This version adds a new ship, the EC-89 (which replaces the venerable EC-88), and make some other changes and improvements to the game.

We have made a small but critical change to the core server's handling of packets. This should result in a dramatic performance improvement for all users under heavy network traffic conditions (ie, when a lot of stuff is going on). The intent is to make capital ship battles more of a reality, and we've taken several important steps towards that with this change, and with the alterations to the TPG Teradon. Tonight should also see the debut of a new border skirmish mission between the Itani and the Serco in Deneb B12. This skirmish involves several Teradons on each side and can be pretty.. visually intense. It's a recent development, so we aren't sure how well the mission works yet, and there are a few problems we're still trying to improve (the mission currently uses a time limit to determine winner/loser, which we're changing). There are no major rewards for the mission at this time, as it's still in need of a lot of testing.. but eventually missions like this will help us move towards more complex gameplay. There's been a lot of talk of replacing CtC or BP, but our intent is really to supercede those dated gameplay mechanics with a whole new variety of interrelated missions.

Cap ships play a big part in this, and we all want user-controllable cap ships as well, so it's in our best interest to make capital scale battles as effective (and cool) as possible.

You may notice that the teradons have a truly new weapon, a large, slow-moving golden sphere. This is intended to be an anti-cap weapon, but it's still in testing as well.

Please check out the new ships and content, try the new missions (offered in Deneb and Geira I believe, for the respective sides) and post any bugs to the messageboard. Most of all, have fun! Thanks much.

General changelog:

- fixed rendering bug that caused some things to not look bumpy
- fixed some lua errors
- fixed /navroute add command so adding the current sector as the first sector won't mess up jumping
- removed some debugging prints on mac version
- Universe Inventory branches are defaulted to closed (except Local Inventory) and displays number of items in the branch (doesn't recurse into ships, though)
- Universe Inventory is sorted by system name
- hud_target HUD element is a full quat instead of a triangle. It fixes some skins
- slight render optimizations for some special effects
- fixed problem with items getting unselected when jettison menu is updated
- fixed a couple client crashes