FreeCol 0.10.7 released

Monday, 2013-01-07 Mike Pope
FreeCol 0.10.7 has been released.  This is a bug fix release to correct some serious gameplay problems in 0.10.6.  The only new
feature present is some improvements to the graphics.

Since FreeCol 0.10.6 was released there have been 18 new bug reports, of which 8 are fixed in 0.10.7, one (roads are sometimes ignored) is partially fixed, 4 were invalid, 3 can not be reproduced or are otherwise awaiting clarification, one was a duplicate and one was a content contribution.  Two other pre-0.10.6 bug reports were also fixed.  Bug reports remain crucial to improving FreeCol.  When reporting please try think about what the developers would need to reproduce the bug.  Very few bugs are easily reproducible from just a textural description.  Too many bug reports get stalled, sometimes indefinitely, because of a missing log file (which is almost always needed in the case of a crash or hang) or missing saved game (almost always needed to replay some sort of strange behaviour).

Note also, we do not handle translation directly.  FreeCol is translated by the volunteers at https://translatewiki.net/.  Please
raise translation issues there, except in cases where you see messages containing percent-delimited words %like% %this%.  These are coding bugs and belong on the bug tracker.

There were also several other bugs fixed, including one that can result in certain bonuses (e.g. Jefferson, Newspaper) being counted
twice.  This can lead to very enjoyable levels of bell production.  New games should not have this problem, but existing saved games are vulnerable.  Unfortunately, a fully backward compatible fix would be quite complex and thus likely to cause worse problems and delay this release, so please do not report this as a bug.  Such reports will be closed with a `Wont Fix' status.

There are also lurking problems with old saved games using the America_large map, due to some lake tiles with null regions and single isolated river tiles.  The map has been fixed so new games are safe.  These problems have caused crashes, all reported cases of which are fixed, but we are not that confident there are no more.

Finally, there are still various hard to reproduce problems where the active unit is not correctly displayed.  These tend to depend strongly on what happened just before.  If you wish to report one of these bugs, we will need a saved game, and instructions on what to do to make the problem happen.  A saved game in the failed state will not be enough.
 
We hope you enjoy FreeCol 0.10.7.