Beta 5 is the last major public beta of Galactic Civilizations II. We will have a minor update on Monday to fix a problem discovered with nVidia cards (crashes on start for them).
Some of the highlights of the new version include:
+ You can set the resoluton from within the game (which is what we think causes the problem on nVidia cards).
+ The Miles Sound System is now in replacing our own home made sound system. However: If you had a previous version installed, your sound and such will not be set right, you'll need to go to options and turn up the sound since it uses a totally different volume control system.
+ It's been optimized for performance. So it should be faster than previous versions.
+ It should use less memory.
+ The human colony ship has a high-resolution texture. We want to see how this performs for people as it's 8 times larger than the typical "high res" texture you have in other games.
+ The planet screen has been re-designed. We don't have all the icons and graphics in yet but the basic layout is there.
+ The Invasion screen is much closer to completion now.
+ Lots of gameplay tweaks.
+ ALL your settings are now kept in \my documents\my games\galciv2
+ There is a lot more "jewelry" in the game for customizing ships including the ability to rotate the stuff.
+ A lot of stuff was done with custom races to make it more seamless.
+ Computer AI is smarter about ship design and what ships it builds.
+ Ethical Alignment choice bonuses are now working.
+ Tons of bug fixes.
Also, this beta marks the end to new beta testers being able to join. Users who pre-order (regardless from where) will get the Collector's Edition version of the game which has additional content.
