Choosing very, very high level on either terrain or city detail is basically giving Pioneer permission to drag your computer to its knees, however powerful it is. Try reducing it a notch; it'll still look very good, but won't sit there painstakingly arranging every single grain of dust on the planet (so to speak) that you'll likely never look at.

Some planets are just more worth visiting than others, I think. Pioneer has a few flat, featureless planets and moons which may look a bit cartoony but also amazingly beautiful worlds with mountainranges, canyons and a nice foggy atmosphere. Especially when you can see other moons or planets from the surface of a planet. That's the cool thing about this game, you have to explore a lot to find the really nice worlds. If you have everything set to high and you get decent framerates, then you can't get it any better graphically so just look for the best planets. The newer alpha builds keep changing planet terrains by the way. It may be that some terrains from the previous builds are gone but for alpha 12 I really like the vulcanic, desert and icey worlds and if you want to see a nice world that's not far away, just fly to Io. If it doesn't look all that impressive on your Macbook, then maybe it's your different hardware. It appears that, though we have more variety in terrains and a few extremely beautiful worlds, I can't seem to find really high mountainranges anymore. Io has a nice big mountain but haven't come across more of those. Maybe I have to look harder. Previous builds sometimes had those spooky looking planets with extremely high mountains, lakes and mist. Does anybody have a tip?

But man, I really enjoy these newer alpha and Robn w.i.p. builds! The new terrain with the canyons, the new cockpit, the fonts and the awesome music! The new starmap which instantly shows which starsystems have colonies, the very easy to use autopilot interface (just select a planet from the planetinfo screen, return to cockpit and engage autopilot), the ability to use manual thrusters while in speedcontrol mode and many other features. And I get the feeling somehow everything's smoother and sharper looking now. Excellent work!

Now if only the deadzone for joysticks would be fixed some day... it's still impossible for me to control the joystick with speedacceleration engaged. It's summer and I'm almost never behind my PC but I'm really looking forward to playing Pioneer again in the colder seasons. It's amazing to see how much it has evolved and how the regular contributers still work so actively to make it even better.

terrian generation is great just teh content now which is being worked on ot to add the gameplay element to the game

I have a tip for ya! Go to Proteus, on of Neptunes moons. It's the best one i've found so far, I fly there every evening <3

Indeed, setting it to "very very high" will make it look great... eventually, but at first it will probably look worse than a lower resolution because it takes so long to generate the detail. Hopefully for alpha 14 (maybe) we'll be able to implement a decent threaded system that will be a bit quicker for people with multi-core cpus. At the moment the current threaded version is just an experiment.

Just wanted to say that i miss Miranda! Is it there or am i just bad at finding it?

That looks like a very tricky moon to get right. It looks as if it has been glued together from odd bits and bobs. s2odan is the man who could answer your question.

the sdman has done a very good job

Does the star gliese 581 exist in Pioneer? I went looking around for it and I can't seem to find it >.>"

Any help will be greatly appreciated = D

In the 3D Galaxy branch, it does. I found it with the system search feature. In sector -2, -2, -1, it is a type M star, 24 light years from Sol.

Its nearest neighbours include 33 G.Lib, NN3877, Gliese 588, Gliese 570, Gliese 595. Its nearest named neighbour is Xi Bootis.

Since you probably don't have the 3D Galaxy branch, and none of you will have seen it yet, here's a sneak peek of Gliese 581, this afternoon. FOR BEST RESULTS: View this on Youtube, and expand to large size, or use full screen.

Hey, I love that search function Brianetta! 😉

All kudos to Rob for that. I'm just the tester.

Naw, its actually Tom's doing. I'm just getting things cleaned up for release.

A group effort then, still very useful and welcome addition to Pioneer. Great work guys! 😎

Will we get to play with the 3D Galaxy and Search feature in the next nightly build?

Life is pretty busy at the moment, so I'd say it won't hit the nightlies for at least a week, maybe two.

the fact a 3d search and map feature has even gone in is a major step - its not new content but it reorganises content in a more complete way ( map content)

Had to register with the site just to say this. Pioneer could be awesome! I really enjoy the autopilot system, and the search feature coming to the map should really help. Many of the models look fantastic. Really impressed, I have now played this more than Oolite.

A couple questions:

Is your team looking for someone to do documentation on gameplay and how to add new models and missions to the game? I looked around but didn't really find anything.

I love the planetary take-off and landing, barring a few bugs. What will planets eventually be host to? I could see being able to pilot drones that collect natural resources like digging up gems, harvesting exotic biologicals, or hunting indigenous species. Being able to "get out" of your ship in some respect would really make the planets come alive, at least giving wealthy players a chance to joyride over different terrains (maybe even different gravities?)in their fancy new rovers, and give bases another form of revenue.

There are lots of planets that serve little purpose as far as I can tell, aside from exploring their terrain (which is probably really cool, my pc sucks). Are there plans to make all the planets have some type of commercial resource or have some other purpose? With the variety of different planets and stars I realize this could get complicated, but imho it would add a great deal of gameplay as well as opportunities for all sorts of randomly-generated missions. Even alien races could be generated in much the same way as your character portraits are(another really cool feature), and their economic output generalized as one of the existing trade categories, or perhaps adding a few unique commodities once discovered.

Sorry, but your game makes my mind switch into overdrive. Very cool folks, keep up the good work.

😆 Mine too! There are better qualified people here than I to answer your questions, so I just wanted to say Welcome! 🙂

Yes. Documentation is being written in markdown in this repository. I'm coordinating that, and at the moment i'm the only contributor. Work on that has been waiting for a bit, because seriously, Pioneer is a rapidly moving target. That repository's wiki contains the rendered markdown of the manual. You can see the style of writing I'm looking for (humorous, and reminiscent of the Frontier manual) and you can also see that the graphics are out of date.

I'm thinking of leaving out the graphics until right at the end, and just getting all the text in there, with placeholders for screenshots, icons etc.

That's just what the universe is like. Space is big and empty. There *will* be enough to do, don't worry. Pioneer is a space game with planets, not a planet game with spaces. Er... whatever. (-:

So, what about translating the game in other language? I'd like to have a look at the volume of the text data for translation.

This has already been mentioned in other threads here. The translation files live in your data/lang directory. The most recently released English version is available here:

https://raw.github.com/pioneerspacesim/ ... nglish.txt

That file will continually be updated, and will have new strings for the 3D galaxy branch as soon as that comes out.

If you wish to become an official translator for Pioneer, tell us. We'll track the language's progress on the issue tracker, and all who are involved can be informed when new translatable strings appear. At the moment there is only one official translator, and that's for the German language. That translator is me, and I'm not even a native speaker. We'd like to see people get involved in all aspects of the game, not just coding.

The manual isn't translated yet, but then, it isn't even complete. The Lua missions scripts aren't formally translated yet either (although there is one very enthusiastic Polish copy). Lua missions don't actually have a proper translation mechanism yet; again, people who want to get involved should let us know.

(Alpha 13) That the Imperial Courier can't land on planets city-spaceports (also by Autopilot) and also crash after start if bought on planet-spaceports is ->

a) intended? They are only for space-stations ?

b) a problem that will be fixed later?

c) my Problem ? I don´t know how to fly that ship?

I think it may be "b". I've found similar problems with the Imperial Trader, a similar ship created by the same person, potsmoke66. It would crash into stations, and sometimes, when approaching a station on autopilot it would point its tail toward the station an use its retro thrusters to accelerate toward it. I suspect these ships may not be alpha 13 compatible.

I've not given any thought to the actual problem, but I thought I'd point out that the AI/autopilot has not changed in any significant way since alpha 9, released in March. The actual problem is likely to be far more subtle.