Hey all,
I posted a new version yesterday that dealt with several bugs, including the issue that locked up the notification engine and a relatively major arena bug. It also adds stuff like a new room and a tech tree, which I think is pretty cool.
Interestingly, the issue with the locked up dialog engine was basically that the game was attempting to attach morphs to both the male and female bodies. Male bodies don't have all of the same parameters though (particularly around breasts and certain facial expressions), and the code that was resetting everything didn't have the correct handling to deal with it. This caused the entire dialog engine to crash until the game was restarted.
As for the pit, I don't quite remember what I fixed there, but it seems a bit more stable now. I need to test more to make sure that it's all working again, but it was a similar issue left over from the gender overhaul. That patch broke a lot of systems in some pretty subtle ways, and we're still seeing the ripple effects. Fortunately, it finally seems to be calming down.
Speaking of which, the rules assistant is still borked in 0.22 alpha, but that's my highest priority for the final release of 0.22 in a few weeks, so it should be sorted by then.
In the meantime, here's a peek at one of the other new features that will be in 0.22. At high zoom levels, NPC's are now displayed as little icons. This not only makes them easier to distinguish (slaves are purple, tourists are teal, etc), but gives a huge performance boost at high zoom levels. So much so that I've increased the maximum zoom level by quite a lot.