Free Orion

FreeOrion is an open-source game inspired by Master of Orion, is a turn-based game of epic space strategy that builds on the classic '4X' model by incorporating the nation-building elements of games such as Europa Universalis 2 and a versatile t

While its modular, open-source design allows for a significant degree of customization of the game engine and the story elements by the community, the FreeOrion team is dedicated to the construction of a living, breathing universe in a 'grand campaign' model.

What is new in this release:

• 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.

What is new in version 0.3.14:

• 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 militaryrelated 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 fleetsupplied 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).

What is new in version 0.3.13:

• 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 fiels
• 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 L
• 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

What is new in version 0.3.10:

• 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.
• 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.
• Various other bug fixes (and additions).

Requirements:

• GiGi - latest from CVS
• FreeType2
• Boost - version 1.32.0 or later
• log4cpp
• DevIL
• SDL
• FMOD
• GraphViz