After updating the Dark Avatar beta to version 0.20.026, my Galactopedia utility reports an XML read error at this location:

GalCiv2\DarkAvatar\Data\English\PlanetImprovements.xml
Line 1958: An XML comment cannot contain '--'

Looking at this file, there are indeed a bunch of "--" character sequences embedded in an XML comment. That's illegal according to the XML specification, and Microsoft's .NET XML parser unfortunately cannot be persuaded to ignore this issue (even with IgnoreComments enabled and validation disabled).

When the "--" sequences are replaced with single "-" characters, the file is parsed just fine. I could write a specialized string reader to do that, but of course it would be much simpler if you guys changed those bits in the XML file. (I'm a bit surprised that your XML editors and parsers didn't already complain.)

Thanks!