The Pioneer development team are pleased to announce the release of
Pioneer Alpha 27. This month seems the introduction of our new (highly
experimental!) faction system. Also new cameras to see everything around
your ship, and the usual pile of tweaks and fixes. Full changelog and
builds for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (32 & 64-bit) are available from the download page.
New features
- Factions, with custom goods illegality and colour coding (#1505, #1567, #1562)
- New views (Left/Right/Top/Bottom, Cockpit Front/Rear) (#1454, #1539, #1544, #1564)
- The settings screen is now acessible from the main menu (#1187, #1512)
- There's now an option to enable texture compression (#1522)
Minor changes and tweaks
- Smooth zoom animation in World, System, Sector and Galactic views (#1170)
- Earth start location has returned to Los Angeles (in daytime now) (#1506)
- Player cash is shown on the 'Personal' page of the Info (F3) screen (#1525, #1500)
- Equipment listed on the Info (F3) screen is split over two columns (#1525, #1527)
- Explosions are now slower and more visible (#1543)
- Application icon for Windows builds (#1537, #1166)
Fixes
- Avoid icons in some ternary systems overlapping each other (#1510, #1511)
- Fix overlapping text for long system descriptions (#1494, #1498)
- Fix crash in SystemInfoView from leaking widget references (#1526, #1493)
- Clamp some newer terrain heights to non-negative values (#1534, #1530)
- Try to avoid placing starports where they will be covered by mountains (#1503, #7)
- Don't pass events through the load/save dialog to the widget below (#1547, #1553)
- Fix crash when old hyperspace cloud is shown after game load (#1552, #1551)
Script changes
- EventQueue, which was deprecated in alpha 26, has been removed (#1485)
- Orbital
phase (season) and rotational phase (time) can now be set in custom
systems with :rotational_phase_at_start and :orbital_phase_at_start
(#1506) - Thruster values in ship definitions are now all positive (#1536)
- New function Dev.SetCameraOffset to help find good cockpit camera offsets (#1130)
Internal changes
- Terrain generation thread now sleeps until being signalled (#1169)
- New C++ wrappers for Lua table manipulation and value persistence (#1438)
- Terrain patches are now rendered more efficiently (#1507)
- Many minor cleanups identified by valgrind (#1524)
- Copyright and license is now made explicit at the top of all code files (#1515)
- Max terrain height for heightmapped planets is computed more accurately (#1504)
- Code to detect supported video modes has moved to Graphics (#1535, #1385)
- Cleaned up UI view code for consistency and stability (#1528, #1558, #1547, #1557)
- Removed duplication in key bindings code (#1545)
- New view (DeathView) to deal with display after the player dies (#1543, #1540)
- Simplified terrain thread locking (#1495)
- Moved intro and tombstone out to their own cutscene classes (#1559)
There has been some changes to the keymap for this Alpha so drop by here to see the key list
