Pioneer Alpha 7.5 WIP

Well here it is anyway, let me know what you all think.

s20dan m3 instead of tones ? why ? 1 tone per unit is much more sense than something like density. Look how goods are transported by sea, its in containers so in EF2 it was done good 1 T per container. Changing it to spare units will make mess in cauculations. What should be changed is few ship iteams like autopilot, scaner, radar mapper, ecm system those things are most programs or electronic boards so it cant weight 1T Rockets weights are silly too but please leave item in commodity market it sopouse to be in containers. For example 1T of liquor means lots of bottles with alcohol 1T of fruit and veg means lots of fruits packed to 1T container, 1T of animals is for example 1 or 2 cows or 1 bull, 1T of computers means lots of PCs ECT ECT so why would anybody change that? Things are transported in containers not boxes or bags even if so then those boxes and bags are packed to containers that way its easier to stack and transport. You can drop stuff to cargo bay like few candies to pocket. Also you will not transport 3 boxes of candies from Berlin to Moscow not mention from 1 planet to another so u take 1 big container to make bigger money. In game there is not mentioned how big is containers but how much they weight so this is little funny, for example 1T of animals how anybody will measure 1 animal or few animals to weight perfect 1000kg 😀 For me there would be more sense to make containers count not weight so 1 container of animals makes more sense for me 🙂 Maybe in game 1T means something like trailer hmm but it makes no sense cuz trailers are hauled by trucks so I bet 1T means 1 tone. As i mentioned earlier it makes no sense for ship items. Game should have other system for ship items and other for commodities in market. Hmmm Maybe someone will make few ship items weightless for example scanner and auto pilot 0T that way it would have sense. There should be cargo space for example 10 cargo space means that 10 containers can be transported by this ship. There is no need to mention how big are those containers just that it would make sense. For example eagle ship looks like there is no place at all to transport containers but if they would be enought small then yes but imagine container that holds 2 cows... eagle ship is to small :] I dont like ideas like cargo compression like it is made in X3 game. I am no scientist but I doubt that there would be any way to shrink cow or human or any living being like it was made in comedy movie "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" even iteams like iron plastic ect. compressing atoms maybe would be possible by storing info about item in electronic way but then we would need machine which can build/reproduce things but original item must be destroyed same goes for live beings. Teleporting would work in the same way so shrinking and teleporting makes no sense. good that elite 1 2 and FE dont have this stupid ideas like in modern games. I liked how things was transported in game "darkstar one" but better way would be robot or robots that would transport containers to ship and not hauled behind ship. In modern games its easier to do things like in x3 containers are sucked to ship :\ I didn't like it at all. When cargo got no free space then containers damaged ship and repairing was very expensive so there was need to calculate if it would fit in ship lol I writed about it on x3 forums but x3 players like it the way it is... o_O stu.... hmmmm weird people. Funny it was to first see how 1 container will take space then fly over it and ship just swallowed container for example 1 Container would take 30 units of cargo space so if ship got only 20 then it taked 20 and left 10 I dont remember exactly if that 10 was left od just disappeared or ship was damaged because of no free 30 unit of space anyway how silly was person who put that idea to game! I hope that someday there will be made game with my ideas not only how things should be stored in ship and gathered from space but ideas that fills my brain 😀 Oh and to be precise as it comes to gathering containers from wrecked ship when they would be ejected and not completely damaged while ship explosion, that container would be pushed by explosion so it would move into space not stopping like it was done in x3 reunion... I dont remember how it worked in frontier elite 2 cuz I played long long time ago and I play pioneer to short to got idea about that. First ship should maintain same speed and direction as that container then robot should be send and try to attach to that container then by maneuver engines it should be slowly inserted to cargohold. It would be funny if container would spin to fast for robot to attach to it lol Hmm robots would be very durable in collisions and just impact container then start to slow its spinning. For me it would be much fun to gather containers from space. I bet 90 % of players would not be annoyed by this kind of realism because if someone play FE 2, FFE and Pioneer he must like realism, other way he would play games like x3, Freelancer, Darkstar One ECT or even much worst "space" games ("space" lol more like underwater games 😆 )

Sorry for my flood of thoughts 🙄

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Not sure what that argument is meant to demonstrate. Though there is an upper limit (which could be much higher on fictional, future containers) not all shipping containers are the same mass

However, it makes sense that in the future we will not abandon the concept of containerisation, so items in pioneer might have a standard cubic meterage thats consistent with all items, only the masses would be different... or it might logically have more in common with the airfreight industry which has several different standard sizes for containers.

Needs are no doubt even more exotic in the future so you might see drastically different container masses also because they do different things like cyrogenic storage or nuclear containment.

While an autopilot might simply be software you buy a license for (assuming pioneer ships are already FBW machines) and therefore mass free, you have no idea how much hardware might also be involved with ships items. A powerful ECM system, even for a smaller ship could conceivably weigh several tons... A scanner is also no doubt more than just a spinning projection on your hud and so on.

the rockets are utterly useless and always have been, but a 1 ton rocket is not necessarily "silly" either depends on a lot of things, a Genie nuclear tipped rocket from the 50's was nearly half a ton, and that was designed to be used from relatively lightweight jet interceptors. but currently... but who uses rockets, very little bang for your buck. a rocket pack, with many smaller rockets would be more useful but still not really in the kind of combat we've seen so far in pioneer. Guided missiles are far more useful, and 1 ton for those is pretty good... even a relatively feeble modern day AA missile like the Phoenix is half a ton, certain SAM's can weigh a *lot* more.

eh, I'm having a hard time following the rest of your post so i'll snip it there. 😉

Cosm1cGam3r, I think you have given us a good example to counter your own argument. If you look at that cargo ship you'll see that the containers are all the same size. If one of those is filled with water, it will weigh more than if it's filled with computers, etc. I agree that an autopilot should weigh nothing, but a scanner is a physical object, like a radar dish , so it should have some mass, imho. Btw, I have a thought on atmospheric shielding that I haven't seen mentioned. Rather than hull plating, I think of it as a type of force field that deflects atmosphere around the ship. It would account for the fact that many of the ships aren't exactly aerodynamic and it weighs the same on large and small ships.

edit; Ok Coolhand ninja'ed me there. 😆

Cosm1cGam3r, looks like Coolhand and Marcel have answered your original question quite nicely.

Btw equipment weights have already been changed, although I only played around with them for a very short time. For example, Unguided rockets now weigh 100KG, Guided rockets weigh 500KG, Smart rockets 1t, Naval Rocket 3t. They are still all the same size but thats easy to change.

Autopilot also is 500KG, I had toyed with giving it 0 mass, but I agree with Coolhand's following point:

Damnit, I thought I had changed Atmo shielding to increase in mass with the mass of the ship. I think it was something like Hull-mass/3, which means it would weigh one third as much as the dry weight of the ship.

I also did this with Cargo bay life-support but using Volume as well as mass.

But I just checked this and the changes are not in the WIP build, I must have reverted them or perhaps accidently broke the changes. It never worked very well anyway as on the equipment screen it only ever showed the 1t mass, instead of the correct mass.

But if anyone wants to see that just let me know and I can post an .exe with that change.

Well to have that, we dont really need to change anything. As like you mentioned it already weighs the same for all ships.

What did you think of the idea of having atmo shield scaling to ship size?

Actually, I hadn't noticed that you'd done that. 😳 I was thinking of FE2. Also, I haven't gotten the wip yet because it's too big for me to get at home on my dial-up. Anyway, it's a good idea. Whether hull plating or force field generator, it just makes sense.

Speaking of shielding, did not the Frontier manual mention something about reflective armour being developed by the navy?

No worries, I forgot to include that change in the WIP. I'll make a minimal version later that will only be a few MB in size which will include that change.

And btw, the download is not on SSC, its hosted by Tom's Pioneer.net site, so you should be able to complete it ok.

Interesting.. hm maybe it could be a shield that takes no space or volume, as it is directly applied to the hull?

Has anyone actually tried the WIP? Come on people, I dont have time to make it and test it all, I have many other things that I have to do. Obviously I have tested it, but One person can only do so much. I need to know of any weird things that are bound to happen for other people. There are also a few ships in the WIP build that need to be tested on 'inferior' pcs, that is PCs with poor CPU and or Graphics Cards.

Sorry, working on it. I know from expierience how annoying it is if you work your arse off and then no-one seems interested.

Two things right away, one unrelated to your work, actually: lower-case i is shown either has capital i or as lower-case l. The two are identical in the font used, which makes them indistinguishable, resulting in a bit awkward reading.

The other thing, related to what you're currently working on: Ship information screen shows total capacity and free capacity in tons, while it should be showing m^3 now. I'm not sure yet if only the unit is wrong or if indeed the wrong data gets displayed, I'll have to chekc up on that a bit more. Just starting to really test now.

Used capacity shows a pretty high number of tons (maybe uninitialised variable?), while all-up weight shows a NEGATIVE pretty high number (most probably uninitialised variable, I'd say). Also, mybe you want to rename "Hydrogen" to "liquid hydrogen", to conform with "liquid oxygen" (The density is the liquid density, in any case, which makes sense).

Oh yeah, side note: The lanner textures are messed up again. The reason for this, as we know by now, is that some GPUs have trouble with non-squared texture sizes. Obviously someone forgott to replace the texture files with the sqared ones.

Thanks 🙂

This one has cropped up before, ah here we go:

We never found a fix for it, I think Kinghaggis installed it onto a different computer and the problem went away. It could be Graphics card related... I have no idea. You could try replacing the font in the WIP with the font from the older versions, just to check if that works, but I doubt it.. 🙁

Do you mean the F3 screen? If so I still haven't really touched that as there is a bug that I haven't figured out how to fix yet, something to do with converting from Floating point to Integer, as you will see the numbers for used and free capacity are way off. (1000 times too high or more)

But yes eventually it will show capacity in volume and then will show Mass in tons, as well as having an updating display of ship acceleration.

The only really accurate display of ship values at the moment is the one in the bulletin board that appears on the bottom left of the screen. But again that still shows capacity in tons, I just need to change that label from 'capacity' into Mass.

Is there a link for these textures as they obviously haven't been included in the source? Once I have a copy of them Ill add them so this shouldn't happen again.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to test it out Uncle Bob. I look forward to hearing any other criticism or ideas that you may have.

Cheers.

Dan.

The thing with the messed up font (i showing as l) can be fixed by using this file:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/rk4lr7

Simply extract it and replace the files in your Pioneer folder with these new ones. Gives you a better to-look-at font, the letter i bug is fixed and you get better looking icons. Courtesy of Jamie Grant 😉 .

There is: http://p66.web.officelive.com/Documents ... _test02.7z

Yeah, that one.

??? Pioneer is written in C++ right? I never had any conversion problems from float to int in C++. Maybe the float value is in a wrong unit? The whole thing still smells more like uninitialised variables, since the values don't seem to be consistent and pretty random.

Having just had my first combat in a beginner Eagle (no scanner, no nothing), I have a few suggestions for the combat AI and HUD. Not really related to what you're working on currently, and probably not on your plans yet, but I'll post them here anyways.

First, it is virtually impossible to loose a one-on-one, even if your ship is far inferior, majorly because the AI has a terrible aim. It needs a rough chance-to-hit calculation to decide when to fire. I was majorly sitting ducks without using any thrusters, and the AI still hit me only randomly every now and then. Currently it seems to fire whenever its ship is pointing in your general direction, even if it is out of range.

This leads to the AI always having overheated weapons in the instant it has the best chances to score a hit. I'd suggest a) checking range as a first fire-decision parameter, and then run a rough calculation of to-hit chance based on relative velocity of the target. If you want to go advanced (and I'd strongly suggest you do), put in a second order chance-to-hit calculation that checks wheather the chances for a hit are likely to get better within the next half second, and if so, let it hold its fire for another bit. Also, let it check for your ships current heading: If there's no gun facing its way, let it keep a steady course and concentrate on aiming, instead of already flying evasive maneuvers while there is no threat.

The second trouble is, it's virtually impossible to win a one-on-one if your ship is far inferior. No, no contradiction there. If you end up in a one-on-one without strong weapons against a vastly superior opponent, the battle can take ages, if it ever stops at all. I spent about 15 minutes chasing an Eye with my minimally equiped eagle. The AI barely ever hit me, it wasn't a threat at all. I hit it again and again and again, however, because its ship could take so much punishement the combat couldn't really be resolved. I was locked up with an enemy that could never destroy me, and on the other hand it would take an unknown amount of time for me to destroy him. I eventually got bored and reloaded the game.

The best solution is, of course, that a superior enemy just takes you out without much hassle (i.e. HITS you). If I had a radar mapper I would of course have had a means of seeing my "progress" on destroying him, so the situation was partly my fault.

But the whole episode gave me plenty of opportunity to study the weaknesses of the HUD. Well, if you can call it a HUD at all, that is. I know that Pioneer is based on Frontier, but that's no reason to adabt the minimalistic hud design. The Hud has to contain information about relative velocity of the target (closing velocity and rel. velocity in the three axis) and its distance, and a target-lead-indicator (i.e. where to point your gun). The last one might be possible as an upgrade, but the first two are absolutely essential in order to make any meaningfull decision during combat. Look at the Evochron series or "I found her" for pretty good hud-designs (especially the former, which has great newtonian combat). In any case, the information has to be near the target on the screen, not somewhere in a corner. This is essential information, and in a combat you don't want to take your eyes off the target to look at it.

Also, of course, the good old "press T and click on a target"-method from Frontier is highly impractical. Make a target list and a few keys to browse through it (the autotargeter from Frontier was a great reliev, but still highly impractical, and actually immersion-breaking. With all the high-tech and whatnot, it seems weird that the people of the 32. century aren't capable of programming a sensible scanner-to-user interface...)

Also, Joystick support should be implemented rather sooner than later. Basic three-axis for pitch, yaw and roll should be sufficient, as the other functions can be comfortably mapped to any buttons on the joystick (I actually played JJFFE with my X52. A bit of work for mapping all the stuff, but well worth it for the vastly increased control).

All in all, I'm still amazed at how far this project is developing. Never saw such speed and determination in an open-source game, keep going!

Another thing that just became obvious, related to the mass/volume system again: The autopilot (especially landing autopilot) is already getting in severe trouble. I don't know if it currently even takes the mass of the ship into consideration, but it can't land a heavily laden ship without wrecking the gear (unless you have shields, that is). Landing my Viper by autopilot every time results in a not too satisfying heavy "clonk" when I stuffed it up a bit too much... The thrusters are able to handle the load (the ship is decelerating on the way down), but the autopilot doesn't give it enough distance before beginning the final descent, resulting in rather high "touchdown"- (read: impact) velocities.

Another stray thing that just caught my eyes, my missiles are enthusiasticaly firing their thrusters when I engage the main engine... 😆

Also, the textures to which I posted a link above don't seem to work in Alpha 7 anymore. Although the model displays correctly in the mesh-viewer when installing them, Pioneer would crash in Universe creation. No idea why...

S20dan, I was planning to download it at work tomorrow, but since I have today off I'm giving it a try. I'll let you know what happens on my inferior pc and graphics card. 4 hours and 36 minutes remaining...

But maybe the maker never intended Pioneer to become more than Frontier. I've said it about 3x before, I would love to see Pioneer become "more" than Frontier. But if it has never been the intention of the creator, and never will be the intention of the creator to let Pioneer evolve beyond Frontier, then you just can't call the HUD a weak point of the game as it's exactly the same as in Frontier.

That's why I would love to see two versions of the game. But if it's the creators goal to make one perfect clone with better graphics, then let it be so. After all, it's his game. I'd still be happy in that case but I would be hysterical if one day we would have more detailed HUD's, freelook, X52 joystick support (I have one too), an option to build miningstations and drivable surface vehicles. But then, maybe the Elite Frontier purists would be disappointed. I guess it's very hard to please everybody.

It would be easier to wish for things if you knew the plan for Pioneer. What it will become eventually. If it's going to be nothing more than an Elite clone (a very good one), then I can stop wishing and dreaming and start enjoying the game as it is. I think it's also very hard for a developer to start working on something when each day, there are 10 different people with 10 different requests. You'll have to make a list eventually of what will be and what won't be in the game to let people know and so the developer can stick to that route without going crazy with the requests.

I won't say it again now by the way. I'm sure it becomes old after a while and most of you get my point now 😀 . This is just the way I would have done it.

I have a plan, but other contributors will introduce their own direction into the project. I have always intended to go beyond frontier, but also I wanted to learn the lessons of over-ambitious and failed project.s

The plan is:

version 1.0: All the (desirable) features of Frontier, essentially similar gameplay mechanics (physics, equipment, cargo), flexible mission scripting so we can go beyond Frontier in terms of missions and other game content.

version 2.0: Crazy experimental shit like full 3d galaxy, owning a fleet of ships, walking on planet and all that stuff you dream of.

The reason to keep version 1.0 somewhat constrained by the Frontier game design is that it ensures we have a clear path to actually completing the game. I don't want to code for 3 years and have an experimental game engine and nothing anyone can play. Having said that, there are things in Pioneer that go far beyond what Frontier had, like the terrain engine. But the terrain engine did not require a rethink of game design or balance and was very self-contained code-wise.

So until a playable version 1.0 I am cautious about experiments in game mechanics, and would prefer smooth development of missions and such like, as the game is really at the stage where real game content of this sort can be added.

Of course, I'm a big hypocrite, since I spent today playing with planck's blackbody radiation equation with the intention of making a more realistic planet greenhouse gas model. But this stuff interests me, and doesn't cause a domino-effect reconsideration of already implemented game elements (or at least not much).

In short: we are almost there so let's not lose the plot 🙂

Ninja'd by Tomm, it turns out...

@KingHaggis:

calm down a bit. I am a developer myself and know very well how annoying it is to have people make utopian feature requests that are nowhere in your design plan to begin with, and certainly not at the point you're standing currently. If I wanted to make such requests, I could easily write up a ten page essay, but I won't, for exactly that reason. Also, I stated above that I don't think that these improvements are on the current top priority list, but since I was encouraged to give input I thought I might as well give it for future reference.

There's a reason between asking for completely new game mechanics an suggestions on how to make the current ones better. Frontier was as it was because of technical limitations, and I'd wager because of time pressure. You simply could not put complex information in a hud with that low a resolution and keep the oversight, and at least FFE was released unfinihshed, without complete features. Plus, I think pretty much all frontier-purists can agree that Braben neglected the user interface while making staggering accomplishements in other areas. For example, we have a 6 degrees of freedom control system since JJFFE, not since original frontier (and not even since FFE), although there certainly wasn't a technical limitation preventing it. Yet I hear absolutely no-one complaining about it, because it enhances an essential feature of the game. As would a better hud, which is the next logical step, because it would make those six degrees of freedom so much more usefull. If it's nowhere in the Dev's plans, I fully respect that, but wouldn't quite understand it. It's a big difference between implementing totally new features and making current features more accessible and usefull.

That aside, the volume/mass system introduced with this WIP is already an extension on Frontier, so I might be on the save side to assume that the Devs would indeed like to improve the overall handling of the game (which is possible without turning it into a universe simulator sandbox where you can manage your own moss-eisly cantine if you'd like to).

Indeed it would be, but I couldn't find a detailed roadmap anywhere, suggesting that the developement is progressing cowboy-coding style. Which makes it hard to guess the opportune moment when a suggestion is in order and when it isn't, so you just let the devs know your oppinion and see if they make something out of it.

That's exactly right. It is none the less important to have the suggestions if you want to make that list. If the Dev chooses to ignore mine, I'm not the one to complain.

I suggested BASIC joystick support (3 axis) which is more or less what we had in frontier. Plus one axis, yes, but since we have controll over that axis (which we didn't in the original) that would seem to make sense, not?

I can still call it a weak point because it was a weak point in Frontier, and I have yet to find a person that disagrees with that opinion, be it hard-core fan or not.

EDIT considering the lanner textures: The textures in the file posted above do work in A7.5, but the lua file doesn't. So just replace the .png's in the current source with those from that zip and you're good.

I am calm 😀 . I just think you think I was being negative about you while I was actually positive about you and the same time thinking loud how the developer (Tom) would deal with all these things and what I would do when I was in his shoes.

You may think I was attacking you or something but the "you" in my posts refer to "you" as in people in general. My comment isn't pointed towards you personally but I'm just openly expressing my thoughts. Don't read it as critisism. In fact, I was reading your post with great enthousiasm and feel the same way. I agree with just about everything you say and want the same things. I can post a whole story now but just re-read the comment. It's actually very positive 😉 .

I just want a little more clarity about this game so I know if I can make requests or not myself. Tom has made things perfectly clear now. I think in the future he's open for extra functions and in the mean time is trying to concentrate on the essential Frontier stuff, just what I was thinking/wondering.

😯 WOW! The future looks bright.

Tomm, you are amazing, I can't think of anything else to say,.......amazing! 😯

Tbh I'm not sure, float related I should have said. I just don't understand why it works fine on the bulletin board, but not on the ship info screen. They both gather the data from the same place.

Hmm... I seem to have fixed it 😆

I was typing this message while checking the code, Looks like the float value was in the wrong unit, silly typo/mistake.

My memory is shit 🙂 I forgot that fixed it.

I do plan to have a crack at some missions soonish, probably in the new year. But you know what its like when you get an idea 🙂

LOL, I never said that. I wish I had a clue about C++ so I knew what the heck you're talking about 😛 .

😆 Typo from copying quote tags

@ UncleBob :

Hardcore fan, dreaming of a sequel since a decade, and I just love the UI in frontier/FFE : gives you every info you need, none you don't, leave a maximum of space for the 3D... I mean most other space games end up telling you that in the future people will use interfaces that will be lagging behind what you already have nowadays in an Airbus 380...

EDIT : well, ok the infos you mentionned should be added, but I'd like to be able to turn all writings off when I just want to gawk at the 3D

There is a computational search engine called Wolfram Alpha that can help you here. Entering "1 ton of air" will yield all sorts of useful info, including how much space it would take up, as both a sphere and a cube.