SpaceSimCentral

Hello,I am have looked into the Pioneer project and it looks really interesting!I am looking for such a project for quite some while, and actually thought about starting a entire new project, until Brianetta mentioned Pioneer, although I have some questions and suggestions.Suggestions:--GUI--I see that Pioneer does not have a actual gui management system right now, so i wanted to suggest the use of MyGui.MyGui is a multi-platform, simple, fast and flexible GUI system written in C++ on a LGPL/MIT license.Everything is build so you can use Editors, XML and Plugins so you do not need to work with the core code, this makes it VERY easy to create GUI's with MyGUIhttp://mygui.info/--Rendering--As far as i know, rendering is currently done purely in OpenGL, this is of course quite fast but could be expended a lot.I want to suggest the possibility of adding support/changing to Ogre3D.Ogre3D is a multi-platform rendering library commonly used in game development, with lots of possibility's but also with really good performance.Ogre has been created to use as dependency for projects, or to build entirely on the core (so just as a renderer, or as a framework).Since this project tries to be as compatible, fast but also pretty, i suggest looking into Ogre3D as a alternative renderer for pure OpenGLhttp://www.ogre3d.org/--Network Support--I know this is not priority but it would be great to have some co-op traveling and combat with a friend.Just to drop it, Enet is a wonderful library to develop networking in games.It does reliable UDP and is very scalable and fasthttp://enet.bespin.org/Questions:- Are there tools available for importing ships and content, or is this still "hardcoded"- Is conversations and trading resources (AI interaction) on the current roadmap?- Will 3D cockpits be supported in the future?- Is it possible to use Pioneer as a framework, using it to create a own planet, environment in space with own stations, create a faction with own capability's and ships etcThanks

Hi, welcome to Pioneer! Thanks for taking the time to post.For the GUI we have very few needs. Most of the hard work comes in the dialog screens and the bulletin board, and thats very very minimal. I'm not sure we need much more, and I'd be concerned about the overheads - anything that takes CPU cycles away from the rendering, AI, etc has to be carefully considered. The GUI code is actually pretty modular right now, and its not hard to get a new space station screen or whatever up and running. There's some aspects that are already scriptable, like the bulletin board, and more will likely come as required. I'm not against a full framework, but I'd want to clearly understand the benefits and tradeoffs before going there.For the renderer, we have very specific needs that I don't expect are met by many engines out there, if any (though I'll confess I haven't looked). There are three things I can think of that might make the Pioneer renderer substantially different from anything else out there.

The vast distances involved, which presents some unusual challenges for z-ordering and level-of-detail.The terrain renderer.The model format, which allows models to produce custom geometry based on game state.Again, I'm not necessarily adverse to using something else, but it needs to give obvious benefits to make it worth what will likely be a huge effort.Considering multiplayer at this stage is just not something we should be doing. The entire game concept is centred around the player. Its not to say it couldn't be done in a way that makes sense, but it would need a huge amount of thought and experimentation. Feel free to make another thread to discuss it :)And to answer your specific questions:
TheOnlyJoey wrote:
- Are there tools available for importing ships and content, or is this still "hardcoded"
We can import .obj models but they need a Lua script to connect them to the game. The format of this script is rather unintuitive and very very easy to screw up and slow the game down to a crawl. We've been talking recently switching to a format that includes animations and then use a light config file to get game state in. Its very early discussions though and you probably won't see anything for months, if at all.
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- Is conversations and trading resources (AI interaction) on the current roadmap?
Already implemented for the station bulletin boards. I'm working on factoring this out so you can do similar things during flight, though obviously the trade mechanism will change (eg cargo drops and tractor beams)
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- Will 3D cockpits be supported in the future?
No plans either way.
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- Is it possible to use Pioneer as a framework, using it to create a own planet, environment in space with own stations, create a faction with own capability's and ships etc
Many of the pieces are already there, but you couldn't a total conversion yet. It will come though.At the end of the day though this is a small open-source project with few developers. If you want to implement any of this stuff you will find the developers quite receptive. Feel free to grab the code and start hacking. We hang in #pioneer on irc.freenode.net so do drop in and say hi