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 OSX and Linux (32 & 64-bit) are available from the download page.
New features
- New 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 tweaks
- Don'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 changes
- New 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)
Fixes
- Interpret 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.DistanceTo
- Fix
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 chips
- Update all material light components when applying a material (#1908, #1887)
UI changes
- Improved 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 changes
- Improvements 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)
You might want to remove the spam link that has crept in (on "Mac OS X"). The SpaceSimCentral forum adds them automatically.
Thanks for pointing that out Guest! :) I will investigate how that spammy link got in there in the first place.
Kudos for yet another Release!