ChangeLog.md

Changelog

Notable changes to the FreeOrion project will be documented in this file.

[v0.4.8] - 2018-08-23

Key Changes

• Imperial stockpile

  • Unallocated production is stored, and can be used on colonies even if they are are disconnected from the empire supply network
  • Withdrawal limits are empire wide, based on planet stockpile meters and indicated on map and production screen
  • Techs, species, and planet focus settings affect stockpiling withdrawal limits
  • Stockpiling-focused species added: the Sly

• Game rules options which can be modified or enabled to affect balance, content, and game mechanics

• Unallocated research points are automatically allocated to the cheapest available tech

• UI Improvements

  • Fleet icon representation on the map
  • Blockade indicators
  • Ship designs, hulls, and parts can be edited, saved, obsoleted, and reordered

• Multiplayer improvements

  • Server run in hostless mode, with server-determined rules
  • Password-based player authentication
  • Observers and moderators can join ongoing games
  • Option to concede a game, subject to conditions
  • Allied victory rules

• Extensive AI improvements

Detailed Changelog

Graphics / Interface

• Galaxy Map

  • Improved handling of overlapping fleets and fleet buttons.
  • Added right-click popup command to dismiss sensor ghosts.
  • Added option to ignore hostile ships while auto-exploring.
  • Added ship design breakdown info to fleets indicator at top of screen.
  • Made pressing escape close open windows in last-opened first-closed order.
  • Added system shield, defense, troops, and supply summary indicators to top of system sidepanel.
  • Let fleets window track moving fleets together.
  • Added an indicator that a fleet is blockaded.

• Research

  • Items can be deleted from the research queue with ctrl + left click.
  • Added right click popup commands to research list view rows.
  • Added or adjusted tech list view colour highlighting, rounded borders, icon sizes.
  • Added research list tooltips.
  • List view scrollbar position should retain its position better.

• Production

  • Fixed erroneous early projected completion times for production queue items with multiple repetitions.
  • Added commands to split or duplicate production items on the queue.
  • If the selected system is a production item's rally location, this is indicated on the item in the queue.

• Design screen

  • Ship designs can be reordered, which will affect their ordering on the production screen.
  • Removed dialog for saving ship designs; a right click popup command is used instead.
  • Added right-click popup commands to obsolete parts, hulls, or ship designs, or to delete designs.
  • Added buttons to toggle part / hull obsolete filters.
  • Indicated part / design availability and obsolescence with desaturated borders in lists.
  • Added prompt to toggle availability filters when the hulls list is empty.
  • Added prompt to saved designs to suggest adding some.
  • Fixed bug where replacing a design twice started added designs.
  • Allowed monster designs to be viewed, edited, and saved.
  • When dragging a part over a slot, a part already in the slot should be hidden unless the part in the slot is being dragged.
  • Ctrl-Dragged parts will remove or replace all parts of the same type.
  • Removed restriction on setting blank design descriptions.

• Multiplayer

  • Multiplayer lobby remembers previously-used settings when returning to the lobby after a game.
  • Added option to limit manipulation of settings in multiplayer lobby to the host.
  • Added server player name / passwords list, which can require players to password authenticate to join a server.
    • Players may be assigned roles, which control what they can do in the lobby.
  • Added optional timestamps to chat in multiplayer lobby and in-game chat.
  • Ready button in multiplayer lobby will lock if not enough players.
  • Added choice of client type in the network connection window.
  • Disambiguated "Player" connection type from "Human", which is also an in-game species.
  • Allowed joining an game being played as a moderator or observer.
  • Split Resign button into a Concede button and a Resign button.
    • Conceding from a multiplayer game, when conditions allow it, eliminates the empires' assets from the universe.
  • Hid load button in multiplayer games.

• Misc

  • Improved objects list filter dialog layout.
  • Added granular log detail-level options for specific game systems and clients / sever
  • Made some droplists not respond to mousewheel events when not open (dropped), so that they won't be unintentionally manipulated.
  • Added options for whether to auto-add default or saved designs to the player's empire.
  • Game will auto-save when quitting or resigning. This can be aborted during the save by the user.
  • Added options to enable autosaves at start and end of turns.
  • Improved thoroughness of effect accounting information.
  • Added continue button (and command line switch) to load the most recent saved game.
  • Continue and load buttons only appear if suitable save files are detected.
  • Added button on options screen to save a persistent config file, which will remain after version updates, and will override any subsequent option adjustments when restarting program.
  • Don't render mouse cursor if game window doesn't have OS focus.
  • The pedia and sitreps can now include links to files in the OS file manager or websites.
  • Replaced "planet bombarded" sitreps with "planet attacked" to disambiguation between bombardment and a planet being in a combat.
  • Made chat history longer.
  • Prevented changing the resource directory during a running game.
  • Made resource directory changes when not running a game cause the content to be re-parsed.
  • Various additional optimizations to GUI layout code, particularly when resizing windows.
  • Attempt to determine the system language when initializing stringtable option for the first time.
  • Added random species option to species droplists when setting up games.
  • Clicking the random seed button on the galaxy setup screen now sets the seed to "Random" which will be replaced by the server with a randomly-generated seed.
  • Various values in GUI should now round to nearest rather than next lower value for their displayed precision.
  • Added lists of available parts, hulls, and buildings to empire pedia articles.
  • Sorted researched techs list on empire pedia article by researched turn.
  • Made several GUI widgets react immediately to being pressed, instead of waiting until the mouse is released to complete the "click".

Content / Gameplay

• New pedia articles, article categorization, extended articles, corrections
• Translation updates: French, Russian
• Added dimensional matrix engine part.
• Made additional species playable.
• Added Replicon species.
• Tweaked various default ship designs.
• Replaced multiple fuel parts with upgrades to a single part.
• Added Nest Eradicator building.
• Added support for pedia articles for planets having different landscape images per-planet.
• Added population statistic.
• Added a sitrep when a ship naturally goes from 0.x to 1.x fuel.
• Added the Flux Bubble hull.
• Make the default diplomatic status be war rather than peace.
• Game rules:
  • Enable random reseeding
  • Stockpile import limits
  • Ship, buildings, techs are 1 PP/RP and 1 turn to produce / research
  • Number of rounds of combat
  • Enable Experimentors
  • Enable super test takeover building
  • Enable conceding and max allowed colonies when conceding from a multiplayer game
  • Restrictions on allied victories
  • Scale ship speed, ship structure, building cost, tech cost, hull cost, part cost
  • Planet size balance adjustments
  • How much to over-allocate on production queue to prevent rounding-related extra turns to complete items

Balance

• Super testers now have perfect stealth, which allows testing without AI interference.
• Restricted engine, detector, stealth, and shield parts to one per ship.
• Adjusted various species' balance.
• Made scrying sphere set visibility to the greater of current and partial visibility.
• Made telepathic detection set visibility to the greater of current and basic visibility.
• Reworked resupply / upgrading of ship parts, based on the last turn a ship was resupplied and the turn a tech was researched.
  • Upgrades now don't happen during the pre-combat movement phase of turns.
• Reduced cost of Transcendent Design tech.
• Required gifted fleets to be stationary.
• Gas Giant Generator now gives a smaller bonus if the planet is populated.
• Reduced Space Elevator bonus for Gas Giants by 1.
• Increased Colony Base hull cost to 3.
• Newly created ships and monsters now cannot block supply (until they have survived a turn) or enemy fleet movement.
• Do not remove production/research on dying planets while there is still remaining population.

AI

• Made AI consider cancelling colony buildings if a better species becomes available.
• Improved scout dispatch, to nearby instead of nearest to capital.
• Improved fleet management during invasions.
• Improved estimation of troop requirements for invasions.
• Made AI consider planet defenses more significant when bolstered by fleets.
• Added limit to troops in AI ship designs, to avoid waste.
• Let AI grow larger (by adjusting limit on number of colonies it will attempt to create).
• Made AI avoid blockaded starlanes when moving unarmed fleets.
• Adjusted AI tech priorities.
• Made AI consider refueling when calculating fleet routes.
• Improved AI interaction with stealthed planets.

Bugs

• Ancient guardians self-destruction only triggers on planets, rather than all possible objects with species.
• Reduced incidence of the mouse cursor or starlanes disappearing.
• Fixed issue where allied visibility of ship didn't include knowledge of the ship design.
• Fixed issue preventing multiplayer games from starting with moderators or observers.
• Made phototropic effects evaluate after target population setting effects, on which they depend.
• Fixed issue with negative target population being made closer to zero rather than more negative by effects intended to reduce target population.
• Fixed various potential crashes while exiting the client.
• Fixed various GUI memory leaks.
• Fixed crash if program was closed while a popup window was open on the map.
• Fixed crash if right-clicking slots while dragging a ship part on the design screen.
• Fixed issue with visibility-related supply obstructions lasting a turn longer than they should.
• Fixed issues with manual saves while an autosave was ongoing.
• Fixed issue where autocycling turns would cause an save-in-progress popup to never go away.
• Fixed issue with pedia links not highlighting when moused over.
• Fixed issue when an AI lost all its planets but still had a military fleet, its fleets could not be reassigned.
• Fixed issue with AI supply calculations.
• Fixed possible client hang when requesting previews of save files.
• Fixed issue with filenames with multi-byte characters being shown corrupted on Windows.
• Fixed various other AI bugs and incorrect or outdated calculations.
• Fixed memory leaks in content script parsers.
• Fixed issues with fleet move paths when fleet ownership is changed.
• Fixed issue with AI not setting research focus on planets without industry focus available.
• Fixed various issues with the movement blockading mechanic of fleets, space monsters, etc.
  • Fixed issue when a blockaded fleet became not blockaded and its route became invalid.
  • Fixed issue where fleets which had never been moved since their creation were unable to enforce blockades.
• Fixed potential crash when updating meters on many objects.
• Fixed erroneous / unnecessary cases of "Unknown" contributions to meter values in accounting tooltips.
• Fixed issue where troop strength shown before a ground combat was inconsistent with what was actually used.
• Fixed issue where ship designs could only be redesigned on the turn they were created.
• Fixed issue where a planet couldn't be colonized on the first turn due to a Tidal Lock special.
• Fixed issues with AIs replaying their turns when loading a game.
• Fixed combat log layout / scrollbar issues.
• Fixed issues with compressed XML saves containing invalid XML.
• Use correct auto aggression icon for new fleet aggression button tooltip.
• Fixed missing combat sensor ghosts.
• Fixed issues with visibility of stale objects.

Technical / Internal

• OSX version is now built as 64 bit binary.
• Improved unit testing infrastructure.
• Removed synchronous messaging; all client-server messaging now uses asynchronous message-response. This should resolve some client hang and lag issues.
• Changed logging format to show Year-Month-Day only on the initial line.
• If parsing a ship design fails, just fail that design, not the whole directory.
• Added UUIDs to ship designs.
• Added FOCS conditions: binary and ternary comparison operators between arbitrary values, which match all objects if true, or none otherwise.
• Added FOCS value refs: binary comparison operators between arbitrary values, which return the equivalent of 1 if true, or 0 otherwise.
• Added FOCS value refs: ternary and quaternary expressions, like binary comparison, but with a value to return if true, or values for both true or false.
• Various FOCS values exposed: SpecialCapacity, SpecialAddedOnTurn, EmpireObjectVisibility, TurnTechResearched, LastTurnConquered, LastTurnAttackedByShip
• Exposed FOCS value: HabitableSize (which replaces SizeAsDouble or SizeAsInt)
• Parallelized and deferred content parsing, reducing program startup lag time.
• Improved error logging when parsing an invalid ship design.
• Added checksums to parsed content, so that client and server content can be checked for consistency.
• Universe object ID generation no longer requires clients to request a new ID from the server for each new object.
• Don't autosave immediately after loading a game.
• Don't autosave at end of host's turn in multiplayer, as other players may not have finished their turns yet.
• Rework Python logging to use standard interface, and to log all errors, not just those manually logged.
• For Hulls, parts, and buildings, non-trivial cost and production time can now be evaluated in more cases when a source or target object aren't or can't be specified, such as in the pedia rather than on the production screen where the empire and production location are known.
• Improved robustness of networking when errors happen, hopefully preventing some hung AI processes.
• Added CMake option to build server only (without requiring client-specific dependencies).
• Reworked mechanics of effect-set visibility.
• Reorganized various content scripts into separate files instead of having many definitions in one file.
• Prevented server from closing when an unestablished client drops its connection.
• Made human client check for an existing server before launching another.
• Made AI client respond to command line arguments.
• Made server have a dedicated saves folder, outside of which clients cannot query for directory contents.
• Standardized names of options on command line.
• Added categorized listing of options on command line with --help option, instead of a single list of all.
• Implemented custom AI state string encoder, which should be safer to load.
• Improved OpenBSD support.
• Various meter modifications have been moved out of the engine and into scripted effects.
• Added FOCS access to immediate meter values, in addition to "initial" values after the last meter update.
• Converted contents of global_settings.txt into game rules.
• Added an ID to each game, which can be viewed in the pedia.

[v0.4.7.1] - 2017-09-03

Bug Fixes

• Production queue: reverted behavior when increasing batch size of a build item back to a proportional reduction of the progress already made, instead of resetting progress to 0.
• Fixed bug in production queue projections.
• Several fixes to AI calculations regarding population/colonization.
• Fixed potential issues for phototrophic species.
• Fixed issues with visibility after combat resolution.
• Fixed bug which caused starlanes not to be rendered on certain systems/setups.

[v0.4.7] - 2017-04-24

Key Changes

• Fighters

  • Launch during combat and attack on subsequent rounds
  • Ignore shields when attacking
  • Cannot attack planets and are not attacked by planets
  • Destroyed by any attack by other fighters or ships
  • Flak weapon shoots multiple times per round and can destroy fighters, but does minimal damage to ships

• Alliance Supply

  • Empires may propose and agree to an alliance with each other
  • Allied empires connect their supply networks through each others' supply connections
  • Allied empires resupply ships within each others' supplied systems
  • Allied empires share visibility information

• Fractional Production Progress

  • Production item progress is now stored as a fraction of completion, rather than amount of PP accumulated.
  • Changes in the production cost now can't instantly complete something that has had its production cost reduced.

• Beginner Bonus

  • When the max AI aggression is set to Beginner Mode, the human player gets bonuses to ship shields, planet troop garrisons, and resource output.

• AI Improvements

• Many new pedia articles, categorization, and improved search

• Production items on the queue may be paused and resumed

• Ancient Guardians may appear as a defensive ground force on planets with specials, instead of Sentries that attack any ship in the system

Detailed Changelog

Graphics / GUI

• General

  • Reworked window layout updates and rendering timing to improve GUI responsiveness.
  • Made some options window GUI widgets resize with window.
  • Enable screensaver when minimizing the game and disable when maximizing.
  • Made some tooltips use the set browse time option value, rather than a default other time
  • Made tooltip rendering more consistent in style.
  • Added turn sound option.
  • Made droplists close when Esc is pressed and respond better to mouse actions.
  • Added right-click context menus for various icons in the GUI, such as meters in the planet panels.
  • Made mousewheel not scroll drop lists when the pointer is outside the list.
  • Made droplists scroll to keep the selected row visible when navigating with the keyboard.
  • Made numpad keys work with droplist navigation.
  • Made current item visible when drop down list opens.
  • Fixed formatting and layout in the save file dialog.
  • Changed default extended tooltip delay to 3.5 s.
  • Added a tooltip to fleet summary icon at top of screen.
  • Added option to show IDs after object names in GUI.
  • Made mousewheel manipulate credits scrolling.
  • Fixed droplists falling outside the application window.
  • Made some scrollable GUI widgets respond to keypresses to scroll their contents.
  • Made ListBox header show for empty list boxes.
  • Paused music when the application loses focus.
  • Closed credits if the app is resized.
  • Update FPS immediately when the option changes.
  • Stopped save file dialog from reloading saves after window focus changes.
  • Added dialog to ask user about waiting for savegame to complete before quitting.

• Pedia

  • Added access to pedia from intro screen.
  • Included more pedia articles in search results
  • Displayed identical parts as one entry in ship browse windows.
  • Made Enter/Return KeyPress events on EncyclopediaDetailPanel set the focus to the search edit.
  • Adjusted planet suitability report for tech-gated species.

• Map Window

  • Changed Fleets window quick close option from right click to left click
  • Made ordering of systems in cycling commands alphabetical.
  • Changed colours used to render some scanlines (indicating a not-visible object).
  • Changed display of map scale distance to integers.
  • Added an inner system circle on the galaxy map, which is drawn for systems with colonies.

• Sidepanel

  • Added automatic selection of ships for bombarding.
  • Added ability to rename systems in SidePanel. System sorting considers the system's id to disambiguate if necessary.
  • Displayed source planet in growth special accounting labels.
  • Added indication of defending troops to invade button.
  • In sidepanel, displayed tooltip not only for the selected focus, but also for available focus settings in the focus dropdown list.

• Fleet Window

  • Added greater variety and more flexible indicator icons to fleet and ship panels.
  • Labeled fleets window as "Near System X" for fleets in transit.
  • Showed empire name in fleets window for fleets in transit.
  • Added right-click menu command to split from a fleet ships that have less than full fighter complement.

• SitRep Window / Combat Log

  • Allowed SitRep right-click menu from majority of sitrep area.
  • Added Copy to sitrep right-click context menu.
  • Added link to help article on sitrep entry right click menu.
  • Added right click context to hide/show types of SitReps.
  • Changed combat log to use empire color to designate destroyed objects.
  • Added SitRep navigation for meter type pedia links.
  • Fixed combat log window layout issues.

• Objects Window

  • Added numerous new column options in the Objects window, and reorganized the options.
  • Reapportioned horizontal space in filter dialog parameter dropdown to improve legibility.

• Design Window

  • Made ctrl + left click in the design window obsolete designs.
  • Fixed hull list display issue.

• Research Window

  • Added right-click pause and resume commands to research queue in GUI.
  • Added pause and resume research functions to Empire, and getters to check if a tech / queue id is paused to research queue.
  • Made tech list columns sortable.
  • Display preferences for complete, researchable, unresearchable and partially unlocked techs will now persist between games

• Production Window

  • Fixed double click on production queue item so that it completes the map window system selection.
  • Fixed planet selection when the production window is open so that the production window info panel gets updated when another planet is selected.

• Game setup / Multiplayer Lobby

  • Reworked layout in multiplayer lobby window.
  • Multiplayer game starts when all human players are ready.
  • Used human player's name as default empire's name in multiplayer.
  • Added option for random species selection during game setup.
  • Prevented multiple players from having the same name in a multiplayer game by adding numeric postfixes.
  • Added new galaxy type images.

Content

• Translation updates: French
• Various AI tweaks: colonization, fighters, fleet movement
• Various stringtable tweaks, corrections, and updates.
• New encyclopedia articles about gameplay mechanics, the interface.
• Many encyclopedia articles have been categorized into lists of similar articles with a category summary article.
• New or updated icons / graphics for various content.
• Added Kraken in the Ice special.
• Added the Automated History Analyser building.
• Added Ancient Guardians as alternative to Sentries for Specials.
• Added the native species Lembala'Lam.
• Added mention of star type restriction to energy shipyard descriptions.

Balance

• Added stealth effects to Spatial Flux hull and increased build cost.
• Reset to 0 a planet's detection upon conquering.
• Adjusted supply propagation by adding tie-breaking conditions related to (unobstructed) distance to the nearest supply source.
• Removed build cost increase mechanic from Stargate.
• Massively increased cost of the Transformer building.
• Reduced other buildings' production times to equal the Transformer's production time.
• Prevented Ancient Guardians on native homeworlds.
• Restricted growth focus to be available on homeworlds of species that are on the planet, not any species' homeworld.
• Removed frontloading of production (due to changing to fractional production progress mechanic).
• Salted the PRNG seed with galaxy setup seed to hopefully avoid often getting the same random effect results due to using just the turn number as the seed.
• Added option to control whether to re-seed the PRNG repeatedly on the server.
• Tweaked Concentration Camps to set Happiness to zero after all other effects.
• AI invasion priority tweaks.
• Made AI handle species with fixed max population when assigning Colonization values
• Reduced initial number of scouts produced by AIs.
• Enabled AI use of XenoResurrection Lab and resurrected species.
• Adjusted AI to further prioritize automation, exobots, and some growth techs.
• In sparse galaxies, moderated the reduction in AI colonization activity that occurs after spotting enemies.
• Adjusted AI value for asteriods during first 40 turns.
• Made neutronium and asteroid armor parts available only to supply connected shipyards.
• Stopped monsters maturing during combat.
• Made Cultural Archives required for research bonus of Auto History Analyser.
• Added allied diplomatic status between empires. Allies share visibility and supply networks.
• Tweaked AI ship designer logic.
• Adjusted build costs and stats of the Solar hull, raised build costs of Titanic and Scattered Asteroid hulls.
• Lowered Protoplasmic and Symbiotic hull base stealth.
• Have the AI combat planning deem planetary defenses to be more significant when they are bolstered by fleet forces.

Bugs

• Fixed Windows installer continuing install before uninstall completes.
• Fixed issues with non-ascii characters in Windows usernames / filenames.
• Made the map distance scale circle track the selected system when the production window is open.
• Fixed some meter change estimates not considering some contributions, such as ship fuel regeneration.
• Fixed clipping of long hull names in design window.
• Fixed issues with the fleets window and the fleets in it moving between turns while the window stays open.
• Fixed some effects which trigger on negative planet target population.
• Fixed direction agreement of mousewheel scrolling in drop down list when dropped or not dropped.
• Fixed issue with production window not tracking non-production window selected system changes.
• Fixed drop down list not tracking main application window resizes, which made them seemingly unclickable.
• Fixed production window queue and list state preservation when updated.
• Fixed issue where a drag-drop on a list could start autoscrolling and never stop if the drop happened while the autoscroll was in progress.
• Fixed issue where rapidly pressing left and right keys while in a listbox could cause a crash.
• Use drydock from highest happiness system planet.
• Made planet stealth techs effect only owned planet not all planets in system.
• Fixed issue with Head on a spike special
• Hopefully prevented some potential crashes when generating random numbers.
• Fixed Hyperspatial Dam supply glitch.
• Fixed issues with unpopulated planets' (outposts') research and industry bonuses.
• Fixed issue where production and research times and costs were incorrect.
• Fixed crash due to multi-meter status bar attempting to render a zero valued meter.
• Fixed monsters blockading and being blockaded not working correctly.
• Fixed some issues when exiting game or closing the client window, such as dangling AI client or server processes which preventing subsequent games from starting properly.
• Fixed players that canceled out of multiplayer games not actually disconnecting from the server.
• Improved handling of AIs taking over empires for human players in loaded multiplayer games.
• Fixed issue with AIs not storing their aggression correctly in save games.
• Fixed AI trying to enqueue unresearchable techs.
• Fix for client crash / access violation upon receiving fatal error message from server.
• Fixed bug which prevented construction of colony buildings for tech gated species when a player doesn't have the required tech, but owns a colony of the species.
• Fixed unowned mines not destroying ships after reducing their structure to 0.
• Fixed numbers in planet suitability report being wrong on the turn right after a planet has been depopulated.
• Fixed issue with the Starlane Nexus building where lanes created together can be closer in angle than allowed, causing problems with later lane creations.
• Fixed bug causing AIs to be crippled by eventually switching an excessively high amount of colonies to research focus.
• Fixed issue in network code which could cause AI client processes to hang.
• Fixed issues with AI troop ship design and production.

Technical / Internal

• C++11 is now supported and required to compile.
• Implemented continuous integration / automated builds
• Fixed inconsistent computation of build number.
• Optimized Font layout code.
• Dropped support for MSVC compilers before 2015 version.
• Added separate description strings for binary and xml save files. Previously, the XML text was appearing in readable form in the binary save files.
• Hopefully made binary saving an automatic fallback for when xml serialization fails.
• Implemented sup and sub text formatting tags.
• Optimizations of effect evaluation.
• Optimized universe generation, substantially reducing time for bigger galaxies and many empires setups.
• Made universe generation more robust to platform / operating system differences.
• Added ipv6 support.
• Various network connection monitoring and shutdown tweaks.
• Increased client connection timeout and delays, which should help connectivity on some OSX machines.
• Allow build of program with unknown git commit.

[v0.4.6] - 2016-09-16

Key Changes

• Reworked supply mechanics (details below)
• Reworked weapon part refinements
• Reworked ship repair: Drydocks, Damage Control techs, Robotic hulls self repair (details below)
• Many small additions/changes to GUI rendering, layout, functionality, customization options, and displayed information that collectively substantially improve usability, responsiveness, and system resource usage.
• Turn processing time improvements
• AI improvements
• New specials, hulls, ship parts, giving new strategic or fun gameplay options

Detailed Changelog

Graphics / GUI

• New default font Roboto ver. 2.001101 (2014) (with a few extra missing glyphs needed / used in the GUI)
• Fixed layout of production / research info panel
• Reworked rendering of various GUI windows to improve performance
• Improved functionality of pedia search box
• Get a list of results instead of jumping to the first matching entry found
• Added mousewheel cycling through items in droplists
• Improved window layout in response to game window resizing
• Made queue and info windows resizable / movable
• Increased default tooltip delay
• Increased default sitrep icon size
• Added a tooltip for when the in-game save button is disabled.
• Added messages when game save is started.
• Improved blending between empires' visibility radii colours
• Added various hotkey commands, including mapping the map or tech view
• Suppressed rendering of ridiculously huge visibility circles, such as from super testers
• Added menu button to open freeorion.org
• Tweaked appearance of colour picker indicator in HS square to have a hole/outline where the lines meet
• Add the distance scale circle to the MapWnd right-click menu
• Added separate option for FPS limit when the game window doesn't have OS input focus
• Added 3D starfield effect on map
• Add an entry on the right-click menu to add to top of build queue
• When left-clicking production queue items, open the system and select the planet instead of just jumping to the system on the map.
• Made ctrl-left click remove an item from build queue.
• Made ctrl-double click add entries to the top of the build queue
• Pedia articles can now have images in them
• New icons for auto and manual turn cycling button
• Tweaked Sidepanel planet pole tilt angle
• Tweaked Sitrep layout
• Reworked rotating selection indicator rendering to be smoother
• Re-enabled sitreps for winning / losing the game
• Add an icon to the PlayerListWnd when an empire wins/loses
• Made Pedia ship design detail page show troop stats reflecting racial bonus/malus
• Clicking a sitrep planet handle will select the planet for production
• Tweaks to rendering techs on tech screen when zooming
• Positioned cursor at end of historical input from pressing up/down in messages window
• Added current turn expected progress to research and production progress meters
• Added specialized tooltip for resource icons
• Made encyclopedia detail panel of production and research screens closable
• Switched a few objects list columns from showing object ids to object names
• Added nearest system column and number of specials column to objects list
• Production and research queue items show max spendable PP or RP per turn
• Added ship rally point tracking / setting to production queue. New fleets are grouped by rally point on the turn they are produced. Ship production items can be right clicked to set their rally point to the selected system.
• Added tooltips to production selector items explaining failed production location conditions
• Fixed issues navigating the directory structure in the save/load file dialog on Windows when accented / non-Latin characters were present in path names.
• Stripped selected Wnd text of tags before passing to clipboard
• Implemented selecting or moving cursor to next word edge when holding CTRL when a text GUI widget has input focus
• Hid map screen pedia when opening the production screen
• Tweaked tech tree layout
• Added icons to tech tree panels showing unlocked or affected other content
• Added button to show partially unlocked techs on tech tree, which are now shown by default, and are techs that have at least one prereq researched.
• Allowed wide/tall windows to spam multiple monitors
• Added option to disable effect accounting in client, which could speed up GUI responses to things that would normally cause an accounting update, such as focus changes
• Made spin controls on Options screen wider
• Improved layout of various UI windows / popups for variable font sizes
• Added "Update Design" and "Add New Design" commands to Design Screen
• Added drop position indicator for completed designs list
• Improved format and detail of combat log, including calculations for each attack and attackers being revealed by attacking
• Added right-click Cut-Copy-Paste popup menus to text entry boxes
• Made shift-delete cut and shift-insert paste in text entry boxes
• Expanded set of allowed hotkey combinations
• In SidePanel confine planet rename context menu item inside planet name
• Moved Infrastructure indicator to population panel.
• Moved supply meter from military to resources panel.
• Options screen widgets to set objects list column widths
• Tweaked how panels in fleets and planets lists resize with or without a scrollbar present
• Added right-click popup menu command to copy text in most GUI text
• Fixed issues where characters font textures weren't loaded even when using a suitable stringtable, making it impossible to use those characters in game
• Added a right-click command to dismiss sensor ghosts on the fleets window, which causes an empire to forget a fleet existed, removing it from the map.
• Disabled sound system init when sound and music are disabled
• Fix crash when OpenAL device does not initialize
• Added message box at startup informing player in case of audio system init failiure
• Added message box at startup informing player in case of insufficient OpenGL version
• Made pressing escape close more GUI windows
• Added tech turn and RP requirements to tech panels on tech tree
• Modified autogenerated fleet names to better reflect fleet contents
• Increase fleet drop target width and add an icon to it
• Modified how client and server communicate in a single player game to avoid firewall popups about network access
• Added scanlines over fleets when not currently visible
• Added nearly-accurate estimate of meter changes on the next turn to meter tooltips
• Made MultiMeterStatusBar rescale to show largest value
• In DesignWnd add ability to drag parts away from design
• Fixed confusing behaviour of main menu when displaying credits (main menu was dimmed, but still active, now requires pressing ESC or mouse click anywhere to stop displaying credits)

Content

• Translation updates: French, Russian
• Removed / updated various missing, unused, or incorrect stringtable entries
• Various adjustments to AI priorities
• Made AI more cautious of hidden threats after losing fleets in a system it can't detect into
• Updated pedia descriptions of various content and UI windows, including adding more links
• Reworked intro sitrep to be less immersion-breaking
• Moved start-of-game unlocking sitreps to before-the-first turn to avoid spamming the player
• Removed "Average X" descriptions of species, leaving these only for the all-average humans
• Made collapsing nebulae create various coloured stars
• Added a "Rough Military Strength Estimate" empire statistic
• Added Spinal Antimatter Cannon
• Improved cross-platform consistency of random results in universe generation and in-game effects
• Added Starlane Nexus and Starlane Bore buildings that can be used to create starlanes
• Reworked Spatial Distortion Generator to push ships back along their approach starlane
• Added Black Hole Collapser and Subspace Rift buildings
• Adjusted some star names
• Added sitreps to Planetary Starlane Drive effects
• Various new hull art and slot positions, tech icons, building icons
• Added the Accretion Disc special
• Fixed / updated bioweapon sitreps
• Added a random turn event that creates Space Krill in an empty system
• Added new galaxy shape "Disc"
• Added the feature to resurrect extinct species found in ancient ruins with the Xenoresurrection Lab (which can only be built on a planet)
• Added the new special Temporal Anomaly
• Reworked weapon part refinements, so that instead of multiple parts, techs increase the strength of parts (although getting the increase to take effect requires being in supply range)
• Added Energy Frigate hull, adjusted some other hulls' balance accordingly
• Updated premade / default ship designs, made naming consistent
• New bombardment weapons (feature in-progress)
• Added EMP and electric overcharge ship parts
• Added Solar Concentrators which increase laser weapon strength for Organic Line hulls depending on local star type
• Split up stealth part and planetary stealth techs
• Added more AI greeting messages, made random
• Added Scrying Sphere buildings, which can be produced and appear around the map randomly during galaxy generation, and share vision between planets on which they are located
• At start of game, the Honeycomb will now turn all planets without specials or inhabitants within 5 jumps into Asteroids instead of destroying them — without renaming them
• Removed the special Volcanic Activity
• Tweaked planet / asteroid naming
• All systems except deep space, black hole and neutron star systems now contain at least one planet or asteroid belt
• Added "Telepathic Detection" species trait (currently only assigned to Trith) which gives basic visibility of inhabitated planets nearby a colony of a species that has that trait.
• Fixed "no repair" sitreps caused by drydocks on outposts

Balance

• Reworked supply propagation mechanics
• In any system, at most one empire can supply ships and exchange production between planets.
• Empires' supply ranges push against eachother in neutral systems, with higher range supply sources blocking lower range (where range decays with distance from the source)
• Armed ships prevent enemy supply from propagating in/out of a system
• In the absence of armed ships, supply won't propagate into an enemy system where a supply source planet is located
• Substantially reworked ship repair
• Drydocks require a ship to be stationary and only repair a proportion of ship structure of the bigger hulls
• No damage control effects work on the turn a combat has taken place except for the Logistic Facilitator flagship, which is substantially reduced
• Balance pass on Robotic hull line and Damage Control techs repair rates
• Various building / tech cost adjustments
• Split Ground Troops species trait into Defensive Ground Troops and Offensive Ground Troops.
• Made Neutronium Forge only be buildable at locations with a Basic Shipyard (like all other shipyard upgrade buildings)
• Tweaked monster detection and stealth stats
• Artificial Moons can no longer be built when a Resonant Moon special is present
• Reworked various modifiers to planet population
• Tweaked Honeycomb and World Tree special locations
• Re-Added the Tidally Locked Rotation special with a population penalty and changed the penalty of the Eccentric Orbit special to a Supply minus
• Space Monster weapon balance tweaks
• Adjusted Experimentor monster weapons
• Planetary Starlane Drive modified so it can't be built on gas giants
• Death Spores and Bio-Terminators now only affect organic species
• Monsters now only bombard one planet at a time
• Reworked how derelict visibility effect works - grants visibility directly instead of temporarily increasing ship detection range
• Added preferred focus for most species
• Made producing troop pods require a production location with troops
• Species with no offensive Ground Troops will no longer be able to build ships with Ground Troop pods
• Balanced research and production bonuses
• Reprioritised mine effects to always occur before repair effects
• Balanced BioAdaptive hull to work same as Nanorobotic
• Tweaked numbers for Logistics Facilitator
• Enable queue additions of energy shipyards in systems with pending artificial blackhole
• Prevent Experimentor spawn location from sundering the galaxy
• Balance Hyperspatial Dam
• Made planets in systems which contain a Gateway to the Void building not provide any supply

Bugs

• Prevented dragging sitrep entries
• Fixed depopulation of planets to work when planet has a negative population
• Fixed rendering of object window items selected with right click
• Fixed multiplayer galaxy setup droplists problematic scrollbars
• Fixed protection focus effect on max troops
• Fixed AI building neutronium extractors
• Fixed AI problem with ship design with id 0
• Fixed experimentor spawn location being blocked by natives
• Fixed a segfault when resigning a game with no empire
• Fixed Fortress special mines effects not properly working together with System Defense Mines techs
• Prevented unowned planet mines from affecting unowned guard ships
• Fixed unowned fortress mines damaging unowned monsters and made mines able to destroy monsters, not just damage them
• Fixed ion storm stealth effect to not affect fields (and thereby itself)
• Fixed issue with stealth effect of Transpatial Drive
• Reduced credits scroll flicker
• Fixed quirks with list scrollbars and row positioning
• Fixed crash when manipulating fleets in Fleets window
• Fixed issue where saves would record an extra nonexistant player, causing problems when loading the save
• Fixed issue with dragging parts over another part in a design
• Prevent a bug with high CPU load and low FPS. A font is now cached even if a requested glyph is not part of the font, but a 'replacement character' is provided
• Fixed crash when setting hotkeys
• Fixed a bug where calling the suitability report from the production window would toggle the production window pedia panel visibility. Now shows suitability report in production window pedia.
• Fixed alphabetical sorting of object list columns when accented letters or other non-latin characters are present
• Fixed a bug where pedia closed instead of showing an entry
• Fixed deleting production items by pressing delete
• Fixed crashes when clicking links in pedia
• Fixed calculation of FPS
• Fixed resource panel not showing expansion
• Fixed a bug where the AI would sometimes think it can't build parts at a planet despite it actually being able to
• Fixed fleet destination text being "holding at ..." when moving along a path that returns to the start location.
• Fixed xenophobic self-sustaining pop malus and xenophobic frenzy happiness malus

Technical / Internal

• Made it possible to read binary or compressed XML saves regardless of current save output format setting
• Made communication between clients / servers on different operating systems more flexible / robust
• Reworked XML save format to have an uncompressed somewhat readable-as-text header with basic info about the saved game
• Added --version parameter to freeorion{,d} executables which outputs the version string to the console
• (*nix) Moved user config and data files to conform with XDG Base Directory Specification
• Reorganized content definitions into multiple files

[v0.4.5] - 2015-09-08

Key Changes

• Replaced Ogre3D with SDL based windowing for human client.
  • Improved mouse rendering and responsiveness and keyboard behaviour, particularly when switching between windows.
• Interface and turn processing time improvements.
  • Tech tree rendering speed especially improved.
• Extensive AI updates.
• New pedia content including introductory articles on game concepts and the interface.
• Revised colonization mechanics to allow producing a building that will convert an outpost to a colony.
  • Species added must have a supply connection from a already-populated planet with sufficient happiness.
  • Production time depends on distance from the production location to the already-species-populated planet.
• New graphical combat summary.

Detailed Changelog

Graphics / GUI

• Added a pin toggle to most UI windows, which fixes them in place.
• Added a Pedia text search box and adjusted Pedia layout.
• Adjusted default window positioning.
  • Made some window positions be saved between sessions.
• Various new/updated icons, including building and sitrep icons.
• Added an option to save games in an XML text format, which should be readable on any OS, although is a larger file than the binary serialization (default).
• Adjusted the size of the planet focus droplist.
• Changed layout of sitreps to be multi-line.
• Tweaked ship design description part list to show multiple copies of a part with a number, instead of repeating the part name.
• Changed allowed hotkey bindings, so most printable character hotkeys need to have a modifier key (CTRL, SHIFT, ALT) held, to prevent hotkeys from firing while typing text.
• Removed some unused sound options.
• Additional object list column types and filter conditions.
• Added popup menu command to save ship designs as a file, and list of saved designs that can be used when designing ships.
• Added monster designs tab to ship design screen.
• Tweaked layout in the generic file load/save dialog.
• Made mousewheel scrolling pan the tabs in a tabbed window widget.
• Fixed layout placement of buttons in object filter window.
• Made colonization suitability report always include Exobots.
• Added an option to toggle whether the pedia in the design screen will instantly update as a designs text is edited.
• Removed various unused properties from ship designs in the pedia (and internally).
• Added some helper sitreps informing of a planet having sufficient population / happiness to be used for recolonization.
  • These helpers are easily customizable by players.
• Changed default player empire colour.
• Added combat assessment to ship designs 'pedia pages.
• Added right-click commands to object list to set planet focus.
• Made the objectlist update when a planet changes focus.
• Made cycling through sitrep turns skip turns with no sitreps.
• Made display of moving fleet ETA controllable with a config option.
• Add "does not stack" information to building descriptions.
• Removed unimplemented statistics about empires from pedia.
• Added tooltips to auto/manual turn advance toggle.
• Made copy and paste functions in GUI work with OS clipboard.
• Added right-click command on icons to look up building types.
• Added an optional mapscale circle overlay to MapWnd, centered on the currently selected system.
• Added (yellow, 3-flanged) mouseover indicator for unexplored systems
• Made some of the darkest empire colors slightly less dark.
• Made pressing return to map hotkey close the fleetwnd, if open, and if not, the sidepanel, if open, if no other subscreens were open.
• Ensured that if a planet has nonzero max defenses (or shields or troops) the SidePanel PlanetPanel will display the military panel regardless of whether the planet is populated or owned.
• Troop ships and fleets will now show their total troops value
• Adjusted sitrep font size to be the greater of the client UI standard font size or 75% of the size for sitrep icons.
• Added several new hotkey commands.
• Made most interface windows be constrained to within their parent window, or the application window.
• Added support for an optional persistent_config.xml settings file which may contain a subset of settings from config.xml, which will override config.xml.
• Made double-clicking planets on the sidepanel open the production screen.
• Enabled "snoozing" (dismissing from display) of a sitrep by double-clicking or right-clicking.
• Removed max size from options window.
• Made the DesignWnd Redundancy check be applied to all part types, not just weapons.
• Enabled customization of the DesignWnd redundant part filtering criteria via common_user_customizations.txt.
• Removed (most of) the extra space in ListBoxes after the end of the content.
• Made SitRep panel remember which SitRep it was showing first, when it is resized.

Content

• Translation updates, most notably an (almost) complete French translation.
• Extensive pedia content reorganization and additions, including introductory articles.
• Transpatial drive part.
• Improved randomness of random empire species selection.
• Exobot colony origin building replaced by new-standard add-species-to-planet style building, but without a standard species requirement of having a source of that species supply connected to the production location.
• Made AIs occasionally respond to chat messages (not meaningfully).
• Added three new specials: World Tree, Honeycomb and Fortress.
• Added two variants of Artificial Planets: Artificial Paradise World and Artificial Factory World.
• Made high tech natives special produce one or more buildings on planets.
  • "Primitive" natives can't get this special.
• Added a higher-capacity advance ground troops pod.
• More empire statistic tracking.
• Added sitreps, including nebula collapse, dyson forest birth.
• Expanded Nebula collapse to create random combinations of asteroid fields and planets.
• Added colony buildings for natives that can colonize but can't build ships.
• Added the Maintenance Ship as an alternative to the Sentry monster type.
• New native species: Happybirthday.
• Added Species Homeworlds page to Pedia.
• Improved slot positions of ship hulls.
• Changes to fields: Ion Storms and Molecular Clouds now start very small, but grow large before shrinking again.

Balance

• Tweaked galaxy special distributions to lessen frequency of multiple specials on one object.
• Concentration camps require a population of at least 3 to be produced, and set planet happiness to 0.
• Hull production and research cost rebalancing.
• Adjusted artificial planet cost.
• Adjusted cost of tech victory.
• Reworked troop level calculations from various techs and buildings, including being more population-dependent.
• Adjusted timing and results of Experimentors doing things, tweaked their shields and defense.
• Made mines work on monsters.
• Made the requirement for attacking during combat be having partial visibility of the target, to be consistent with the criteria for starting a battle.
• Added requirements for a minimum number of planets and systems near home system locations.
• Reduced shield part strengths and costs.
• Tweaked monster maturation to depend on the game turn.
• Added shields to the Bloated Juggernaut and reduced its damage value.
• Adjusted the Krill Spawner part (from Ancient Ruins) so that when in an unarmed ship it provides a stealth bonus.
• Removed biospores from level 1 Kraken and Juggernauts. For level 3 of same, changed biospores to bioterminators.
• Phototrophic natives can now have bright or dim stars (not only orange/yellow ones).
• Changed time to build Phinnert colonies to 75%.
• Removed Large Planet trait from Scylior and Hhhoh (natives) and added it to the Etty (playable).
• Self Sustaining Xenophobes (ie Trith) should have more stable population problems as it's based on explored systems not visible systems.
• Adjusted monster nest special monster spawn rate to be sensitive to GalaxyMonsterFrequency; left the domesticated spawn rates alone.
• Ancient Ruins will have a location condition of at least 3 jumps from empire homes.
• Dyson Forests will have a location condition of at least 3 jumps from empire homes.
• Dyson Forest's regeneration effect will receive a no-combat-last-turn-here condition.
• Homeworlds and capitals get +5 happiness.
• Rebalanced planetary stealth and detection modifiers.
  • Standardised modifiers as multiples of 20.
  • Each stealth special can be penetrated by the same level detection.
  • All planets given base stealth 5.
• Made the megalith producible only on planets with an imperial palace, and provide a troop bonus to nearby systems.
• Added ProductionQueue support for frontloading and/or topping-up, controlled by default/global_settings.txt.
• Planetary Ecology will now grant a flat + 1 bonus to Good and Adequate that expires with Symbiotic Biology.
• Starting planets have max happiness.

Bugs

• Fixed multiplayer lobby player list scroll position resetting when receiving updates from the server.
• Fixed rare bug where Floaters could spawn Forests in almost every system.
• Removed design deletion right-click popup for moderators to avoid crash.
• Fixed issue where setting the default save filename in a FileDlg would be overwritten when the working directory was set.
• Fixed checks of slot type when automatically adding parts to a design.
• Fixed in-progress building icon tooltips on sidepanel.
• Tweaks to child/parent windows to prevent possible memory leaks.
• Fixed potential hang when single player galaxy setup was cancelled.
• Fixed rendering issue with detection rangle circles on map.
• Fixed bug where a ship that is destroyed during a combat round when it it attacked multiple would be counted multiple times in the ships-destroyed statistic tracking.
• Excluded empty (destroyed) fleets from empire pedia listing of owned fleets.
• Fixed issue where after pasting text into an edit control, the cursor would always be at the end of the text.
• Prevented natives from spawning in player home systems.
• Fixed glitch with blockades.
• Made rounding precision "epsilon" value of production and research larger (0.01), so being a tiny fraction of a point away from complete is considered being complete.
• Fixed bug where a planet could have its combat round squandered due to having another planet selected as target (invalid).
• Fixed a bug where a combat sitrep would not be sent to an empire whose outpost had been in combat, if the empire had no non-outpost combatants.
• Changed combat attacker order shuffle algorithm to standard Fisher–Yates shuffle to avoid a bias.
• Fixed issue where centred button text labels weren't repositioning properly when resizing.
• Fixed object list column sorting of numbers (as numbers instead of as text).
• Fixed a bug where outposts could be prematurely excused from combat, allowing them to wrongly get shield regen the next turn.
• Fixed multicolored system names on the MapWnd for systems with more than one empire owning planets.
• Fixed names in multiplayer lobby, which were showing the local player's name for all players.
• Fixed combat 'reveal' of stealthed attackers to be after all the attacks of a given round have been completed.
• Fixed bug with fleet movement path deterimation, where it treated a fleet as refueling when in supply even if it did not stop at a system.
• Fixed MapWnd cycle to next/prev fleet so that it skips over destroyed fleets.
• Fixed Pedia Species Homeworlds bug that had caused entries with more than 5 occupied planets to be left out of the display.
• Fixed planet names on sidepanel losing formatting tags when the planet is renamed.
• Fixed multiline text display bug when rendering colored highlighted text.
• Fixed Exobots not having Bad Ground Troops as described.

[v0.4.4] - 2014-09-07

Key Changes

• Interface and turn processing time improvements.
• Extensive AI updates.
• Combat mechanics reworked.
• Balance changes including supply mechanics, damage control, ship hulls.
• New "core" slot type.
• Configurable Hotkeys.
• New save / load file dialog.
• Queued fleet move orders.
• Python scripted universe generation.

Detailed Changelog

New Features / Improvements

• Implemented Python scripted universe generation.
  • Can be easily modified by editing script files.
  • Accessible through "Irregular 2" galaxy shape in galaxy setup.
• New "core" ship design slot type, added to some hulls and required for some powerful ship parts.
• Made all empires sitreps visible to moderators and observers.
• System and ship names moved into stringtable, so they can be translated with the rest of the in-game text.
• Added a bombardment mechanic, allowing ships to target and affect planets outside of battle.
• Added a UI for configurable hotkey command key bindings.
• Galaxy setup data is stored and can be accessed from the pedia during a game.
• Graphs display added that allows plotting game history of various statistics about empires.
• Made it possible to refresh the stringtable or change stringtables without restarting the program (although not all of the GUI will immediately refresh text when doing this).
• Gifting mechanic allows giving ships to other empires with a presence in the same system.
• Improved support for FreeBSD.
• Modified system naming to group adjacent systems and give them similar names, distinguished by Greek suffixes, to prevent running out of system names in large galaxies.
• Reordered turn processing to improve consistency between server results and client-side estimates of effects processing.
• Added tracking and pedia display of various statistics about empires, such as numbers of things destroyed, lost, invaded….
• Combat mechanics reworked:
  • 3 rounds, during which objects all fire simultaneously at random targets.
  • Initially undetected ships that fire become targetable on later combat rounds.
• Made low-aggression AIs even less dangerous to help new players.
• Added shift-right-clicking to queue fleet move orders.
• Set default multiplayer autosave option to true.

Content

• Various tech tree adjustments, including removing prerequisite techs and merging of similar techs.
• Translation updates.
• Added / updated / corrected descriptions of various parts, techs, hulls, buildings….
• Added more star names and ship names, and gave unowned monsters names.
• Added sitreps for unlocking buildings, hulls, ship parts, monster growth, ….
• Reformatted / standardized sitrep text, added information to sitreps.
• Replaced the "Weapons" species bonus with piloting skills, which modifies ship damage.
• Organic hulls "grow", increasing structure over time.
• Core slot type introduced, appearing on some hulls, and with some parts only mountable in core slots.
• Changed default galaxy options to 150 stars and 6 AIs.
• Added more predefined ship designs.
• Ancient Ruins special:
  • Modest decrease in spawn rate.
  • Preventing them from doubling up in a system.
  • Much rarer now if Monsters Frequency is set to "None" (in part due to lack of guard monsters in this case).
  • Explored Ancient Ruins are now marked as excavated.
  • Made less sparse on Low Planet Density setting.
• Added preferred focus to species, to which new colonies will default.
• Made all (including non-monster) unowned ship hulls move around on their own.
• Head on a Spike specials track the locations of captured empire capitals.
• Natives sometimes given advanced tech bonuses, making them more dangerous to attack.
• Reworking the Experimentors.
  • Starlanes removed at the beginning of the game will not be replaced until after turn 200.
  • Sitreps announce monster release events.
  • The stealth levels of Black Kraken and Bloated Juggernauts are reduced.
  • A Victory Sitrep is generated if the Experimentor Outpost building is captured.
  • Ensuring after capture / destruction, fleets are not trapped in a no-lane system.
• Removed some old and uninteresting specials and renamed some existing specials.
• Added Robotic Interface Shields, which get bonuses from being located near other ships with the same part.
• Added Krill Spawner part as a possible Ancient Ruin unlock.
• Added Ramscoop part.
• Added Transpatial Drive part.
• Removed Interstellar Lighthouse because it was incompatible with current visibility mechanics.
• Reworked Psychic Domination to require a focus setting to enable, and to require telepathic species.
• Added some restrictions to when buildings can be added to the production queue.
  • Can't build a second palace.
  • Prevent quirks where a second something could be added to the queue, but would then become unproducible due to there being too many of it enqueued.
• AIs announce their aggression at the start of a game.

Graphics / GUI

• New and updated icons for various ship parts, buildings, techs.
• Added right-click popup on players list to look up empires.
• Fleet management improvements.
  • New automatically created fleets are set to aggressive if they contain warships, or passive otherwise.
  • The new fleet aggression toggle can be set to automatically decide aggression for new fleets, as above.
  • Right-clicking fleets or ships gives management commands: merging, splitting, and splitting by design.
• Added changing expression planet happiness icon.
• Production queue made to highlight items in the currently selected system.
• Added production queue right-click menu commands.
• Improved rendering of visibility circles.
• Limited copy-cut-paste functionality in some GUI text controls.
• Indicated mountable slot types in part descriptions.
• Made some multiline text areas scroll multiple lines per single mousewheel tick.
• Fixed longstanding missing item drop sound issue on options screen.
• Made looking up techs, buildings, ship parts or hulls from the map screen just show the pedia entry, and not open the design, production, or tech screens.
• Increased thresholds for displaying wasted PP or RP notifications, to avoid them appearing due to rounding errors.
• Sorted system droplist by system name (except for Deep Space, which are scatted through the list).
• Numerous pedia text and GUI control placement layout adjustments.
• Tweaked cloud spawning effects.
• Design screen disables the confirm button to prevent creating duplicate designs.
  • Added tooltips for design confirm button to explain why it is sometimes disabled.
• Restored system name colouring by owners, including multiple colours when shared between empires.
• Added right-click command to rename ship designs.
• Fixed / implemented mouseover highlighting in popup menus.
• Made clicking on a non-command in a popup menu not cancel the popup.
• Fixed a few places where changing text or list contents would annoyingly reset list scroll positions.
• Hid fleet/ship names when panels are small to avoid overlapping with destination text.
• Added Linux install targets and icons.
• Added toggle buttons for info windows: graph, messages, empires.
• Modified rendering of GUI windows to show a pointed bottom-right corner when resizable, and a cut off corner when not.
• Added buttons to adjust objects list window visibility filters more quickly.
• Added tooltips to tech tree tech panels, production queue.
• Made production / research queue widths adjustable in options.
• Reworked fleet icons to be more complicated and informative.
• Added All / None sitrep filter toggles.
• Enabled sitrep filters for observers.
• Added turn auto-cycle button, which automatically ends turns for players (immediately) or moderators (when all players have finished their turn).
• Made clicking empire PP and RP total indicators open the production or research screens.
• Improved disabling of order-giving GUI controls when a player's order giving is disabled between turns.
• Redesign of save/load file dialog, now showing information about each game, and sorting by file modification date.
• Added automatic generation of repeat keypresses while holding down a key.
  • Rates and delays for keyboard and mouse repeat have options in the options screen.
• Made objects list columns configurable by right-click popup menu.
• Enabled (glitchy) sorting of objects by any column by left-clicking the column heading.
• Incomplete ship design name changes are now immediately reflected in the pedia description.
• Added Available, Unavailable, and Redundant parts filtering on the design screen.
• Added right-click popup to enqueue production items and techs on their respective screens.
• Hulls and designs can be dragged from the list to the main design panel to load them (and can also be double-clicked, as before).
• Made clicking the design background image show the hull in the pedia instead of the incomplete design.
• Added toggle to pin GUI windows in place.
• Removed X from top-right of windows that can't be closed.
• Changed the default design screen layout.

Balancing

• Extensive ship hull rebalancing.
• Made colonization require at least partial visibility of the target planet.
• Made stargate construction require at least 1 population, so the required focus can be set.
• Added penalties to planet resource meters when changing focus, to discourage doing so frequently.
• Tweaked various effects, to ensure intended-bonuses never actually amplify penalties, and penalties never actually give bonuses.
• Various supply mechanics changes:
  • Made supply meter grow 1 per turn up to max supply.
  • Changed Interstellar Logistics to give a fixed +3 to supply range.
  • Planet size affects supply: smaller gives more supply than large.
  • Space Elevator gives any planet equivalent supply to tiny planets.
  • Species can have good or bad supply traits.
• Increased native planet troop levels, making invasions more costly.
• Adjusted universe generation special distributions.
• Made meters reset to 0 if a planet is conquered, and disabled meter growth on the turn after capture.
• Changed Ion Storms to give fixed 40 point penalty to stealth and vision.
• Made derelict specials stealthy (40 stealth).
• Adjusted monster spawning rate dependence on galaxy setup setting.
• Damage control techs rebalanced.
• Made Concentration Camps require a population of 3 to be built.

Bugs

• Fixed production costs at start of queue processing, so that processing the queue doesn't affect the costs of other queue items during the same turn.
• Hopefully fixed issue causing dangling server processes from failed load game attempts, which would prevent starting a new game.
• Fixed issue with having multiple different production block sizes on the queue leading to incorrect production costs.
• Fixed Collective Thought Network bonus range.
• Fixed bug causing display errors in the production queue, including "never" for items that should complete in one turn.
• Fixed xenophobic self script triggering from outposts with negative population, or from use of exobots.
• Fixed homeworld growth focus overriding homeworld bonus for the same species elsewhere if it has more than one homeworld.
• Fixed crash and memory leaks when filtering the objects list.
• Gaia special will no longer trigger for Exobots on an Adequate planet.
• Fixed issue on OSX where selecting observer or moderator mode in multiplayer lobby could cause a crash.
• Fixed memory leak in tech tree display code.
• Fixed memory leaks in AI ship design code.
• Removed rename command from other empires' fleets' popup menus.
• Fixed issue where failed colonization attempts could leave ships in an inconsistent state.
• Fixed issue where hotkeys would be enabled while entering text, preventing certain letters from being typed.
• Fixed issue where auto-exploring fleets wouldn't update the GUI to show that they had been told to stop exploring.
• Hopefully fixed issue where the system instead of bundled Python framework was being used on OSX.
• Fixed issue with a ship moving from a system with the derelict special to another system with the derelict special not receiving both bonuses.
• Fixed issue with scrapping multiple ships causing a crash.
• Disabled game saving in GUI when doing so could cause problems.
• Stopped Asteroid Snails from moving.
• Fixed (broken) use of galaxy setup seed in multiplayer games.
• Fixed crash with observers enabling multiplayer autosave.
• Fixed glitchy window dragging.
• Fixed random seeding functions to properly seed more random number generation.
• Fixed some crashes when a model dialog was open (such as a droplist) when turn updates arrived and caused a GUI refresh.
• Fixed Cosmic Dragon adding Nova Bomb Activator specials to any / all planets when it was not in a system.
• Attempted to fix some quirky GUI state issues when alt-tabbing or clicking in/out of the game window.
• Stopped setting of galaxy map pedia article when opening the research or production screens.
• Adjusted population reduction formula for the Concentration Camps and Evacuation buildings, to correct odd results when target population is substantially below current population.
• Adjusted colonization process so colonizing an outpost doesn't cancel scrap orders on buildings on the planet.
• Fixed issue with multiplayer chat history display.
• Fixed issue with ships with self-repairing hulls starting with 0 structure when produced.
• Fixed rare situation where if a floater is the only monster outside a system, it could spawn forests at almost every system.
• Removed design window options for moderators in multiplayer to prevent crashes.

[v0.4.3] - 2013-10-26

Key Changes

• Shields now reduce damage, and all new shield & armor content.
• Many fixes and improvements to the AI.
• Detailed combat log display.
• Numerous GUI tweaks and improvements.
• Galaxy Generation is now based on a editable random seed.
• New clouds and nebulae on empty systems and moving around the galaxy.

Detailed Changelog

New Features / Improvements

• Fundamental change to ship shield mechanics: ship shields reduce the amount of damage suffered from a hit by a fixed value (determined by the shield strength stat), instead of providing additional structure that regenerates between battles.
• Reworked supply block / fleet movement blockade mechanics:
  • Supply blocks and fleet movement blockades have been harmonized to occur in the same situations.
  • Non-stationary ships no longer create blockades / supply-blocks.
  • Armed aggressive fleets arriving in a system and then remaining stationary will maintain any supply flow for their empire, and block it against enemies not already having armed aggressive fleets present.
  • If armed aggressive fleets for two enemy empires arrive at a system at the same time, supply maintenance takes precedence over supply blocks -- they will each maintain supply for for their empire, and not block supply for the other, for so long as both sides remain and survive.
  • An empire 'secures' use of a starlane as an exit from a system simply by having a fleet enter that system along that starlane. If no armed aggressive enemies were already present in the system, then passage through all exiting starlanes is secured for that empire so long as it maintains an armed aggressive fleet presence in that system.
  • Passage of an empire's fleets through 'unsecured' starlanes exiting a blockaded system is blocked until the blockade is completely broken, by defeating all armed aggressive enemy forces present (previously movement was only halted for one game turn); exit along a 'secured' starlane will be allowed after the fleet has halted for at least one turn in the system, even if the blockade is not broken.
• Raised max number of systems to 5000 in GUI.
  • Note FreeOrion is balanced for and performs best with a galaxy in the low 100s of systems. Higher numbers make a game increasingly unbalanced and make rendering performance and turn processing times worse.
• Many fixes and improvements to the AI.
• Added a configurable random seed value for galaxy generation.
• Made focus visible on detected planets a player doesn't control.
• Detailed combat log display.
• New Moderator player type in multiplayer mode:
  • Sees the full universe like an observer.
  • Controls the length of turns.
  • Can create and destroy objects, add or remove starlanes, and set ownership of objects.
  • Can be used with no other human players and several AIs to have a more-controlled AI test arena than using observer mode.
• Made fields visible if any part of them is within detection range, rather than their centre.

Content

• Major revision of shields/armor/weapons (due to the new shield mechanics):
  • Added new shield techs and parts.
  • Added new armor techs and parts.
  • Rearranged tech tree for armor and shield techs:
    • Changed starting techs: instead of basic shields players now get basic armor at the start of the game.
  • Completely reworked/rebalanced shield, armor and weapon parts stats, tech and build costs.
  • Adjusted space monsters accordingly.
  • Adjusted a few basic pre-made/starting ship designs, discarded the rest.
  • Adjusted affected species picks accordingly.
  • Reduced Acirema ship shield bonus to +1.
• Added molecular clouds that reduce ship shields, which spawn outside the galaxy and move in.
• Added nebulae that spawn on no-star systems.
• Added more species write-ups.
• Added terraforming reversion building.
• Translation updates: Finnish, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Russian.
• Tweaks/refinements for Evacuation building.
• Concentration Camps now cause a lingering negative effect on population, of indefinite duration even if the camp is removed.
• Fixed Solar Orbital Generator building description.
• Fixes to Psychogenic Domination and System Defense Mines techs.
• Corrected description of requirements for the Static Multicellular hull.
• Fixed Egassem species description.
• Tech tree reorganization and various adjustments to techs.
• To avoid confusion removed "can colonize" property from species that can't build ships.
• Fixed weapon species picks:
  • Grant not only a specific refinement level, but also all preceding techs at the start of the game.
  • Lowered weapon tech for ultimate weapons from Laser 4 to Laser 3, adjusted premade ship design "Mark IV" accordingly.

Graphics / GUI

• Replaced galaxy map toolbar button text with icons.
• Added detection range circles opacity control to galaxy map options.
• Added empire statistics to empires window.
• Sitrep window will not pop up if the design, research or production screens are open.
• Sitrep messages:
  • Added sitrep message when tame monsters mature.
  • Added sitrep message upon total population loss from Concentration Camp.
  • Added sitrep messages for mines.
  • Added sitrep messages for Psychogenic Domination.
  • Reordered sitrep order of presentation; is now customizable via content files.
• Augmented census popup with tag/characteristic info.
• Reorganization of species description text.
• Planet and field icons in objects list.
• On the ship design screen ship parts are now hidden for which improved/refined parts have become available that are superior in every aspect (so, Laser 2 hides Laser 1 etc.).
• Added "X" close buttons to objects list and pedia windows.
• Added aggregate fleet stats icons at top of fleet window.
• Moved focus drop box to top level of planet panel, out of the resources subpanel.
• Overhauled research screen rendering:
  • Rewrote rendering of tech panels.
  • Adding tooltips to tech panels with details that are now not shown on the panel itself.
  • Highlighted enqueued techs on tree.
  • Tech panel mouseover and selection indicators.
  • Removed tech type buttons on tree filter.
  • Added prerequisites and unlocked techs to tech descriptions in pedia.
  • Removed tech navigator. Pedia entry for techs have equivalent links.
  • SHIFT + single click enqueues a tech.
  • CTRL + double click enqueues a tech to top of queue.
• Ship stats of a ship design displayed on the ship design screen now take into account effects groups acting on a ship.
• Readjusted fleet window summary bar to show current stat rather than projected next turn values.
• Modified pedia panel "up" button behavior to always be enabled and to always go directly to the index, regardless of what page the view is currently on.
• Replaced pedia panel button text with arrow icons.
• Tweaked multiplayer default empire names, species and colors selection.

Balancing

• Reduced required distance to moving ships for Collective Thought Network (from 500 to 200).
• Species balancing:
  • Having xenophobic species in an empire causes disruption (in form of maluses) for the colonies of the xenophobic species as well as for other colonies near them.
  • Xenophobic species get the Concentration Camp tech at the start of the game.
  • Reduced Etty detection range malus (from 20 to 9).
• Increased chance for no star systems.
• Made Gas Giant Generator and Interstellar Lighthouse building bonuses non-stacking.

Bugs

• Fixed spawning of Acirema guard ships so as to not be triggered by (player owned) Acirema ships.
• Fixed several issues with one click colonize/outpost buttons.
• Fixed issue with empty fleets appearing in-game after their ships have been destroyed.
• Various fixes/adjustments to Concentration Camps.
• Fixed issue that sometimes stars were stacked on top of each other during galaxy generation.
• Fixes for various issues with loading/saving games.
• Restricted speed bonuses granted by Infrastructure Ecology tech and Interstellar Lighthouse building to ignore immobile ships.
• Fixed stealth reducing effect of Interstellar Lighthouse building.
• Fixed display of system name for systems that have no star but do have planets.
• Fixed map hotkey issues.
• Fixed issue that production progress stops for ships if their design is deleted.
• Fixed non-working "Cancel Scrapping Ships" order for fleets.
• Fixed issue where planets that lost population and converted to outposts retained their focus setting.
• Fixed some crashes in research screen / tech tree.
• Fixed detection range circle overlap artifacts at high detection ranges.
• Fixed issues with fleet stat calculations.
• Fixed sometimes inaccurate population projections on colonize button and planet suitability report.
• Numerous other bug fixes.

[v0.4.2] - 2013-02-20

Key Changes

• Very much improved, non-cheating AI. Sometimes experienced 4X players loose.
• Many GUI enhancements and shortcuts.
• Galactopedia expanded with game mechanics articles and many cross-links.
• Batch production of ships now possible.
• Improved sitrep notifications
• Reworked stealth and detection
• Almost everything has been enhanced, reworked, and better balanced.

Detailed Changelog

New Features / Improvements

• Very much improved AI:
  • Added an AI aggression setting during game setup.
• Keyboard presses should now account for the operating system language setting, and it should be possible to type non-Latin characters in-game as long as the appropriate character set is used in the selected stringtable file.
• Added an objects list window, with collapsable rows showing objects containing other objects:
  • Objects list has an incomplete filtering function to control what objects are shown.
  • Right clicking an object in the objects list give a command to data dump about that object to the messages window. (For debug purposes).
• Added ion storms moving around the map. Ships and planets in storms have reduced stealth and detection.
• Improved Sitrep:
  • Added type filters.
  • Old sitrep entries are kept on later turns, and may be reviewed.
  • Different icons for different event types.
• Added droplists to items on production queue to produce multiple items before being removed from the queue.
• All ships produced by an empire on a single turn are now put into a single fleet, rather than a separate fleet for each ship.
• Added a happiness meter to planets.
• Disabled production of duplicate buildings when one already has been produced.
• Various turn-processing and GUI speed improvements.
• Added a Protection Focus
• Reworked combat:
  • An attacking ship will fire each of its weapons separately at independently- selected targets.
  • A ship that is not visible on the map to an empire cannot be fired at by that empire's ships in battle until the ship fires on one of that empire's ships.
• Reworked autosaving
  • Autosaves are in a separate directory from regular saves
  • There is a customizable limit on the number of autosaves to keep

Balancing

• Unified resource and fleet supply into a single meter: the Supply meter. Infrastructure is not involved.
  • Outpost now provide 0 jump supply, and colonies 1 jump supply. Techs and buildings can extend that.
• Removed infrastructure from having any effect on producing Industry or Research.
• Greatly reduced the number of Theory techs that have no direct effect.
• Adjusted price and research time of many techs.
• Recallibrated Stealth & Detection Strength numbers:
  • to max around 100.
  • to work with the new mechanics.
  • Reduced detection ranges for ships and planets by roughly half.
• Loosened requirements for Asteroid hulls/parts
  • Asteroid processors are no longer shipyards, but must be built on a belt for a shipyard anywhere in the system to build asteroid hulls.
  • Rock/Crystallized Armor Plating now requires an Asteroid Reformation Processor somewhere in the empire.
• Rebalancing of weapons, ship hulls, armour, and shield parts.
• Made Terraforming more expensive, and made it get more expensive for repeatedly terraforming the same planet.
• Made colony ships more expensive.
• Disable production of shipyards at outposts.
• Adjusted Microgravity Industry to "Increases Industry by +5 on all Industry- focused colonies in system with an asteroid belt outposts. Additional asteriod outposts do not provide additional benefit."
• Removed loophole that made Exobot Origin buildings cheaper than building. Exobot colony ships on Exobot worlds.
• Some rough species balancing:
  • Weakened Trith with Narrow EP.
  • Strengthened Egassem with Ultimate Industry.
  • Strengthened Laenfa with Average Industry.
  • Strengthened Gyisache with Great Research.
  • Species with a starting weapons bonus now also start with more ships.
• Major Redo of Ground Troops:
  • Protection focus now increases max troops to 200%.
  • Species Bonus/Malus is now multiplied.
  • Native planets and homeworlds now have a bonus to troops.
  • Outposts have weaker defenses.
  • Increased cost of Garrison Techs, and decreased capacity of Troop Pods.
• Increased penalties to population on poor and hostile planets.
• Planet meters, such as population, can now be negative, which can lead to faster loss of population on uninhabitable planets.
• Redstricted production of imperial palaces if an empire already has one that it produced.
• Some buildings deduct from their planet's infrastructure, reducing benefits from having high infrastructure on those planets.
• Added increasing cost to some ship hulls depending on the number of ships an empire owns.
• Incrased amount of information players are sent about other empires, including capitals and their supply network.

Content

• More Game Concepts 'pedia entries.
• Russian & French translation update.
• Added Dampening Cloud monster.
• Added Planetary Evacuation.
• New ultimate detection strenght tech "Omni-scanners".
• New detction strength booster special, Panopticon Complex.
• Added Philosopher Planet special.
• Added Furthest species.
• Added a ship speed boost effect to lighthouses.
• New engine ship parts.
• Added planetary shield and defense boosting techs.
• Reworked stargate mechanics.
• Made three of the indigenous species telepathic.

Graphics

• New Focus & Planet meter icons with matching chart colors.
• Sitrep icons.
• More unique icons, especially fo ship parts.
• Added scanlines to more places in GUI to indicate objects the player previously saw but can't see on the current turn.
• Added multi-turn expanding ring effect for supernovae.

GUI

• Added one-click colonize and invade buttons to sidepanel. Selecting ships in the FleetWnd will override the default selection of ships to use for these actions.
• Added cumulative weapon, structure, and sheild, information to fleets so it is easy to gauge a fleet's chance of winning.
• Numpad keypresses now enter numbers when numlock is on, and act as arrow navigation keys in text edit widgets.
• Added option to swap left and right mouse buttons, for left-handed players.
• Added line to producible item tooltips to indicate that items must be unlocked.
• Added key remapping function for hotkeys, via the file keymaps.txt.
• Recoloured most planet meters.
• Added right-click popup menu commands to:
  • set map / misc options (enabled in options screen).
  • split damaged ships from a fleet.
  • split unfueled ships from a fleet.
  • scrap a whole fleet.
  • have a fleet automatically explore.
  • look up special icons in the 'pedia.
  • look up ship designs in the 'pedia.
  • generate planet-species suitability report.
• New Census tootlip that shows the species breakdown of the player's empire's population.
• Other empire resource icons have simple tooltips.
• Adjusted contrast of progress bars.
• Hid some details of projects on production queue when there is insufficient screen space.
• Added red/green colour coding of colony predicted target populations on colonize button.
• Added ! indicators on top of screen to indicate if PP or RP are going unspent.
  • These indicators may be clicked to open the appropriate production/research screen.
• Added thick starlane indicators in empire colour to show connected systems that can share production.
  • The colour of these indicators is altered conspicuously when the group of systems has unspent PP available.
• Alphabetized entries in most encyclopedia lists.
• Added fleet summary statistics (number of ships, weapon strength, etc.) to fleet data panels in fleets window.
• Added somewhat unsightly text indicator of star colour to system sidepanel.
• Made popup menus less transparent by default.
• Changed how names are shown for enemy ships and fleets.
• Added Can Produce Ships and Can Colonize conditions to popups for ship designs in the production screen, to better indicate why they can / can't be produced at a location.
• Added links to techs that can unlock buildings, ship hulls, and ship parts in their 'pedia entries.
• Added empire summary icons for empire detection and a count of ships owned.
  • Removed mineral and trade icons.
• Added a plain-text stealth indicator to the building tooltip.

Bugs

• Disabled building shipyards at outposts.
• Disabled the construction of any duplicate buildings at the same location. It is still possible to double-queue a building and get multiples.
• Fixed longstanding font corruption with non-Latin text.
• Partial fix for a crash with font text colours wrapping over line ending in the encyclopedia window. May still result in glitchy text colouring, but hopefully won't crash.
• Fixed issue where some producible items would be replaced by empty space on their list.
• Fixed issue where in-game options taking text would be saved as "1" instad of blank text.
• Hopefully fixed crashes when manipulating fleets.
• Fixed miscalculation of number of production projects in progress.
• Fixed building indicator progress bar
• Prevented ships from engaging in combat with planets of which they have only basic visibility.

[v0.4.1] - 2012-08-03

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 propagation.
• 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 propagation.
• 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 updates:
  • 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 updates:
  • 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.
• Special updates:
  • 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
• Tech updates:
  • 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.
• Many description improvements, and some spelling corrections.

[v0.4] - 2012-02-05

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 category.
• 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.
  • when a tame space monster is 'born'.
• AI script updates.
• New default pre-made shipdesigns for empires.

Graphics

• Made companion stars always visibile in in side-panel.
• 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.

[v0.3.17] - 2011-09-23

New Features / Improvements

• Added space monsters.
• Added neutral natives on planets.
• Added frequecy of monsters and natives can be adjusted during galaxy setup.
• Ground troop ship parts that allow a ship to invade neutral or enemy planets. Planets can be invaded only if their shield meters are zero. The original and new owners get sitreps after invasions succeed.
• Very basic ground combat system for capturing planets - ship combat can no longer capture planets.
• Reduced turn processing time, particularly for large galaxies.
• New versions will ignore old config.xml files, preventing some crashes after updating.
• Added more lists of content, and more details about content, in the encyclopedia.
• Reduced file save size by using binary format (instead of semi-readable text).

Balancing

• Generally a lot of little tweaks to make the beginning of the game more playable.
• Decreased cost of colony pods by 20%.
• Unexplored systems block resource sharing between planets, preventing players from knowing about a hostile presense in a system before exploring it.
• Ships no longer have functional detection when moving on starlanes. Ships must be in a system to detect objects.
• Planets can be seen, although without details, by any object in their system, regardless of detection and stealth. Detection strength above planet stealth gives details about the planet.
• Planets do not increase their shield, troops, or defense meters on a turn they are attacked.
• Fleets must end a turn's movement if they arrive at a system that contains hostile fleets and no friendly fleets.
• Increased base detection of all hulls to at least 5.
• Colonies target construction is increased to 20 so once the meter fills, they create 1 jump supply lines.

Content

• Added a lot of minor "native" species, a few of which have extended descriptions.
• Experimental addition of various space monsters.
  • Added domesticateable space monster nests.
• Added Small & Medium basic hulls (smaller and cheaper than standard).
  • Improved, usually cheaper, pre-made ship designs.
• Added Computronium Moon & Damaged Computronium Moon specials.
• Added automatic terraforming to Gaian planets.
• Added guard ships sometimes to Gaian, Ancient Ruins, & Computronium specials.

Graphics/GUI

• Added binary star variant star graphics.
• Added new building graphics.
• Systems with no stars but with populated planets now show their system name on the map.
• Systems with only non-player populated planets have a lighter name on map than non-populated systems.
• New sitrep messages.
• Slightly improved resolution settings apply button functionality on OSX.
• Made default sidepanel with slightly larger so that the 6th meter icon in planet panels will not be partly hidden.
• Made default message window and players list wider and less tall.
• Invade button on planet panels works similarly to the Colonize button; a troop ship must be selected in the same system.

Bugs

• Fixed issue where empty fleets would remain when moving ships around.
• Fixed crash when using conditions to check the distance between two systems.
• Made sidepanel disable focus droplists when the planet is not owned by the client's player.
• Modified the Imperial Palace to only work on planets owned by the empire that produced it, preventing captured palaces from moving a player's capital.
• Fixed bug with detection system where ships in a system could detect arbitrarily stealthy objects in the same system regardless of their detection strength.
• Fixed issue where planets would not feed themselves, even if they produced adequate food, while being blockaded.
• Fixed issue where ordering a single ships to colonize multiple planets in the same system could leave nonfunctional cancel buttons on planet panels.
• Fixed bug where actual system name was being shown instead of "Deep Space" in the FleetWnd.

[v0.3.16] - 2011-06-15

Changes since the last release include:

• Replaced the fullscreen turn progress window that covered the map with progress indicator text in the message window. The map now stays visible between turns, but with order-issuing UI disabled until the next turn starts being playable.
• Chat messages are now enetered in the same message window with a more obvious interface for entering text and displaying old messages.
• Added an empire / player list window above the chat / message window. When any empire or player is selected, chat messages are sent only to that player.
• The server now sends updates several times between turns, including fleet movements before combats, and a full update (as before) at the start of the next turn.
• Added an encyclopedia to the in-game interface, showing information about game content like ship parts, techs, species, etc.
• Added the option to have observer players in multiplayer games. These players can see the whole universe, but don't have an empire to control and can't control when turns are ended.
• Added the option to have AI players in multiplayer games.
• With the observer option and AI players in the multiplayer lobby, it is now possible to create an AI-only game with only a human observer. This works like an AI test arena, with the AIs playing against eachother and no human player.
• Added a "Drop" option in the multiplayer lobby, to allow removing human or AI players from games.
• Added "Deep Space" to possible types of systems in universe. These systems have no star, but may still have a planet.
• Made map screen zoom centre on the cursor instead of the centre of the screen.
• Improved rendering support for graphics cards that don't support rendering buffers and shaders.
• Made system sidepanel resizable and draggable.
• Made the UI generally respond better to FreeOrion window resizing. The intro screen generally looks good, but production and research don't resize properly, yet.
• Content updates, including new species.
• Tweaked fleet window layout to remove the new fleet drop panel when the window is very small.
• Added optional autogenerated effects descriptions to various tooltips and content descriptions. These must be enabled in the options to be seen, since many people complained that the autogenerated text was hard to read.
• Translated stringtable updates.
• Updated AI scripts.
• Reworked autoresolved combat.
• Added an "Apply" button on the resolution screen. This seems to work on Windows, but may not on other operating systems.
• Changed the tech tree layout code to a custom implementation. There may be some quirks with this new system.
• Tweaked layout and rendering of meter bars.
• Fixed issues with food distribution to planets.
• Made rollover link text colour modifiable in options.
• Made SidePanel retain scroll position of planets list between opening and closing the panel or changing system, and when pressing the turn button.
• Fixed issue with SidePanel where scrolling up planet panels would cause the system droplist and forward/backward buttons to become unusable.
• Fixed sidepanel scrolling problem when expanding and collapsing planet panels.
• Tweaked how colonization works, so that ships ordered to colonize, and their fleets, don't disappear until the turn is ended. Ships ordered to colonize are marked with an indicator. As well, colonization now can't occur if there are enemy armed ships in the same system.
• Various bug fixes and new features within the game content and AI scripting systems.
• Made the client respond more promptly to server disconnections, so that players don't attempt to finish their turn before being made aware of the disconnection.

[v0.3.15] - 2010-08-04

Changes since the last release include:

• Added scriptable species definitions in species.txt. Species have names, icons, focus settings, evironmental preferences, food consumption and effects associated with them. Many data-table based meter modifications have been moved into species effects, including population and health dependence on planet environment level for a species.
• Removed secondary focus setting, and removed the balanced focus option. Planets now have only a single focus selection, all of which much be specific and (hopefully) more interesting to play with and easier to create content for.
• Made focus settings moddable as part of Species defintions. Available foci on a planet can depend on arbitrary conditions, which may make for interesting gameplay changes with advancing tech or situational changes during a game. Each species can have a distinct set of available foci as well.
• Fixed issue with custom ship designs that would frequently crash the game when they were built.
• Modified behaviour of design screen when modifying a design: the incomplete design's info is now shown in the encyclopedia panel whenever the design is modified or if the main panel is clicks. Clicking a part or hull once shows info about that part or hull, as before. The information about ship designs in the encyclopedia is also greatly expanded.
• Added right-click popup menu command on the list of completed designs on the design screen: "Delete Design". This lets players remove designs from the list that appears on the production screen, and from the completed designs list itself on the design screen.
• Added species property to planets and to ships, which is used when colonizing to determine the species of the new colony. Built colony ships get the species of the planet where they were built.
• Added an indication of ships species next to the design name of a ship on the fleets window, and planets species in their population tooltip.
• Modified colonization UI to require a single colony ship to be selected before showing the colonize button for colonizable planets. The colonize button now shows the initial (determined by the colony ship capacity) and target planet population (determined by the species to be colonizing) on the colonize button.
• Added some Python library files in a zip in the main FreeOrion directory in the Win32 installer. This should fix issues with nonfunctional AI when Python hasn't been installed on a user's system.
• Removed the homeworld special, and modified species to track all the planets which are their homeworld, which are set during universe generation. Multiple planets can be a homeworld for a species, which is helpful as there are presently only two species available.
• Fixed (hopefully) some issues with directories-finding code on Linux.
• Modified apperance of meter bars on the sidepanel, to support showing current value, change in current value, and target/max value, even if the target is less than the current value.
• Added a food consumption meter type, which is shown on the planet panels on the sidepanel, next to health and population.
• Planet population icons use their species icon, rather than a generic population icon.
• Added a droplist to pick species during single or multiplayer game setup.
• Replaced contents of empire_names.txt with various generic empire names, rather than the species names that were there, since species are now a separate concept from empires.
• Modified how empires and players information are stored in and retreived from save files, to make it easier to get this information when loading games without needing to load the whole save file.
• Made loading games much less likely to crash the client or server. Any errors that occur will abort the load and (hopefully) show an error message, and likely return the player to the intro screen, rather than crash.
• Fixed issue with saving or attempting to write to an unwritable log file, which could previously crash the client or server.
• Added some logging of the time it takes to execute various initialization tasks, to help future performance tuing.
• Added an "inherent" meter cause type, for a few default/basic meter levels that are set automatically to make the game mechanics, particularly for stealth, work better.
• Reworked Meter concept. Now meters have just a single value, instead of a current a max as before. Some meters have associated meters that are used like a max or target value, but not all, which is useful because various uses of meters don't need a max or a target value.
• Added new meter types for max and target meters, as these are now separate meters internally.
• Modified the population growth mechanics to account for food allocation meter values and the possibility of larger population than target population.
• Removed upper bounds on meter values. This may cause some UI problems if values are larger than can be shown in the available space, but we'll deal with this when it becomes a problem.
• Modified tooltips to handle new paired (or unpaired) meters.
• Changed clickable links in sitrep entries and encyclopedia entries to be always distinctly coloured rather than underlined when moused over.
• Modified effect parsing for new meter system, and accordingly updated content files.
• Moved various data table-based meter modifications into effects.
• Modified parts palette on the design screen to not show buttons for classes of parts for which none exist.
• Changed resource output calculation to use meter values, rather than a more complicated multiplication and scaling between meter value and planet population. The resource output can still depend on population by making the effect that sets the resource meter value depend on population. This makes understanding output and where it comes from simpler.
• Tweaked colour of industry meters.
• Added Dump functions to various gamestate objects, which can be used for debugging or logging.
• Added numerous content scripting object properies and modified existing ones, including adding a string property type, and properties such as object name, species, building type name, planet focus, ship design id, fleet id of a ship, planet id of a building, system id for any object, final and next and previous system id for ships, and the number of ships in a fleet.
• Added a SetSpecies effect and a Species condition.
• Changed Homeworld condition to use new system of species having one or more homeworld objects, rather than working with a special. Homeworld condition can match any homeworld, or can take a list of species names whose homeworlds should be matched.
• Modified FocusType condition to take a list of focus type names to match. Planets with those foci will be matched.
• Modified BuildingType condition to takte a list of building type names.
• Fixed some issues with CMake build system.
• Wrapped some code in try-catch blocks to prevent some crashes when parsing stringtable entries.
• Fixed issue where empires would lose visibility of starved planets, and never actually observe them being stared, so would perpetually think they were in the state they were immediatly before starving.
• Disabled the message box that popped up to inform players they had won, as this was annoying, particularly when playing a game with no AIs, in which case a player would always win on the first or second turn.
• Replaced ship health meters with structure and max structure, as health meters were changed to health and target health, and it doesn't make sense to have more structure (-al integrity) than the max, even though a planet could have (temporarily) more health than its long term stable health value.
• Renamed some tooltip resource "production" strings to "output", to avoid confusion with the separate "production" concept in game.
• Consolidated some stringtable entries related to meter tooltips, which now use standard meter name stringtable entries.
• Modified victory sitreps by adding a text parameter that can be filled in with an entry in the stringtable by the client.
• Added VarText support (in stringtable entries) for building types, specials, ship hulls and parts.
• Fixed some meter value discrepancies between server and client.
• Changed conditions and effects evaluation to use the initial value of a meter on a given turn, so that meter values can be repeatedly recalculated and not accumulate as a result.
• Removed several resource output object properties from content scripting, since these are now redundant with the resource meter values.
• Added new hull design backgrounds.
• Removed unused ship icons.
• Fixed some app bundle isues on MacOSX
• Removed "previous" value from meters... which contained the value of the meter on the previous turn, as this wasn't being used anywhere.
• Tweaked behaviour of code that sets default rendering settings dependent on graphics card GL version support, which is intended to reduce the number of crashes on older rendering hardware.
• Tweaked behaviour of stealth threshold slider on galaxy map.
• Fixed crash when clicking between FleetWnd and other windows and the map surface.
• Added initial code to 3D combat system to support cached rendering of objects.
• Improved simultaneous server/client combat timestep updating.
• Fixed issue with server logging that was shutting down before all logging was complete. This should make server log files more useful after crashes.
• Fixed a minor graphical glitch on the encyclpedia panel, where a border line wouldn't be rendered.
• Fixed issue with autogenerated condition / effect descriptions that treated a "Value" in a SetMeter effect as a property of the source object, rather than the target object that is should be.
• Various stringtable changes / updates, etc.

[v0.3.14] - 2010-04-30

Changes since the last release include:

• Progress on the 3D interactive combat system. This can be tested during regular games by running freeorion --test-3d-combat or directly by running freeorion --tech-demo. This is not yet meant to be playable, however.
• Transitioned to CMake from SCons build system (Visual Studio and XCode projects are also still available).
• Tweaked planet population growth dependence on health.
• Misc. content / effect fixes.
• Various rendering tweaks and configurable options.
• Made the expected locations of binary and data directories more flexible.
• Fixed issue where running freeorion -h would still start the program after outputting help text for command-line options.
• Added indicator to system resource summary to indicate when there is no import or export of a resource * Added location indicator to production queue items.
• Various AI script improvements.
• Fixed bug where planets weren't properly autoselected on production screen, preventing production items from being enqueued in certain situations.
• Fixed issue where fleet buttons were rendered over top of sitrep or sidepanel.
• Moved "Moving To Unknown System" or "Holding at System" text to fleet panels, rather than a separate text box below the fleets list on the fleets window.
• Changed resource meter growth to +1/turn from a much more complicated formula.
• Fixed issues with meter growth prediction.
• Made ships regenerate 0.1 fuel/turn when not moving.
• Fixed issue where previous effectsgroups's target set were being used for subsequent effectsgroups, leading to problems with techs or buildings acting on the wrong objects.
• Fixed issues with Number, NumberOf, WithinDistance, and Affiliation conditions.
• Fixed issues with SetTechAvailability effect.
• Added minimum population requirements, below which population of planets is set to 0, to prevent very small numbers being tracked.
• Made buildings on a planet become owned by empires that colonize the planet.
• Added missing TradeStockpile property for effect definitions.
• Tweaked part tooltips on the design screen.
• Expanded part encyclopedia entry text.
• Added or fixed CreateBuilding and CreateShip effects and parsing.
• Allowed full effectsgroup definitions to be added to ship parts and hulls, rather than just stat-setting effects.
• Fixed issue with UI number rendering showing wrong numbers of digits.
• Made systems with resource sharing connections provide fleet supply.
• Completely reworked the visibility system to take into account stealth, detection and distance, and to have empire remember previously-seen but not-currently-visible objects and include these in displayed systems in GUI.
• Added fog-of-war indicator on systems and planets that aren't currently visible to player, but which the player previously had visibility of.
• Fixed issue with unreadable text on research queue.
• Added Stationary condition, that matches non-moving objects (for effects definitions).
• Added right-click popup command to split fleets.
• Added the ability to right-click command buildings or ships to be scrapped or cancel scrapping. Ordered-scrapped ships aren't included in fleet fuel and speed calculations. Ordered scrapped ships and buildings have a large red X over their icons.
• Added an optional coloured disc around objects to show their visibility radius, and an additional optional slider to set the "assumed stealth level" that is deducted from visibility ring radius, to show how far away objects of the indicated stealth could be seen by ships, planets or buildngs.
• Added a check for OpenGL version and automatic setting of some rendering options at first startup to hopefully prevent some crashes on systems without OpenGL 2.0 support.
• Made default mouse mode non-exclusive on Win32, to avoid issues with disappearing mouse pointer.
• Reworked planet panel rendering.
• Changed UI default colour scheme.
• Fixed issue with sidepanel scrollbar not showing up when needed.
• Stored empire name and server address be remembered from game to game.
• Disabled deleting of old autosaves when loading a save, to aide debugging.
• Added safety / sanity checks to order execution to prevent AIs from crashing the game.
• Removed MSVC 2005 project files.
• Made resource distribution and fleet supply use known systems, rather than only currently-visible systems.
• Fixed issues with fleet arrival sitreps on turns when those fleets were also destroyed.
• Fixed fleet window layout issues.
• Fixed issue with inconsistency between expanded or collapsed panels on sidepanel in or out of production mode.
• Fixed crash where dragging a fleet onto the ships list would crash.
• Various translation updates.
• Fixed some issues with old gamestate flashing on the screen briefly when loading another game, or with old galaxy map appearing over the intro screen after resigning or being disconnected.
• Fixed issue where meter accounting estimates were wrong when loading games.
• Hid autogenerated effect / condition descriptions by default, since many people were complaining about how hard they were to understand. Showing nothing is probably better in most cases, but they can be turned back on if desired.
• Fixed starvation sitrep generation.
• Fixed code that determine the directory where the running binary is located on various operating systems.
• Reworked automatic combat resolution so that combats can occur over several turns, and ships and planets can be damaged (see ship health indicator and planet construction dropping).
• Added a planet captured sitrep message.
• Disabled system name multi-empire colouring due to issue it was causing when interacting with underlining or bolding of system names to indicate presence of a shipyard or homeworld.
• Added option to specify player's name in single player.
• Fixed missing close X on FleetWnd.
• Fixed issue with "byte order mark" in stringtable files.
• Improved credits scroll rendering.
• Added an optional zoom slider to the map.
• Added utility variable "Value" to set meter effects, to allow modifying the existing value that's being set without needing cumbersome variables like Target.MaxFarming.
• Separated full screen and windowed resolution options.
• Made clicking on a tech on the queue show that tech in the encyclopedia.
• Made players joining multiplayer lobbies for new games be assigned different colours from any other players in the lobby, and be assigned empire name equal to their player names.
• Added meters to ships to store / determine their part stat values (range, ROF, damage), and effects to modify these meters.
• Added backup stringtable lookup in the English table. This means that missing strings in translated stringtables will be shown as English text, rather than an error message in game.
• Tweaked layout of multiplayer lobby screen.
• Added --load and --auto-advance-first-turn console commands to load a single player save with the specified name and to autmatically advance the turn once, which are useful for debugging.
• Fixed issue with SitRep being stuck under other windows on the map screen.
• Fixed issue where button text on intro screen would overflow available space.
• Fixed up FreeOrion icon file to have multiple resolutions, and to be used for the Win32 window and executable file.
• Fixed some issues with Win32 installer and uninstaller.

[v0.3.13] - 2009-05-24

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 fields.
• 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 ж
• 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.

[v0.3.11] - 2009-01-09

• 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 propagate 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.

[v0.3.10] - 2008-01-25

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).

v0.3.9 - ???

Changes since the last release include:

• A mostly-statically-linked Linux binary is provided that should work on many distributions.
• Various new and updated art (tech icons, nebulae, map stars, etc.).
• Gassy substance on the map to give galaxies shape.
• Internal details of ship designs, hulls and parts and their interaction with other game features, including how they're defined in text files.
• Completely reworked design screen. The current version is much closer to the planned design, though is still incomplete. It can be used to design ships by drag-dropping parts after selecting hulls, and to review existing ship designs.
• New ship parts.
• Various Python AI interface improvements.
• Various minor UI improvements.
• Various bug fixes.
• OpenGL 1.5 is now semi-required on Linux. The program might run without it, but this is unsupported. Note that future versions will require GL 2.0 for Windows and Linux.

[v0.3.8] - ???

If you're confused about version numbers, pretend the last few "RC" releases didn't have the RC. Release naming should be more consistent in future.

This is mostly a bugfix release; the crash when an AI empire was defeated issue in particular should be fixed. Additionally, the capacity to do Python AI scripting has been significantly increased, should anyone else be interested in working on that.

[v0.3.1-RC7] - ???

Some new stuff includes:

• Many new icons. Yay for art people.
• The infamous food bug is fixed! (and various other bugs).
• A new initial test ship design screen. You can pick a hull and add parts to it, and the ship will be buildable on the production screen. Naming your design doesn't work properly due to map keyboard accelerators not being disabled on the design screen, though.
• An initial test fleet supply distribution route calculation and display system. There are small checkered lines emanating from systems with planets you control over top of starlanes. These can be expanded by researching the Fleet Logistics tech. Enemy fleets block the propagation.
• Various UI improvements.

[v0.3.1-RC6] - ???

The full list of changes is too lengthy to list completely, but some of the notables include:

• FMOD is gone! OpenAL is now used for sound, eliminating a non-free dependency.
• Several other dependency versions have changed (though this isn't visible to most players).
• AI runs on Python. Anyone can edit the script in /default/AI/FreeOrionAI.py without needing to recompile FreeOrion. If interest in this is expressed, I can write up documentation about the interface FO provides for AI, so contact me if you'd like that information.
• The production and research screens have been overhauled. The UI is much more customizable now, with movable and resizable windows and more flexible displays of the tree view or the buildable items. As well, queues have icons for their items on them.
• The sidepanel is significantly changed, with entirely reworked resource, population and buildings panels.
• Building panels on the sidepanel show in-progress and completed buildings.
• Specials on a planet are shown below the rotating planet render.
• There are tooltips on the sidepanel, in various stages of (in-)completeness, particularly on the resource panel, that provide lots of hopefully-useful information about what's going on to produce the numbers that are displayed. This should help make understanding how the game works much easier.
• Meter and resource production estimates on the sidepanel now account for effects much more accurately. There are still some issues with this to be resolved, but results are shown graphically.
• Much art has been added, including new tech and special icons.
• Various bugs have been fixed…

[v0.3.1-RC5] - ???

RC5 has been released. It represents a lot of behind-the-scenes work, and some more user-noticable stuff too.

Note: The save file format has completely changed, and so your old files will not work.

• A few more techs, buildings, and graphics associated with techs and buildings have been added.
• It should be a lot faster to load and save games, and to receive new turns from the server. (This is the behind-the-scenes stuff.)
• There is now an indicator that shows up over a system when the cursor is over it, and another indicator over the currently-selected system, if there is one.
• The options window was completely rewritten. It should be more complete now, and should work a little better.
• There are now two modes of running FreeOrion available in the start menu -- full-screen and windowed.
• Numerous bug fixes.