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This is the second bug-fix release since the February release. The most notable bug that made it into previous bug fix release was a save compatibility issue where the game did not allow the player to load saves from the previous version (the player could circumvent the bug by force loading the save, by holding down Ctrl-key when clicking Load).
Another notable fix is the loud white noise-bug, that some have encountered.
For those playing a localized non-English version, we have identified and fixed hundreds of broken strings in the following languages: Brazilian Portuguese (pt_BR), Chinese (zh), Czech (cs), Danish (da), Dutch (nl) French (fr), German (de), Hungarian (hu), Italian (it), Polish (pl), Portuguese (pt), Russian (ru), Spanish (es), and Swedish (sv). Unfortunately, the fix also accidentally marked all languages as translated, over on the transifex project page. This will be addressed shortly.
After this release, we will return our focus on merging new features. Brave pilots daring bugs while enjoying latest new features are encouraged to keep an eye on master branch, and report any encountered bugs.
Published by impaktor 7 months ago
This is a bug fix release to compliment the February release. Most noticeable bug, now fixed, was that weapons firing were out of sync making combat exceedingly difficult.
The February release also included a system editor, but many did not realize it had to be launched from the command line with proper arguments to specify if you want the model editor or the system editor. There is now a graphical option to select which. The editor window is now resizable as well.
Some bugs are like roaches - and refuse to go away. We thought the missing atmospheres were fixed but turns out the February release only fixed the procedurally generated planets, not the scripted ones (i.e. the 20 core systems), causing fuel scooping on gas giants in these systems (like Jupiter and Saturn) to not work.
If you stayed in a system for a long time you might have noticed performance issues. This was due to several issues with trade ships causing them to accumulate, which have now been fixed.
Published by impaktor 9 months ago
https://github.com/pioneerspacesim/pioneer/assets/4182678/25acaa21-61d7-4032-8a2d-023096ea3af1
(Watch on Youtube | Music: Distant Home by Diduuz)
A year in development brings with it plenty of new exciting features, but also many changes under the hood which are necessary to lay the groundwork for what is to come.
New games are now launched from a new menu that exposes the starting state. Players can now fully see what conditions they will be starting in, which also allows developers to initialize a game with parameters of interest to test. The New Game Window also laid the technical groundwork for recovering old saves from the 2023-02-03 release, more on this further down.
Due to Pioneer's partially procedurally generated content, a new release would usually break old game saves. This occurs because sampling the random number generator differently causes the resulting universe to be different, which could cause the space station the player was docked at to no longer exist. This forced each such release to block existing saves from loading. Well no more! As of this release there is now a mechanism that lets players recover old save games, by starting a new game with the progress of the saved one, where variables that could not be resolved become free for the player to set manually. Note: active missions are not recovered, finish them in your old Pioneer install if you want to, before loading the save into this new Pioneer version.
From now on you can land on the orbital stations manually, and the autopilot handles landings much more gracefully too. Although it can be done without any flight assist, it is recommended to use the cruise control and rotation matching functions of the flight computer to avoid fender-benders.
This release packs a GUI System Editor, that lets anyone customize existing procedurally-generated systems or design entirely new systems without editing any code. The development team would love if the players create new custom systems and contribute them for inclusion into the core game. This also means all custom systems should now be authored in JSON, through the GUI tool, rather than via hand-written lua-files, which are now deprecated. See wiki for documentation.
For those players who like to take notes about their career as a galactic merchant or mercenary, the flight log has been overhauled. It now supports sorting, filtering, and exporting the flight log to an HTML file.
New in this release is an alternate rendering method for planet and gas giant atmospheres which calculates the real-life Rayleigh / Mie scattering equations to produce more realistic atmosphere colors under all conditions. The version in the release is still experimental - the differences between e.g. a Nitrogen-Oxygen and a Methane atmosphere are not taken into account, and distant terrain rendering is still using the old atmosphere calculations. To turn it on, scroll through the scattering menu under settings.
There are many other changes, as is evident from the list below. Some notable are new textures for one of the the ground stations, planet rings being in shadows of the planet, trade ships now being less reckless when hyper jumping out, mission deadlines re-balanced, three new music tracks, and planned hyper jump route is now saved across sessions.
There are also many changes under the hood, but for brevity we refrain from listing them. Briefly, they include things like: code optimizations, render optimizations, improved compilation time and new API functions for modders to use. This will also be the first releases that provides an AppImage. See Changelog.txt for a complete list of all changes.
On the development team side, shortly after the last release (2023) robn handed over the all the infrastructure that he had been running for us for free. The change meant we now have new URLs to dev forum, wiki, API docs and a new dev docs page. Our forum and wiki are now hosted on a paid service, with annual cost of $75. If you want to contribute to the war chest, no donation is too small.
With this release, we've re-organized our CMake build scripts slightly, added CMake Presets, and introduced a new PROJECT_VERSION_INFO
variable to better identify the contents and version number of the build when triaging issues. For Windows and Linux developers using Visual Studio, VSCode with the CMake extension, or any IDE that supports CMake Presets, compiling the game should now be only a few clicks away.
Distribution packagers that build Pioneer without Git repository information available (or apply patches in a way that changes the git commit hash) are encouraged to set the PROJECT_VERSION_INFO CMake variable to a value that clearly identifies the source version the package is built from.
Fly safe!
Bugfixes are not necessarily relative previous 2023 February release, but rather reflects fixing features as they go into master branch.
Published by impaktor over 1 year ago
We are happy to bring you a release with many new exciting features and improvements: a new gorgeous ship, the Coronatrix Courier, two new cockpits, and a redesigned default cockpit for all other ships. City generation is now more efficient, and city layout produces much larger cities. Some station shipyards now have a paint shop, so you can give your rusty old space-bucket a custom paint job.
(A Blender render of the new Coronatrix and its cockpit)
(The new Xylophis cockpit, seen from in-game at Barnard's star)
(Mexico City in the morning)
The economy has seen a re-write to now also allow interplanetary trading: stations consume and produce goods, and demand will affect price, causing profitability of an over-used trade route to drop until the market returns to equilibrium.
After 11 years in hiatus, the Scout mission is back, now with special ship equipment, letting you take missions to scan a planet from meters above the surface or from orbit.
Also, our Info and Station screens now have a more consistent UI font size. Please also make sure to check your keybindings in the settings menu, and make note of new changes.
Long-range combat has been improved, by making missiles much smarter, and allowing beam lasers to aim where they should. Ships are now easier to control due to a new speed limiter and much improved cruise modes, and support for cockpit head-tracking and mouse zooming.
(Showing off the new ship control improvements, during development)
On the administrative side of things, robn has handed over his last responsibilities, which caused us to change the dev forum URL, and create a new wiki for developer documentation.
NOTE: this release version is not backwards-compatible with old savefiles due to major breaking changes to multiple gameplay systems.
Fly safe!
There have been many bugs fixed see, for a full list, see Changelog.txt, some of the more notable:
Published by impaktor over 2 years ago
The Pioneer developers have been busy since the 2021-07 summer release, and have made several major improvements to the game! Perhaps the most notably, the "oldUI" interface system has been completely removed from the codebase, replaced with a massively improved label rendering system for the Sector Map and the old System Overview screen being completely rewritten into the new System Atlas screen.
Similarly, the station Bulletin Board and Ship Equipment displays have been redesigned to show more pertinent information to the user and pave the way for future usability features.
This release features a major gameplay improvement: commodity stocking at stations has seen a refactor to remove an artificial profit-cap, which provides players with an increased economic incentive for flying larger bulk-cargo ships and finding a profitable commodity route tailored to their ship. We've also added a first iteration of dynamic stock depletion; in its current state it serves as an incentive for bulk traders to rotate between different stations when they have purchased all available stock of a commodity. This will be expanded upon in further releases!
On the graphical side of things, an internal refactor of Pioneer's rendering subsystem has slightly improved performance in drawcall-heavy scenes and opened the doors for developers to implement more complicated graphical effects. Following on from the last release, another ship has received a complete graphical overhaul, this time the Xylophis light shuttlecraft! It's available as a starting ship in the Barnard's Star scenario, and can be a quite economical package courier in the early stages of the game.
As always, a list of noteworthy changes and bugfixes is collected here; the full list is available in the Changelog.txt file distributed with the game.
Published by Web-eWorks about 3 years ago
We hope you will enjoy this summer release, bringing several major additions, most notably a total visual overhaul of the Sinonatrix, a total rebalance of cost and maneuverability for all ships, and systems now filled with merchants, busily making their way to their places of commerce, making pioneer a little less "lonely". As usual, we have made many tweaks and other additions, and hopefully more bugs fixed than new ones introduced.
As always, the full list of features, changes, and fixes can be found in Changelog.txt.
Published by impaktor over 3 years ago
First official release in a year, on the day, so suit up, and jump into your ship for an epic adventure into the infinite depth of space. As usual, please see changelog for the full list of features, code improvements, and bug fixes, but a selection focusing on what is noticeable for seasoned fellow pioneers follows.
Among the major changes, that you'll hopefully notice in-game, is the move of our UI to the more flexible Imgui library (which we call "PiGui"), something that's been ongoing for years, is now almost done. Another, is vastly improved combat, through aim assist; as well as improved trading, through completely re-balanced commodity prices. Something that might throw off seasoned players: we now have consistent use of MMB (Middle Mouse Button) for rotating camera in both worldview (i.e. cockpit) as well as in sector- and system view, rather than RMB. Other notable milestones are:
A selection of some of the more notable/important bugfixes, that we hope you never experienced in the first place.
Big thanks to developers, contributors, and players for keeping this going!
Published by impaktor almost 4 years ago
What's this, two Pioneer releases in one year? We have so many new things coming up that we decided to push out an early testing release ahead of the yearly Pioneer Day release.
Some (but by no means all) of the notable changes to test are:
Please play and test as much as possible, and report any bugs you find.
Have fun and fly safe!
Published by Web-eWorks over 4 years ago
Another year, another busy Pioneer development cycle. As always, you can read the full Changelog to see all of the work that's been done, but this time we're listing out some of the major improvements.
Published by impaktor about 5 years ago
Just a test.
Published by fluffyfreak over 5 years ago
One year since last build release, tagging and marking this as a release. Please see the change log for what's new, modified, improved, or nerfed. Enjoy!
(Also, alternative linux32 and linux64 download here)