This weekend I fixed up some various bugs and did a lot of work on ranged weapons. They pretty much work now. Characters can be equipped with weapons and tend to use them relatively correctly.
There are two more major outstanding things to be done before the next release: Adding the ai selection buttons (should be easy, a couple of hours at most) and adding faction generation code, so new factions come into play if old ones get eliminated (a little trickier, this means taking out some assumptions that live in the code).
Anyway, I think I’m basically on schedule for the 9-15 alpha.