All posts by Vendetta Online is a space-based MMORPG with true realtime combat and a vast persistent galaxy. Available for Linux, Windows, Mac and Android.

Vendetta Online 1.8.206

VO 1.8.206 includes:- Added new 3rd-person flight camera modes for all platforms. It is the default for new Android installs and can be changed in Options->Game->Flight Camera Mode Turn off mouse-look when using them on PC platforms.- Added Auto-Fire mode for Android version when in Touch-screen mode for a better new-player experience. Auto-Fire is default to on and can be toggled in Options->Game->Auto Fire and is an optional setting for the 'Activate' HUD touch button. Auto-Fire only fires when the selected target is an enemy ship outside the No-Fire-Zone and is close enough to be hit. Only the Primary Group is hooked up to Auto-Fire.- Flight-Assist mode now has the ability to fly backwards. When the desired speed is zero, pressing decelerate further will cause the ship to fly backwards.- Android HUD touch regions no longer release when dragging out of them. This mainly affects the Look Direction touch region in the lower right of the HUD.- Escort, Border Skirmish and Hive Skirmish missions are now aware of partial damage and will credit players for "assists."- Border Skirmish mission descriptions now include an indication that there are players in the opposing mission.- Fixed Trade Guild missions to count ore given to the mission as being sold to the station for Mining Badge credit.- Fixed a broken docking bay in the Training Sector.A Few Comments:The addition of "reverse" to Flight Assist has been requested for a very long time, and we're happy to finally add it for all those who favor this control method.Third-person flight might not seem that useful to experienced people on the PC, and aside from the control of capships, first-person remains the best option (especially for combat). However, for new users on phones and tablets, the display of the ship helps bring across a certain rapid understanding of distances and helps make the overall experience a little more intuitive. Playing VO on a touchscreen is no picnic to begin with, so these improvements are pretty meaningful. It is notable that there are actually two different 3rd-person control models available, which can be selected from the Game area of the Options menu.The addition of auto-fire may cause controversy in some circles. Generally we aren't big on automating the control of weapons or flight. VO is a very skill-driven game, and we prefer to stay pretty close to the recipe. For touchscreens, however, some improvement needed to be found, to let people play with only two inputs (fingers/thumbs). Auto-fire allows one to aim with one hand, strafe/accel/decel with the other, while leaving the firing up to the client when the ship is properly pointed to the target's leadoff reticle. The improvement in combat usability on a tablet is pretty dramatic. One can actually do some low-level botting of collectors and the like. Touchscreen devices will

Vendetta Online 1.8.205

VO 1.8.205 includes:- Fixed crash on exit after changing certain Video Options on Mac/Windows/Linux versions.- PCC Missions now have an optional Begin/End Time requirement that allows missions to be visible for a certain time.- Ore taken by missions now count as being sold to the station for awards such as Basic Miner badges.- Accomplishment and faction awards now cause the station Buy menus to update automatically so new items are available immediately.- Added Front/Rear text labels to Front and Rear HUD radars that disappear when you hit Combat license 3. The labels are also togglable in Options->Interface->HUD->"Show Radar Labels when Combat < 3". In addition to the above, another change should be mentioned that was accidentally left out of a previous patch log. We altered PvP collision damage to do only a fraction of the damage it did previously. Thus, when player ships ram other player ships, it does less damage than when they ram stations or NPCs. This was done to help alleviate a certain exploitative tactic of PvP killing designed to avoid faction loss in monitored or guarded space. The lack of faction loss for collision deaths was itself a previous work-around for a much older exploitative tactic where players could get others to lose their faction by suiciding themselves against their enemies. So, let's hope this latest alteration removes some of the issues for the moment, until some future problem is discovered stemming from players colliding too much (heh). Until then..Have a happy new year, everyone!

Vendetta Online 1.8.203-204

VO 1.8.203-204 include:- Five new PCC missions from Phaserlight.- Added support for Sony Tablet P.- Bots no longer attack their defend target if the defend target damages itself.- Bots that damage their defend target no longer get attacked by other bots with the same defend target.- New players are now notified when they fly too far away from the station in the training sector and will be given the option to return to the station.- Newsposts accessed from the character selection menu are now properly formatted.Holiday Gift to Past SubscribersAs has also been posted via our Newsletter, Facebook, Twitter, and other outlets.. past subscribers whose accounts expired before October 1st of this year, may now play for free through January 1st! Have fun!Vendetta Online for Android PhonesFor any who missed it, the official press release went out this past week, announcing Vendetta Online support for many Android phones (Tegra, Snapdragon, PowerVR), as well as the recently added Joystick and Voice Chat support in the Android version.

Vendetta Online 1.8.202

VO 1.8.201-202 include:- Added joystick support for Android 3.1 and above.- Added PLUGINS_LOADED plugin lua event that triggers after all plugins are loaded.- Fixed another bug with changing channels in Voice Chat.- Added experimental Voice Chat for Android version.- Added Heyzap Check in button to Android Updater.- Fixed problems with switching between group and guild voice chat.- Fixed problems with Border Skirmish.On the face of it, this may not seem like that significant of a release. However, a few of the things added over the past week have some meaningful ramifications:Joysticks for Android - The biggest complaint about playing VO on Android mobile devices is usually the control mechanics, especially when one attempts combat. Our touch interfaces will always be improving and evolving, but there's only so much that one can do with a touchscreen: it gives no tactile feedback (you don't "know" you've pressed the button by feeling it depress downward.. haptic shakes and things are not the same), and it gives no positional feedback (you don't know that your thumb is in the right place by the "feel" of the button). The custom interface on the Xperia PLAY does a little better in this regard, and keyboard-mode has always worked pretty well (Asus Transformer tablets, etc). But for the average phone or tablet owner, there have been limited options for good gameplay control.Hopefully, joystick support will be a solid step towards improving that situation. General support for joysticks and gamepads was added in Honeycomb 3.1, only available to tablets, and unfortunately was only added for java-based Android "activities" (we prefer to use "native" activities, also something added in Gingerbread and Honeycomb, for potentially improved performance and reduced memory usage). So in order to support joysticks in the meantime, we had to come up with a way of spawning a java-based version of the game in cases where joysticks are desired. As of this release, you can plug in a joystick, then run the game. It will detect the presence of the joystick and offer you the option of running a java-based activity that will support the controller.We've tested this with an Xbox 360 controller, an older Logitech wired-USB gamepad, as well as a flight stick and some other devices. We'll also eventually test it with the Logitech F710 wireless joystick. You still have to manually define and configure the joystick, setting up the axes and buttons and so forth, and use our not-super-intuitive joystick interface (we'll improve on that at some point), but it should work. We welcome feedback.Now it is notable that joystick support is only present on Honeycomb 3.1 or better. Honeycomb is a tablet-only OS, and joysticks are not supported on Gingerbread (2.3), the more common phone OS. So for p

Vendetta Online 1.8.200

VO 1.8.200 includes:- Fixed a client crash when logging off while a capship shield effect is active at the same time.- Hotkeys are removed from the Forgive Kill dialog so typing when the dialog appears does not cause accidental forgiveness.- Removed extra PLAYER_ENTERED/PLAYER_LEFT_SECTOR lua events.- Border Skirmish accounting will no longer be incorrect after server restarts.- Consolidated bounty news reports now display correct locations.- Best prices of addons in ship cargo are now properly updated when jumping between sectors.Some much needed debugging and fixing across the general game, while we've also released stability improvements to the Android build in the background (Samsung-based PowerVR devices are reportedly working better, albeit with reduced graphical quality).

Vendetta Online 1.8.199

VO 1.8.199 includes:- Bots no longer drop cargo if they are not damaged at all by players. If a player damages a bot but does not destroy it, cargo is still dropped.- Nation choices are now randomized in the Character Creation menu.- Added support for Android devices with PowerVR graphics.- Further reduced raw materials needed to manufacture the Trident.- Trident Type M cargo expanded to 600cu. - Mass of Fused Composite Plating significantly reduced.Bot Drops - We had developed a bit of an issue with people "farming" bot drops by having NPCs fight one another, and keeping the sector artificially "alive" by flying out into the distance. This was both troublesome for my ability to create rare drops that couldn't easily be farmed, as well as a load on the server (some of these NPC battles are pretty intensive, meaning server resources are being used where no one is actually playing).Thus, the solution was to have bots only drop items when they have sustained damage from a player character. We didn't do that originally, in the interest of maintaining a kind of "equality" between PC and NPC characters, but it really wasn't worthwhile given the later tradeoffs. Trident Changes - Hopefully this will make the tridents more easily constructable. We are planning more capship changes, but all development has to be juggled by immediate priority. To get a more complete list of what changed in the Trident Type M build tree, see this Suggestions Forum thread.PowerVR support on Android - This is a big deal, and has been a long time coming. We had to put in quite a bit of work to make this happen, along with support from our friends at Texas Instruments (OMAP CPUs) and Imagination Technologies (PowerVR GPU series). We now support all the major game-capable Android chips, with the exception of ARM's problematic Mali GPU (Galaxy SII, etc), which may work with uncompressed textures. Currently, our official support includes NVIDIA Tegra, Qualcomm Snapdragon and now PowerVR (TI, Samsung). We welcome testing and reports (good or bad) posted to our Android Forum.Happy Thanksgiving! - To all our US-based players, and frankly all our friends everywhere in the world. We have a lot to be thankful for. All the best.This will be the planned "release" for this week (barring major bugs). Some of us have family events on different days, and while we'll still be working, this will probably be it for content changes until next week.

Vendetta Online 1.8.198

VO 1.8.198 includes:- Avalon Torpedoes now do 15,000 damage and require only 60 energy per shot.- Newsposts and Events being no longer marked as 'New' once it is read.- Show Station in Login/PDA menus options for all platforms.- Added graphical enhancements for NVIDIA Tegra 3.- Fixed a condition where depositing credits into a guild bank took the player's credits but didn't deposit the credits into the guild account. Please continue to post feedback about the Avalons and other areas to gameplay to the Suggestions forum. More changes are in the works.

Vendetta Online 1.8.197

VO 1.8.197 includes:- In non-fogged sectors, other vessels are no longer visible on the sector list beyond 15km. There is no longer "universal knowledge" of all other ships in the sector, regardless of distance. This may continue to be tweaked and adjusted, moving forward.This has been a more technically complex change than we originally anticipated. We tried to drop it in last week, and then had to revert while we sorted out some bugs. So, please let us know if you see any issues with this particular feature.This is also likely to be a feature that comes with some attached controversy. If you'd like to read some of the backstory, check out the five-page 2009 feature-proposal thread on Suggestions (post don't respond to that thread or revive it). Limitations to awareness have always been part of the intended goal here; after all, with limitations comes the ability to alter those limits through various equipment changes, creating a richer and more diverse option selection, as well as making "stealth" tatics more of a possibility.It's also notable that 15km is pretty far, in the game. We definitely have sectors that have things spread across larger areas, but in most "social" cases (like stations), this pretty easily covers the areas where people congregate. 15km is also a lot of ground to cover to "sneak up" on anyone.Also, as a reminder, changes like this should be seen as a first step, not a final and absolute statement. We welcome feedback, as always. We may need to tweak distances, or change things based on sector content (beyond fog-vs-no-fog). Perhaps have major station sectors with larger "ranges" thanks to some radar-enhancing feature of stations, while more far-flung sectors have smaller and more claustrophobic visibility ranges (plus variability due to addons or ships, or grouping with capships, etc). All these things are possible, and should be duly discussed on the Suggestions Forum.

Vendetta Online 1.8.196

VO 1.8.196 includes:- Arklan Guardians now have a one-in-ten chance of dropping an Avalon Torpedo launcher. They will eventually be for sale near Deneb as well, or potentially dropped by certain convoys; this is a first step.- All platforms now default to autodock mode. This can be changed in Options -> Game Settings.- Single-player Android tutorial now does autodock.- Miscellaneous UI tweaks for Android version.- Marshall only gives a list of bounties that have logged in within the past year.- Bounties are sorted by number of bounties and then the total bounty price.- Collector bot behaviour in Training sector have been changed to not attack unless being attacked and to not fly away as easily.- Empty bounty news posts now say there were no bounties collected instead of being blank.