Pioneer Alpha 28 news

The Pioneer development team are pleased to announce the release of
Pioneer Alpha 28. This month sees the debut of our new UI engine (main
menu only so far), flight and combat improvements and a load of tweaks
and fixes. Builds for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (32 & 64-bit) are available from the download page.

New features

• First stages of the new UI system (#1586, #1625, #1623, #1622, #1642, #1634, #1639, #1651, #1615)
• Cockpit views have been removed (#1606)

Minor changes and tweaks

• Improve placement of cameras in Imperial Courier/Trader (#1599)
• Laser bolts are now faster (#1607)
• Thruster
  fuel (propellant) mass is now taken into account in the ship info view
  and shipyard screens, and in hyperspace calculations (#1574)
• Cargo jettison now handled by Lua script (#1443)
• Basic support for rendering Cyrillic characters (#1647, #1031)

Fixes

• Fix choice of non-/rotating initial frame in Space.SpawnShipNear (#1584, #1581)
• Hide thrusters in camera (not cockpit) views (#1578, #1577)
• Hammerhead's cockpit camera is now correct when the head is extended (#1594)
• Fix placement of docking bay text in 'nice_spacestation' orbital (#1154, #1605)
• Fix input (e.g., laser fire key) leaking from one game to the next (#1613)
• Don't generate an alert for ships parked in orbit near a station (#1636, #545)
• Allow non-ASCII characters in savefile names (#1632, #1627, #1482)
• Ensure frames for stars with no orbiting bodies are sufficiently large for the autopilot to compute orbits (#1645, #1626)
• Fix Achernar9 mass & radius (#1640, #1626)
• Ignore UTF-8 Byte Order Mark in text files edited with some Windows editors (#1661)

Script and model changes

• Separation and orientation is now specified for dual laser mountings (#1518)
• Removed Engine.userdir (deprecated since alpha 26) (#1602)
• Added StarSystem.faction attribute and Faction object to get information about a system's faction (#1568)
• Removed Ship.Jettison, added Ship.SpawnCargo (#1443)
• Ship.flavour
  attribute and Ship.SetFlavour method to fully customise the ship
  model's appearance. Ship.SetPrimaryColour and Ship.SetSecondaryColour
  are now deprecated (#1637, #526)
• New attribute Ship.shipId can be passed to ShipType.GetShipType. Ship.shipType is now deprecated (#1589)

Internal changes

• Code clean-up in the handling of world view cameras (#1601)
• All file access operations now go through FileSystem (#1632)