The Pioneer development team are pleased to announce the release of
Pioneer Alpha 31. This month sees the introduction of crew. Hire folks
for your ship and they'll do things for you and improve your skills in
trade and combat. We also continue the conversion to our new model
system, with several ship and station models converted. Full changelog
and builds for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (32 & 64-bit) are
available from the download page
(Note: This is the last alpha release that will include LMR).
New features
- Crew! Hire people to do stuff for you (experimental) (#1973, #2025, #2030, #2039)
- New ship "Deep Space Miner" (#2023)
Minor changes and tweaks
- Cargo scooping now only requires a collision against the ship rather than a specific part of it (again) (#1922)
- Improve point sprite (LMR billboard) rendering performance (#1927, #1929, #1928)
- Improve city rendering performance (#1927)
- Removed per-light ambient color and building fade (#1930)
- Ship thrust and fuel tank size have been rebalanced (#1689)
- Restore "Pioneering Pilots' Guild" text (#1987, #1989)
- New Hope is now located on land (#1977)
- Debug information overlay now includes latitude and longitude (#1994)
- Missile spawn and control moved to Lua (#1663)
- Add more names to the name generator (#2021)
- Labels on SGModels can now be set (#1979)
Fixes
- Collisions with stars now work again (#1942)
- Dates before 3200-01-01 no longer display negative (#1955, #1954)
- Text on SGModel ships now uses correct character offsets (#1980)
- An unset decal no longer displays a black square on Intel graphics (#1976)
- Fixed various crashes caused by console completion (#1998)
- SGModel animation timing fixes (#1978, #1970)
- Greatly reduced chance of police ships spawning on top of each other (#1993)
- Fixed station names being repeated within a single system (#1958, #1911)
- Handle missing material definitions by providing a basic white default material if none are specified (#1817, #1916)
- Detect conflicts between animations (#1938)
- Animations now work correctly across detail level switches (#1978)
Model changes
- Converted Lanner ship to SGModel (#1957, #1969, #2002)
- Converted Wave ship to SGModel (#2022)
- Converted "big crappy" spacestation to SGModel (#1964, #2017)
- Converted "hoop" spacestation to SGModel (#1932)
- Converted standard building set to SGModel (#1923)
- Removed "mushroom" ground stations
- Removed long-unused building models (#1923)
- Modelviewer: Reloading model also reloads textures (#1968, #1939)
- Modelviewer: View controls are improved (#1982)
- Modelviewer: Larger models are displayed without z clipping (#1982, #1933)
- Modelviewer: Improve zoom behaviour (#2020)
- New material parameters: unlit, two_sided and alpha_test (#1995, #1935)
Script changes
- Remove deprecated Ship methods.SetPrimaryColour and SetSecondaryColour and shipType attribute
- Ship
thruster efficiency can be specified with effective_exhaust_velocity
value, instead of thruster_fuel_use (either can be used) (#1689) - Add max_crew & min_crew params to ship def (#1973)
- Missile control methods Missile.Arm, Missile.Disarm, Ship.SpawnMissile and Ship.AIKamikaze (#1663)
- Separate station defs from LMR station models (#1913, #1931, #1934)
Internal changes
- Cameras are no longer attached to a body, and World View camera controllers are no longer derived from Camera (#1889)
- Remove kill count from core (#1944)
- Intro & tombstone can now use SGModels (#1956, #2006)
- SGModels now have priority over LMR models of the same name (#1956)
- Console completion now handled through the LuaObject dispatcher (#1945, #1672, #1972, #1974)
- Queries for near-by objects now use a very basic acceleration structure (#1910)
- String <-> Integer enum mapping tables have been separated from Lua (#1996)
- Improve MultiLineText draw performance (#1999)
- SGModel nodes all carry a pointer to the renderer (#1986)
- SGModels can now be instanced, with separate appearance and animation state for each (#2007, #1975)
- Bad terrain generator output will now emit lots of debug info before crashing (#2005)
- Fixed some memory leaks (#2011)
