Pioneer "January 2014" 20140131 news

Changelog
For January 2014. Full changelog.

• New features
  • New ships "Malabar" and "Vatakara" (#2599)
  • Show hull heating effect in atmosphere (#2550)
  • Shield meshes with hit effects (#2491)
  • Show trails behind ships (#2529)
  • Skybox support (#2570)
  • Initial cockpit support (experimental) (#2603, #2614, #2679)
• Minor changes and tweaks
  • Ship stat balancing (#2620, #2673)
  • Atmospheres in gas giants are much deeper (#2609, #1395)
  • New "free software" charity on the bulletin board (#2611)
  • Change start ships and initial equipment (#2696)
  • Add delta-v data to ship market (#2616)
  • Earth start position now starts at 13:00 (Pioneer time) (#2615)
  • Misc. tweaks for the intro animation (#2649)
  • Improve the sector view map, giving more navigation info (#2640)
  • Improve cargo and cabin use gauges, easier to understand (#2657, #2648)
  • Key bindings of sector view are now configurable (#2542)
  • Advert type icons in the bulletin board (#2668)
  • Remove unnecessary colon from ship empty weight description (#2682)
  • Show min/max crew in shipmarket (#2681)
  • Show labels on stations and cargo models (#2680)
  • Show decals on models (#2680)
  • Improve error reporting (#2694)
  • Xylophis textures updated (#2700)
  • Don't allow cargo to be jettisoned wile docked (#2699)
• Script and UI API changes
  • Game.StartGame now takes an optional start_time argument (#2615)
  • New method, Random:Normal gives a random number with normal distribution (#2651)
  • New method, SpaceStation:SetEquipmentPrice to override equip/cargo price at station (#2654)
  • New method, ChatForm:ClearFace removes face without clearing whole form (#2663)
• Model changes
  • Modelviewer: Show bounding box when showing collision mesh (#2664)
  • "Landing" tag-point to define where the bottom of the ship is for the landing collision test (#2695, #2656)
• Fixes
  • Fix label positioning in orbit and galaxy views (#2608, #2576)
  • Various fixes for keybinding modifiers and repeats (#2524, #2523, #2618, #2630)
  • Fix Taxi "group of one" mission (#2623, #2628)
  • Fix Taxi and Delivery assassins never spawning (#2622, #2624)
  • Reset table scroll position when it goes off screen (#2629)
  • Clean up station state correctly between games (#2631)
  • Fix TradeShips crash when trying to launch after failing to add fuel or cargo (#2634)
  • Fix ship pattern selection (#2645)
  • Fix shipyard adding ships faster than it sells them (#2653, #2650)
  • Fix that fuel was not displayed as percentage after load (#2659, #2660)
  • Clear chat form face when showing crew candidate list (#2663, #2647)
  • Calculate a sane mousewheel scroll step for scrollable regions
• Internal changes
  • Render screen to texture in preparation for post-processing effects (#2525)
  • Various code cleanups (#2621)
  • Serializer Reader class can now load data from any file source (#2646)
  • Expose models to Lua, move pattern methods from ModelSkin to Model (2645)
  • Add initial model binary converter/loader (#2643)
  • Replace GatherTransforms with a visitor (#2686)
  • RefCounted(Ptr) with atomic counter and allowing const correctness (#2688)