Yippee! 😀

+10 cool robn! 😎 😎 Now Pioneer is really starting to leave Frontier far behind. It already has done this in the graphics department as everyone can see, but it's just as important to advance the gameplay too. Intra system missions are a great idea for a money maker if your broke plus it gives players a good excuse to visit all the starbases in a system. Yes, very pleased I am with this new feature! 🙂

I didn't see that one 🙂 Thats great.

liek any good game engine needs some meat and bones. Low level missions are a good place.

That mission was written in Lua.

Lua is something that every player here could have a go at. You don't need any software beyond Pioneer and a good text editor. Information on Lua is widely available on-line, and the devs can certainly answer all the Pioneer-specific questions people might have.

Try it; you might like it. Even if your first script just gives you personalised plates.

I just got my first look at the 3D galaxy, and I'm in Heaven! (pun intended) 😀

how about mining missions and missions to pick up and delivery certain goods to a certain place but make the player buy them off the market ( this will setup a later ingame feature dynamic supply and demand) that even after that cna affect economic development- employment ratios, trade hub "wealth" , dynamic changes to technology levels and what ship and parts are available. Colony development and hte like

This latest nightly build is awesome! I'm having a good time transporting stuff from city to city and city to spaceport. Now it would be nice if you would start with an interplanetary shuttle so you will HAVE to earn cash to buy a real spaceship. 😀

Also, I'm really starting to appreciate those autogenerated faces. It's fantastic to see new faces on every new bulletin board you visit. Makes you want to explore the galaxy even more. Very well done. And, wow, the new starmap!!! Pioneer is really shaping up nicely. I've started making a few city buildingmodels myself. I really feel that I must contribute to this game. I'm still busy learning 3DMax so my buildings are not very good yet. I'm also @75% with my Dutch translation. I hope someone else is not doing the same thing but if so, it's no big deal, just 1 hour work lost. Dutch language really sucks for Pioneer. English sounds so much better 😀 .

I asked about mining missions ages ago and was told it was in the pipeline, then later on i was told it wasnt.

Please put mining machines in for asteroids/planets. I also though colonization of planets was going to be a feature also. Anyone know about this?.

Regards

I'm not sure what you've been told, or by whom, but I can say it this way. There's no specific plans for or against mining or colonisation. It just hasn't been done yet because nobody has stepped up to write the code. Both have been discussed and its generally agreed that mining is something we absolutely want, while colonisation needs more discussion and experimentation as it may be the wrong fit for the game. Without anyone to write the code though its all rather moot.

28 August - 6940e63

This build has Ziusudra's new Trade Ships module. Now you'll see ships constantly entering the system, docking, buying and selling cargo, undocking and jumping away. No more ships blocking the landing pads forever, and the whole galaxy now seems to have come to life. Try it out!

will the system track what these ships have , will they influence trade by their behaviour, availbaility of goods and later impact on colony development ( being an active pireate might drive up system prices if u kill enough ships)

No. Perhaps one day, in the distant future, but right now Lua scripts can't exert any control over stock prices, and as you already know there are as yet no plans for colony development.

The X series does this, and that's the principle reason for it being such an utter CPU and RAM hog. The economy simulation is by far the most expensive part of the game, in terms of computing.

will it affect asssination missions, the appearnce of pirates and other not so advanced features then ?

Not sure how it would affect assassination missions. A mission to assassinate a trade ship?

I'm looking at pirates as my next project. They will be attracted to systems in much the same way as trade ships. I plan to have the pirates attack any trade ships they find.

Something already in place is that if the player and/or pirates keep killing trade ships, they will eventually stop coming to the system. Though that is only persistent as long as the player is in the system.

Right now you're going to have problems with this and pretty much anything that requires a NPC ship to attack another. The "kill" AI is unable to chase down a target ship at distance. Unless the target is very close (within tens of kms) at which point the combat AI kicks in, the AI code instead tries to "flyto" the target. Unfortunately flyto doesn't track changes in the target, so the AI flies to where the target was at the time it was activated.

Players see this too - try targetting a ship from a long way away and then using "Fly to vicinity of AB-1234". You'll probably end up in the middle of nowhere.

What we need is an AI that knows how to chase/intercept a moving target. Presumably it would look at the current velocity and acceleration of the target and determine a point in space that it could cross its path at with matched speed, and aim for that. It would also need to constantly recalculate this to handle changes in the target. I suspect its not an easy thing, but we're going to struggle to do much interaction with NPCs without it.

They are separate Lua modules. Unless somebody writes modules specifically to interact with each other, they will not do so.

If there's something that you want to happen in the game, the best way to go about it is to write a script yourself that will do that. Lua scripts describe what things in the game should do, without describing how. "How" is the job of the engine itself. "What" is the job of Lua scripts, and is very much about gameplay. If you can't or won't try writing Lua scripts for Pioneer, another thing to try would be to gather a team together. You clearly consider yourself an ideas man; you just need people to put your ideas into action.

You could give your team a cool name, like Ollo's Brains. Or not...

Has there ever been a scripting clan?

Tried a windows nightly build.

While my computer is not modern and so can't use opengl shaders (being limited to opengl 1.4 and sadly unlike direct3d shaders there's no cpu emulation program for them for my card like 3d analyzer does) but i am really impressed by how amazing the landscape can be and how smooth the game performance is for such superb visuals.

Here's a little hoovering over Phobos with terraformed Mars in the background.

Fabulous work Pioneer dev team !

16 September - ac00f561

Alpha 15 development is well underway. The two major changes visible to users so far are actually the restoration of a couple of old things. Assassination missions are back and available on the bulletin board at most stations:

The "hoop" station, lost for almost two years, makes a return:

There's other less visible things of course. As always, the Changelog shows the full list of stuff. More gets added every day!

I can see that there's some interesting stuff going on there for me to play with. 😈 I always wondered why that part of spacestations.lua was disabled.

Is anyone else having problems saving and loading games in pioneer-ac00f56? If I start a new game on Earth, save it and try to load it I get a message saying that it can't be loaded because it contains errors.

Yes, this build (and almost all of them back to alpha 14) has a nasty save game corruption bug. That was the last build with that particular bug. More recent builds (ie ff91c2c and 1fee3ed) do not have this issue. Note that the fix also involved a save game version bump, so these more recent builds will not load the corrupted save files nor any from alpha 14 or earlier.

Fyi, nightly builds are available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/pionee ... s/nightly/.

Thanks. I'll stop messing with it and get the latest build. 🙂

Btw, It doesn't pay to mess with Ann Miller.

22 September - 716c720

We've added lots of eyecandy in the last few days so its a good opportunity to show a few screenshots.

New city models. Vlastan's gorgeous new city models are now in, and all the old buildings have temporarily disabled pending a new building selection code (I'm hoping to have it done next week).

Four-bay indoor station. durandal extended the venerable mushroom station with a four-bay version. This will be used for high-population cities/worlds in hostile environments.

Panther. durandal also spent a lot of time cleaning, fixing and optimising ship models, and with some help from s20dan revived our old Panther variant.

Lua console. jpab made a great start on an in-game script console which can be activated by pressing ~. You can call into any of the available Lua methods to test things, hack your ship and all sorts of other things. This is highly experimental and its very easy to crash the game from here. This is very early days and there's still a lot of improvements to come.

the panther looks cool, nice job on that 😎