VO 1.8.266 and 266.1 included:- All known radar issues have been fixed.- Charged weapons no longer fire if they drain zero energy from your Power Cells.- Addon/Mineral/Cargo scanners now have a title before each list so addons vs. cargo items are distinguishable.- Fixed crash on Android version when attempting to go to the ship purchase menu in the new player in-game tutorial with the L1 gamepad button instead of the R1 button.- Nvidia Shield now defaults to game controller input instead of touch-screen input for the tutorials and HUD.The initial release rolled out this past Friday, with some further patches on Weds for unrelated issues that cropped up. Another release may be expected tomorrow.

As I mentioned last week, we're working on a number of new gameplay features, including some new ship and graphic assets, as well as the ability to configure ships to "look" a bit more unique and different. I'll dig into that in a moment.The improvements to the Shared Radar Extender (internally referred to as the "AWACS" system) have since been released on Friday. There have been some bugs that have cropped up with the radar since the release, most of which have been fixed by now, and we're aiming to have things entirely resolved as of the release this coming Friday. Unfortunately, the time spent on Radar bugfixes has delayed persistent-mine development (described in the last post) by about a week.New Capships. As I covered last week, we're actively building some new variations of the Tridents, to allow our players to put a more unique "stamp" on these creations. Capships are one of the most complex and arduous achievements in Vendetta Online, so allowing people plenty of variation is a worthy goal. Here's a brief look at the upcoming Trident Type S (prototype, final version may have further variations in coloration, etc):Expanding the role and value of Capships. It really isn't enough to make more visually distinct capships, or even variations in ship statistics, they sorely need the addition of certain features to make them more usable within the game universe. We are currently working in this direction, although I can't promise how quickly some of this will be released. Among other things:- Adding the ability of a pilot to launch from and re-dock with their own capship. This will allow captains a lot more flexibility, to launch and mine from an asteroid, or trade with a smaller station. It will also allow people to share control of capships far more easily and rapidly, making further use of the existing Key system we use for conquerable stations.- Adding more Capship Stations to the Universe. This is also a clear necessity, to allow people to be able to operate from different locations in the galaxy; trading, repairing, and securely storing their vessels. In this initial rollout, these stations will probably not be as large as the current capship station, but will rather be new components that will be added to, or nearby, existing Capitols and major trade hubs. Only a minority of stations will support direct docking of capital ships, and this is intentional. Smaller stations will require undocking and ferrying of cargo, etc.There are other elements that I'm not going to delve into describing just yet, like the potential "capturing" of capital ships, or their increased per

VO 1.8.265 includes:- Fixed problems with the group radar extender addon. Multiple extenders in one group (one per member) are also supported.- 1-9 hotkey support for the sensor-list.- For plugin developers, the GUILD_MEMBER_REMOVED event now contains the reason for the event as the second argument.All of this builds towards what was discussed in the "What's around the corner?" post from earlier in the week.

We've been pretty silent on development for the last few months, and I wanted to take a moment to shed a little light on a few of the things you may see in the near future.Several projects have been taking up development time, some of which are externally-related projects that are still secret, and others have been a critical "cleanup" and housekeeping of certain game related features. The process of building and releasing a game across so many platforms can be challenging, so some work to make the system more manageable was sorely needed. We also have some servers that require upgrades, and other chores that take up time, but don't directly impact the game in any visible way. We did a lot of this work over the past summer, and while some of this work is still on-going, at this point we're aiming to dig more deeply in gameplay-related changes.So, without further ado, here are a few of those projects in the works (for the next few weeks):New ships, new graphics assets. We're making changes to the engine to allow us to do a lot more dynamic creation of graphical assets, to better depict a particular enemy pirate clan, or allow a player to configure the "look" of their first constructed station. Our initial experimental implementations of this are the Vulture and the Trident, which have not yet debuted, but hopefully the "new" Vulture will be showing up in the near future.Perhaps the most important aspect of this development is that we'll be able to create a lot of content procedurally, without increasing download size and even minimizing impact on client memory overhead. That's always been a big struggle for us.. the desire to add a lot of cool looking stuff, to give people more "unique" looking content, but without ending up at a 30GB download like other well-known MMOs.Lots of bugfixes, some of them greater, others smaller. This spans the distance from gameplay that has had broken aspects for a long time, all the way to low-level architectural improvements to make current and future gameplay possible. A few examples: capship battle scalability, making AWACS radar work properly (a feature of player-capships that is important for the future), etc.Long-requested feature implementations. Again, some bigger and some smaller, but even the smaller ones could have major ramifications to the universe. Example: fully persistent mines, no longer requiring the player to be present in the given sector. The mines will persist across sector restarts, be destructable by anyone, and will still impact the faction standing of a remote player in the same way as if the mine-laying player had been present for the "kill". Overall, we think mines will open up a lot of interesting tactical potential with minefields, and defense of conquerable assets, will also play into..Expanding the very nature of weapons and armo

VO 1.8.264 includes:- Fixed upside down display issue with Android devices with Mali-400 GPUs.- Reduced network traffic when capships with turrets are in the sector.- Changed login menu background for aesthetic reasons.- Added ETC1 compressed texture assets for fresh installs of the Android sideload apk (/sdcard/VendettaOnline doesn't exist and the app is uninstalled). This improves memory usage on Mali devices.What's not mentioned in this update changelog are all the other changes that are happening, like the imminent appearance of the new Vulture (thanks to a server restart), along with development of new Trident variants. There will be a more substantial newspost in the near future.

VO 1.8.263 includes:- Updated Oculus Rift sdk to 0.2.4 which allows the magnetometer to be calibrated through the Oculus Rift calibration utility.- Added tutorial voiceovers specific to consoles and gamepads.- Proximity and lightning mines are no longer triggered on group members.- Added experimental texture loading to Linux 64 version. Please report any rendering/missing texture issues.The new vulture is still in the works, we need to do a server restart and some other maintenance, so it may be another week. In the meantime, we've gotten a lot further with procedural texture compositing; this should be really useful for all kinds of things, from player-owned capships to stations to NPCs and general fighter variants and so on.

VO 1.8.262 includes:- New Vulture ship assets added for upcoming testing.- Improved gamepad support for Android. Better default buttons for OK (A) and Cancel (B)- Added experimental texture loading to Linux 64 version. Please report any rendering/missing texture issues.- Fixed auto-fire on Android microconsoles.- Fixed ice texture when shaders are turned off on OpenGL PCs.- Increased Oculus Rift field of view.- Mines now sympathetically detonate when other players mines explode nearby.- Fixed Moga controller X/Y buttons not working properly under certain circumstances.- Conquerable stations are no longer chosen as trade mission destinations.- NPCs and turrets no longer attempt to fire on players entering the sector (while they are invulnerable).- Removed OpenGL Intel DRI check for Ivybridge so shaders won't get disabled.- Fixed in-game capchas when running on Android consoles with overscan compensation enabled.The new Vulture will not be "released" immediately, instead we're going to put off the Release Event until late next week/weekend. The process of patching it into the game took a bit longer than expected, and I'd like a little more time for testing and preparation before releasing the ship "into the wild", so to speak.Linux64 is also testing our new next-generation unified material system, which is experiencing a few issues and will be patched up shortly. Your patience and bug reports are appreciated :).

VO 1.8.261 includes:- Capship missile-based turret fire delay persist properly.- Fixed problem with chat entry field on the touchscreen HUD losing focus if Tab is pressed on a connected physical keyboard. The Tab button on the virtual keyboard now auto-completes names.- Added Quit confirmation menu on Android.- Added option on mobile devices to disable vibration feedback for button presses.- Fixed memory corruption bug on certain mobile devices with specific chipsets and driver versions.- Fixed graphics error under very specific circumstances that caused some 3d objects to not render properly.- Capship turret list in the Tactical tab are now sorted so they are always in the same order.- The list of key possessors in the Key Info menu is now sorted alphabetically.This release has actually been out for a little while, I'm just bringing the News system up to date, and making room for a more substantial post. For now, check out the General forum for a sneak peek of the new Vulture..

VO 1.8.260 includes:- The 'station under attack' notification received by keyholders of conquerable stations now includes what station is under attack.- The word 'cockpit' is no longer filtered in chat.- Turret fire delay now persists between leaving and entering turrets.- New Amazon GameCircle 2.0 support; requires the app to be updated through the Amazon Store.- Players can now decline a guild invite if they are already in a guild.- Horizontal scrollbar in Jettison menu was not visible if any items' names were too long, hiding the individual 'J' buttons.- Chat messages are more robustly handled during the tiny instant while you jump between sectors.- Keychain error messages now include the name of the player you were attempting to give the key to.Larger changes are in the works, potentially including some content drops as well as new ships and graphics. A lengthy "status" post will be coming in the near future, and a newsletter following after. We've had a number of people out sick and traveling lately, which has delayed some upcoming announcements by a couple of weeks; but I expect to have a firmer timeframe next week. Take care all!