Happy Thanksgiving, all.  I know it's a been a while without any news.  Things are moving along with the new version, albeit more slowly than planned.  The good news is that the updater is almost complete.  I hope to start testing it within the next week or two, and I may recruit a few veteran players who don't mind coding up their orders line-by-line old-school fashion until the GUI is ready.  
 
I've also made a few tweaks to the rules, mostly with respect to devices and the astronomics phase.  I may omit a few fringe items for the first version, just to keep feature creep from delaying the initial version.  As always, if you have any suggestions, make a note in the forum.  That where I usually go to look for ideas for the next release.
 
This version of Star Empires is going to be completely open source, so I've set up a Google Code project for Star Empires.  There's not a whole lot there to look at just now, but if you're really interested in looking over the code as it takes shape, have at it.