Vendetta Online 1.8.348

VO 1.8.348 includes:- New prototype dynamic economy in the Orion Mining station located in Latos N-2. Locally produced goods are now manufactured at a fixed rate, and can be depleted; non-local goods arrive only by NPC Trade Convoy or Player Trading. Any commodities, ships, and addons sold to the station become available for purchase, but currently retain the common pre-requisites for the respective item (Level, Faction Standing, etc). As the quantity of an item increases, the price drops, and vice versa. Custom items such as event trophies cannot be sold to the station at this time.Please keep in mind that this is very much still a prototype economy model. We're tweaking pricing and a number of other factors. Yes, it will eventually spread to other stations, but we have a lot of tweaking and measurement to do before it becomes the dominant economic system of the galaxy.As always, bug reports and feedback are greatly welcomed! Thanks all, have a great weekend.

Level3 Communications Backbone Network Problems

For the last day and a half, the Level3 Communications network has been experiencing major problems in the Midwest area. Although our game is served from four different transit providers, of which Level3 is only one of them, this is still impacting a lot of players. They are a common transit path for many providers, as they've historically been one of the better Tier-1 ISPs.Level3 is actively working on the issue, but we don't have an ETA at this time. Problems you experience in the game, related to various forms of "lag" are probably going to be related to this.

August Newsletter, Economy Changes, EverSpace Promo

We're pretty excited about some of the new changes coming to our dynamic economy in the near future, and we discuss that and a number of other topics in the latest Vendetta Online Newsletter:https://www.vendetta-online.com/newsletter/08.2015/newsletter.08.2015.htmlOne of the more unusual points to be found in there, is our support for a completely different, unrelated game, the upcoming single-player title EverSpace from RockFish Games. RockFish is a new studio, formed from the original team members who created the Galaxy On Fire series. They're good friends of ours, and we're doing what we can to help their Kickstarter succeed. The game itself looks beautiful, and is already to a playable prototype stage, but they're looking for funds to help complete it.Thus, we've chosen to make a special offer available: If the EverSpace Kickstarter succeeds, we will give every backer a special Vulture ship-skin in Vendetta Online, and we will randomly choose one lucky backer to receive free a one-year Premium subscription to our game ($90 value)! Check out the above newsletter for details, and be sure to take a look at the EverSpace Kickstarter. If you're a Vendetta Online player, chipping in $5 to help them is probably worth it just for the content we're giving away! (We derive no financial benefit from this, we're just trying to help another indie game company get started).We think their game looks amazing, and we hope it's something you like as well.

August Newsletter, Economy Changes, EverSpace Promo

We're pretty excited about some of the new changes coming to our dynamic economy in the near future, and we discuss that and a number of other topics in the latest Vendetta Online Newsletter:https://www.vendetta-online.com/newsletter/08.2015/newsletter.08.2015.htmlOne of the more unusual points to be found in there, is our support for a completely different, unrelated game, the upcoming single-player title EverSpace from RockFish Games. RockFish is a new studio, formed from the original team members who created the Galaxy On Fire series. They're good friends of ours, and we're doing what we can to help their Kickstarter succeed. The game itself looks beautiful, and is already to a playable prototype stage, but they're looking for funds to help complete it.Thus, we've chosen to make a special offer available: If the EverSpace Kickstarter succeeds, we will give every backer a special Vulture ship-skin in Vendetta Online, and we will randomly choose one lucky backer to receive free a one-year Premium subscription to our game ($90 value)! Check out the above newsletter for details, and be sure to take a look at the EverSpace Kickstarter. If you're a Vendetta Online player, chipping in $5 to help them is probably worth it just for the content we're giving away! (We derive no financial benefit from this, we're just trying to help another indie game company get started).We think their game looks amazing, and we hope it's something you like as well.

Dramatic Server Migration was Dramatic.

Vendetta Online is now up and running on a completely different server cluster, in a new location. This is actually pretty exciting, and more information about this will be coming in the next Newsletter, due out shortly.Unfortunately, the process of migrating the server was not without challenges, as shown by the extended downtime over the weekend. We apologize for any inconvenience this caused. The bug was a pretty deep and low-level mix of different things, which all had to randomly happen at the same time in a particular way to create a problem. Unfortunately, it only ever showed up under production usage. No amount of testing ever demonstrated the problem, as some problems actually require a full load before they start to appear (real people behave differently from simulated loads).Anyway, we tracked down and fixed the bug as quickly as possible, and the game should now be stable again. Please do continue to open Support Tickets and post on the Forums if you should happen to see some sort of major issue.This new server cluster should open up a lot of gameplay possibilities for the expanded universe, and increased capacity, like the ability to sustain loads from new iPhone and Steam users.But, for the moment, we're still evaluating things. Thanks for your patience during the transition.

Vendetta Online 1.8.347

VO 1.8.347 includes:- Updater and game client now use a threaded getaddrinfo to look up the server's IP address; if DNS fails to resolve within 10 seconds, it will fall back to a visible error, instead of using OS timeouts.- Updater now directly uses the patch cloud hostname, instead of redirecting through vendetta-online.com.- Hive Stronghold sectors idle timeout is set to 5 minutes, a more reasonable length of time to return and pick up Leviathan drops.- OpenGL driver restores the window title if it has to be recreated for video option changes.After the migration last Friday, we hit a bug that only impacted new Android users, which took some time to fully debug, although we had mitigated it on the server-side by Saturday night. A lot of the work this week was to make the updater and installer that much more robust, to prevent this kind of thing from happening again.Plus, we had been planning to add some of these features for some time. For one thing, it brings VO a little closer to native IPV6 compatibility (although we aren't there yet), and also allows the game to react better to failure cases (with a proper error message), like people who have a misconfigured nameserver, or those experiencing an outage.The bug, and subsequent fixes, soaked up much of the time intended for the server migration this week. So, that has been tentatively pushed to next week.Thanks, and have a great weekend, everyone!

Vendetta-Online.com now More Secure and SPDY!

As of last week, the vendetta-online.com website is now running from a totally new and updated webserver, with significantly more bandwidth, sixteen times as much ram as the old machine, and four times as many cores. We used to only encrypt website traffic when you were really using a "secure" area, like viewing important account information. Now, however, you may notice the browser's Lock icon appears constantly: The entire website is 100% encrypted at all times, and non-encrypted traffic is no longer supported. We're also offering some of the more recent cryptographic enhancements, like the Google-supported ChaCha20/Poly1305 cipher, for those on Chrome browsers, as well as protocol enhancements like SPDY, to make the site load considerably faster. Towards the end of the year, we expect to also support the next-generation web protocol HTTP/2 as well. We'll be continuing to tinker with the site over the coming months, as things stabilize, further extending our support for HTTP Strict Transport Security (also pre-loading the site into browsers), and adding HTTP Public Key Pinning.The upshot of which is: The site should now be more robust, more secure, and faster than ever. It is still built with our same degree of care and heightened security-paranoia, so we hope it will be a great home for a long time to come. The internet has taken a lot of security hits over the last couple of years, from major SSL exploits like Heartbleed, to revelations about eavesdropping, and now the recent Android Stagefright bug. The best anyone in our position can really do, is build the best infrastructure we can imagine, and keep a watchful eye on the horizon. That's part of what this new site and system is about: a new setup to help mitigate potential unforeseen attacks, while also letting us react more quickly to news of brand-new bugs or issues.Migrating this site took quite a lot of time, as it's a pretty complex endeavor, but we're very happy to have it out of the way. We're still going to be doing more server-migration work over the coming weeks, this time working on the game-server itself, to make for a faster and more scalable game environment. These changes haven't happened yet (we'll post again when they're in place), but we're hoping for faster sector load-times, faster player inv

Vendetta Online 1.8.346

VO 1.8.346 includes:- Changed the 'Route' button in the Mission Info to 'Dock' and displays text saying to dock to the local station to accept the mission when clicked.- The "PLAYER_DIED" lua event now triggers for anyone who dies within your sensor range (15km). Chat messages are only displayed if you are the victim or the killer.- After un-docking from your own persistent capship, your capship now retains current velocity and slows to a stop, instead of stopping immediately.- Jumping into a sector and landing directly into a capship docking bay no longer auto-docks your ship.- Fixed typo in Training Neutron Blaster description.- Also, server-side changes from this week: new production database system, new game webserver, etc.Lots of infrastructural changes took place this week. We're still kind of "settling in" with the new servers and database systems, so please continue to let us know if anything isn't working properly. We'll have more announcements about all of this next week. Have a great weekend, everyone!