Vendetta Online 1.8.309

VO 1.8.309 includes:- Lightsources from weapons are now colored to match their visual effect.- Added support for multiple lightsources to more ships.- Fixed crashes when changing video drivers or resolution when in multi-threaded rendering mode.- DirectX 11 driver now chooses window-mode if it cannot go to fullscreen-mode instead of falling back to the DirectX 9 driver- Switching video drivers should no longer cause graphical artifacts.This release brings the new lighting model in DX11 much closer to its intended goal, although still missing a few things. Fire effects from damaged ships don't yet emit light, nor do station floodlights or "floating neon" advertising signs, etc. A few types of materials still don't receive dynamic lighting (station solar panels), although most of them now do.Many of the stability issues have been addressed as well. If anyone is still having problems changing to or using the DirectX 11 driver, please post to the Bugs forum and let us know (with screenshots, if possible). DirectX 11 will soon become the default driver for Windows, although we'll still retain the other driver as a compatibility fallback for a long time to come.But, before it can become the default, there's some optimization work that has to happen, as well as adding a lot of the well-known options to the driver. Once the optimization work has happened, and the shaders have stabilized, we'll begin back-propagating support to the other PC platforms (Linux and Mac). A much newer OpenGL version will probably be required for advanced graphics features, possibly OpenGL 4.1; although again, we will still retain the older driver as a fallback for older hardware.If the new lighting is slow for your computer, don't lose heart. Continue using the DirectX 9 version for now. We expect to speed things up quite a bit in the near future. We'll go into a bit more of a technical discussion about the nature of the changes once things have stabilized as well.If graphics updates aren't your thing, no worries, it'll only be a few weeks and we'll be back to other topics :).Have a great weekend, everyone!

Vendetta Online 1.8.308

- New prototype DirectX 11 driver has been added. To try it out, go to Options -> Video -> Change driver... and select 'DirectX11 GKGL driver'. Multiple dynamic lights are enabled with this driver if your GPU supports DirectX 11-level features. Dynamic lights include weapon fire, rocket/missile/ship exhaust, and explosions.- Corvus Greyhound (and Painted variants) changed from 250 to 190 thrust, 8250 to 7500 armor. This version includes a significant renderer change, that being the addition of dynamic lightsources. For the moment, this includes a limited subset of the flare "lights" in the game, but does cover a lot of the most common (ship engines, rockets, energy weapons, as mentioned above). The light color is not yet correct to the visual effect in some cases.This is still early in development, and we're still testing, but we think it looks pretty cool thus far. For now the feature is limited to those with DirectX 11 support, using the DX11 internal driver on Windows. You can manually select the DX11 driver in the Video area of Settings. Once the lighting has been stabilized, we'll add support to Linux, Mac and possibly other platforms. These improvements are primarily directed at the PC, where the performance margins are quite large.There will be other renderer improvements coming as well. We have a lot of gameplay work to do, but for specific reasons we needed to get this renderer development out of the way quickly. Thus, it's been bumped up a little in priority. On the flipside, the game should get a lot cooler looking in a short period of time. I hope you all enjoy it.Have a great weekend, everyone!

Vendetta Online 1.8.307

VO 1.8.307 includes:- Fixed weapon hit-check failures.- Masked off the regions near the HUD's touch controls from being used for touch-targeting so it is more difficult to accidentally change your target while flying.- Linux OpenGL drivers now use the pbuffer extension if available for off-screen rendering.- Fixed incorrect Vendetta Online logo size when loading the different Offline Training Simulator sections.- Android version now automatically re-tries certain types of download failures during installation.We have a lot of work going on behind the scenes right now, this is an interim release until some of the other development is ready. We're trying very hard to get to a point on mobile where we can wrap some of this platform-specific development and get back to overall gameplay work. Among other things, you can expect near-term changes to station defenses, strike forces and certain early missions. We'll also do our best to drop in some high-level content as well. New assets are still in development (capship stations), etc. We'll talk more about that in the next newsletter.Until then, have a great weekend!