It's time for another update for Galactic Civilizations II and this time we've put our energy into not just adding new features, fixing various reported issues, and tweaking game balance. This time we integrated in a new graphics engine for the ship rendering that should result in a performance boost of 10X to 15X depending on your setup and what is happening on the screen.

This update should be available via Stardock Central by around 5PM EST on June 7, 2007.

Here's a complete list of what's been changed:

+ NEW: New Graphics Engine for ships which should result in a 10X to 15X performance improvement for most players

+ NEW: Computer AI updated to be better in diplomacy

+ NEW: AI ship design more optimized

+ NEW: More differentiation between alien races on what technologies they research

+ NEW: The popup for adding money to negotiations on the trade screen will now open with the value needed to make the AI accept the offer (or the total amount in your treasury if they won't accept it).

+ NEW: Graphs and mini-map rewritten using Direct3D instead of GDI

+ NEW: 3 New Custom Maps

+ NEW: Galaxies tend to have more stars and planets

+ NEW: Stacked ships will only show one ship in the tile

  + The ship that is displayed is chosen like so:

     + If a ship is the galaxy’s selected ship it is always shown

     + Otherwise, the toughest selected ship is shown

     + If no ship in the stack is selected, the toughest ship is shown

    + An icon appears next to ships that are in a stack

    + when you move a ship off of a stack, it will show the next ship in that stack

    + This significantly increases performance in my tests.  I had a stack of about 50 ships and no major hit to frame rate.

+ NEW: Added code to save score data for non-metaverse games locally in the My Documents\My Games\GC2DarkAvatar folder

+ NEW: You can now change the social project (if there is stuff in the queue) from the colony list in the civ manager

+ NEW: Some additional dialog (but no new trees) for computer players

+ NEW: Added Starbase module to repair the starbase with Tech Requirement Advanced Hulls.  Will only show up if the starbase is missing HP, and can be 'installed' multiple times.  This module should not count towards the total modules.

+ NEW: Option to use old graphics engine for users of video cards that don't support the DirectX features we're using

+ FIX: Fixed bug where non-optimal defenses were never decreased as the defenses absorbed damage during a battle round

+ FIX: Fixed end of turn crash that happened if you had the Force AI to use Max CPU option ON.
 
+ FIX:  Made Build Menu update after a project is decomissioned. 1 per planet improvements like Orbital Terraformers will now show up in the build list again if you remove them from the queue or destroy an existing one.  1 per civ and 1

per galaxy improvements may not be destroyed and rebuilt - this is by design.
 
+ FIX: Fixed bug where if you changed the settings for a custom opponent's Natural Abilities and/or Financial Resources, the values would not remain the same after leaving the tab.

+ FIX: Fixed error where invalid information was being returned by the activation code in Win98 and Windows ME by adding alternate code if the first instance failed.

+ FIX: Fixed bug where save game was not saving the campaign file name and added code to fix save games currently exhibiting this bug (should fix problem with people continuing their campaigns)

+ FIX: Fixed crash bug where if the random event that creates a new minor race happened mulitple times, the minor races would end up with the same name and then delete each other's ship designs, causing a crash on the end of a turn

+ FIX: Fixed bug where the turn a ship was created was not saved/restored when loading a save game, which could cause a ship design to be deleted too early

+ FIX: Fixed bug with loading height maps for planet surfaces

+ FIX: Fixed bug where ending the game from the planet screen resulted in a crash because the planet screen was not hidden before the end game screen was unhidden

+ FIX: Added strings that were not being saved to scenario save game code

 + FIX: Made it so that your allies won't declare war on you in the mega event Allied War where the good races gang up on you.

+ FIX: Minimap and line graphs now uses Direct3D for drawing, which should show an increase in framerate.

+ FIX: Updated the QUICKSTART command line parameter code to work with DarkAvatar's settings

+ FIX: The minimap scrolling lag on Vista should be resolved, and scrolling in general should be smoother with better frame rates.

+ FIX: On Vista PCs, the debug.err will now be saved in the Documents\My Games\GC2DarkAvatar folder. (This will not work if you run the exe in WInXP compatibility mode.)

+ FIX: Fixed a minor bug with the money popup in the tradewnd if you were in debt.

+ FIX: Fixed bug where the influence and morale bonuses did not show up correctly on the summary screen (from the planet screen) if there was a influence or morale bonus (respectively) on that tile.

+ FIX:  Flushes resource manager’s resources when game exits

+ FIX: Fixed crash in invasion ground units

+ FIX: Fixed crash if memory does not allocate in ResourceGraphic

+ FIX: Fixed crash in ship design code if hardpoint data failed to load

+ FIX: Fixed bug where minimaps were not refreshing immediately when you started a new game

+ FIX: Added code to handle if you or your trading partner are in debt to fix flakiness with the money popup in the TradeWnd. 

+ FIX: Fixed bug in the function that calculates the morale of a colony to fix a longtime bug where your morale could permanently drop to 1%

+ FIX: Made it so that ships on the Governor minimap should show up larger when they are affected by the switch.  Also made starbases not show up on this minimap to reduce clutter.

+ FIX: Fixed typo in XML files that caused land and background textures in Invasion window to be black

+ FIX: Added code for the super hive to adjust the costs of factories in the queue when they take over another colony.

+ FIX: Fixed a lockup on Trade screen when you have a huge amount of money in the treasury and you try to offer money.

+ FIX: Fixed lockup on Governor screen when you click on the Starship rallypoint governor

+ FIX:  Found a solution for the graphical glitches on AMD machines.

+ FIX: Optimized new batch renderer so that ship instances of the same type will share the same vertex and index buffers.  This will save memory over the previous implementation where each instance had its own vert and index buffers.

This should also fix the where ship parts sometimes would not show textures in the designer.

+ FIX: Fixed some alt-tab crashes present in 1.6 beta 5.

+ FIX: Added code to remove AI ship designs from the graphics cache when they are no longer being used

+ FIX: Fixed bug where, in 1 on 1 battles, if both ships kill each other, the stronger surviving ship would have hp restored instead of receiving 1 hp.

+ FIX: Added support for mixed vertex processing which should help some people with older video cards who would normally be running in software vertex processing mode.

+ FIX: Changed the way that vertex and index buffers are created to help framerates for cards running in software or mixed vp mode.

+ FIX: Fixed bug with loading save games that could cause the cheater flag to be tripped

+ FIX: Fixed bug where you could change AI mining bases to send to your planet

+ FIX: Fixed bug where the repair starbase module was showing up as a bonus in the starbase details screen after it was applied

+ FIX: Fixed bug where the repair starbase module was being counted as one of the available modules even when the starbase didn't need repair, which threw off the total count by 1.

+ FIX: Memory leak in ship gfx when you alt-tab out of the game

+ FIX: Fixed the “Missing Mining Base Graphics” bug

+ TWEAK : Turned off some debug strings to try and improve loading time

+ TWEAK: Added dialog to warn you if you start/load a metaverse game with a cheater flag

+ TWEAK: Pirates event less common, somewhat less lethal

+ TWEAK: AI deals with Disease event better

+ TWEAK: Various tweaks to AI behavior

+ TWEAK: Extreme Colonization more expensive

+ TWEAK: Visual updates to some planetary improvements

+ TWEAK: AI more focused on what it builds on planets (long story)

+ TWEAK: AI tweaks to tech tree

+ TWEAK:  In the Ship Designer, when using auto-place to place a component, the component will use the current scale and rotation settings

+ TWEAK: You are no longer permitted to change your capital to another world, and bonuses for the capital city have been increased.

+ TWEAK: The display of stars on the minimaps should now  be more visible on large and gigantic galaxies.

+ TWEAK: Made a slight change to the code that starts the AI threads which may help with the AI seeming to get a free turn at the start of a new game or when loading a save game. 

+ TWEAK: Planet Surface Variety Option now defaults to 50%

+ TWEAK: Converted star box to use vertex buffer for point sprites and optimized it for point sprites, and optimized it for software vp if running in software vp mode

+ TWEAK: Added option for “Enhanced Ship Rendering” - if you are running in software vp mode, turning this off may increase your performance

+ TWEAK: Added option to allow the game to start in mixed vp mode when it would normally start in software vp mode.  Turn this off if you encounter problems in mixed vp mode to start in software vp mode.