able to test. So if you play the nightlies and you see it and can reliably reproduce it, please tell us (here or in an issue on the tracker) how to reproduce it so we can get it fixed.

(Feel free to post if you see it but can't reproduce it, but understand that's entirely not useful to us - we need a reproducable case).

Cheers!

Thank's that helps me decide how often I should be downloading a nightly.

But it is very tempting when you see a nice new feature that you want to try 😎

It just happened to me, I noticed it for a split second after pressing F7 then it appeared and stayed after completing the hyperjump. Not sure if it is easily reproducible as it looks as if it's random. It did briefly disappear after pressing F4 but returned on exit from that screen. After landing it remained until I did a save and on reloading the game it was gone. I will keep an eye out and see if it happens again when I jump.

I was able to reproduce it several times even after exiting the game and reloading.

When docked at a port click on F2 (nav and star maps) then click on F7 (Star system Info) and it should be easily reproducible 😎

Edit: I've just opened a new issue for it on the issue tracker

Brilliant, thanks. We now have a good idea of what's going on and should have a fix in shortly.

Ok confriming the above is reproduceable good to see it fixed so quickly

23 April - 46154aa

An interesting feature for modders and hackers just landed on master - modding support. When you run the game you'll notice that you now get a "mods" folder in your userdir (ie My Docs/Pioneer/mods, ~/.pioneer/mods, etc). If you drop a zip file in here, at game start its contents will be transparently attached to the data/ dir and loaded by the game as part of its normal operation. If a file in a zipfile has the same path/name as a stock file, the zipfile version will be used.

This can be used for any file under data/ - ships, models, systems, music, fonts, textures, whatever. If anyone is building add-ons for Pioneer, this is how you should package them.

Some simple examples:

[*:31phydlf]

graveyard.zip - adds a custom system "Graveyard" (up and to the right of Sol) and a script that does something when you jump there. Example of bundling mutiple files in a mod.

[*:31phydlf]redsol.zip - replaces the system def for Sol with one that has a red star. Example of replacing a core file.

This is really just the bare-bones support for a more comprehensive modding system in the future. If you're thinking about modding Pioneer, please try this out and be sure to report your experiences! We'll add more info to the "Modding" topic on the wiki as we learn more.