That's awesome news, I am amazed the Hubble picked it up at all. It should be named something better than P4 though. And yes, could Pioneer be the first ever game to include the full Plutoian system?

If someone sends a patch the moment its attributes are known I promise to include it 😉

I do hope someone does robn. It would be another feather in the cap for Pioneer's dev team. 🙂 Y'know this highlights a great strength of Pioneer and the way it's development is progressing, it's flexible enough to include such up to date information. 😎 Match THAT Infinity! 😀

Perhaps, instead of concentrating on the pebbles, we should include some actual dwarf planets? These things are round, and big enough to land on. Let's not forget Ceres, either. While it might be the smallest known dwarf planet, it does account for about a third of all the asteroids' mass, and is by far the nearest to Earth at any time of the year.

Data can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_So ... ts_by_size

Thats a lot of planetoids... Many I don't even know.

I was reading an old site the other night about astronomy and thought I had found out some interesting stuff... It basically went on to talk about Earth's 3 moons.. Yeah exactly.. Anyway it turns out that in 2002 Earth's 3rd moon was believed to have been found.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2251386.stm

Which then gets you thinking... 3rd... well what on Earth was the second one then?

Cruithne discovered in 86 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3753_Cruithne

Unfortunately the truth is far less interesting than that though, as the 3rd moon, J002E3, turned out to be the third stage of the apollo 12 rocket. And now that detection and observational equipment is more accurate these days, it now turns out that Cruithne does not orbit the earth but has a kind of parallel eliptical orbit with the Earth.

So that means for at least 16 years astronomers believed that Earth had 2 moons... Has anyone else every heard of that?

I'd heard of Cruithne before, but a 3rd Moon!?! 😀

Almost a shame it wasn't, it would make for handy practice for NASA/ESA/JASA etc!

Well, I think those "experts" would want to bury that one 😆

Hehe, what kind of a name is that?

The wiki link is handy. I thought we already had most of the larger ones already but evidently there are a few that slipped through the cracks.

Hehe, yeah thats probably why we never heard much about it. We know how much NASA loves to be embarrassed. 🙂

Comets (including their tails, always flowing away from the sun, naturally) would be cool to have in the game

30 July - d0e897a

Less than a week to go before the freeze for alpha 13, so a lot of the big recent developments have landed. Here's a selection:

* Multiple language support has just hit master. A German translation is the first non-English language supported. Note that this is considered experimental for alpha 13. The major problem at this point is that many of the station screens are designed for English words, and the much longer German words tend to break things. This will be tackled for alpha 14.

* Face names. The station faces now have a name and sometimes an occupation, so you know who you're talking to 🙂

* Outlined fonts in use in most 3D displays. This greatly improves visiblity of text, especially with bright backgrounds.

* Station menus have been rewritten. The code is internally much cleaner. Not many user-visible changes, but the station menus do feel far more responsive.

* And a pile of bug and crash fixes, of course 🙂

Thank you. Downloading now.

looking ahead any aims for alpha 14

We thought we'd make it a little more like alpha 12.

I'd have liked to get the Orbital code into this version perhaps with an example somewhere for people to visit but it's looking like it'll slip into Alpha 14. Too much still needs doing (collision for example). I'm just doing a code self-review/cleanup and finding/fixing a tonne of issues, partly as pactice for a job interview on Thursday 😀

Best of luck in your interview fluffyfreak. 🙂

Cheers Geraldine 🙂 it's on my 32nd birthday too! I'll be either commuting or interviewing for the whole day 😆

good luck with the job interview and fix to the collision code looks funky

That funk is probably supplied by the fact that I haven't gotten it working yet 😳 😆

Just fyi, I'm trialing Sourceforge as a new download site, because they have basically no quota, fast mirrors all over the world and most importantly are faster for me to upload to. The latest nightly has just been uploaded there, as will Alpha 13. If it works out then we'll continue to use it, otherwise we'll try something else.

The links from pioneerspacesim.net will be updated shortly and alphas will still be posted there so if you have the download page bookmarked then there's nothing for you to do.

I'm curious to know if this will make you more likely to try a nightly build.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/pioneerspacesim/files/

yes im a member of sourceforge much easier so yes im happy to download nightly builds from there

@robn

Are these just for the nightly builds or are you thinking of moving code over too? I'd prefer to stick with a Git based solution now that I'm (finally) starting to get used too it. I couldn't imagine moving back to svn or something like it.

Just for downloads. Git and Github provide far too many advantages - that won't be changing while I'm the one doing merges and releases 🙂

I think all of the devs (and, er, me) fully buy into the Github community idea. It removes so many barriers to participation, that moving to something more restrictive would just be wrong.

21 August - 2a48c5e

This has the first release of the 3D galaxy, which has been discussed elsewhere so I won't go into it here. Something else cool in this one is the inclusion of local delivery missions; that is, deliveries to other starports in the same system. Finally the interplanetary shuttle has a use!

deliveries within system are a good step