One time a week or two ago I sat down and played the game in a multiplayer session with a couple of fans. One thing we found was that... well the planet view was atrocious.

So we redid it.
In this patch, we mainly focused on QOL things, instead of features (which are coming) and we ended up changing the appearance of the game massively for the better, we think. We did get time to add a few cool things, such as tracking of military strength, better tooltips, a few things involving mouse input, and so forth. But our main focus was fixing the crashes that occurred in the last patch.

• Fixed a nasty crash to desktop that happened after several hours involving OpenAL (For real this time). We thought we had fixed this before, and it turned out that what was going on was that the problem wasn't with us. OpenAL apparently has an issue where if you try to play MP3 or .wav files it will detonate randomly. OpenAL is used in a lot of games, and apparently, it's been an issue for the past three years with their audio library. So, we changed all the audio to .ogg files, and it doesn't crash anymore.
  
• Fixed a really rare issue (After pulling my hair out and punching a few doors) of turns locking up and the date endlessly spamming into the future. What was occurring here was that a bugfix had been done where the game was saved or autosaved, it would throw an error if you had a civilization that had no designated slave species at a settlement. We added a huge amount of error handling and changed how it works so that it should NEVER happen again. If an error is thrown now it will now instead shuffle through civilizations and not corrupt your save file.
  
• If you simply right click in the combat view, it will now attack whatever enemy formation is around your mouse cursor - as intended instead of having to use Ctrl+Drag to attack. How this never got fixed previously or noticed prior to this patch was beyond me, literally nobody complained about this for some reason.
  
• Pressing F to focus on the combat map now focuses properly.
  
• Unit grouping spam reduced.
  
• Message log now scrolls properly.
  
• The main menu buttons are now centered on the center of the screen.
  
• If you use the middle mouse button to drag the view you will no longer click every damned button in the process if you go over it.
  
• If you mouse over a ring, it will now become transparent.
  
• Added another more obvious button below the planet view to go back to the solar view. This is why I need feedback, people.
  
• Also fixed an issue where rings were not drawing properly to begin with, reducing lag in planet view.
  
• Asteroids are slightly less common in space combat maps, and dust clouds are now generated instead.
  
• Redid the planet map entirely. On playing this one time, I was disgusted myself at how ugly looking both the flat and the 3D planet view looked. So, I added tile blending, added a series of artwork for every settlement in the game, changed the icons for every settlement, changed the way we draw weather, and so forth. It now looks very pretty.
  
  The 3D planet view now looks very nice, with all kinds of colorful icons.
  
  
• Flat planet view was redone also and now doesn't look atrocious. Now you can see icons of your cities, your outposts, your mines/farms, and so forth.
  
  We also added a bunch of icons such as city icons, hurricanes/cyclones, and so forth for the flat planet view.
  
  
• Deserts now look different and better.
  
• Redone mountains so they don't look terrible.
  
• Instead of the generic, inaccurate "Army Division 05D" or "Battle Fleet 59D" we now autogenerate fleet and army names based on the number of troops with accurate military strength classifications. This isn't related to actual number of units be it tanks or infantry squads' size... it's based on the individual crew of every single individual in an army or fleet, be it a pilot, a co-pilot, the troops and crew aboard a transport, the amount of crew aboard a space station, etc.
  
• Troop counts now display in the tooltip.
  
• If a settlement is damaged, under construction etc - it now displays how long it will take before repaired/finished.
  
• If you drag select over the UI in the combat menu it will now select properly.
  
• infantry, the sizes of your armies, the pilot and co-pilot of a starfighter, the crew aboard a dreadnought or space station down to the individual level are now simulated accordingly.
  
• Because of this, we added the ability to read the "Military Garrison"- or actual number of soldiers stationed on a planet to the tooltips.
  
• Redid fleet and army icons to something that looks better.
  
• Army/fleet icons now scale based on the number of units in every fleet or army.
  
  
• One QOL feature that I'm not sure how it never made it into development - If you right click a planet with a fleet or army, the fleets you have selected will now automatically go into orbit around the planet, and the armies you have selected will land on random locations on the planet.
  
• Unit health bars are now much brighter and easier to see.
  
  
• Added a UI element that displays Materials, Population/Food, and Wealth a lot better with hand drawn icons.
  
• Added materials and troop counts for armies and such on the overview window.
  
• Improved a number of tooltips.
  
• Now if an army/fleet/building is selected on a planet, the planet view will automatically center in the screen on the object selected.
  
• Right clicking an already selected fleet/army on the overview window now deselects the fleet/army.
  
• Made it so that things do not spawn on the poles as often as before.
  
• Volcanic planets on generation will now come in all kinds of different colors. This does not affect savegames.
  
• Planets no longer generate with colors - IE: A blue forest planet will appear blue, not red or something.
  
• Made mouseovers take longer to activate, was taking too fast.
  
• An issue with gas giants and stars that would lag the frame rate has been fixed. This will not change for savefiles, but now if you generate a new game it will generate gas giants and stars that don't lag the planet view.
  
• Changed the level that you can zoom in and out of the galaxy view as it was reported that you couldn't zoom in far enough.
  
• If you have at least one space station in a system now it will mark it as your territory.
  
• After saving or loading it will no longer not show your borders until you end a turn.
  
• A number of other UI improvements and fixes.
  
• A number of other bugfixes.
  
• A number of other stuff I can't remember off the top of my head.

One of the most common things I've heard was "Why don't you redo it in Unity", throughout the 15 years of development. In fact, I heard it so many times that I actually tasked a developer with remaking it in Unity to see how hard it would be.

He said it would take 10 years to redo. We're not remaking it in Unity. I wouldn't recommend doing something similar either.

Regardless, we're still trying to find time to do the Linux port. It's coming. The game is written in a language that easily ports to other operating systems - but we've had other things come up that are fixed in this patch, such as the game crashing after a couple of hours. We're going to have to delay the 1.2.0 patch by a few weeks because we had to do this. Among some of the stuff in that is - again, terraforming (Might be moved to 1.1.6) and things like... Stargates.

That's pretty much the reason you haven't heard of this game yet.
We are fixing things.

Cheers,
The Developer

This is I believe the final patch before we start work on 1.2.0. If we find additional issues, we will patch in 1.1.5, but we're going to start working on adding new major features to the game soon.

• Fixed an issue with the unit icons missing in the battle map and in mouseovers.
  
• Changed generation, planets will no longer tint red if they are "Green Forest Planets" for example. (Savegames will be unchanged.)
  
• Planets with Oceans will now no longer be strange colors because of this.
  
• Expanded on Volcanic planets, updated appearance of these so they can now generate different colors.
  
• Updated the mouseover indicators in the solar/planetary view and draw much nicer now and are much less of an eyesore.
  
• Changed the planet tileset to be clearer and draw better.
  
• Fixed an issue where Space-Explorer Vessels had missing textures.
  
• Settlements on planets now draw better and will not draw over shorelines.
  
• Better texture for mountains, Mountain Planets.
  
• Temporarlly cut shapeshifters and their traits because it was causing a crash.
  
• Added the ability to spawn on Frozen planets. (We have a huge update in 1.2.0 for this planned, that will allow you to choose more specifically what kind of starting planet you are to land on.)
  
• Fixed a really odd bug where if you had no slaves on a planet, and you recruited slave units, it would replace your slaves with Abominations with zero population. Now they start out as your present species.
  
• Slave units will now draw with their respective slave portraits.
  
• Terrain on certain planets now displays a proper tooltip.
  
• Fixed an issue with certain displays showing repeated versions of the same display (According to Helz)
  
• Fixed a strange lockup where if you hit the left button on the religion view (That someone didn't report for some reason) it would crash the game.
  
• Fixed an issue where base camps would spawn 3-4 tiles away from the base if you landed on an empty tile.
  
• Fixed an odd issue where towns would transform into Capitols on unowned planets.
  
• Other bugfixes.

Cheers,
The Developer