That's very nice! 😀 It ought to spread the word and generate interest. You've also shown me some places to explore! Welcome Commander!

Pioneer is (to borrow a phrase) a dream given form. It's a playground for those who hold in their souls the thought of travelling the cold, stark reaches of space simply for the beauty of it the experience; the dreamers, the poets, the explorers. While we've all been waiting on Braben to overcome his decade-and-a-half long stage-fright and deliver the next iteration of his extraordinary series, a pair of lads have cobbled together something almost as extraordinary - a living, breathing gloriously realised universe of unique and interesting planets, stars and moons that not only act as they should but LOOK as they should. No neon nebulas at every turn, no tiny systems of stations with planets as painted backdrops, no travel restrictions or loading screens...even as an alpha this little game has made many of us here very happy people indeed, ad long may that continue!

Your video is fabulous, KingHaggis! Welcome to the site. That's a beautiful piece of music to put it to, as well. Vangelis. I'd never heard that one before but I'm sure that's going to become one of my absolute favourites. 😀

Welcome to the SSC King Haggis 🙂

A stunning video and I hope it gets lots of views, in fact I demand it does!

Tomm, I think, will be most pleased. Thank you for sharing this with us. 😎

I will give it some more views when i get home because I will put at the top of my playlist on youtube so the video showcased on the homepage will be this one. Nice presentation KingHaggis and of course welcome to SSC, damn nice first post. You sure know how to make an entrance 🙂

* Should see it on SSC main page now.

welcome a'board commander

that's 😎

i'm shure this is welcome,

btw, you should patch the pioneer.exe of alpha3 to get rid of the scrambled up planetary info screen

pioneer-wip.rar (2010.20.08)

Excellent vid Kinghaggis must remember to pack the Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses when I go Sirius. 😀

Heh, thanks for all the positive comments guys! Video editing has never been my favourite hobby but fortunately it's not difficult to capture some nice footage with Pioneer. Beautiful worlds everywhere you go :D. I hope more people become enthousiastic after watching the video. Spacesims in general should get more attention. Too bad the genre has been neglected for so many years.

Anyway, Ross 154c remains my personal favorite planet. Looks so real from space! But I'm on my way to the Waedla system (?) now because I saw good screenshots on this forum. Too bad the game crashes a lot on my PC. I hope it will become more stable in future.

Thanks, I'll give it a try!

Thanks, that cheered me up a bit. I just had a very sad breakup. I think my perseverance with pioneer owes a big part to this happy period.

Hey, I'm sorry to hear that, Tomm. I've had one of those this year myself, back in April. 🙁

You should be very proud of the work you've done. This little game of yours is something special, even as an Alpha.

I too am very sorry to hear that Tomm. 🙁 To help cheer you up a little, know I am trying my best on the Frontier Forum to get a comment from Mr Braben himself on the Video. Callum (the site admin) is going to try and get him to have a look at it. I am sure if he gets a chance to look it over, he will be impressed as the rest of us are at your wonderful work. So keep on smiling!

Fantastic video!

yes don't worry. I've recovered enough higher brain function to code the docking computer today and yesterday. It was a bit harder than it should have been because there were bugs lurking in the rotating space station code that threw me off...

I'll upload a new exe at some point

My god..it's full of stars!

Thank you.

KingHaggis, what program you used to capture the game screen?

i guess i downloadet one (virtual dub), but it's a bit complicated to setup.

or even better i will post you a special version of pioneer and you make the vid 😉

but i think i have to work on it still a bit and it's far from beeing useful for play, because it's a framerate killer and models have to be restricted to allow some others.

but i would like to see my new city buildings in a vid for shure

[attachment=186:2010-09-10_131314.jpg]

i want to put it on a free server but the ads are to rude, so i place this here, i can still change the content later on 😉

testversion_data.7z

try to setup a separate install of pioneer and replace the models and sub_models folder, replace copy over won't work because then all models will be loadet and that didn't works (on my machine at least)

to all others, feel free to download it, it comes with my adder which i waited to upload so long because of some troubles it gives when installed all shipmodels (on a standart pioneer alpha4, it should work, but then you can't use many more), but it comes with absolutely no warranty!

on the other hand would be interesting to hear how it works for others, i'm constantly getting to the limit of modules running, actually i had to disable some environmental sounds just to make it playable again (else allways in battle the game terminates).

edit: sorry that won't work with the arco, i forgot 😳

edit2: ok, for those who dare arco_01 older version that will work with the older combo buildings

arco_01_old.7z

further you need to unzip the building base sub_model to make that work (for the factories, they need that, i later implemented it to the combo_0 script).

i'm really curious if some can re-enable more models as i allready did in this setup, you can do simply by unzipping them,

or zip some others you don't like and delete the folders afterwards.

standart ships are all disabled except for the interdictor, you can re-enable them by renaming the ships.lua.bak (remove .bak). there is also a excerpt of it to enable the ladybird separately (ladybird.lua.bak).

a hint from times before mod exchanger, use 7-zip or ultimate zip to create exe's from the models or whatever, place a shortcut into your pioneer folder, now you can exchange the models easy by clicking on the .exe

to assign the folder in which the exe-zip stands simply leave the field for the default folder blank when setting it up.

yes, i know the ports need a cool new building to, it is allready finished...

in my head

still i'm not arrived at gliese825, there is a courier on my way and it carries a hull auto repair system, what a mean beast!

yes i could reload a older savestate but i changed some buildings in the meantime (changed the tags) and the savegame won't work now without reverting the buildings.

edit 3:

there's a small other bug, shanghai will appear, but some other cities need at lest one building of sort 'city_power' i guess, that was the reason for the unloadable gamesave and last city i aproached it terminates also because of that.

sorry havn't known that and i thought, ok game runs i can see shanghai.

again 😳

here's a replacement script name it "extra_bld.lua" and put it into "data\models\city\combo\"

or edit the existing one and add the 'city_power' tag yourself.

i'm really sorry, but i had no idea that at least one of this (each?) sort is needed.

what is this good for?

buildings tagged 'city_building', appear, let's say spread allover the city

buildings tagged 'city_starport_building', appear only close to the starport (very close)

buildings tagged 'city_power', appear on the very outer circle of the city sometimes never (i recognized now small ones work good for that, so you can use it for little wind or solar power plants.

I'm making a video using your testversion folder potsmoker, is there anything in particular you want in it?

I used Fraps to capture the ingame footage. Then I used Adobe Premiere CS4 to edit the video and put music to it. I then converted the video to a lower resolution videofile. I'm still experimenting to find the best settings but I think the overall video quality of my Pioneer vid is good enough, 720p is nice and the size is still acceptable (somewhere around 500MB). You can also use Windows Movie Maker to edit your footage but it crashes often when using large files. Also, you have to be careful which music you put to it cause Youtube won't allow music from certain artists on their website. Vangelis is usually no problem.

I used VirtualDub once but I never really got used to it. Either I'm doing something wrong or it's a very difficult program to use. I'd love to make a vid showing off your new models. Others can do that too, of course. The more Pioneer vids, the better. And I'm sure Pioneer looks a lot better with your new building models. Those domed buildings look awesome. I'll see if I have time this sunday evening to make something nice.

music is no problem, there is a lot of absolute free music on the web.

hint, check archive.org for free audio

example, (i quickly picked one from the top of list)

04_-_Alpha_Signal_-_VFWRT-24ZS.mp3

i guess youtube shouldn't have no problems with such, except they are controlled by sony 😆

anyway, personally i would use one of the old soundtracker modules from good old amiga times like this

spacewarzopus2.mod (needs a player that can read soundtracker modules)

the cool thing about is that it didn't needs much experience and you can edit (rearrange, strech, repeat parts of), the modules to your needs that they fit exactly to the clip, using software such as modplug

(i.e. the length of this file is fit to the intro length of FFE, if you number the files in folder "space" of FFED3Ds music from 1 to 18 and give this the number 18 it will played at front each time you start the program, of course as a mp3 then)

Virtual dub is a very good prog to use man. Its the fastest out of all of them. It took about 1 to 2 mins to cut and append 15 vid files all 1 - 2 gig (20gig total).

Adobe after effects took over 5 hours.

Virtual dub is only good for cutting and compressing and adding filters though. It won't do transitions like premier or after effects, ie fade in fade out ect.

My advice with vids would be:

1. Fraps to record (although any recording program wil be fine),

2. Virtual Dub to cut the video and stick together your clips. (Its so fast for this)

3. After effects for transitions, or you could use premer, but after effects has many more options, make sure to save an uncompressed video, After effects and Premier are perhaps the worst options for compressing videos. (Almost as bad as Windows Movie Maker)

4. Use VirtualDub or MeGUI to compress the video. These are the fastest programs, although using a command line might be faster.

For decent compression, you will also need the x264vfw.exe encoder or an up-to-date xvid encoder.

x264vfw

xvid

MeGUI

VirtualDub

If you are going to upload to youtube, then you want to compress the file as little as possible. Because youtube will recompress the file when it receives it.(And quite poorly too!)

However, we don't all have massive upload speeds so compressing the file will be a must more than likely unless you dont mind waiting all day for an upload, but just do it as little as you can bare.

With HD stuff, I would generally compress it to about 5000kb bitrate. At this rate a 9 minute film in 1920 x 1080 will come out at about 300 MB (with sound), with not much quality loss. MeGUI is best for this, as it has some more options for optimizing the video without increasing bitrate (file size).

If you want to use the best/newest codecs, I would go with x264 (H264) codec, it is the best in terms of quality to file-size when dealing with HD video. But can be a pain in the arse with all its settings, and its quite easy to make a video with h264 that youtube will reject because of some unknown setting you flipped and forgot about. But MeGUI can be good here with its number of preset settings that it has for various platforms.

With these programs, if your video turns out blocky you dont need to increase the bitrate, you can simply add De-blocking to the options and set the strength.

Cutting Video in Virtual dub:

[attachment=194:Untitled-1.jpg]

Some Pioneer vids here:

This one was made using Fraps to record, VirtualDub to cut, After Effects for Transtitions and MeGUI for Compression. Compressed as an Xvid at 8000KB/s @1280x720

This one starts with a 3 sun sunrise 😉

Fraps again with this one, but only Virtual dub used for cutting and compression. Compressed as an xvid at 5000KB/s @1920x1080

@Potsmoke, this one has your Adder in it 😉

Really enjoyed that 2nd video s20dan, good work!

I love those new videos, particularly the planet with the big pillowy-looking hills. It is a pity about the disappearing terrain glitch. Here is a work-in-progress build of pioneer with that glitch fixed:

http://pioneerspacesim.net/sites/defaul ... er-wip.rar

Great more videos! Well done s20dan 🙂 Nice to see you showcasing your "Boa" freighter too. Thanks also for the update Tomm 🙂

Dude, you rock. Thats been annoying me since first alpha. I'm going to have to make another video now with some low canyon flying 😉

Tomm, is it possible to add in another level of planet quality, like a very very 'very' high, or just call it ultra ? (could be good for the videos)

Thanks guys for the compliments on the videos 🙂

EDIT// Unfortunately the hotfix isn't working for me 🙁

In stdout it says this: " Error loading shader data/shaders/bgstars.vert.glsl. "

I've looked and thefile seems to be missing.

EDIT2// Copying any of the shader files and renaming it to "bgstars.vert.glsl" seems to do the trick, but there are some issues with the stars and main menu.