Hi everyone, we've been rather quiet lately as we've been quite intensely productive. Also, I'm really tired of being repeatedly wrong about when we'll release the persistent mine feature, so I've been a little reluctant to keep posting "Still working on it@!#". But, we are. Fingers crossed, you will see it in a Vendetta Online near you Very Soon Now. Perhaps days, perhaps only hours?In other news, we've had some people testing the new "Event Commands" that we've built over the last month or so, creating some cool new scenarios and content that will hopefully be pretty fun. The general goal is to have a whole bunch of cool events and things going on during our usual holiday-season period (Christmas to New Years), and I think this one is going to be better than ever.There seems to be a lot of market interest around Android-based micro-consoles and set-top-boxes this holiday season. Devices like the GameStick and Mad Catz MOJO in additional to the OUYA and other players. As a result, we're doing a little quick work to improve and polish up the experience on these devices. In some cases, fixing simple bugs (the pitch axis default was reversed by accident, in a mistaken commit some time back), in other cases adding a few easy features (basic menu navigation with the D-pad). These changes are beneficial to everyone, as they impact the general playability of VO with a game controller on any platform, including possible future cases like Steam Box "Big Picture mode" and the like.We may have a bit of an influx of newbies sometime soon, although we don't know exactly when. But we've been trying to spruce up our various different sites and listings, from the front page of vendetta-online.com (iOS AppStore link, soon new screenshots) to the Android Play Store, to Amazon, and so on. Keep an eye out, and as always, please be kind to the new folks.Graphical changes are still in the works, they'll debut as soon as I can get a chance to test and roll them out. This includes capship skins, Vultures and so on. Unfortunately, everything is always more complicated than one hopes; so some of my goals, like a clear "Military" class of vessels, require re-vamping some AI definitions to make sure the skins are used in the right situations.We're also working on new replacement asteroids, for certain types, that will drop in seamlessly on the PC, as their shapes are very closely matched to the existing asteroids, but with more polygons and detail. Don't expect these to roll out immediately, the work is still in process, but this is one example of a multi-pronged effort that's going to drastically change the way the game looks in 2014, building towards the Vendetta Online 2.0 goal set. Big changes to lighting, shaders, and content density. Do you have a super fast video card in your gaming desktop, and expect to max out all settings? Great! Expect your power bill to go up.We

VO 1.8.269 and 1.8.270 included:- Collision damage calculation now works more like the 2012 version, but retaining the improvements to threading, etc.- Concussion Railguns now reloadable.- Collisions of less than 50HP of damage are ignored, so small bumps don't result in actual hull damage.- New "Power Cell Blaster" available at a Research station, somewhere in the galaxy. Depletes the enemy power cell by 50 units per hit.- The Xang Xi Self-Propelled Concussion Mine can now be reloaded. - Fixed missing textures on improved ETC1 assets for Android if the shaders are disabled.- Fixed Tegra 4 detection on Android 4.3.- Tegra 4 and Adreno 320 (and above) based devices now use full screen resolution instead of upscaling.- Better auto-detection of android-based consoles.Some long-awaited gameplay fixes and improvements, which will hopefully resolve some player concerns, along with an all-new weapon type that allows the remote draining of an enemy Power Cell. This can be used to prevent an enemy from jumping to another sector, or opening a wormhole to another system. It's a totally new game paradigm, so there might be some related bugs, as always we welcome feedback via the Bugs forum, or Support Tickets if the issue is more sensitive.Earlier in the week we launched the updated backgrounds, planets and other improved graphics on the Android platform, along with interface improvements for micro-console and set-top-box type devices. Basically, Android devices without touchscreens and featuring an internal "TV" flag will be auto-configured for "TV Mode", an evolution of the interface we built for the OUYA. Similarly, we've dialed up the default graphics settings for the latest chips, so players with NVIDIA Tegra4, or Qualcomm Adreno 320 or better, will get a high-detail experience with native display output (1080p or more, unlike the defaults which "upscale" 720p). This can make for a pretty impressive TV-playing experience, especially with a high performance device like the MadCatz MOJO.The timing on these mobile changes were important, to help support some of our partners, as well as position the game for some enhanced exposure in the mobile marketplace.We are still continuing to work on the persistent-mine and persistent-capship features. We're being particularly careful with certain critical aspects of development in that area, as it touches on a lot of fundamental game concepts. But progress is still being made, and we'll start to ship it as soon as we're solidly confident in the code.Have a great weekend everyone!

VO 1.8.268 includes:- Ships now display their volume as cargo in their description.- Improved performance of inventory updates in the client UI.- Added assets for a variety of graphical markings for ships.This might not be the bigger release we've been aiming to make for the last couple of weeks, but it was necessary to meet some other deadlines related to the upcoming release of the improved graphics assets on Android (nebula, planets, etc). Some development, like this, has a long chain of linear events that need to be started as early as possible, to make sure all the updates are ready, approved by any third-parties, and propagated out to the download servers when the release finally goes "live".If you have an Android device and would like to help test the new version, take a look at this forum thread. Feedback is appreciated. (Please don't post the sideload URL on any sites though, the Play Store APK will be updated soon enough, and we'd prefer people install it that way).The "graphical markings" mentioned in the update are new shaders and engine changes that allow us to more easily use the dynamically composited materials I wrote about a few weeks ago. The textures themselves were already in place, but the work needed to be wrapped up so that I can begin rolling the content itself into production. I can't say exactly when you'll see ships in "military markings" or some of the other changes, but I expect pretty soon here.The changes were also needed to allow the Anniversary Edition of the new Vulture to be put into production. I want to "release" all the new Vultures at the same time, so getting this working was important. Rolling out the new Vulture is also pretty high on my priority list.Persistent Mines and Capships UpdateThis is still coming along, and big thanks to all the PCC members who have been helping us on the Test Server. We've uncovered quite a few bugs, along with some more aspects of how old and new design choices were meeting in sometimes-unexpected ways. This is all good stuff, it's just taken longer than we expected.Releasing the Persistent Mines is still our #1 gameplay priority, and priority-overall. We do get interruptions every once in awhile, which will delay things a little here or there, including some recent real-life challenges that have soaked up some of our hours lately (that I've mentioned on the forums). More Events, and Possible Newbie InfluxI've been talking about having more Events in the past few weeks, along with new event-related tools. We've had some advancement in this area, and hopefully we'll get it to coincide with some potential upcoming exposure. I'll post proper Events when w

We encountered some issues with persistent mine development last week, and chose to spend some more time in evaluation and testing of the new system. These changes are taking place at a center point of many intersecting areas of gameplay, basically taking a lot of non-persistent concepts and making them fully persistent, regardless of whether a given player is online (possibly impacting mission data and character information in new ways). This makes for a lot of potential "edge case" bugs, that while probably very rare, we still want to rule out to make this new feature as solid as possible. We are still optimistic that persistent mines will be rolled out later this week, but all the better for the extra investment of our time.The problems with persistent mines has slightly delayed other development, we do not expect full capship persistency this week. But work on that is on-going, and dovetails to some extent with the general-persistency work being done for mines, so testing one feature can also help the other.We *are* moving forward with other work, related to the new ships variants (Vulture, etc), weapon types, and the like. Tweaks with the Trident(s) will be on-going, and more information about some of the upcoming Automated Events will also be forthcoming. More News updates will be posted as scheduling becomes a little more concrete.Be sure to also stop by for the upcoming Nation War event. Perhaps we'll even see the new Vulture represented? Possibly with a few tweaks, from user feedback? I look forward to the on-going discussion on our Suggestions Forum.As always, thanks for your patience and support.

A couple of brief status updates on the development mentioned in the last few posts:- Persistent Mines are coming along well. With some luck, we might even see them in the next release on Friday. We put in some time to try and make mines more flexible concepts (in the engine), and the overall addition of persistency has been a good thing, which directly fed into and influenced..- Persistent Capships, which are taking a little bit longer. There are some complex concepts that we're updating in the game to make this all work robustly. In fact, we probably haven't done this much low-level client/server development in quite some time. But, we're proceeding carefully to minimize the potential for issues.- Capship Variants and Changes are still on-going, and I want to state very clearly that no one should draw any "permanent" conclusion from recent changes to cargo space / docking-bay usage and the like. I've been very open on the forums that we would like continued feedback and input on a lot of these concepts, and that I'm willing to change values (as I did right after release, for the cargo-space-requirements of many smaller ships, bringing it more in-line with a player suggestion). One has to be careful how one spends precious development time, and when things are in constant change, and we have a lot of changes going on with capships; obviously the persistency stuff, but also the potential for things like player shields, new weapon availability and types, etc.We want to retain all the good gameplay that has evolved out of player usage of capships over the past couple of years, but we're still headed towards a number of more advanced goals for capship capability that I think will make people very happy when we get it all released into the game (short-term, not Soon).- New Vulture feedback is welcome on the Suggestions forum. For those unaware, there's an experimental prototype version of the new asset in the Corvus Capitol sector. The asset will eventually replace all existing Vulture variants, as the standard Vulture graphics.- Automated Events are something I have on the mind lately, as a possible target for the near future, when some of the current projects are completed. These would work similarly to player-run or developer-run events, but would be common enough in interest, and simple enough in implementation, that we might be able to just script them to happen automatically on a regular basis. That way we can avoid a lot of the scheduling scenarios that often crop up with player-run events. These automated events would in no way replace player or developer-run events, but would persistently augment them and offer some guaranteed times to pull people together. If you'd like to see Nation War or some similar concept be implemented as an automated event, please feel free to weigh in on the Suggestions Forum.

VO 1.8.267 includes:- New Vulture variant is now available at the Corvus capitol.- Players' ships now count towards the cargo of capships when they dock. If not enough cargo space is available, the player cannot dock.- Capship owners can now give their ship a custom name. The custom name is displayed in the upper right area of the capship menu. Use the /renameship "New Name" command to change it. You must be piloting the ship to use the command. A GUI interface is forthcoming. Names are validated by the server the same way character names are.- Fixed a bug that prevented some news posts from being viewable.Requiring cargo space for ships docking in capships was always part of the intended design, but had been temporarily avoided to make the initial rollout a little simpler. Now that the limitations are enforced, you can dock different numbers of ships based on their relative size. For instance, a Behemoth is 300cu, allowing two of them to dock with a current Trident Type M; where the smallest of fighters is 100cu, allowing up to six ships to dock.We can, of course, continue to tweak the cargo stats and other aspects of the Tridents, as we move forward.The new Vulture is the testbed prototype for replacing the existing asset. It is currently configured identically to a Vulture MkIV, to give people a 1:1 comparison against a widely-available, existing ship. Polite feedback on the forum is welcome.Naming of capital ships is of course a first-generation implementation, mainly to get the ship name concepts stored on the server. Once we have a population of named ships, we'll move ahead with adding the ship-name to locations on the HUD, etc.

The latest newsletter was released earlier today. If you're interested enough be reading this, then hopefully you're also subscribed to the mailing list (do the email-verification and then check the little box in your "Account Info" on the website). If you don't get it immediately, don't worry, emails will be going out all through the weekend.In the meantime, you can also read the newsletter online: Here. Most of the news is covering topics I've discussed in recent newsposts, but a few things are new, including the mention of our development of new tools for running Events, as well as the upcoming ability to name your own capship. If we're lucky, the capship-naming thing could appear as early as tomorrow (fingers crossed).Similarly, I also mentioned that we're working on more varieties of graphical markings for ships, including some which may be applied to "Military" craft, like this prototype below (the blue color below is at random and not associated with any particular faction, the markings are independent of color):This should help people to immediately distinguish between different types of convoys, and we're working on markings for military, "pirate", and other uses.