Paragon Alpha 8 final has been released! Alpha 8 has seen significant work on improving the underlying functionality of the engine, including a significant re-write of the renderer (with improved shader support), multiple enhancements to the AI and integration of enhanced crash reporting capabilities that will help us to locate and fix bugs much more quickly from here on. On the art front there have been upgrades to existing assets as well as several new ships and cockpits added to the game For the upcoming Alpha 9 we're planning to focus on graphical and gameplay enhancements including improvements to the HUD, new shield and fuel mechanics, a greater degree of settlement variety and further development of factions. Summary of Alpha 8 Changes: Art:

• New ships, including the medium class Unitech Long Range Explorer
• New cockpits
• New megastation hangar and re-modeled exterior
• New transit drive sound effects
• Changes to megastation textures and a few more minor modifications to assets.

• New Transit visual effects (active when post-processing is enabled)
• Better ship thruster visual effects
• Lighting changes
• New effects system with OpenGL 3.1 support
• Ships and stations moved over to pattern based paint markings system
• Crashes produce crash dumps for debugging purposes that we can use to reproduce the crash in the debugger. described here

• New AI now handles all docking actions
• Lots of AI improvements and moving NPC ships to new AI
• Disabled piracy status on ship-ship collisions

• Better crosshair and lock reticle
• Autopilot/Comms UI changes

• Fixed an issue causing crash when exiting hyperspace
• Fixed issue causing messages to repeat in message log
• Fixed instability issues caused by dlls with mixed visual studio versions
• Fixed crash caused by perlin noise functions overflowing
• Fixed crash caused by NPCs trying to fly around invalid bodies
• Fixed issue that sometimes caused background in intro not to get rendered
• Fixed issue with switching post processing on/off
• Fixed issue with post processing causing a random crash on some machines
• Correct version of Visual Studio 2013 runtime is now deployed with Paragon.
• Fixed LUA crash that happens when switching to equipments tab if the language is non-english. Any string constants that are not defined by that specific locale will use english constants as fallback.
• More external shared dependencies for linux have been included in the release following reports that libpng12 was missing.