** Major Changes **

+ High Score List: Lets you keep track of scores on local games

+ New Governor 'Reroute Ships': Send All ships of a given type to a specific rally point. Colonies building the ship type will also change their rallypoint destination to the specified rallypoint.

+ New Governor 'Colony Reassignment': Switch military production on colonies going to a given rally point

+ Event Log: List that keeps track of the major events that occur throughout each game

+ Memory Optimizations: Tweaked several areas to cut down on memory usage, and stomped out some glaring memory leaks, allowing lower-end machines to run gigantic galaxies more efficiently (and improve performance across the board)

+ Lease and Maintenance Tab: Helps players to manage your weekly expenditures

+ Screenshot Hotkey: CTRL + 'PrintScreen' will now take a snapshot and store it in your 'My Documents/My Games/GC2DarkAvatar/Screenshots' folder

+ Anomalies Reappear: Survey ships are now of greater importance with the addition of re-spawning anomalies to the galaxy

+ Ability to Rename Stars: Button added for the renaming of...well...stars

+ AI Tweaks: Computer opponents should now put up a better fight

+ Improvements Tweaked: A value here, a new bonus there...several improvements are now 'more better' based on player feedback

+ Debug Output: Made debug.err always go in user defined data directory. This is to deal with problems encountered by people with limited user accounts and for consistency with Vista.


** Minor Tweaks **

+ Added standby mode for auto improve asteroids and auto survey ships.

+ Terran Alliance is now more inclined to focus on building larger starships.

+ Optimized AI sorting routines for better performance.

+ Spore module are more expensive.

+ Spore Weapons technology is more expensive.

+ Morale buildings are more powerful.

+ Capped the number of stars in a galaxy to reduce the amount of memory usage.

+ Whenever a planet changes ownership, any trade routes involving the planet are cancelled.

+ Made it so that the saved scoring information also saves mod name and description if mods are enabled.

+ If you update several planets, it will update all of them in the colony list.

+ Auto survey and auto improve standby modes are cancelled when you set an autopilot destination for the ship.

+ Changed the way that save games are saved so that you won't lose your previous auto save if you fail to save (due to out of memory, etc).

+ Fixed the sorting code in the governor's screen so that Nothing is always at the top.

+ Changed it so that all textures not generated by the game (like thumbnails) and not in dxpacks should be loaded (and flushed) by the resouce
manager, which should help keep memory usage down.

+ Made the AI mark its old designs as obsolete so that we can tell which ones it's not using more quickly.

+ Changed the code that cleans up the obsolete AI designs because it was letting the designs hang around in memory even after no ships were using it.

+ Auto attack is now canceled if UPIssue is preventing ship from attacking because of non-aggression UP issue.

+ Tweaked distribution of planet tile bonuses so that the starting home worlds are more likely to get bonuses distributed on them, but no more than 3 per planet.

+ Changed AI ship class naming convention so that if the AI designs new ships every week, it doesn't re-use the same class name, which can cause problems; the AI now tracks how many times it has designed a shiptype and uses that for the version number.

+ Blocked tiles map is now updated once per turn so that the code that uses it will be more accurate, reducing the chance of landing ships on anomalies, planets, etc.

+ Changed it so that the stacked ships and fleet windows recycle their entries so that they aren't constantly allocating and deallocating. The Stacked Ship context window will attempt to shrink the number of saved entries if it hasn't used the last max number in awhile.

+ Ships marked as destroyed are removed from the main list the first turn they are marked destroyed instead of waiting until they are deleted; this should fix crashes and prevent the AI from picking dead targets.

+ Added code to delete multiple ships at once from the maintenance tab.

+ The prompt to upgrade a starbase now lists what type of modules are available to build.


** Bugs Fixed **

+ Crash on some machines when star density is 0

+ Bug which caused animation in combat viewer to fire wrong weapon and/or fire at the wrong ship

+ Ship list entries were not being deleted when the ship was destroyed

+ Not all planet/ship list entries were being displayed

+ Mining base lines would not disappear if the base was destroyed because planet was traded or conquered.

+ The treasury display on the main ui was being constantly updated during the end of turn, thus causing slowdown

+ Rounding errors with bonus research production

+ Reduced some of the slowdown when moving a selected ship caused by updating the ship context area

+ Bug in Xeno Ethics that reset debt to 0 and converted the negative treasury balance to a lease

+ Took out some debug messages that were making debug.err files huge

+ Possible crash in ship components when removing old ship designs

+ Crash due to not checking the colonies for what ships they're building when checking if a ship class is still in use

+ Bug in the AI ship design code that was causing multiple ship designs to be created with the same exact name, which could cause memory leaks and graphical glitches

+ Bug that could cause AI ships to be created with the wrong ship class

+ Fleet context window was not updating after ship moved

+ Trade Window was not popping dialogs up over it

+ Cari squashed a spider last Wedensday

+ On the TradeWnd, the dialog warning that the other civ had no money was using the player's empire name

+ Bug in GraphWnd scaling code

+ Crash caused by AI ships holding on to ship destinations that were destroyed

+ Fixed bug where clicking on a ship would attempt to clear the selection flag for all ships in the galaxy, regardless of whether they were selected or not, causing lag

+ Bug where the turn button was always green even if there were ships with moves left

+ 'Weird minimap lines' bug

+ Starbases were being added to the moveable ship list, which caused the end of turn button to never come back

+ Bug where ignored races still could be chosen in the Opponentwnd

+ Planet thumbnails were not being reused even if the planet surfaces were identical

+ Removed unnecessary information to be saved in save games

+ In the Dread Lords campaign, when playing from Dark Avatar, it was not possible to continue due to it not finding the location of the next
mission's files

+ Bug in the Dread Lords campaign when playing from Dark Avatar where scenarios with the Dread Lords would never end because they had the incorrect race ID

+ Bug with activation code on Win98.

+ Changed code that writes out debug messages to be more threadsafe

+ Made it so that the dxpacks are kicked out of memory after the screen has been created if there are not multiple instances of the screen, like custom list box entries, thus reducing the amount of stuff kept in memory.

+ Changed screen code to make sure that the textures created for the screens do not create mip map chains, which are unnecessary in screens and just take up more memory

+ Crash caused by not being able to find strings in the flavor text files (text that appears when the AI talks to you)

+ XML data saved at the end of a game was not saving campaign data if it wasn't a metaverse game

+ Crash in the rendering code related to alpha-blended graphics

1.80a changes: