Thanks for that advice. I've noticed the ship 'jink' as I approach the entry. I presume that's the docking sequence attempting to take hold of my ship. I'll try switching off speed control and fly in on pure manual to test the idea that it is interfering with docking.

On another note...I'm doing a lucrative package run to Callisto Spaceport in the AD Leonis system. I'm now sitting outside the station. I've requested docking clearance but the station master is telling me 'Cleance denied. There are no free docking bays.'

OK, fair enough, it's good to see some signs of life appearing in the universe.

My question, though, is how long do I need to wait for docking clearance. I can only get 10x time acceleration due to the proximity to the planet, which again is fair enough.

I've also tried travelling out and back to another planet in the system to kill some time (a 2 A.U. round trip) but even that was not enough.

Maybe I need to fire on the station to clear some of the police vipers and take their bays... 😀

has helped in frontier, but not in pioneer, police simply can't start to.

did you fly into the station nonetheless? (it's possible)

maybe you would have seen a "shipwrecked" transporter (lies on it's side like a dead fish), sometimes the ships can't launch proper from the stations and hang after in the station occupying it for ever (i experienced that foremost in wheel stations). only a previous saved game can help and good luck not the same ship will be selected next time you enter the system. i'm not shure, but i mostly have seen Panthers locking up the station, but i can't tell you why exactly the panther.

it's a bit a problem to let the AI act on unforeseen occasions, mankind can do such, we are creative, machines not, how shuld he act when the panther touches a wall, lost it's direction? moves in same direction as before, but that might not work because the ship has turned around allready, finish, lies there forever.

you can see similar on the new docking procedure, which i think should be overworked a bit, maybe just slowed down, because sometimes not enough time is taken to align the ship proper to the stations y axis and you repetively fly into the stations wall because AI assumes still straight fwd (god how stupid, reminds me of that police joke, knock as long until it fits).

Right now they never leave. The TradeShips module right now spawns a few ships inside stations and a few more out space and sets them to fly to stations. Once they get there they stop. I intend to have something a bit more fluid for alpha 10. For now if they're really messing up your game you can delete/move data/modules/TradeShips.lua and they won't spawn.

should have thought about that to, old "nice spacestation" has only one dock, of course it's locked by traffic sometimes.

still a previously saved game will help best, because at enter system "the cards will be shuffled new".

next time you've got better luck maybe.

still it's wise (and i do allways) to save a game before you leave a system, that's a old frontier wisdom.

it always allows you to get better chances.

Hahaha...got a bit of a chuckle out of this one then. Oh well it is beta software after all!

After some frustration last night I decided to ram the docking bay - went straight through the outer door and into the maw of a sippy imperial courier inside.

Tried to shoot it there and then in the bay but my relative velocity was too high and I slammed into either it or the rear wall! 😆 😆 😆

Game over!

RIP OLD BEAN

I've been enjoying the nightly builds (thank you robn) but I can't seem to save the game in any of them. When i put in the file name in and press save it drops me to the desktop. I read the post about the save game code being rewritten, is it still a work in progress in the nightly builds? Alpha 8 and 9 save fine.

Also, where would be a good place to post issues/bugs?

Sorry about that. The short of it is that the "real" code for Windows to establish the location of the save dir didn't work at all on the alternate compiler I use for the nightlies, so I had to rewrite it. I did so in the simplest way I could and gave it the tiniest amount of testing. Unfortunately I can't do much more as I don't have easy access to a Windows machine to test. We need a Windows programmer to step up and fix that save dir code for both platforms.

For the moment pretty much anywhere - forums, mailing list, IRC. We're pretty quick and finding and fixing stuff at the moment, and for anything bigger I'm keeping a todo list. I want to get a bug tracker up and running soon but I haven't quite got around to it. As I mentioned elsewhere it would be a huge help if someone wanted to step up to do bug triage work, which is kind of a psychological impediment to me getting a tracker up - I don't want more work right now.

I guess that could be me, if you want bugs triaged once each day. I can try to get them sorted by priority, match duplicates where possible, request more information if needed, the usual.

No problem. All the developers/contributors are doing an outstanding job on what is really a "labor of love". It's a privilege to run the builds and see how Pioneer is taking shape. Besides, blasting off from Shanghai in an Asp Explorer and skimming the Himalayas before accelerating into orbit never gets old. 😀

It looks like I'm the guy now, and will be triaging all of your bugs, misfeatures and feature requests. I'll let robn give the 'official' announcement, along with the URL of our bug tracker, just in case he has any changes to make before we go live. Once that's public, it will become our preferred means for you all to tell us about bugs you find.

The idea here is for me to receive all incoming bug reports, to assess their severity, make sure they aren't already known, and to submit them to the developers without drowning them. My job is to make their job less stressful. So, if you have a bug right now, send it to me by PM (so that I notice it) and I'll make sure it's in the system.

what is about input recording, could such be realized (limited to physical gameworld)?

will input recording be useful ?

i guess it would be great to replay your action, change to outside view and watch the scenery, a "fixed" outside cam would be another idea.

the scene in Pioneer is not very big i know, i exported some with OGLE.

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Gernot, would it be possible to re-make the classic Frontier intro using Pioneer? I know you already have the ships (except for the LRC), but I dont know how it could be done. I always wondered how Braben did the original too.

it's somekind of a special scene he used, objects simply act like in the game, but "input" is predefinied, so the ships (all objects) act allways the same.

"camera" would have to be predefinied to and moved by "storyboard".

but i think robn is thinking about such allready (to make such a "live" intro).

one could (but it would mean a horrible work) export scenes to .obj and rebuild them in blender to create a movie, this would allow at least to place the camera where you like.

but if you don't like to get to close to the original intro, it should be possible in a more simple way (play a scene and record it, later cut all into one).

the basic LRC won't be a big thing to build (stupid brick with city blocks on it).

Thinking, though its a fair way off. One item fairly low on my list is a mechanism for scripts to define a path through space for a ship to follow. Setting up movies (cutscenes!) would be a natural extension of this. A little extra stuff would be needed to put the camera on a similar path, but I don't think that would be a lot of extra work.

Don't hold your breath waiting 🙂

Of course, there is more important things to do in the meantime, but later on when the game is in it's "polishing phase", at least some kind of intro would be nice, if not an exact re-creation, them something even better. 🙂

I have tried 7, 8, and version 9 of Piuoneer, but in all cases when I boot the executable, my display driver crashes, but it is only for this program and no other I have used. Im running windows 7, any help?

Another question,

Is Saturn missing its rings? I read in earlier posts that certain video cards (ATI) were having trouble displaying the rings but didn't know if it was my drivers (Nvidia) or something that was being worked on.

There is an issue with Saturn's rings and possibly more issues with other planets. I can get them to display although there is still some graphical errors

I just did a test on my iMac (with an ATI card) and I don't have Saturns rings.

Also ATI here, and also no rings, though my gut feeling (having not checked the code) says its not to do with graphics card and more to do with the system/terrain seed which is changing with pretty much every build at the moment.

We will need to do something to make sure the rings are always there for Saturn. I've logged an issue so it doesn't get forgotten: https://github.com/pioneerspacesim/pioneer/issues/18

I should have pointed out that I am using an Nvidia card with the latest drivers on Windows XP. Pioneer screen shot showed the Alpha 9 version not a nightly build.

I can see the rings in alpha 9 with my Radeon 9550. Ring shadows don't display and when I got near the rings sections of them would disappear. That sort of thing happened in FE2 as well, so I assumed it's not a bug, it's a feature! 😉