This week has been rather busy. We posted another beta last week, so we had the usual upsurge of activity on the forums. We've had very few new bug reports, and people are very pleased by the beta.

One thing that is confusing them is that most of them have turned off their prompts so that they don't realize that they are spending money when they automatically build a starbase.

A few people have been having problems with saving scenarios they make with the scenario editor. One of them has Windows 98, so it may be a Windows 98 thing because so far we haven't reproduced it here. I tried reproducing it on Kris's test machine with Windows ME, but it worked fine. I have no idea what could be causing the problem, though.

I finally checked all my code in today. There were a lot of changes that I'd made since beta 2 that I hadn't checked in at first because I wanted to test it more, then because I couldn't remember all the changes that I made. So I went through with BeyondCompare today and ran diffs on all my modified code so that I could make a list of all my changes and verify that it was safe to check in. Here's a list:

+fixed divide by zero crash in AICivilization (morale of the Drath was 0)
+changed campaign screens cancel and done buttons to back and continue.
+fixed crash in custom minimap
+fixed bug where custom minimap couldn't find its gfx
+fixed crash when loading game with minor race screen open
+added some cheat keys
+added debug message to submit screen
+fixed bug where you could build starbases on resources even if you didn't have enough money
+fixed bug where no gfx showed up for political party descriptions
+fixed bug where gamescreen unhid after end of campaign
+fixed bug where unexplored starbases were showing up on the minimap because of their resources
+removed AP code from old opening menu, race setup screen
+fixed bug where I-League wasn't showing up on minor races screen
+added minor race option
+added description box for custom game list
+added code to make sure that player setup uses settings from prefs.ini and not last campaign mission
+added codd to initialize race setup screen from scenario
+fixed fonts for new races on race setup
+added code to make sure that race setup uses settings from prefs.ini and not last campaign mission
+fixed difficulty setting calculation for if not all races are enabled
+fixed bug where stars loaded from map weren't being indexed correctly
+fixed bug where resources loaded from map were overflowing the resource array (max # resources == 100 now)
+fixed bug where minors were taking over stars that were allocated by custom map
+made sure that all assigned stars in custom maps create their colonies
+made sure that initial ships get assigned home colonies
+fixed save game offset bug caused by terror stars destroying stars and deleted rallypoints
+fixed bug where techs with IDs higher than impossible tech couldn't be accessed
+added functions to grab just one data element (string or int) from a file that may be obfuscated using GetPrivateProfile functions
+end of scenarios now use end game text from the scenario file
+hooked up campaign screens to new opening menu
+added delete button to save game dialogs
+added description box to scenario list
+fixed team display on campaign screen

Some of that stuff went into beta 3 since I put together the build, but mixed in there are some of the things that I've done since then like the description for the scenario list.

I've mostly been forgetting to write my blogs because I leave it until the end of the day, and I'll decide to do it at home after dinner, but then I get caught up in non-work stuff.

Today I'm going to make a separate function to calculate difficulty for scenarios that will take teams into consideration. I still need to do more testing on campaigns, and Brad just e-mailed me some new maps and scenarios. There's also a bug that's been around since the new races went in that the minors aren't using the correct graphics. I have it mostly fixed, but a few of the logos are showing up with what look like palette problems on the foreign policy screen. Also, apart from the four minor races that start at the beginning of the game, none of the other minors get their logos on their stars. I dug around on Alex's old hard drive and found the raw graphics and made a bunch of targa files in preparation to encode those logos. I still have to create alpha channels for them, but I'm going to leave the rest of the work on those for later because it's such a pita.

Note: if this appears twice it's becaues I was having problems submitting.