I could have sworn we already had an issue for this but I couldn't find it, so I've just logged issue #236.
how about suborbital planetary cargo planes and the like as npc ships cant shoot but might jus fly around as background candy
Sensible uses for navigation lights include atmospheric flight and rendezvous manoeuvres in orbit or deep space. Clearly, atmospheric flight should follow aeronautic practice. In space, it might be sensible to adopt other schemes.
Bearing in mind that in space a vehicle can be in any orientation, and that this orientation might have nothing to do with the direction of movement (which is all relative anyway), the red/green navigation light system is borderline useless. My thoughts are that the following system would make sense:
[*:17yjkv6q]Illumination lights. These shine across the exterior of the vehicle, and are principally there to allow inspection of the vehicle by a tethered camera, through any suitable window, or another vehicle. They also allow the vehicle to be seen by the human eye (although thermal imaging will always be able to pick up a space vehicle).
[*:17yjkv6q]Main engine axis indication. A simple two-colour system; a red light on the back of the vehicle, and a blue light on the front, where the front and back are defined by the main engine's axis of thrust. These allow nearby vehicles to see in which direction, relative to the observed vehicle, any major change of velocity will occur. If you're seeing only the red light, you're going to get hit by reaction mass. If you're seeing only the blue light, you're going to get hit by the vehicle itself. If you can see both, you ought to be safely off-axis. The colours are easy to remember; under acceleration, they're the same as the colour-shift that would be observed from that direction. In this respect, they might even make sense to alien cultures, in the unlikely event that contact is made, and assuming they evolved to see the same narrow band of colours that we did.
In any case, there's not much more that would be needed. NASA gets by without any of that, but then there isn't much in the way of human space traffic yet.
At some point id like to see the ability to have multiple ships and fittinsg in different part of the universe ( like store it here for x amount per day and come back later on to colelct or change ships) something that will tie in with the expanded lua system, personal colonies spaceports and all other things "empire and technological building stuffs)
Nightly builds have been somewhat sporadic in the last week while I've been moving house but are now back. All sorts of interesting stuff has been added to Pioneer recently.
* New facegen faces, accessories and clothing. There's some really weird stuff out there now; do post screenshots if you find anything fun!
* Populated systems are now highlighted in the sector view. This is highly experimental, and the throbber effect will likely be tweaked in the future. We're interested to hear what you think of displaying more information in the sector and system views
* FOV can now be configured via the config file. One for you crazies with your panoramic monitor setups 🙂
* You can now use the mouse to rotate the spinning ship in the info view and the shipyard.
* We now have a scriptable music player. Right now there's a trivial test script with a link to some music you can grab to try it out. The current plan is that alpha 12 will have a more complete action-based system and a full complement of music.
Seeing the populated systems at a glance is a great feature (for those of us who are a bit new to the map), but that throbber speeds up with the TAF.
Seeing the populated systems at a glance is a great feature (for those of us who are a bit new to the map), but that throbber speeds up with the TAF.
Yes, just noticed that myself while making the screenshot there. Issue #247.
Eeeexcellent!!
[attachment=808:mr-burns-picture.jpg]
vote yes for the throbber though could be tweaked a little but all good idea
Tweaked how? Feedback wanted! 🙂
I was thinking of making it more like a pulse, i.e. a heartbeat, and slightly less enthusiastic!
It is a bit much at the moment but I wanted it to get peoples opinions 😀
We're now in feature freeze for alpha 12, so this build is effectively a release candidate. Its also the first to contain a comprehensive set of music for you to enjoy in your travels.
Because of the music the download size has increased substantially. I'm about to start looking at alternative compression options to try to bring this down.
Robn, why dont you split the download in two between the main program and the music files? That would save you from compression hassles.
For the moment I'm keeping them together as the music is likely to change quite a bit over the next little while, so it'd be easy to get into the situation where an older music pack with a newer game version might not work as intended.
Anyway I've done my testing. 7z (LZMA2) will bring the Windows archive down to around ~180Mb and has been tested to work properly when created on Linux and unpacked on Windows, so future builds will use it. Linux will remain bzip - changing to xz only takes ~5Mb off the size of the archive and the tool is not common enough that it might cause problems for people.
Fantastic work, gentlemans! This build already feels like a vast improvement over 11! I love the throbbing population markers in the system view, although I agree with comments above about it being a different, less bold colour. Do we have distinct empires in the game yet? Will the throbbers be different colours depending on which empire?
The music...wow. Most of the tracks are amazing and add SO much to the game! I also noticed that we can - finally - select navigation targets from the star system information panel! MASSIVE thumbs up for that one! Feels like I've been waiting for it for ages. 😀
Pioneer is now starting to feel very mature. Still some rough edges - the HDR still completely breaks the game visuals on my Radeon based system - but it doesn't feel like long before we'll slip into Beta phase at all. It's been awesome watching this game develop and I anticipate many wonderful things to come! Kudos for all your hard work, everyone!
without getting onto the empire building thing to much the three main empires as they are ( federation, imperial and all other indepdant ?) could be a different color with room made for either changing empires or player added, mission tweaked or other form of empires down the track
Different colours by faction is a good idea and has been suggested before. It probably won't come as long as the final plans for factions in the game are still up in the air, but I can see it being something we'd want to do.
Funny you should mention that. Just this morning Luomu posted a patch that fixes HDR on Radeon. Its already been merged into the code and a new dev build with the fix should be available in about three hours (and of course it will be in alpha 12) 😀
Thanks 😉 Which tracks do you like?
A short question, if I slide the volume to minimal, will the playing of the music tracks stop or will they continue to play with volume off and thereby eat cpu cycles? Because is never play games with music. I guess deleting the tracks is sufficient?
They continue to play. Its a good thought, so I've logged it as issue #270.
Deleting the tracks will work nicely. If you want to disable all sound, set DisableSound=1 in your config. That actually does disable the sound subsystem entirely, unlike turning the volume down.
You can also delete the music player script in data/modules/ so it won't eat cpu cycles 🙂
Its early in the devlopment cycle for Alpha 13 but there's already heaps of new stuff in the latest dev build.
Model cache. You're all familiar with the "Simulating evolution of the universe..." loading screen. Most of the work done during this is loading the models, which involves a lot of running scripts and building internal data structures with the results. tomm came out of hibernation to implement a nice little cache for this data. Now this internal data is written to disk when you first run Pioneer and is then used on later runs rather than regenerating each time. We're seeing typical load times drop to 3-4s from 15-20s - a huge improvement.
New and updated terrains. As usual s20dan is staying up late to work his magic with the terrain generator. He's posting lots of screenshots of his current work so there's not much more to say.
Hyperspace targeting rewrite. The hyperspace target is now part of the sector view, and is stored separately to the selected system. Most of the time the two are kept in sync (so keeping the existing functionality the same), but at times where a hyperspace target is selected from outside the sector view (eg by following a cloud) the target will "lock" and remain set separately from the selected system. When this happens the hyperspace target will be shown with a grey highlight:
You can also set and clear the hyperspace target using the space bar in the sector view.
The other change around this is that any system can be set as the hyperspace target. The ability to jump to it is checked at jump time rather than at selection time, which means there's no longer the situation where you can set a target then change drives or sell fuel, making the target invalid. Jumping at this point used to get you to Sol (system 0), which was always rather confusing. That doesn't happen anymore.
Charon. Pluto's little friend makes his debut. This is not so remarkable in itself, but I include it here to show just how easy it is to contribute to Pioneer. All these little things add polish and shine to the game but are often overlooked because they're so small that they don't make it onto the scanner. Every single person reading this can contribute to Pioneer! Get in there! 🙂
what about a few keiper belt objects just to be a pain and a nuisense lol
It seems there's always an opportunity to add something to Pioneer.
Hah! Yes I just finished reading about that and was going to post it here 😀
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