FreeCol 0.11.6

The FreeCol team are glad to announce the release of FreeCol 0.11.6. This is a bug fix and incremental improvement release from 0.11.5. All 0.10.x and 0.11.x (x != 4) games should continue to work with 0.11.6.

We hope you enjoy FreeCol 0.11.6. Onward to 1.0.

The FreeCol Team
Common problems

Java 7 is no longer receiving active support, therefore this version of FreeCol switches to using Java 8 which is the currently supported release. This will hopefully fix the problems that many Mac users have been experiencing. If FreeCol 0.11.6 fails to run, check first if your installed Java libraries are up to date.

There has been significant effort trying to track down cases where the lower right corner panel (InfoPanel) disappears for unknown reasons (see BR#2907 and elsewhere). If this is still occurring we are particularly interested in reproducible test cases with 0.11.6.
Bugs

43 new bug reports have been made since 0.11.5 was released. 19 were fixed, 4 need more information, 3 were duplicates, 3 were invalid, 3 were rejected, 2 were quite minor and reclassified as improvement requests, leaving 9 definite new bugs.

At least 7 older bug reports were also closed, 2 were fixed and 5 went out of date.

There are now 50 open bug reports, many received partial fixes.
The majority of cases are still UI issues, but the proportion of reports that are blocked needing further information is rising. Please remember, if you report a bug, check back to see if developers that are working on it have clarifying questions. On the other hand, there has been useful progress on several "What Would Col1 Do?" issues, and more is anticipated in the next release thanks to a highly detailed play through of Col1 contributed by Mark Jackson.
Additionally, there are some open bug reports which require more media (images or sounds). Any help on these would be highly appreciated.
User-visible changes since 0.11.5-release
New features

The autosave directory now follows the save directory if it changes.
New warning that distinguishes approaching colony food exhaustion from actual ongoing starvation.
Lots of tweaks to the compact colony report.
Better tool tips on the trade report.
Added a link to the FreeCol manual on the About panel.
All cargo (more than 100 units) can be dragged with the control key, contributed by Fenyo.
Native settlements have roads as in Col1 (confirmation from Fenyo).
Number of goods on a carrier is shown in InfoPanel at lower right, full stacks have bigger icons instead IR#157, PF#44.
Active unit cargo should be selected by default when entering a colony IR#22.
Terrain bonus does not apply to settlement defence PF#73.
Coronado only reveals minimal colonies in classic mode PF#83.

Bugs fixed

Sentries now obey the client option and do not cause doubled moves BR#2882
TilePopup is now correctly shown near the tile when using keyboard or menu.
Use of country name rather than an adjectival form in several places BR#2888.
Abandoning a colony when units have it as a destination no longer hangs the game BR#2889.
The window frame now correctly appears on second monitor in correct size when starting the game in windowed mode, see BR#2803.
FreeColDialogs are correctly positioned now, also avoiding them being wrongly shown on primary monitor when the main window frame is on secondary monitor, see BR#2803.
The classic colony report works again BR#2898.
Cities of gold are named properly BR#2903.
Colonies can be founded on native land BR#2906.
FreeColDialog instances do not contain redundant shifted backgrounds anymore, contributed by Bernat, see BR#2911.
Fixed TileInfoPanel to show information about the terrain cursor being on unexplored tiles.
Fixed map display to consistently draw everything on partial updates, see BR#2580.
--server option now only controls starting a stand alone server, --server-port controls the port independently.

Other improvements

When characters are not supported by the "ShadowedBlack" font we provide (mostly used for panel headers) the game automatically falls back to using the normal game font, to prevent rectangle glyphs from being shown for non-latin characters.
Map display is improved; the optional region borders and black map-grid are consistently shown everywhere now.

Developer issues

Java 8 is now required to build FreeCol.
Developer documentation is now compiled and added as a pdf to the distributions.
Integer, Select and Range options now validate their input. Watch out for logged warnings of bad input.
splash.jpg moved into ./build, and is built into FreeCol.jar, added --no-splash option.
The game now tolerates modding in higher resolution tile images, see git.a85590de for more detailed explanation.