New version has arrived, complete with a new updater and some other graphical enhancements and bugfixes. The new Updater should properly recover from aborted downloads, allowing people on modems to have an easier time installing and updating the game.

The new background renderer system is in place, with new, highly detailed backgrounds for all the systems. People may need to play with their Visual Quality settings, and other Video/Graphics options, to obtain the balance of speed and quality that they desire. The new background renderer gives us a tremendous amount of flexibility for adding new sectors with unique backgrounds. However, at present, on the lower detail settings (Off/Low/Medium/High) look a little worse than the old backgrounds (edges of planets are jagged). Very High background detail and above will display the new 3D-object planets. Extremely high uses detailed sprites for many of the stars, and will result on a heavy framerate hit on all but the fastest systems.

Some Win32/DirectX users may find themselves starting in OpenGL after they update. We aren't sure what causes this, but exiting from the game and re-running seems to solve the problem and allow the DirectX driver to be reselected (in Options -> Video -> Change Driver).

A number of other bugs have been fixed. The "invisible missile" problem has been solved. Etc.