@Arrakkh

That's not much information to go on, but if you haven't changed anything to do with Pioneer then could it be something you've changed with your operating system? I assume that it's Windows, but since the game runs on Mac and Linux to it'd be helpful to give that information 🙂

If you are running Windows then you should have a folder called "Pioneer" in your "Documents" folder. This should have several files and folders including a stderr, stdout, and opengl files.

If you could post those here then we can take a look at them and try to see where it'd going wrong.

Another thing you can try is deleting the folder called "model_cache", occasionally the contents of it can get corrupted if you shutdown Pioneer whilst it's in the process of loading and creating the cache files. Then try running the game again.

Cheers,

Andy

Thank you Andy.

I deleted all the files inside the model-cache folder and now it works.

Qustion: to install mods I have to put them inside the mods folder. Right?

Cool glad that's worked 🙂

Yes I think so but I'm not at my home PC right now so I can't check, you can take a look at our wiki entry on mods.

Hightmaps? I see the Earth.hmap file, but I dont really understand what it is ( I assume it's some sort of DEM, geo-terrain thing, I also assume it's 256 color bitmap.) Could we talk about the hightmap? How it's generated and maybe if a different image format would do teh same job just as effectivly?

I checked these links after doing a forum search, but ... 
https://github.com/pioneerspacesim/pion ... heightmaps

The code that actually produces terrain height values from this map is:

https://github.com/pioneerspacesim/pion ... ed.cpp#L28

Anyway, Pioneer is lovely and I really enjoy flying around Puget Sound and other places I've lived or read about, like Ngorogoro Gorge in Africa.

I have no idea how the current heightmaps were generated but internally they appear to be 16bit signed or unsigned values... I don't know why.

First of all. Big congrats to the Pioneer team. As I wrote a loooooooooooong time ago I am still happy to work on manuals/documentation once the game stabilises a little. This excites me greatly as I love nice big manuals.

Ok just a few questions I have aith Alpha 29 if I may. I was wondering if I can find out what code/files I would need to modify for the following (so I can test some things)

- turning off all hostiles ie no one will try to shoot you

- expanding the hyperspace range

- fuel does not run out when flying

Cheers everyone. Great to see missions in buying new ships etc.....damn fantastic work. I posted the update re alpha 29 on the Frontier Forums as Geraldine is temporarily away for a week or so.

Once again Pioneer dev team....you're all brilliant !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You can stop pirates by (i think) deleting pirates.lua in the data/modules directory, or editing it so that max_pirates = 0 (or something like that).

Not sure about the answers to the other 2 questions.

Cheers but I checked the pirates.lua and it's not quite that simple

I'll see what Robn / Brianetta say  🙂

[EDIT: Actually should I have written this in the Alpha 29 thread instead?]

- turning off all hostiles ie no one will try to shoot you

There's no way to outright turn off hostile ships, but you can get pretty close by removing (parts of) the modules that spawn enemy ships. The Pirates, Taxi, DeliverPackage and Assassination can all spawn hostiles under particular circumstances, so remove those modules or better, comment out the calls to AIKill. The ships will still spawn, but won't engage.

After that the only ships that will attack you are the police, as they're not yet managed by scripts. But they're easy to avoid - just don't try and shoot up a starport 🙂
 

- expanding the hyperspace range

You can't do that from Lua directly, but you could write code to automatically fill your hold back up with hyperspace fuel after jump, and/or do something silly like remove all your cargo and equipment immediately before jump and add it back in afterwards in an effort to reduce your mass and increase your range. That last one would be quite fragile though.

There's currently some stuff being worked on that would move equipment out to Lua, making it possible for you to define a hyperdrive with some ridiculous range. That's probably still a few months away though.
 
 

- fuel does not run out when flying

You can't stop fuel being consumed, but you can either edit the ship defs (in data/ships) and change thruster_fuel_use to 0 (ie consume 0 fuel per second), or you could write a onFuelStateChanged event handler to automatically refuel your ship when it gets low.

I wrote this for personal use. I'm not going to push it, and it's not an officially supported script.

https://gist.github.com/4008245

Place the file in data/modules.

If it's patched with third party code, it's not exactly alpha 29 any more. Try it on the actual alpha 29 release, and if it still crashes I'll take a look.

I wrote this for personal use. I'm not going to push it, and it's not an officially supported script.

https://gist.github.com/4008245

Place the file in data/modules.

Thank you Brianetta. Works perfectly. F3, into the missions screen and your options appear. Thank you so much for that.

I'm going to examine the LUA script you gave me here to see if I can break it down as to how it works.

Cheers again.

There's no way to outright turn off hostile ships, but you can get pretty close by removing (parts of) the modules that spawn enemy ships. The Pirates, Taxi, DeliverPackage and Assassination can all spawn hostiles under particular circumstances, so remove those modules or better, comment out the calls to AIKill. The ships will still spawn, but won't engage.

After that the only ships that will attack you are the police, as they're not yet managed by scripts. But they're easy to avoid - just don't try and shoot up a starport 🙂

 

You can't do that from Lua directly, but you could write code to automatically fill your hold back up with hyperspace fuel after jump, and/or do something silly like remove all your cargo and equipment immediately before jump and add it back in afterwards in an effort to reduce your mass and increase your range. That last one would be quite fragile though.

There's currently some stuff being worked on that would move equipment out to Lua, making it possible for you to define a hyperdrive with some ridiculous range. That's probably still a few months away though.

 

 

You can't stop fuel being consumed, but you can either edit the ship defs (in data/ships) and change thruster_fuel_use to 0 (ie consume 0 fuel per second), or you could write a onFuelStateChanged event handler to automatically refuel your ship when it gets low.

Thank you so much for that Robn. I'll have a look at all those scripts and check the AIKill parameter sounds like the best way to go doing it that way. Again thank you so much for that.

Is there some kind of "programmers guide to Pioneer" document that can brief new programmers how the structure works and what does what etc ? I am on github already incase it is there. Just thought I'd ask just in case.

Thanks again........Pioneer is going forward in leaps and bounds every month.  🙂

Is there some kind of "programmers guide to Pioneer" document that can brief new programmers how the structure works and what does what etc ?

There is.
http://pioneerwiki.com/wiki/Introduction_to_Mission_Scripting

An extra little Easter egg for you good folk, to celebrate Christmas: Un-comment line 427 (take out the -- at the start) of data/ui/InfoView.lua for a fun little toy. If you use it, and break your ship, you get to keep all the pieces. No warranty. No support. Have fun. (:

This might sound nooby, but how do I "join" or plead my alliance to a faction?

There is.
http://pioneerwiki.com/wiki/Introduction_to_Mission_Scripting

An extra little Easter egg for you good folk, to celebrate Christmas: Un-comment line 427 (take out the -- at the start) of data/ui/InfoView.lua for a fun little toy. If you use it, and break your ship, you get to keep all the pieces. No warranty. No support. Have fun. (:

Thank you so much again Brianetta. You guys are AMAZING.....I still can't get over what a big update Alpha 29 is......I might start getting nightlies again once a week I think !!!  🙂

This might sound nooby, but how do I "join" or plead my alliance to a faction?

Not a noob question at all I am sure everyone wants to help with people learning about PIoneer as much as they can. I know Robn and Brianetta have put up with me alot and I am eternally grateful to them.

Now for your question, I am not sure if that is even implemented. It might be in a mission so if you look for a mission that is for a faction especially maybe near the borders perhaps ? There could be something there ?

This might sound nooby, but how do I "join" or plead my alliance to a faction?

Factions are still very new, so we don't have that sort of stuff yet. It will come!

ANdveen sistem looking at factions map seems to be the capital sistem of Shattered empire. i went there, but it's just an empy sistem, unsettled.(Except a pirate ship that I had to destroy). 

Known issue. I reported similar a couple of weeks back.

Factions are still very new, so we don't have that sort of stuff yet. It will come!

Awesome! 🙂 can't wait to see how it turns out.

It would really be awesome if there could be random generated wars between different factions, like 20 vs 20 fighters and your job is to make sure your faction wins.

I know it's too much to ask, but it would be great.

Awesome! 🙂 can't wait to see how it turns out.

It would really be awesome if there could be random generated wars between different factions, like 20 vs 20 fighters and your job is to make sure your faction wins.

I know it's too much to ask, but it would be great.

Stop it you're making me drool   🙂

I have a question, could Alpha 30 be dedicated to the late great Sir Patrick Moore? I know some out there wont know who he was, but in the UK he was regarded as a national treasure and did much to further interest in astronomy both here and abroad. Would you, could you please consider this guys?

... could Alpha 30 be dedicated to the late great Sir Patrick Moore?

Sir Patrick Moore was indeed great. He was responsible for me buying my first telescope, and first Norton's Star Atlas, when I was a kid in the early '60s. I still have the 1973 edition Norton's on the bookshelf - half the charts are falling out now, though. In my current Oofic, I've re-named a very minor character Ptolemy, after his cat. My small tribute!

Thats a nice tribute Cody. 🙂