Since the last release of Airships, I've been working on rewriting the game's networking. Having encouraged you to play more multiplayer games, it turned out that the multiplayer systems were unstable, especially the chat overlay. This major rewrite should fix this problem and also add some new convenience features.

Because it's a large change, I'm first pushing this to the beta branch. As always, you can opt into the beta branch by going into the game's properties in Steam, into the Betas tab, and selecting "beta" from the drop-down.

Now this is very important: please try out this new multiplayer system, and report any problems, crashes or mere frustrations you have. While I've done my best to write the code right and test it, I know from experience that it's likely I've missed things. Don't assume that some problem is obvious and that I'm aware of it. I am currently aware of zero problems with the new multiplayer code. It's up to you to tell me otherwise!

Anyway, here is the change log. Assuming the beta goes well, I will push these changes to the main version of the game, and get started on the next round of improvements.

• Rewrote network code to be faster and more reliable. The new network system connects to a separate server, and the old one will be shut down in a while.
• Reintroduced the multiplayer overlay. You can now seamlessly chat with other players in the multiplayer lobby while playing single-player games, designing ships, and so on.
• Timestamps for messages.
• Recent chat history when logging into the multiplayer lobby.
• Combat playback speed adjusts dynamically to keep the game running smoothly and lag at acceptable levels.
• The game now runs in the background, so you should be able to alt-tab away and have multiplayer chat, etc continue working.
  

Addendum: beta 2