Alpha 12 released

robn · Post by **robn** » Fri Jul 08, 2011 8:00 am

The Pioneer development team are pleased to announce the release of Pioneer alpha 12. Builds for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux are available for download from the download page.Changes for this release:New features* Music! 17 songs and scriptable music engine and control script (#233, #250, #171, #267)* New star and planet images in system info view (#167)* 'Home' key resets camera in external view (#199)* Re-implemented and re-enabled old hill, mountain, volcano, desert and river terrains for Earth and Mars-like worlds (#211)* New "dunes" terrain for Mars-like worlds (#211)* Earth terrain tweaks: more noise variations and reduced mountain height (#211)* System information (F7) button cycles through info tabs in system info view (#212)* Pause buttons now toggles game settings if game is already paused (#217, #221)* Can now set navigation target by clicking on bodies in the system info view. Navigation target will be highlighted in the info view. Body info is displayed on mouse hover (#220, #255)* Lots of new and updated parts for facegen (#213)* User configurable FOV support in the config file (#219)* Distance and fuel required text in sector view now colourised to indicate if jump is possible (#227)* Highlight populated systems in sector view (#242)* Mouse can now control ship rotation in ship info and shipyard (#243)* New Lua event onFrameChanged and dynamic body frame attributes to help determine which planet/station/etc a ship is near (#249)Fixes* Lua model args passed as doubles to avoid loss of precision (eg time) (#174, #176)* Removed misleading F7/F8 text from zoom icons (#201)* Pass alert state to Lua onShipAlertChanged event (#191, #195)* Avoid loss of precision when calculating radius of very tiny bodies (#189)* Hyperspace range is displayed correctly again (#222)* Occasional crash in system cache pruning (#230, #237)* Crash due to buffer overrun in sound player (#253)* Fixed HDR lighting on Radeon (#87, #263)* Replace broken hill/dune terrain with something that works* Adjust Saturn, Uranus and Neptune so they have rings as appropriateInternal changes* All model timing now based of game time (#175, #178)* City models are now loaded at startup (#71)* All terrains optimised (octave count reduced) (#211)* Optionally use ccache to speed up builds (#235)* New HYPERSPACE and DOCKED flight states to explicitly describe some conditions instead of having to infer from other data (#89, #252)Thanks as always to everyone who downloaded and tested a dev build, reported an issue, submitted an idea or left a helpful comment. As you can see there's been a lot of little tweaks and fixes over the last month and things are starting to feel very polished as a result

Geraldine · Post by **Geraldine** » Fri Jul 08, 2011 5:06 pm

Great news robnHad a qick fly around Sol to check out the sights. Saturn looks different!

s2odan · Post by **s2odan** » Fri Jul 08, 2011 6:30 pm

Quote:
Saturn looks different!
Its getting there, but next time around it should look like this

:[attachment=829:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-07-08 23-08-25-98.png]Its a new terrain so changing seeds won't give you that one, but it will be in the next alpha. Although there is the old saturn terrain in alpha 12 and changin seeds could give you that one with rings instead of the jupiter one.

trumpet · Post by **trumpet** » Mon Jul 11, 2011 3:22 am

Saturn looks like this on the Mac version. Alpha 12 Macbook ProNivida GeForce 9400MOS X 10.6.5

tomm · Post by **tomm** » Mon Jul 11, 2011 6:14 am

So the people seeing the gas giant rings through the planet, what graphics card do you have and what platform are you playing on?

robn · Post by **robn** » Mon Jul 11, 2011 6:16 am

Known issue, happens on all platforms and both Radeon and Nvidia, but only wth shaders enabled. I expect its another depth bug.

trumpet · Post by **trumpet** » Mon Jul 11, 2011 8:41 am

hi Robn I just turned the shaders off and yes, the rings are clipped correctly....

Geraldine · Post by **Geraldine** » Mon Jul 11, 2011 10:16 am

I never use em as I prefer the look of the game without them, at least for now. Y' know I was thinking there, that the last two screen shots of Pioneer I posted on here, were of Saturn. I really must try going to other systems more often

Mind you, I also noted seed value of 14 in s20dan's pic. Looks like I will be going back to Saturn again!

s2odan · Post by **s2odan** » Mon Jul 11, 2011 10:56 am

tomm wrote:
So the people seeing the gas giant rings through the planet, what graphics card do you have and what platform are you playing on?
Nvidia Gtx285 + Win7x64 here.Rings are clipping incorrectly in the pic I posted back there, although its harder to see as they rings are the same colour as the gas giant in that pic.

fluffyfreak · Post by **fluffyfreak** » Mon Jul 11, 2011 11:21 am

nVidia 470GTX, Win7 x64With shaders enabled I can see the rings through planets too.

OSH · Post by **OSH** » Wed Jul 13, 2011 6:06 pm

Unplayable. I have 1-2 fps. CPU: Athlon64 2 GHz (one core), GPU: GT 440,. What is more important? CPU or GPU? Or I have both too weak?

s2odan · Post by **s2odan** » Wed Jul 13, 2011 8:28 pm

CPU is more important.Were you able to play the previous alpha without problems?

ollobrain · Post by **ollobrain** » Wed Jul 13, 2011 10:19 pm

OSH · Post by **OSH** » Thu Jul 14, 2011 4:18 am

s2odan wrote:
CPU is more important.Were you able to play the previous alpha without problems?
Certainly yes. After buying Geforce GT 440 I hoped, I can play this game on max details and with HDR lightning...how fast must be CPU to play without lags?

Luomu · Post by **Luomu** » Thu Jul 14, 2011 5:26 am

OSH wrote:

s2odan wrote:
Certainly yes. After buying Geforce GT 440 I hoped, I can play this game on max details and with HDR lightning...how fast must be CPU to play without lags?

Well, the usual question first: do you have the latest nvidia driver? Your CPU should be just fine.

OSH · Post by **OSH** » Thu Jul 14, 2011 5:36 am

Yes. I've tested almost all version of drivers.

Luomu · Post by **Luomu** » Thu Jul 14, 2011 5:56 am

OSH wrote:
Yes. I've tested almost all version of drivers.

I've got more questions then :)Does HDR off make a noticeable difference?How about shaders off?Does the situation matter, like being close to a city? Try debug starting point.Does the intro screen lag as well?

fluffyfreak · Post by **fluffyfreak** » Thu Jul 14, 2011 6:04 am

Try two things for us if you could:-press escape to bring up the options menu,1) turn down city detail - does the framerate improve?2) turn down terrain detail - does the framerate improve?Also, if you leave it for a while does the framerate pick up after a while? Perhaps when the terrain has finished generating.Oh and how much RAM do you have?

s2odan · Post by **s2odan** » Thu Jul 14, 2011 11:19 am

Quote:
After buying Geforce GT 440 I hoped, I can play this game on max details and with HDR lightning
Nah thats not going to make much of a difference at all Im sorry to say. That card is good but Pioneer is very much CPU bound to the point of insanity. You'll have no trouble displaying the details, its just getting them calculated and on-screen in the first place thats the problem :)If you bought the card to play Pioneer its not a total loss, as in the future the shaders and G-cards are only going to get more and more use as things are exported to shaders.Try following FluffyFreak's and Luomu's advice and trying those couple of things.You never know this may be a new bug. Although one thing strikes me as rather obvious in all this: You mentioned you had a single-core CPU, now pioneer always wants to use 2 cpus/threads unless told not to, so really it should act all slow like that and Im left wondering why in-fact it ran well before...If you can compile your own copy from source you can easily fix this by removing the threading tag from wherever it is set

Brian(etta) knows more about this as he has had a similar problem before.

OSH · Post by **OSH** » Thu Jul 14, 2011 4:30 pm

Luomu wrote:
Does HDR off make a noticeable difference?
YES
Luomu wrote:
How about shaders off?
IS BETTER
Luomu wrote:
Does the situation matter, like being close to a city? Try debug starting point.
YES, IT'S BETTER AT DEBUG STARTING POINT
Luomu wrote:
Does the intro screen lag as well?
NO
fluffyfreak wrote:
1) turn down city detail - does the framerate improve?
YES
fluffyfreak wrote:
2) turn down terrain detail - does the framerate improve?
YES
fluffyfreak wrote:
Also, if you leave it for a while does the framerate pick up after a while? Perhaps when the terrain has finished generating.
it's variable. sometimes is for short time without lags, but after this game stutters.
fluffyfreak wrote:
Oh and how much RAM do you have?
2 GB RAM
s2odan wrote:
If you can compile your own copy from source you can easily fix this by removing the threading tag from wherever it is set

Brian(etta) knows more about this as he has had a similar problem before.
No, I'm not a programmer. Could somebody compile such version without supoorts for two cores?

SpaceSimCentral

Alpha 12 released

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