That’s right, folks! After five months, version 0.8.1a is finally ready to go! As always, it is available both as a full download and through the launcher. Despite the long wait time (which was at least partially my fault, as I’ll explain below), it is only a minor bugfix update to get rid of the crippling “negative crew” effect experienced by some players. Development of actual content updates will resume soon, and I already have some fresh new ideas for how to improve the game. Anyway, I feel I should explain what actually happened:

After several months, what was originally meant to be a “hotfix” is now a very, very cold fix. After doing a considerable amount of mucking around with FTP, it seems there is a sooper seecret limit on the file size that can be uploaded. When the music was added, I rather naively included in in full, uncompressed .wav format because it was the easiest to use from a coding standpoint.. However, this inflated the game size from a meager 790 kilobytes to over 100 megabytes. For those of you not familiar with nerd jargon, that’s almost 150 times larger. The limit just so happened to be large enough to allow me to upload one such file, but not two. While I can’t do anything about the storage limit, I can convert the music to a smaller file type. This will allow me to upload version 0.8.1a and subsequent versions. However, it isn’t entirely future proof, and there may come a time when the sooper seecret storage space quota comes back to bite us in the hind quarters once again. To help delay the inevitable, once version 0.8.1a is uploaded, version 0.8.1 will be deleted from the server. This shouldn’t be too much of an issue since 0.8.1’s bugginess is the reason for the new version to begin with.