The Pioneer development team is pleased to announce the release of Pioneer Alpha 29. This month we have a rewrite of the infoview, including per-mission screens and player name/face customisations. Also we have over a hundred new factions with varying government types, and sector map updates to view them. Full changelog and builds for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux (32 & 64-bit) are available from the download page.
New features
- InfoView (F3) rewrite. Now has player name/face customisation and per-mission info screens (#1633, #1785)
- Economical autopilot. Trades fuel for time (#1582)
- Your ship's automatic rotation damping can now be turned off (#1570, #1156)
- Almost 100 new factions with varying government types (#1621, #1620, #1675, #1761, #1771)
- Zoom out the sector view to see a faction map (#1754, #1764, #1761, #1796, #1784)
- modelviewer can now dump models to Wavefront-format files (#1763)
Minor changes and tweaks
- Cargo scooping now only requires a collision against the ship rather than a specific part of it (#1674)
- Refueling now handled by Lua script (#1649)
- Fixed navigation lights on Courier, Trader, Meteor, Natrix (#1710, #1711)
- Added transparent backgrounds to planet icons to avoid some visual glitches (#1572)
- Don't clear hyperspace target when the current system is selected in the Sector View (#1662)
- Improved scanner draw performance
Fixes
- Workaround shader glitches for planets with zero temperature (#1712)
- Pioneer should not be marked as "Not Responding" on startup in Windows (MSVC builds only) (#1743)
- Fixed flight log crash after visiting 1000 stations
- Barnard's Star is now a member of the Federation (#1620)
- Reduce use of random number generator in sector generation. Fixes
super giant distribution and makes it go a little faster (#1765)
Script changes
- Custom Systems: Faction allegiance can now be set for custom systems (#1621)
- Factions: More than one government type with weighting can now be specified for a Faction (#1621)
- Factions: A radius attribute is available on the Faction object (#1660)
- debug.deprecated function to warn when a deprecated function is used (#1718)
UI changes
- Gradient container to provide a linear gradient background (#1682)
- Expand container to force a widget to fill available space (#1685)
- SmallButton widget (#1722)
- Icon widget (#1737)
- TabGroup controller
- Label exposes SetText to Lua (#1690)
- Box containers no longer take expand/fill flags (#1665)
- Margin can now apply a margin to a single side or direction (#1747)
- Grid can now have nil entries and has a ClearCell method (#1723, #1738)
- Functions taking a widget can now take a table with a 'widget' field (#1723, #1738)
- Widget.SetFontSize has been replaced with SetFont to select both type (normal
- or heading) and size (#1684)
- UI constructors for 'Single' widgets take an optional final argument specifying the inner widget (#1723, #1738)
- MouseMove event also receives relative mouse travel (#1767)
- Improved UI sliders/scrollbars (#1720)
- UI elements can now be disabled (#1749, #1721)
- More flexible UI widget size control (#1746)
Internal changes
- Wrapper to allow new UI to provide views for the old GUI system (#1691, #1755, #1756, #1759)
- Fix the LuaObject the Check/GetFromLua, which were swapped round (#1730)
- Models moved to data/lmrmodels to make space for new model system (#1762)
- Code cleanup in StarSystem (making several members private) (#1773)
