FreeOrion

FreeOrion v0.3.10 has been released for Windows XP. kroddn has also produced statically-linked Linux binaries, but these aren't on sourceforge yet as of this writing. This is an unstable development update, with various new features, but also various bugs.

Changes since the last release include:
-Toggles to turn off galaxy gas rendering and optimized star rendering that might cause problems for people with older video cards.
-Various art additions, including ship parts.
-Updated AI scripts.
-Removed the very verbose usage / command line output when outdated config.xml is present, and allowed the game to keep running in this case, just ignoring any invalid entries in the file.
-Various Design screen UI improvements.
-Improved default layout on the tech screen.
-Various tech / content additions. You now need a shipyard to build ships, and start with one in your home system.
-New panel of military-related indicators on the sidepanel, for things like shields and fleet supply range.
-Ship hulls and parts can now be given effects, and some have had some added to do things like give ships more fuel capacity.
-Tweaked how meter estimates are recalculated after focus changes, hopefully to improve some reported horrendously long delays after changing focus in long / big games. (Feedback on this would be appreciated)
-Various translation updates.
-A selector on the galaxy setup screen now allows one to select how many AIs are in new single player games.
-Added a preliminary list view to the tech screen.
-Ships now require and consume fuel while moving, and get it replenished when not moving in a fleet-supplied system, which are indicated by the scrolling dashed lines emanating from systems. Fleets now have a fuel indicator on their panels in the fleets window. (Some of the aforementioned bugs are related to fleet movement as a consequence of this).
-Various other bug fixes (and additions).

FreeOrion v0.3.11 has at last been released for Windows XP. A mostly-statically linked version is also available for Linux.

Changes since the last release include:
-Fixed effect accounting, seen on tooltips for meter icons for planets on the sidepanel, so that newly-created buildings take effect immediately.
-Gave ships in fleet window fuel indicators.
-Fixed new colony starvation bug.
-Added tooltips to part icons on design screen.
-Various translation stringtables were updated.
-Added a MoveTo effect that can be used in techs or buildings to move ships, whole fleets, planets or buildings around the galaxy map.
-Star graphic updates.
-Fixed route-length calculations for moving fleets.
-Fixed bug where not enough systems were generated to fit the requested number of AI players. Now extra systems are generated when appropriate.
-New and modified tech icons.
-Fixed incorrectly drawn fleet move lines that occured in some situations.
-Added initial, limited, implementaiton of coloured starlanes along which empires can exchange resources. Lanes are coloured half-way to the next system if the starting system could propegate resources further, but is being blocked by a blockade or the next system being unexplored.
-Modified food and minerals distribution and stockpiling to be limited by which systems are connected and able to share resources.
-Added a few options on the UI tab for the galaxy map. Can now disable background stars and galaxy gas rendering, can disable optimized system rendering, and can turn turn on or off resource-sharing and fleet-supply lane colouring. Can also adjust the size of lane colouring.
-Made it possible to refer to other stringtable entries in strings. [[STRING_NAME]] will be replaced with the string with the appropriate other string inside another stringtable entry.
-Highlighted the buttons at the top right of the map screen to indicate which of the various sub-screens are open (Research, SitRep, Menu, Design and Production)
-UTF-8 stringtable text endcoding was added, allowing non-latin text (eg. cyrillic) to be rendered. Some glitches in this remain, however.
-Removed log4cpp dependency
-Various other minor bug fixes and tweaks.

FreeOrion v0.3.12 has at last been released for Windows XP.

Changes since the last release include:
- New (barely started) Ogre-based 3D combat tech demo. Run FreeOrion as "freeorion --tech-demo" to give it a test drive. OpenGL 2.0 is now required to run FO.
- New "Quick Start" main menu option. It starts a game immediately using your previous settings (or the default settings if you haven't run FO before).
- Fixed crashes on renaming fleets and right-clicking the rename ship popup menu.
- Fixed crashes on enqueueing more production points than available and when displaying very small numbers in the UI.
- Made it possible to start a single-player game with zero AIs. You can now play SimGalaxy.
- Added black outlines around system names on the main map to increase readability.
- Added a tooltip that shows system resource production and consumption.
- Misc. tweaks to the SidePanel layout.
- Added some strings missing from the German translation.
- Added --external-server-address parameter (used with --force-external-server) to FO, allowing FO to run off of a remove server and start a new game there.

FreeOrion v0.3.13 has been released. For the first time, we are simultaneously releasing with Windows, statically-linked Linux, and Intel Mac OSX installers all available.

Changes since the last release include:
* Various incremental improvements to the combat tech demo, some visible (asteroids) and some not.
* New fleet icons that indicate the type and size of a fleet and point in the direction of travel when not at a system, with various options to control how they are displayed
* Different arrangement of fleet icons around systems
* Scanline-like fog of war indicators over system icons, which can be disabled in options
* Reorganized UI colour options to make more sense and remove redundancies
* Added circles around systems that have known starlanes connected to them
* Fixed bug with irregular galaxy star placement
* Significant AI script improvements: AIs explore, research, build ships, colonize and are aware of fuel range limits.
* Added a map distance scale indicator, with option to turn off
* Changed positioning of fleet icons moving between systems to be squished (slightly) into the space between system rings, so there is always a ship-icon-free space around the star / within the system ring
* Added scripting support for defining various properties about ship parts and hulls in text files, including variou statistics about ship weapons
* Added indicators on map to show which fleet icon(s) contain(s) the selected fleet(s) in the active fleets window
* Added indicators along fleets' move lines to show the positions they will be on future turns, up to their final destination ETA
* Changed fleet move lines to use scrolling dots rather than stippled lines
* Made ships passing through a system that can supply fuel at any point during a turn get refueled, rather than the previous requirement of starting a turn in a system to get refueled, and using up 1 unit of fuel to depart a system that has fuel supply.
* Fixed some issues with meter estimates when loading saves
* Fixed issues with various lists in game not automatically repopulating themselves when something about their contents changed
* Shrunk the size of asteroid "planet" panels on sidepanel
* Made system and planet names have italics, underlines and bold to indicate homeworlds, shipyards and capitols, respectively
* Fixed some effect description parsing issues
* Made the Imperial Palace building set the empire's capitol
* Made techs cost nontrivial RP and turns, since many people objected to the 1 RP and 1 turn development costs that were present
* Added switches in a few source files to make techs, buildings and ships quick and cheap to build or research, without needing to make changes to their definition text fiels
* Updates to Russian, German, Polish, French translations
* New Finnish translation
* Made the fleets window resizable and changed the information displayed on ship and fleet panels and in the fleet window itself
* Added tooltips to meter statistic icons on fleet panels in fleets window
* Added parsing code and text files to define or list the techs, ship designs and fleets that empires are given at the start of a new game
* Added a new Optical Scanner ship part
* Moved some config files around to a directory determined at run time, so that nothing is expected to be in the working directory, making things work better on Linux in particular
* Made colony ship colonist capacity / new colony population depend on the capacity of the colonization ship parts in the ship design
* Added backgrounds behind ship parts on design screen to indicate the types of slots those parts can be placed in, and added matching slot graphics to indicate what parts can be put in them
* Made planet panel selection work anywhere on the planet panel when the production screen is open
* Fixed planet autoselection when the production screen is open, hopefully eliminating confusing cases where no planet was selected and people couldn't figure out how to build something
* Made the selected planet and other selectable planets much more obvious on the production screen, by making it brightly outlines, and making unselectable planets have a gray background
* Added a new Orbital Drydock building that's needed to produce some ship hulls. The homeworld starts with one, but building more requires some research. Adding this building means that colony ships can be built at the homeworld at the start of the game, which was previously not possible, leading to confusion for new players
* Improved network connectivity on Win32 systems
* Updated fonts, allowing more non-latin characters such as Ł
* Added Mac XCode project files to SVN
* Fixed problem where the sidepanel wouldn't return to the state it was prior to ending a turn or opening and closing the research, production or design screens
* Added a right-click popup menu to the options screen colour selectors, that lets one revert a colour to its default value
* Increased the health on adequate and good planets, so that adequate planets actually grow before health research is done. This lets some AI colonies grow that were previously stuck at their initial population.
* Added some error output to console if config.xml writing fails, hopefully to help figure out some issues with Russian and Greek language Win32 systems that are getting "Invalid UTF-8" crashes