[Explorer-judge] GE 2.8.3 in beta2; "new" intercepts coming closer

[Alexander S. <su...@fo...>]

Hi everybody,

This is just to inform you that Galaxy Explorer version 2.8.3 entered beta 2
phase. As for 2.8.3 beta, the main source of inspiration for this technical
bug fix version was Jan Olof's Orion that induced the following changes:

- Modified unintuitive EditDB planet owner id input from a short int to a
symbolic race name.
Empty string on input results in the kUninhabited planet status.

- Fixed the asteroid test by adding a special method to the Planet.h and
skipping the dependency on the fragile CGalaxy::MinPlanetSize() and the
unnecessary -kSlop there.

- Eliminated out of bounds addressing in the production dominance
calculation - uninhabited planets used to overwrite the allocation header by
0.0.

Now I plan to wait for a couple of weeks until the fixes prove themselves in
the field, and issue 2.8.3 officially shortly after that. That is going to
be the last version using the "old" intercept rules - with all the flavor
we've come to love. Next major subversion, 2.9, is going to feature "new"
intercept rules along the lines we've discussed earlier.

Best regards.

Alexander