Hey everybody,
I'd like to thank you for participating in this little joke (of you wanted to or not, heh), and I'd like to point out officially here that it was actually an April Fool's joke.
Cubic planets were a nice opportunity for us as an April Fool's joke since it took not even 5 minutes to swap out the models for the planets and to add the date check for them to be activated. This "improvement" was easy to add and purely visual, without impacting gameplay. That made it the perfect opportunity for April 1st. So for those worried tht we're wasting our precious dev time: We didn't actually lose any work time over this.
Since some people are actually thinking that our focus lies on planet visuals instead of new content: Yeah, that's of course not the case. We like our planets, we might improve them in the future, but right now we're very busy with the Alliances update. It's a lot of work but coming along nicely. Once we have more to tell you, I'll make another announcement.
Oh, and in case you did like the cubic planet visuals, you can add the following line to your client.ini file in your %appdata%\Avorion or ~/.avorion folder to enable them:
Look for the [Background] category and add the following line (or edit the value in case the line already exists):CubePlanets=true
Have fun!