From Release notes from pioneer: link to original post

We are happy to bring you a release with many new exciting features and improvements: a new gorgeous ship, the Coronatrix Courier, two new cockpits, and a redesigned default cockpit for all other ships. City generation is now more efficient, and city layout produces much larger cities. Some station shipyards now have a paint shop, so you can give your rusty old space-bucket a custom paint job.

(A Blender render of the new Coronatrix and its cockpit)

(The new Xylophis cockpit, seen from in-game at Barnard's star)

(Mexico City in the morning)

The economy has seen a re-write to now also allow interplanetary trading: stations consume and produce goods, and demand will affect price, causing profitability of an over-used trade route to drop until the market returns to equilibrium.

After 11 years in hiatus, the Scout mission is back, now with special ship equipment, letting you take missions to scan a planet from meters above the surface or from orbit.

Also, our Info and Station screens now have a more consistent UI font size. Please also make sure to check your keybindings in the settings menu, and make note of new changes.

Long-range combat has been improved, by making missiles much smarter, and allowing beam lasers to aim where they should. Ships are now easier to control due to a new speed limiter and much improved cruise modes, and support for cockpit head-tracking and mouse zooming.

(Showing off the new ship control improvements, during development)

On the administrative side of things, robn has handed over his last responsibilities, which caused us to change the dev forum URL, and create a new wiki for developer documentation.

NOTE: this release version is not backwards-compatible with old savefiles due to major breaking changes to multiple gameplay systems.

Fly safe!

Major Changes and New features

• New ship: Coronatrix Courier (remodel and conversion of the Amphiesma) (#5462)
• Add custom two-seater cockpit for the Xylophis (#5373)
• New, more detailed default cockpit model (#5368)
• Add bespoke cockpit for the Sinonatrix (#5370)
• Enable in-system trading between different stations (#5474)
• New mission type: perform orbital or surface scans of a body for large rewards (#5433)
• Add station stock and demand, with impact on commodity prices (#5474)
• New sidebars and cargo display in the Flight UI (#5431)
• Massively expanded and improved spaceport city generation (#5430)
• Improved lead calculation for pulse and beam weapons (#5417)
• New follow-target and follow-orient flight control modes (#5371)
• Add player-controllable flight speed limiter (#5371)
• New radial menu for autopilot hold-orientation functions (#5371)
• New paintshop customization interface for stations (#5342)
• Adding the new and fixed patterns and texture to ships (#5347)
• Display thruster plumes in cockpit view for enabled ships (#5370)
• Metal creaking sound feedback under high acceleration (#5335)
• Add cockpit headtracking, mouse zoom and smoothing (#5460)
• Improved missile targeting to make them significantly more dangerous (#5472)

Minor Changes

• Implement select target and cycle hostile contact buttons (#5429)
• Nav target icons indicate whether the target is on the other side of a body (#5438)
• Display station tech-level in System Map info panel (#5439)
• Added more varied and interesting donation mission titles (#5445)
• Anti-aliased rendering of ship ID labels (#5459)
• Player starts with a Coronatrix at sol (#5462)
• Add interface to configure joystick axes and deadzones (#5477)
• Allow treating joystick axes as "half axes" (e.g. gamepad triggers) (#5477)
• Increase trade-in value of ships from 50% to 65% (#5475)
• Increase amount of credits granted at Mars and New Hope starts (#5474)
• Load mods from unpacked directories as well as zip files (#5432)
• Improve LuaTimer per-frame performance (#5453)
• Allow model files to reference textures in other folders (#5459)
• Add a model hierarchy view to the ModelViewer (#5459)
• Fuel / cargo scooping is now moddable by Lua (#5389)
• Cargo life support expiration is now handled in Lua (#5389)
• Refactor input binding widget to allow binding key chords (#5371)
• Add axis input to select radial menu options with gamepad (#5371)

Bugfixes / Tweaks

There have been many bugs fixed see, for a full list, see Changelog.txt, some of the more notable:

• Increased equipment capacity and tank size of Sinonatrix (#5472)
• Fix hostile ships running away from the player and never engaging (#5436)
• Fix saves with invalid ships causing menu errors (#5480)
• Fix tradeships becoming unresponsive and filling all station pads (#5456)
• Fix shading of Vlastan Library building (#5483)
• Fix lodos missing a gun mount tag (#5486)
• Fix station pads being assigned wrong bay indicies (#5488)
• Fix undefined behavior when clearing joystick axis bindings (#5415)
• Fix joystick axis reporting invalid joystick value when cleared (#5415)
• Fix Search and Rescue (SAR): fix refueling mission (#5383)
• Fix SAR allowing ships without suitable passenger capacity (#5413)
• Fix SAR missions generating invalid configurations (#5446)
• Fix SAR missions not giving the player enough time to reach the target (#5446)
• Fix potential to buy more than the available amount of a commodity (#5413)
• Fix crash when opening System View in hyperspace (#5428)
• Fix MusicPlayer crashing when music ends on sector view while in hyperspace (#5425)
• Fix cargo life support not being correctly handled (#5419)
• Fix catastrophic rotation after undocking from space station (#5422)
• Fix ship having no gun cooling after selling laser cooler (#5426)
• Fix shield recharging being disabled after selling shield booster (#5434)
• Fix broken Scoop mission, due to onCargoDestroyed event not triggered (#5407)
• Fix illegal scoop missions didn't spawn saleable goods (#5446)
• Fix randomly-generated background stars being invisible (#5390)
• Fix docked music not playing (#5378)
• Fix Flight Log use game start time instead of the Jan 1 3200-based Game.time (#5263)
• Fix Flight Log not being saved (#5498)
• Fix ship passenger cabin capacity not being shown when buying a ship (#5439)
• Fix SolFed homeworld was pointing at Shanghai instead of Mars (#5439)
• Fix auto-route button routing to the wrong body in the target system (#5435)
• Fix high-priority messages not interrupting timewarp (#5446)
• Fix incorrect message when landing at ground stations (#5450)
• Fix an issue that duplicated BBS adverts when autosaving (#5456)
• Fix several crashes when changing player / model debug flags (#5459)
• Fix UI error when pumping fuel in hyperspace (#5455)
• Fix UI tooltips having extremely inconsistent font sizes (#5454) (#5475)
• Fix Terrain generation bug, making high altitude terrain lack detail (#5498)
• Fix memory leaks (#5495)
• Fix Skipjack textures (#5496)
• Fix no crew at start (#5515)
• No negative times in BBS (#5515)
• Fix distance to planet surface being calculated relative to body center (#5515)
• Default flight roll keys to Q/E (#5515)
• Armed recon mission informs the player when they've reached the target area (#5522)