Alpha 30 released

[robn]

The Pioneer development team are pleased to announce the release of Pioneer Alpha 30. This month we have beautiful new atmosphere, lighting and terrain effects, a rewritten autopilot that now allows you to intercept other ships and fly in formation (and pirates to catch you!), and the introduction of our new purpose-built model engine, SGModel. Full changelog and builds for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (32 & 64-bit) are available from the download page.New featuresNew model system (SGModel) (#1676, #1208, #813, #1852, #1914)Rotation damping icon and control on the panel (#1842, #1837)OSX: Hold the option key down when launching pioneer.app to launch the model viewer instead (#1803)New volcanic surface effects on some planets (#1782)New and improved autopilot (#1812)Improved atmosphere rendering: scattering, sunsets, thinner fogs and ground lighting fixes (#1888, #1891)Russian translation (#1899, #1713)Minor changes and tweaksDon't allocate projectile geometry for every projectile. Huge performance increase during combat (#1822)Main menu now has keyboard shortcuts again (#1821)Player's name now updates during editing in Personal Information view (#1845)Rondel system moved further away from Sol and surrounding stars (#1861, #1815)Star fade-in has been adjusted to make stars less visible in daytime (#1881)Some missions now state the distance to the target system (#1886, #1909)Try harder to find a populated homeworld for a faction (#1860, #1792)Clicking cancel from the Load dialog now returns you to the game (#1847, #1325)Bulk ships are now only placed at orbital stations (#1890)Improve building self-shadowing and lighting (#1898, #1811)Low/medium/high orbit altitudes reduced to be more likely to fit in object frames (#1903)Script changes and model changesNew attribute StarSystem.explored (#1793, #1797)Custom systems can now define gravpoints (#1701, #1074)Added attributes in space/ground station models info table: ship_launch_stage, parking_distance, parking_gap_size (#1812)FixesInterpret galaxy density bitmap as unsigned values (#1818, #1813)Invert mouse cursor movement in rear view (#1820)Missions no longer vanish from view when other missions are completed (#1824, #1826, #1854, #1856)Fix crash when switching away from settings screen after death (#1844, #1698, #1742)Move SystemView time control buttons above the dash to work around input priority problems (#1853, #1851)Fix occasional bug that could leave a trailing slash on some filesystem paths (#1843, #1486)Fix division-by-zero bugs in missile AI (#1873, #1872)Fix loading of player's criminal record and fines (#1877, #1874)Selected systems are now always shown in the sector view (#1864)Fix crash bug in Lua function SystemPath.DistanceToFix long-broken mouse flight under Linux by disabling DGA. Set config option SDLUseDGAMouse=1 to revert to old behaviour (#1892, #5)Fix system info view to ignore irrelevant mouse wheel scroll events (#1894)Don't toggle labels and rotation damping while console is active (#1897, #1364)Don't save/restore GL_POINT_BIT attribute, it breaks GL state on old Intel chipsUpdate all material light components when applying a material (#1908, #1887)UI changesImproved appearance of Dropdown widget (#1789, #1766)Fix layout of non-contributing widgets inside pack boxes (#1789)UI widgets can now have keyboard shortcuts (#1821, #1841, #1840)Internal changesImprovements in text rendering performance (#1791)Move MSVC headers and libs to pioneer-thirdparty repository (#1807)Removed legact MissionStatus code from core (#1824)Optimisation in access to ship type information (#1827)Add support for high precision timing and floating-point exceptions (#1836, #1846)Enable floating-point exceptions during AI processing (#1838)Lua methods can be marked "protected", stopping them being called by user-supplied scripts and mods (#1706, #1869)Rotation damping code cleaned up (#1866)Various minor cleanups (#1867)Allow point sprites to be rendered with different alpha blending modes (#1880)Unknown tokens for Lua translations are no longer treated as errors (#1865, #1862)Rename terrain noise macros to avoid global namespace polliution (#1883)Various code improvements in frame handling and other things (#1812)Cleanup SectorView system index usage (#1884)Split FileSelectorDialog and LoadGame/SaveGame out of GameLoaderSaver (#1847)Font optimisations and support for language-specific font overrides (#1899, #1907, #1904)Avoid use of strtof, it doesn't exist on MSVC (#1905)

[Marcel]

Oooh Yeah! I've been waiting for this one! :biggrin:

[Guest]

OSX: Hold the option key down when launching pioneer.app to launch the model viewer instead (#1803)This new feature is especially handy for Mac OSX users as you no longer need to 'compile your own' to get the model viewer working as it is now bundled up into the one app bundle (for people like @potsmoke66 who have had issues compiling on OSX in the past).

[autumnlover]

Gravpoints. Wow! That's great improvement of custom systems. Now I hope to be able to recreate Wolf 630 as it was in Frontier Thanks, I was waiting for this! :gamer:

[Geraldine]

Wonderful, what an awesome release Robn. Better get busy! :girlcrazy:

[Luomu]

[Geraldine]

Mod DB updated :girlsmile:

[StarMax]

Very nice! Like Vuzz stated: It's a famous release! Kudos

[pagroove]

Good release. I like the atmospheres.

[Overlord]

Not sure if anyone else has mentioned this but the scanner issue when you fire weapons is still there. When in the vicinity of a station after firing you get a warning message from the station every 5 seconds rendering the scanner unusable. Otherwise a marvellous release! :gamer:

[AWC3117]

Good release I like the graphics tweeks, and the dedication to Sir Patrick Moore. I found a pretty big bug though: You can now fly through stars. I like this bug.

[OSH]

My God..When I have time to test it? Maybe when Alpha 40 will be released... :unsure: