Alpha3 changes

[shadmar]

(edit: adding all changes in to this post)

Not done yet but just keeping a log :

• New laser sound effect
• Quarter size arrival/dep clouds, color departure cloud orange.
• Let paragon use its own userdir, mod friendly does not interfere with pioneer or genesia.
• New ships always equips autopilot
• Remove retro firing, and reduce the overshooting autopilot.
• Show hyperspace jumps in minutes/seconds instead of days/hours (sector view)
• Sound effects for transit drive stage 2. (breaks savegames from Alpha2)
• Re added custom system : Firedrake (new hope)
• Jovians can be scooped by autopilot
  • works on gas giants lesser than 150 earth masses, but it is not guarranteed that autopilot manages to orbit the planet.
  • slightly changed atmosphere properties on gas giants, making them scoop friendly.
  • hydrogen is now reaction mass for fuel instead of water
  • ship will now automatic refuel during a scooping.
• Local parked traffic added, tradeships will now jump in low orbit instead of just above ground.
• New interface sound effect.
• New warning sound effect.
• HUD textures improved. New ship; Mining Pod (Mining Drone model added to game)
• New ship : Mining Pod
• New drone : Mining Drone.
• Shields are dimmed to be less intrusive
• Fulcrums added; artificial jump exit points in developed systems that override natural ones.
• New Model : Large Fulcrum
• New Sound: Fulcrum Activation
• Police are now scripted, backs off if fines are paid, you have a 20 second limit to pay fines before they attack.
• Starmap/sectorview now have an population indicator
• Added lights to ships and stations
• Added back in updated small starport for less populated worlds
• New ship names
• New ship; Utility Tender
• New ship; Omni Explorer
• All new city buildings
• Multiple older ships and stations retextured
• New missile and cargo models
• Different sized cities and starports based based on planet characteristics
• New mining pod model
• New ship; mining ship
• New ship; mining carrier
• 1st phase of big update to the space flight system completed.
• New HUD design
• Medium and large class ships now able to dock and undock from stations
• All ship statistics properly balanced
• New drives implemented to cater for all ship sizes, only drives appropriate to current ship appear for sale
• GLSL skybox support added to engine
• Persistent nebulas appear on a per sector basis
• add support for formation flying

[outridersol]

• New interface sound effect.
• New warning sound effect.
• HUD textures improved. New ship; Mining Pod (Mining Drone model added to game)

[shadmar]

• New ship : Mining Pod
• New drone : Mining Drone.
• Shields are dimmed to be less intrusive

[outridersol]

• Fulcrums added; artificial jump exit points in developed systems that override natural ones.
• New Model : Large Fulcrum
• New Sound: Fulcrum Activation

[shadmar]

• Police are now scripted, backs off if fines are paid, you have a 20 second limit to pay fines before they attack.

[shadmar]

• Starmap/sectorview now have an population indicator

[outridersol]

• Added lights to ships and stations
• Added back in updated small starport for less populated worlds (not yet active)

[outridersol]

• New ship names
• New ship; Utility Tender

[outridersol]

• New ship; Omni Explorer
• All new city buildings
• Multiple older ships and stations retextured
• New missile and cargo models

[outridersol]

• Different sized cities and starports based based on planet characteristics

[shadmar]

Maybe make a cutoff soon, do a week of intensive tests (play the game a couple of hours every night) fix eventual crash bugs and upload a alpha3?

[outridersol]

Definitely, we've got a ton of stuff in now. Ideally we can get the new travel system stuff in-game as well, but even if not we should definitely get something out soon.

Maybe start the freeze early this coming week and test from there.

[Salwan]

I'm planning to add the throttle down when transit gets interrupted, fixing the remaining travel system bugs, random session-persistent skybox per system and loading skyboxes directly from pngs generated by Spacescape to skip the converting to dds step. I will aim to get these done as soon as possible ideally before the freeze.

[outridersol]

• New mining pod model
• New ship; mining ship
• New ship; mining carrier

[outridersol]

• 1st phase of big update to the space flight system completed.
• New HUD design
• Medium and large class ships now able to dock and undock from stations
• All ship statistics properly balanced
• New drives implemented to cater for all ship sizes, only drives appropriate to current ship appear for sale
• GLSL skybox support added to engine
• Persistent nebulas appear on a per sector basis

[outridersol]

Ok, creating an alpha 3 checklist, when everything on it is done we must release :)

-balance ship attributes DONE -get skyboxes merged into master DONE -get new drives working so that newly rebalanced big ships can go places DONE -re-write some of the in-game text (no more "welcome to our little blue playpen" type stuff etc.) DONE -update changelog DONE

[outridersol]

• add support for formation flying

[outridersol]

Ok, alpha 3 checklist is complete, so time to start thinking about getting the release together;

Things to consider;

-Builds; we can do windows builds, obviously, and the game is now linux build ready, but we'll need to do a linux build as well (I don't have linux box myself), and I don't think we have anyone who can do a mac build at the moment.

-Release method; been meaning to look into the github releases system to see if it's worth using.

p.s. @shadmar did you want to get the gaia branch into this release, or is it still going to be a while?

[shadmar]

nah, gaia can wait, mining also.

however we should do some testing for a few nights, play the game, get around look for crashes or other stupid issues.

One paticular annoying bug os that the transit drive powerdown sound suddenly appareas in series out of nowhere.

[Salwan]

I thought I fixed that random transit finish sound! seems like something else is causing it, I will take a look..

[Salwan]

Ah yes I did but in pfs_planetarytransit, just pushed the fix to master

[outridersol]

@shadmar yeah, I suppose we should really :). So feature freeze for the release begins now, and we aim for a release on, say Thursday or Friday?

[outridersol]

Seems like most of the game breaking bugs have been squished, so I'm thinking release time perhaps today if there's no objections?

[Salwan]

Yes, no objections here :)

[shadmar]

No objections here either. :)

[outridersol]

Awesome! I can do the windows build and the update on indiedb which should do for now. @shadmar do you think you might have time to do a linux build over the weekend? As far as Mac goes I think we're still lacking someone who can compile, but hopefully we'll have a charitable volunteer come along like last release.

[shadmar]

yes, building the linux64 variant now on ubuntu.

I remember someone mentioning we lacked a dll in the dev builds, so it might be nice if we could test the windows version on a non visual studio computer before uploading.

[shadmar]

Building on ubuntu gives me errors :

/pioneer/pioneer-thirdparty/usr/include/assimp/matrix4x4.inl:311:55: warning: use of old-style cast [-Wold-style-cast]
Background.cpp: In destructor ‘Background::UniverseBox::~UniverseBox()’:
Background.cpp:40:9: error: ‘m_cubemap’ was not declared in this scope
Background.cpp: In member function ‘void Background::UniverseBox::Init(Graphics::Renderer*)’:
Background.cpp:48:2: error: ‘m_cubemap’ was not declared in this scope
Background.cpp: In member function ‘void Background::UniverseBox::Draw(Graphics::Renderer*)’:
Background.cpp:106:5: error: ‘m_cubemap’ was not declared in this scope
Background.cpp: In member function ‘void Background::UniverseBox::LoadCubeMap(Graphics::Renderer*, Random*)’:
Background.cpp:114:9: error: ‘m_cubemap’ was not declared in this scope

I might push some code to fix this.

[outridersol]

cool, nothing done yet, and I'll test the windows build on a fresh computer

[Salwan]

@shadmar I checked the code, do you have an idea what the issue is?

[shadmar]

it looks fine to me. so I'm abit clueless.

[outridersol]

Question; which file is it to change version name?

[outridersol]

np worked it out myself for once :)

[outridersol]

Looks like the release is going to have to wait until tomorrow.

@shadmar good catch, tried windows build on non dev windows 7 computer and it wouldn't run, wanted msvcr110.dll

Looks like the release is going to have to wait until tomorrow.

[shadmar]

I have removed the "dev" in in Alpha3 and added a tag + bumped vesion for Alpha 4 dev in master. If you want to checkout the Alpha 3 frozen version, just checkout the tag "ALPHA3" (also listed under tags in github) Master is now Alpha 4 dev.

As for linux, I have to check next week when back on work, I was unable to link sdl_image, source compiles and all but doesnt link on my box.

[outridersol]

Any thoughts on the msvcr110.dll issue? I looked it up and it seems to be related to not building properly so it's possible I'm doing something wrong, but i've got it set to release mode so I'm not sure what else to try.

[Salwan]

The issue with msvcr110 is that in this case windows 7 doesn't come with it installed, a possible solution is to require the user to download the runtime installer from here http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30679 and that's what games usually do during the setup process.

An alternate solution is to include the msvcr110.dll library with the game files so it can be found by the executable, the library is under a license that allows any individual file in the redistributable package to be included with any application. (reference: list of redistributable libraries from the runtime package http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/vstudio/hh857605)

The third possibility is that you could try lowering the runtime library in VS2012 to require version v100 (VS2010) or v90 (VS2008), one of them (or both) should come with a fresh install of Windows 7 so no new runtime library would be required. To do this go to project properties -> Configration Properties -> General -> Platform Toolset. But I personally don't advice it because v110 provides better compatibility for windows 7 and beyond.

[shadmar]

It's one of the drawbacks of building using VS, they need redistributed dlls.

On your "clean" box, try adding this to the pioneer folder (so we dont require additional download)

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/11319604/redists.rar

[outridersol]

Cool, thanks for the explanation. Anyway looks like putting the dlls in the folder did the trick. So we're ok to add the dlls to master then I guess?

[Salwan]

Yes, that's the cleanest solution :-)

[outridersol]

Last thing, is there a straightforward way to change the exe (process) name in VS2012?

[shadmar]

Pioneer.exe? Just rename it after compile (if I understood correctly)?

[outridersol]

I'm not that slow :D. No I mean the process name that shows up in the corner if you run the game windowed etc, that stays as "pioneer". I'd guess I need to rename something in the solution before compiling without messing up the linking. Not a big deal anyway, I'll poke around a bit.

[Salwan]

Oh the window title, there are two places: graphics/Graphics.cpp line 59 and Pi.cpp line 293 for video settings :) Changing both should do the trick I believe

[outridersol]

thanks, I'll have a try at that.

[outridersol]

yep, that did it, I take it it's ok to change it to that in master too?

[Salwan]

yes

[outridersol]

Alpha 3 uploaded and available! Nice work by everyone :)

[shadmar]

Linux64 build for alpha3, also contains the fix reported by Vuzz for starport_small :

http://www.jottacloud.com/p/fklippen/e5b045549ad04ed1aca33ee1ac339be6

[outridersol]

awesome, will upload.