Server Restarts
Servers will now restart immediately when 0 clients are connected, instead of waiting the usual 5 minutes for the restart.

Minelayers
Minelayers, both UGTO and ICC, now have aft armor / shields.

Shielding
Shields can now "pull" charge from other shield facings. In other words, you can charge up a shield on a certain side by drawing power from a shield from another side on your ship. This will make the ICC much more effective against the UGTO. To change your shield settings, use the following commands:

NUMPAD8 - Front Shields
NUMPAD6 - Right Shields
NUMPAD4 - Left Shields
NUMPAD2 - Aft Shields
NUMPAD5 - Full shields

Each time you use this function, it will draw 10% charge from all other shield facings.

Also, you can toggle shields on or off, by pressing CTRL S.

Ship/Monster AI
These settings have been tweaked for better gameplay. Now monsters will not crash into planets as much, except for the Energy Entities, which have a problem due to their large size.

Ship AI has been enhanced to allow your ship to automatically avoid planet collisions. If you are on a collision course with a planet, you ship will change its course to avoid a collision.

SmartUpdate.exe
The SmartUpdate.exe file replaces the old update file, MirrorUpdate.exe. This new updater will make sure you have the correct and up to date files after a file download. Additionally, you will have the option of being asked to stop any program that is running a *.DLL file that needs to be updated. Reboots should now be rare.

Ships Lost / Resources Lost
Because of the confusion of the "Ships Lost" catagory in the profile, there will be a new catagory, "Resources Lost" which will run on the same basis. You will now also lose 0.005 prestige for each point of "Resources Lost", i.e. you lost 0.5 prestige for destroying a ship worth 100 resources. You will not lose any value of the ship even if it is damaged.

Metaverse Color Coding
The Metaverse Map is now color coded to indicate the main control of a sector.

White: UGTO
Blue: ICC
Red: K'Luth

In Development...
Richard Lyle is again making big plans for Darkspace, and here they are:

1. Trading - I plan to start on this tomorrow. Basically, this will be very involved, but I don't really think it will take more than a week before we'll begin testing. Planets will have real needs and consume certain goods at different rates. A good example, is all planets will need food to sustain the population, the higher the population the more food needed. This means terran planets will become a prime source of food for a star system, thusly players can make good amounts of cash by hauling food out to the barren mining planets on the outskirts of the system. Additionally, StarPorts will be a new structure that can be built. StarPorts will automatically launch freighters carring goods from one planet to another, meeting requirements for goods when no players are available to transport those goods. All in all, I've got a pretty hefty design spec'd out for this, and I'm REALLY looking forward to getting this into DarkSpace.

2. Ship Refits - Once trading is implemented, and players can make money, how to spend their money aside from increasing their prestige becomes the next question. Players will be able to orbit any friendly planet, and upgrade components of the ship using their hard earned cash.

3. Missions - important to increasing gameplay in the MV. Missions will generate automatically based on conditions in the game.

4. Metaverse bonuses - Awards given to players when a star system is completely taken by a faction. Like the scenerio bonus prestige, except for the metaverse.

5. Metaverse events - Events that occur in the metaverse will be posted into the web site. Additionally, when clan planets are attacked or invaded, a message will be sent informing the clan their planet is under attack.

6. Profile improvments - Option to have offline messages emailed and more.

Moderator / Monsters
Moderators can now play as monsters, and will be treated as neutral objects. You will not incur any Friendly Fire points for attacking them.