Thats actually one of our oldest ships, been sat there for months unused because of a totally inefficient .lua. 🙂 Literally all that changed was the dynamic texture selection, so instead of occasionally seeing one like that and one that would look new, they will all look old like that.

can't wait to buy and fly one

It's great to see the big ships getting some attention. 🙂

Bigger ships getting attention and as we go more specialisation to

New nightly build, and this time it is OSX (why should we have to wait until a new alpha release before we get to see all the goodies). Because the OSX builds are done on a different machine to the Linux and Windows machines they may be a little out of sync (i.e. they may be different builds depending on when they have been kicked off).

Thanks to Rob for giving me a hand with some of the scripts.

Enjoy!

29 September - 3b12f97

29 September - 3b12f97 [ Windows | OS X | Linux ]

A bumper nightly build today! If you haven't used a nightly this would be a great one to try!

OS X nightlies. As Philbywhizz noted, we now have nightly builds for OS X. If you give it a try please do let us know how it goes for you.

Star terrain. We've talked about this a lot so there's not much more to say about it. This might be your first chance to try it. Visit some stars and keep those screenshots coming!

Music. Four new ambient tracks from Fremde and Emajogi to keep you chilled during your travels.

Breakdowns and servicing. Your engine requires servicing! It takes a while, but if you leave it too long it may disintegrate entirely. Look for your nearest friendly mechanic on the bulletin board.

Translations. Romanian, Dutch and Italian translations have been added.

Development proceeds apace. Freeze for Alpha 15 is next Friday (7 October) with the release a week later (14 October). This is going to be a big one!

Cool!

Oh btw the extra tracks are by Emajogi and Fremde this time round, I only filtered and processed the sound for Emajogi 🙂

Cheers.

Oops. Fixed! Thanks!

Brianetta's drive servicing script works a treat, been testing it for a while and works really well, you can go up to around the two year mark (game time) without needing a drive servicing, but I wouldn't go any higher, otherwise you end up with scrap instead of hyperdrive , so its a great edition to the game,

I already added a feature request for enhancements to the script, but was Brianetta#s idea to enhance the script in the first place, but anyway, hope some or all of the requests get added

as for the star terrain, look utter awesome, nice job to all those that worked on this, as you can also crash into stars, would be nice if stars slowly rotated and maybe change colour a bit to make them a bit more life like, but the changes do make stars more interesting to look at and worth the effort of having them in

nice job all around, the game is certainly getting better

drive servicing cold be incorprated into colony management - player owend stations or colonies in far flung areas perhaps and even trade in various drive technologiy levels

Good start with the script tho

I played around the Fractal value in one of the nightly builds.

Lowest Fractal setting :

And setting them on the highest :

(both using max or nearly max detail, i don't remember exactly)

Impressive how Pioneer is visually scalable

Just fyi, alpha 15 has entered its pre-release feature freeze. It will be released next Friday 14 Oct.

robn, somehow I can only find an osx version for the last nightly build. Any particular reason for this, or am I being blind again?

EDIT: Ah, today's builds are complete again.

The OSX builds and the linux/windows nightly builds are a little out of sync as robn does the linux/windows version and I do the OSX version.

So it really depends on who runs the build script first 🙂

Nightly update - 12 November

Its been a while since I've posted one of these. Time to get back on it! The current nightlies contain two interesting user-visible things.

Autopilot v2. jaj22 has spent the last few weeks rewriting the autopilot again. Previously it had a waypointing system where it would figure out the next place to fly to, fly to that point and come to a stop, then work out the next point, and so on. This behaviour was most noticable when flying around a plant - you'd get a choppy, stilted journey. It also caused some problems in certain circumstances because it wasn't able to adjust to local changes. This sort of thing is what caused it to sometimes fly into planets or into the back of stations (eg Barnard's Star). Now its much smarter, but it needs testing, particularly in weird or complex systems. If nothing else though, set it to fly to something on the other side of a nearby planet and watch how it smoothly circles the planet - it really is beautiful.

Something else that's nice with this autopilot is that it tells the player if it couldn't complete the command. This is most easily noticed when docking permission is denied, but it will also tell you if it can't counter gravity or can't make orbit, both rare but possible scenarios.

Mouse indicator. You've probably noticed that its really difficult to fly with the mouse. The reason for this is that the moving the mouse with the right button down actually moves a hidden marker which the ship then works to orient itself towards. This was rarely clear to people, which just made the mouse flight seem crazy. jpab has implemented a yellow X marker that you'll see when you right click. It moves as you move the mouse. The ship will align itself to that marker, which should make mouse flight easier/possible. We're looking for feedback on this feature because its not yet clear if its correct or intuitive.

I will certainly give the nighty a try robn, need to pull myself away though from the Alpha 16. 😳 I just downloaded it. But the chance to try the new auto pilot is too difficult to resist. Loving the new scanner in Alpha 16 by the way 😉

One thing though, remember that feature in Frontier when you reached a certain altitude above a planet, your ship used to orientate itself to the planetary horizon? Would adding that feature ever be considered in the future?

Just to save some of you from looking for the nightly, here is a direct link http://sourceforge.net/projects/pioneer ... s/nightly/

that feature was neccesary in ffe because you could not roll your ship. Now that we have our 6 degrees of freedom, it would be rather annoying when the ship orients itself to whatever it deems sensible without asking me. A horizon hold autopilot that i can engage or disengage at will, on the other hand, would be very handy for manual landing. Or at least a surface mode for the hud that displays a lather.

Oh yes, only when under auto-pilot to act as a kind of crash avoidance system. I wouldnt like to see the removal of the ability to fly between the tight spaces of the buildings and buzz all those office workers! 🙂 In fact I have a little confession 😳 Sometimes when I am at work sitting at my desk with a ton of paperwork to do, my deranged mind will wander back to moments like that in Pioneer, wishing (while looking out the window at all the other office drones) that I could do that for real! 😆

Speaking of auto-pilots, just did a load of local deliveries in Sol to really give JJ's new AP a good work out. Totally smooth transitions, it feels so much better instead of the jjagged ( 😳 sorry) movements of the old AP. So a big +1 from me! 😀

The mouse indicator is good for slow speed work and fully manual operations, this is a useful addition robn. In my view, I think it should stay in the game 🙂

Can I have just one last little niggle? It's about takeoff.

Why do we need to press F5 to engage "set speed"* mode just after takeoff?

Wouldnt it be better if the ship did that itself once it reached a certain altitude above the starport, leaving the player free just to hit the main trusters and aim for the big black? I know this is a minor niggle and not really a worry to you veterans out there, but some new players to the game might forget this little detail and have a very short first flight. This might put them off the game a little. Dont forget that younger gamers are not used to learning curves like they had back in the day. They just like to pick something up and play. Later on of course (once they are well and truly hooked 😈 ) they can get into the more complex aspects of the game.

What do the devs think?

*Edited post to display the right flight mode, set speed not manual 😳

Huh? I never had to do that, I'm always in manual mode after takeoff. Maybe it depends on what mode you were in before landing?

Like so?

Really?

Maybe it's a bug then in the Windows version, but with every alpha I've tried, I have always had to hit F5 just after takeoff 😕

Nope, Windows version here. And yes, my first flight was pretty short. Then I went back to check on the keyboard layout... 😆

Set speed mode is not manual mode. Your ship is in manual mode immediately after take-off, meaning you really do need to be actually flying it at that point.

Set speed mode is likely to end up as part of the autopilot. It's a remarkably complex feat for a spacecraft to accomplish!

😳 Oh my bad, getting my modes mixed up again. Thank you for pointing that out Brianetta. Yes I ment Set Speed mode just to give new players an easier start to their Pioneer expeience.

Indeed! 😆 Even the building in that picture looks just like the ones presently in Pioneer. Great pic Uncle Bob 😎

26 November - e5a410d

Its been a quiet couple of weeks. We figure that its a combination of the breakneck pace of the last couple of months and the fact Christmas is coming. Something good however is the lovely bugfix that hit master today that fixes texture and shader problems on pretty much all Mesa-derived graphics drivers. This includes Intel integrated graphics, pretty much every open-source Linux graphics, and VMware. If you're on one of these systems, please grab this nightly and let us know how it looks!