Nightly builds

[Luomu]

Azimech wrote:
A short question, if I slide the volume to minimal, will the playing of the music tracks stop or will they continue to play with volume off and thereby eat cpu cycles? Because is never play games with music. I guess deleting the tracks is sufficient?

You can also delete the music player script in data/modules/ so it won't eat cpu cycles

[robn]

10 July - d26a9d6Its early in the devlopment cycle for Alpha 13 but there's already heaps of new stuff in the latest dev build.Model cache. You're all familiar with the "Simulating evolution of the universe..." loading screen. Most of the work done during this is loading the models, which involves a lot of running scripts and building internal data structures with the results. tomm came out of hibernation to implement a nice little cache for this data. Now this internal data is written to disk when you first run Pioneer and is then used on later runs rather than regenerating each time. We're seeing typical load times drop to 3-4s from 15-20s - a huge improvement.New and updated terrains. As usual s20dan is staying up late to work his magic with the terrain generator. He's posting lots of screenshots of his current work so there's not much more to say.Hyperspace targeting rewrite. The hyperspace target is now part of the sector view, and is stored separately to the selected system. Most of the time the two are kept in sync (so keeping the existing functionality the same), but at times where a hyperspace target is selected from outside the sector view (eg by following a cloud) the target will "lock" and remain set separately from the selected system. When this happens the hyperspace target will be shown with a grey highlight:You can also set and clear the hyperspace target using the space bar in the sector view.The other change around this is that any system can be set as the hyperspace target. The ability to jump to it is checked at jump time rather than at selection time, which means there's no longer the situation where you can set a target then change drives or sell fuel, making the target invalid. Jumping at this point used to get you to Sol (system 0), which was always rather confusing. That doesn't happen anymore.Charon. Pluto's little friend makes his debut. This is not so remarkable in itself, but I include it here to show just how easy it is to contribute to Pioneer. All these little things add polish and shine to the game but are often overlooked because they're so small that they don't make it onto the scanner. Every single person reading this can contribute to Pioneer! Get in there!

[ollobrain]

what about a few keiper belt objects just to be a pain and a nuisense lol

[Marcel]

Quote:
Charon. Pluto's little friend makes his debut.
It seems there's always an opportunity to add something to Pioneer.http://www.space.com/12356-pluto-fourth-moon-discovery-hubble-photo.html

[fluffyfreak]

Hah! Yes I just finished reading about that and was going to post it here

[Geraldine]

That's awesome news, I am amazed the Hubble picked it up at all. It should be named something better than P4 though. And yes, could Pioneer be the first ever game to include the full Plutoian system?

[robn]

Geraldine wrote:
That's awesome news, I am amazed the Hubble picked it up at all. It should be named something better than P4 though. And yes, could Pioneer be the first ever game to include the full Plutoian system?
If someone sends a patch the moment its attributes are known I promise to include it

[Geraldine]

I do hope someone does robn. It would be another feather in the cap for Pioneer's dev team. Y'know this highlights a great strength of Pioneer and the way it's development is progressing, it's flexible enough to include such up to date information. Match THAT Infinity!

[Brianetta]

Perhaps, instead of concentrating on the pebbles, we should include some actual dwarf planets? These things are round, and big enough to land on. Let's not forget Ceres, either. While it might be the smallest known dwarf planet, it does account for about a third of all the asteroids' mass, and is by far the nearest to Earth at any time of the year.Data can be found here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_objects_by_size

[s2odan]

Thats a lot of planetoids... Many I don't even know.I was reading an old site the other night about astronomy and thought I had found out some interesting stuff... It basically went on to talk about Earth's 3 moons.. Yeah exactly.. Anyway it turns out that in 2002 Earth's 3rd moon was believed to have been found. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2251386.stmWhich then gets you thinking... 3rd... well what on Earth was the second one then?Cruithne discovered in 86 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3753_CruithneUnfortunately the truth is far less interesting than that though, as the 3rd moon, J002E3, turned out to be the third stage of the apollo 12 rocket. And now that detection and observational equipment is more accurate these days, it now turns out that Cruithne does not orbit the earth but has a kind of parallel eliptical orbit with the Earth. So that means for at least 16 years astronomers believed that Earth had 2 moons... Has anyone else every heard of that?

[fluffyfreak]

I'd heard of Cruithne before, but a 3rd Moon!?! :DAlmost a shame it wasn't, it would make for handy practice for NASA/ESA/JASA etc!

[Geraldine]

s2odan wrote:
turned out to be the third stage of the apollo 12 rocket.
Well, I think those "experts" would want to bury that one

[s2odan]

Brianetta wrote:
From image: Makemake
Hehe, what kind of a name is that? The wiki link is handy. I thought we already had most of the larger ones already but evidently there are a few that slipped through the cracks.
Geraldine wrote:
Well, I think those "experts" would want to bury that one
Hehe, yeah thats probably why we never heard much about it. We know how much NASA loves to be embarrassed.

[highlander]

Comets (including their tails, always flowing away from the sun, naturally) would be cool to have in the game

[robn]

30 July - d0e897aLess than a week to go before the freeze for alpha 13, so a lot of the big recent developments have landed. Here's a selection:* Multiple language support has just hit master. A German translation is the first non-English language supported. Note that this is considered experimental for alpha 13. The major problem at this point is that many of the station screens are designed for English words, and the much longer German words tend to break things. This will be tackled for alpha 14.* Face names. The station faces now have a name and sometimes an occupation, so you know who you're talking to * Outlined fonts in use in most 3D displays. This greatly improves visiblity of text, especially with bright backgrounds.* Station menus have been rewritten. The code is internally much cleaner. Not many user-visible changes, but the station menus do feel far more responsive.* And a pile of bug and crash fixes, of course

[Azimech]

Thank you. Downloading now.

[ollobrain]

looking ahead any aims for alpha 14

[Brianetta]

We thought we'd make it a little more like alpha 12.

[fluffyfreak]

I'd have liked to get the Orbital code into this version perhaps with an example somewhere for people to visit but it's looking like it'll slip into Alpha 14. Too much still needs doing (collision for example). I'm just doing a code self-review/cleanup and finding/fixing a tonne of issues, partly as pactice for a job interview on Thursday

[Geraldine]

Best of luck in your interview fluffyfreak.