Did a lot of behind the scenes overhaul, got rid of a lot of noobish programming practices – using strings (eg: ship names) instead of their memory addresses to identify/compare/assign objects. The newer method is both faster (though CPUs are so fast it doesn’t really matter) but also easier to debug and error correct.

I was about to overhaul the AI, but I felt somewhat hesitant, I didn’t have the exact method in mind so I wanted to hold off a bit so I did a few battle editor changes, you can now specify targets for ships, and link stations to bases (so that a shipyard can produce ships using the base’s resources). Also you can specify backgrounds and light parameters in the generated files.

Next up I decided to tackle tutorials, they’ve been text files for a while now, but not in “xml” type format so I decided to convert them to make them easier to maintain. This will also impact objective files for all game modes – and basically overhaul how games start and load, before game starts were hard coded, after these changes they will be read from xml files meaning that they will be open for modding and easier changes.