Hi - I'm sorry about the trouble!
Is the previous version still fine on your system? You can download it here to check:
https://fractalsoftworks.s3.amazonaws.com/starsector/starsector_install-0.95a-RC15.exehttps://fractalsoftworks.s3.amazonaws.com/starsector/starsector_mac-0.95a-RC15.ziphttps://fractalsoftworks.s3.amazonaws.com/starsector/starsector_linux-0.95a-RC15.zipI strongly suspect that you'd encounter the same issues since nothing major has changed in this regard from the previous release.
Also, it might help to know what operating system you're running, what your graphics card is, and more details about what
exactly you're seeing.
(I actually had an email exchange with someone about a week ago where they described a similar-ish problem - "the game just seems to freeze up and stutters". In their case, it turned out to be an OS problem and a reinstall of windows fixed it... not that I would suggest it. Just, there's a range of possibilities here.)
Some things to try:
1) Rebooting, if you haven't
2) A clean reinstall of your graphics drivers, using DDU to uninstall them. At a guess, this one seems like the most-likely to produce results
3) Turning off whatever else you have running; for example, MSI Afterburner is known to cause problems. Video capture or overlay software could potentially cause a problem as well
4) If you're running with sound on, it might be worth it to run with sound off just to see if that helps and figure out of it's a sound-related issue or not
5) Depending on your setup, something else worth trying is making sure both the game .exe, and the jre/bin/java.exe, are forced to run on your primary graphics card
6) Running the game as administrator / in compatibility mode for windows 95/7/XP