well the change was to fix the "unseeable tractorbeam" problem
you can change the texture to be all white so it looks like before
the texture is in textures/tractorbeam.png
feel free to replace it with a white 1x1 texture--which is what you saw before...I don't mind the new look do you?
The old was a bit plainer, but by being so it matched the original's quite well. The new one is a bit busy, as well as very obviously being two intersecting perpendicular planes instead of a beam of some sort.