At long last, Beta 2 is live! Please make sure that the title screen says beta 2 in the lower part of the screen.

Vista users with the NVidia 8600 may notice graphic corruption and or crashes when starting a new game from within a game. Shutting down the game and restarting it will help. This seems to be a driver issue and we will be contacting NVidia for help debugging it. If you experience this problem, please e-mail your debug.err as an attachment to gc2bugs@stardock.com with the title Vista NVidia Gfx corruption, and make sure to put text in the body of the e-mail so that the bug database doesn't block it.

+ NEW: The tournament "A Rock and Hard Place" is now enabled (scores will take awhile to show up in the list on the TournamentWnd)

Please note that you can only submit Tournament games if you win them, unlike Metaverse games (which are still disabled because I want people to focus on the Tournaments and general gameplay issues rather than trying to rack up points on the metaverse.)

+ NEW: Torians and the Korath are now enabled, along with their tech trees and improvements

+ NEW: Added and implemented new planet textures and height maps from Scott for special habitability planets

+ NEW: Fleet thumbnail icons will now show the top 3 ships.

+ NEW: Human tech tree adds new weapons techs

+ NEW: Weather Control Zenith implemented – improvements can now raise planet quality

+ NEW: 4 new icons/query images
+ DesecrationFactory1 (not implemented, for a factory that lowers planet quality)
+ Market3 (replacement for Trade Center)
+ WarCollege1 (not implemented, for an improvement unlocked by Terran's "Interstellar War College" tech)
+ WeatherControl1 (image for the Arcean's weather control imp)

+ NEW: Images for Wretched Harvester and Aul Incinerator

+ NEW: First batch of LogicSequence's planet textures into the game
+ 4 radioactive
+ 4 barren
+ 2 toxic
+ 3 good
+ 3 poor (that will eventually be in the unimplemented 'Medium Class' texture group)

+ NEW: Tech Tree Screen now displays the ship components that are unlocked by a tech

+ NEW: Tech Tree Screen now has tooltips for the icons in the tech nodes

+ NEW: Ellipsis icon on tech tree screen will display a tooltip that lists all of the items not displayed by the icons

+ UPDATED: Initialize WillingnessToTrade at 50 (0 means they won’t trade, 100 means they love to trade).

+ UPDATED: Arcean Tech Tree updated with Willingness to trade values on their techs

+ UPDATED: Several new ship components for the Arceans

+ UPDATED: New planetary improvements for Drengin

+ UPDATED: Lots of new tech added (too long to list)

+ UPDATED: Tech tree screen: techs that allow colonization of new planet types show icons for that planet type

+ UPDATED: Tech tree screen: techs now show icons for the ship components that they unlock

+ FIXED: Bug in determining height of planet height map from file name

+ FIXED: Bug that caused overlapping techs in tech screen

+ FIXED: Lockup when invading a planet

+ FIXED: Bug where a tech in the Korath tree (that was also in techtree.xml) set to require a new tech that was defined only in the Korath tree. Since the required tech appeared later in the file, the requirement was not found when the tech was loaded, so its requirements were set to None, and it appeared in the wrong place on the tech tree.

+ FIXED: AI evaluates tech trades more intelligently, more use of the Willingness to trade variable.

+ FIXED: Bug where some planets would still have generated textures

+ FIXED: Bug where if you traded for a tech that was in your tech tree, it would not display in the correct location on the tech tree screen

+ FIXED: Bug where empty line would appear in combat viewer battle log after first round if neither fleet/ship had an atlas-type component

+ FIXED: Minor races will now use DefaultTechTree for their tech trees

+ FIXED: Bug where background on tech tree screen did not pan

+ FIXED: Centering of icons on tech tree screen

+ FIXED: Bug where if planet screen was open when you colonize a planet, the planet screen would not update properly and display the wrong map and planet data.

+ FIXED: Bug where minor races would not get unique tech trees

+ FIXED: Graphical bug on tech tree screen when zoomed out. Techs where the line came out the bottom would have disconnected lines.

+ FIXED: Missing tooltips

+ FIXED: Crash when destroying colony with an agent on it

+ FIXED: Navigation Centers

+ FIXED: Incorrect upgrade targets for the Arenas and the Ultimate Energy Feeding Center

+ FIXED: Bug that was causing the negative influence bonuses to be interpreted as really large positive values

+ FIXED: Modified a lot of code to account for possible negative improvement values (huge headache)

+ FIXED: Going to StarportWnd from PlanetWnd via ColonyList

+ FIXED: Bug with removing hardpoint data, which would have caused stuff to hang around in memory too long, and sometimes a crash

+ FIXED: Added code to update race config files if the version doesn't match the current version

+ FIXED: Crash caused by AI not being able to find model for a user designed ship after it takes over a planet that is about to complete a ship

+ FIXED: Seilore's bug where right clicking on a planet to set as a destination didn't do anything, the root cause of which may have also caused the bug where ships lose their destinations or fail to go to rallypoints

+ TWEAK: There are now default thumbnails for the ship components, which makes the loading a little faster.

+ TWEAK: Added warning message to debug.err if loading a saved game from Dread Lords or Dark Avatar

+ TWEAK: Tourism is now worth 10X as much as it was in Dark Avatar.

+ TWEAK: Players now only start out with 3,000 instead of 5,000 (they have lots more money because of the tourism change)

+ TWEAK: The starting game year has been changed to 2227 to match story.

+ TWEAK: Slight increase in ship maintenance cost because money in Twilight is more plentiful.

+ TWEAK: Time to initialize planet surfaces has been reduced

+ TWEAK: Planets now choose their textures using a new height map system. There is still a data/height maps/ folder. In this folder there are .raw files with one of the following naming formats: (in all of these, the first # is a number. And the #s after the w and h represent the width and height of the height map (respectively)

PlanetQualGood_#_w#_h#.raw (Good planets, class 6 and up. )

PlanetQualPoor_#_w#_h#.raw (Poor planets, class 1 – 5 )

PlanetBarren_#_w#_h#.raw ( barren planets )

PlanetRadioactive_#_w#_h#.raw ( radioactive planets )

PlanetOceanic_#_w#_h#.raw ( oceanic planets )

PlanetToxic_#_w#_h#.raw ( toxic planets )

PlanetHeavyGravity_#_w#_h#.raw ( heavy gravity planets )



+ TWEAK: For each of the raw files, there is a corresponding .png in \gfx\planets. The .png however only has the first part of the name (up to the _w ) For example if the raw file was PlanetQualGood_24_w512_h256.raw, the png would be PlanetQualGood_24.png


+ TWEAK: There are other raw files there that are used for home planets or specific planets (like mars) which are specified in CustomPlanets.xml

+ TWEAK: Fixed typo in "First Time Colonization" event text

+ TWEAK: Added code to make sure that the ship that needs to be skipped gets selected