I learned my new thing the other day. There's something called GDI+ that shipped with XP what might make my life easier. The previous tootip post uses it to display transparent tootips as a concept. There are a bunch of other things it can do. I need to look into it further to see what we can do with it.

This is a concept for 3.4 only. If I can work out all the bugs, it makes quite a difference It's the same information that's in the status bar at the bottom.

Yes, it will be optional.   Second verion.

Sorry for the lack of updates, we're still moving forward. I'm testing out the new supply calculations. I think I can speed things up quite a bit. It will also allow for better supply rules down the road. I'm also changing the way that the language strings are distributed if I can by putting them into XML files isntead of DLLs. That should make life easier.

I see that VS2K8 SP1 Beta1 is now out. There are a lot of neat things coming up in SP1 that are going to make life easier. For one thing, I see that WPF interacts nicely with D3D, and the the tools for WPF are getting better.

In case you're wondering what that means, it means that a major facelift is possible when I start on the next version.