Pioneer 20260907

What's new in 20260907

What began life as a simple bugfix release to fix the occasional surface-to-orbit terrain spike has grown with each passing month until it became the autumnal harvest bounty we set before you today. In this veritable cornucopia of new features you'll find major improvements to the flight HUD, new and improved Rayleigh-Mie terrain lighting for atmospheric planets, visible thruster exhaust trails and dust kicked up on planetary surfaces, smuggler's holds to hide your ill-gotten cargo, and more!
Visual Improvements
Rayleigh-Mie Atmospheric Terrain Lighting
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Thruster Plumes & Shield Heating
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User Interface
Flight Reticle and Radar Landing Aids
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We've completely revamped the flight UI, implementing a new local gravity display, current thrust-to-weight ratio display, and a thruster activity indicator. The radar has received the ability to display the docking pad you need to land on, and the central reticle now shows a line-and-tick helper to assist you in orienting your ship to the landing pad correctly.
Orbit Apoapsis / Periapsis Altitude Display
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All text elements of the flight display got upgraded to use our new shadowed text rendering tech, improving visibility while maintaining readability over bright surfaces. We also finally added a readout displaying your current Apoapsis / Periapsis height while you're in orbit.
Other Features
OpenAL
Pioneer has received a more modern audio backend using the OpenAL Soft library. Aside from nice technical improvements, the major features of this backend are support for Binaural Rendering (HRTF) for headphone users and a simulation of the Doppler effect that Pioneer was completely lacking.
Smuggler's Hold
A feature long-discussed among the development team has finally been added to the game - now you can install shielded cargo spaces in your empty passenger cabins, disguised as simple blank walls to fool any cops who come knocking on your airlock. These cargo spaces provide a certain amount of shielded cargo capacity which cannot be detected by a police scan. Beware though - if you have more illegal cargo than shielded hold space, you will still be caught and fined for all of the goods you are carrying.
Load Mission Cargo
If you dock at a station with no room in your cargo hold, you no longer have to undock and re-dock to pick up the mission cargo for someone who wants you to bring their belongings back to them. …

Full release notes »