Latest FreeOrion 0.4.1 Released

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Geoff the Medio
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Posts: 13586
Joined: Wed Oct 08, 2003 1:33 am
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Latest FreeOrion 0.4.1 Released

#1 Post by Geoff the Medio »

FreeOrion v0.4 has been released for Windows and Intel Macs.

Changes since the last release include:

New Features / Improvements:
  • Further reduced turn processing times.
  • Added ship repair.
  • Split LifeFrequency galaxy setup setting into separate Monster and Native Frequencies.
  • Added lists of planets and fleets to Empire encyclopedia entries.
  • Disabled order issuing on various screens between turns, which should avoid potential crashes.
Balancing:
  • Simplified the tech tree.
  • Adjusted stealth and detection values for monsters and early ship hulls. This helps avoid sudden appearances of ships in player systems, battles, and resulting loss of ship messages without warning.
  • Imperial palace now adds +10 to the capital planet troop meter.
  • Switched research output to be population based.
  • Added ship shield regeneration when they have not recently fought in battles.
Content:
  • Added techs for increasing the size of troop garrisons.
  • Added new 'Planetary Defense' tech catagory
  • Combined some theory techs with their application to simplify the tech tree.
  • Made some techs, ship parts, ship hulls, and building types that had very large costs be officially not researchable or producible.
  • New Sitrep messages: when a planet is terraformed by the Terraforming building, and when a tame space monster is 'born'.
  • AI script updates
  • New default premade shipdesigns for empires.
Graphics:
  • Made companion stars always visibile in in sidepanel.
  • Added clearer fleet icons.
  • Made AI empires choose more distinctive colors.
  • Made structure meter icon distinct from health meter icon.
  • Added icons for some ship parts.
  • Added animated system selection indicators.
  • Replaced ground invasion overlay graphic.
GUI:
  • Sorted techs alphabetically in encyclopedia index.
  • Added a separate message for starting up AIs so any problems with that won't appear to happen during universe generation.
  • Hid unresearchable and unproducible items on the tech tree, production screen, and design screen.
  • Made map zoom with the slider smoother.
  • Removed separate fleet windows that opened when double-clicking a fleet in the main fleets window.
  • Limited messages window history to 100 lines.
  • Coloured fleet window icons with empires / monster colour.
  • Tweaked tech dependency arc positions.
  • Added tooltips to producible items in production screen list.
  • Added highlighting to show which producible items can be produced on the selected planet.
  • Made automatically adding parts to ship designs more flexible; parts will be moved around to accomodate the new one, if possible and necessary.
  • Improved in-game chat autocomplete.
Bugs:
  • Fixed problem with non-Latin font character rendering.
  • Fixed tamed monsters wandering off on their own initiative.
  • Fixed some crash bugs related to the Psychic Domination tech.
  • Fixed bug where the tech tree view reset every time a tech was added or removed from the queue.
  • Fixed / prevented crashes when font files are missing.
  • Fixed misplaced text on tech tree tech panels.
  • Fixed a crash occurring during tech tree layout.
  • Fixed centring on techs on tech tree.
  • Fixed issue that caused AIs to do nothing on OSX.
  • Fixed crash or graphical glitch ocurring when transferring all ships out of a moving fleet.

User avatar
Geoff the Medio
Programming, Design, Admin
Posts: 13586
Joined: Wed Oct 08, 2003 1:33 am
Location: Munich

FreeOrion 0.4.1 Released

#2 Post by Geoff the Medio »

FreeOrion v0.4.1 has been released for Windows and Intel Macs.

Changes since v0.4 include:

New Features / Improvements:
  • Players can control zero population planets or 'outposts'
  • Reworked stealth and visibility system. Empires now have a detection rating, and ships/planets have a detection range. Within range, detection strength is determined by the empire's detection ability. Outside range, there is no detection.
  • Specials now have stealth ratings, and may not be visible to empires with insufficient detection ability.
  • Removed minerals. Planets now just generate industry that is used for production.
  • Added an aggression setting for fleets, which can be toggled between passive and agressive. Passive fleets try to hide and don't attack enemies. Aggressive fleets attack any enemy they can, and can block supply propegation.
  • Added very basic diplomatic system. Empires start at peace, and can declare war, propose, or accept peace with other empires. Battles between empires happen only when at war. Diplomacy is controlled through right-click menu on the players list.
  • Made unarmed ships unable to block supply propegation.
  • New 'Game Concepts' section of the 'Pedia to help exlain the game.
  • Macro support in script files.
  • Experimental AI process priority management on Windows builds, which will hopefully improve GUI performance at the start of turns in games with multiple AI players.
  • Many new sitrep messages
  • Many Tooltips are now more informative.

Balancing:
  • Reworked how poplation growth works. Food and health no long exist. Instead, planets can be set to "growth" focus to boost population directly. There is no longer any food distribution or starvation.
  • Rebalanced stealth & detection levels.
  • Balanced bonuses to population to max at 100
  • Flattened the distribution curve of star and planet types.
  • Increased cost of troop pods to make conquest less casual.
  • Made monsters nests last on average twice as long.
  • Halved the generation of floaters from forests.
  • Colony and Outpost bases (for in-system use only) can be built without shipyards.
  • Greatly weakend the Sentry and Sentinel
  • Increased the effectiveness of shields and armor by ~ 2x
  • Removed internal slot from basic small hull, but increased fuel capacity
  • Switched the premade colony and outpost ships to a medium hull, but increased the cost of the colony and outpost parts to compensate.
Content:
  • Fixed many spelling errors in various descriptions.
  • Updated many inaccurate descriptions.
  • Tweaked ShipDesign encyclopedia entries to show total cost instead of per-turn cost, to be consistent with buildings.
  • Translation updates, particularly Russian and French.
Species:
  • All species now have different aptitudes at resource production, ground combat & so on. A few have special stealth and detection abilities.
  • Sorry, currently very un-balanced.
  • 5 classes of species: Organic, Lithic, Robotic, Phototrophic, and Self-Sustaining. Population in each flourishes for different reasons. More differences planned.
  • All Homeworlds now provide a population bonus, and for some species, can be set to 'Growth' to provide population bonuses for colonies of the same species
  • Added Phototrophic species pick, which increases population with brighter suns.
  • Added Exobots, a constructable robot species.
  • Changed roster of playable species.
  • Acirema native colonies now occasionally produce ships, and have better defenses.
  • Additional minor species.
Monsters:
  • Greatly increased the strength of monsters.
  • Added Experimentor outpost which produces dangerous monsters later in the game.
  • These monsters may be overpowered for the time being.
  • Destroying/capturing this outpost is a victory condition.
  • New Asteroid Snail space monster
  • Added Nova Bomb and biological weaponry
Specials:
  • Adding 3 new growth Special Resources each for Organic, Lithic, & Robotic species.
  • Abandoned Colony special now works.
  • Added three Derelict system specials.
  • Added new stealthy planet specials, and stealth-making monsters.
  • Computronium Moons now have empire-wide benefit
Techs:
  • Removed Farming and Mining oriented Techs.
  • Reduced the number of different types of shipyards while increasing the cost.
Graphics:
  • All monster types now have unique icons.
  • Added unique graphics for each hull.
  • Unique graphics for more shipyards.
  • Added overlay for Ancient Ruins.
  • Added new fleet icon for outpost ships.
  • Assigned hull thumbnails to show in the sidebar of the design screen.
  • Improved the logic behind the choice of graphic to display for hulls and ship designs.
  • Disabled 'shininess' in sidepanel planet rendering, which wasn't working properly.
  • Hid map detection range circles for objects not visible to the player.
  • Made all resource indicators just show the available / produced amount, rather than also having a change prediction for some of them.
GUI:
  • Removed slot type and availability toggles on the design screen part palette. Now only available parts of all slot types are shown.
  • Renamed the 'Construction' meter to 'Infrastructure'.
  • Added some diplomatic status, and player type and status information icons to the players list.
  • Generate fleet arrival sitreps for all visible fleets, not just the player's own fleets.
  • Added basic combat damage sitreps.
  • Made top-of-screen toolbar not draggable again.
  • Rearranged military icons of planets to make troops more prominently displayed.
  • Adjusted display of numbers like 240 so they are shown as "240" instead of "0.24 k" in some cases.
Bugs:
  • Fixed bug where new fleets created by the player wouldn't appear in fleets window until the next turn.
  • Fixed memory leak / massive FPS drop when the sidepanel had a rotating planet control open and the system was repeatedly modified.
  • Fixed crash when adding new ship designs and ending the turn.
  • Fixed randomization of starting species in multiplayer lobby.
  • Fixed crash when enqueuing buildings with very low costs.
  • Fixed ordering of planets on sidepanel, which was by internal id number instead of orbit number, which lead to numbered planets appearing out of order.
  • Fixed crash generating cluster galaxies with few stars.
  • Fixed some crashes with test / temporary code in 3D combat testing.
  • Fixed issue where last tech on the queue wouldn't disappear when removed by the player.
  • Fixed broken pre-made ship fleet window icons.

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