Your_mom: that sounds like a crash. The resolution thing you're experiencing is part of how the game tries to recover from a crash, since it doesn't know if the crash was a video card problem or not. Can you try to lock it down under what circumstances it happens?
Further, this crash sounds like a crash we had previously that was fixed, it was something in the ai code somewhere, iirc. Can whoever fixed that crash take a minute to look at the alpha sources and see if maybe your fix got clobbered? My gut tells me that's what happened. That crash also happened when leaving a server while playing against an AI.
So, if it's an intermittent crash, I'm willing to go on and release 0.3.0 in a couple of days. If it's every time, but only on leaving local game, I'm willing to release anyway but could be persuaded to wait until it's fixed. If it's more serious than that, we should fix it for 0.3.0 obviously. This is the only bug found in the alpha so far that I think might call for more work before 0.3.0.
wrtlprnft has already fixed a few bugs reported here, and I think we should go ahead and choose a later revision off the trunk (possibly the latest) for 0.3.0 because he's done stuff to deal with some of the annoyance factor reported here (font size) and there was actually a fairly serious bug in the cockpit that made mercam unusable. It wasn't noticed, I guess, until the standard cockpit was different for incam than for other cams.
Of course, going with the later version depends on whether or not other potentially breaking changes happened too. So, this is important so I'll put it in bold,
is there anybody waiting until after 0.3.0 to tear up the trunk? Besides me, that is.
In any case, I'd like to ride this alpha another couple of days anyway and see what else comes up.
Some things to try:
Try different fonts! That's for sure. We keep saying it's ttf support, but we actually have support for adobe's postscript fonts too, and some bitmap fonts. Check FTGL's website to see a complete list, we support everything they support.
Try making a cockpit! There's a tutorial on the wiki for it.
Playlists are important. If you listen to music while you play, bind the media player keys (it's in global keybinds) and make a playlist.
I'll put together a more comprehensive try-me list on the wiki for 0.3.0 final, but let's keep in mind this starts the development series, and while we're interested in wider and longer testing, we're also interested in serious feedback. This is your chance to tell us what we're doing wrong and what we could be doing right! If you like to extend the game (previously only moviepacks were the way to do it), then please do so and tell us what else you need to make it the way you want it. If you wait until Bacchus's first beta to tell us you really need <insert favorite feature here>, it'll be too late. Now's your chance to really help us improve the game, and we're not taking "I can't program" as an excuse anymore.