Vendetta Online 1.8.408-409

VO 1.8.408 and 409 included:- The new Capella-class capital ship has been added to random NPC convoys.- Capship Hangar and station Manage Ship tab ship lists now show the addons and cargo of each ship, and display the ship's total mass in its description.- OpenGL 4 driver on Linux now uses 3.1 Core Profile to enable instanced rendering support on hardware that supports it.- Self Defense flag now expires only when the 15 minute timer runs out, or the original victim kills the attacker.- Gear VR now allows mining guns to operate when they are in the primary weapon group, and no gamepad is detected. The tap-to-select action changes to Select Nearest in Front and the mining guns auto-start when close enough to the asteroid.- Previously unseen character names coming from kill messages are now added to the name tab-autocomplete list.- Capella's rear launch bay is now also a docking bay.- Fixed visual artifacts and improved quality of the Capella's texture maps.- Increased number of turrets on the current Capella variant in convoy testing.- Fixed crash when starting VO for the first time on a system with no audio driver enabled.A number of substantial changes lately, starting with the introduction of the new Capella-class capital ship previously announced in the Holiday Newsletter.Additionally, GearVR users on headset-only can now mine, something that was impossible before due simply to the limited number of controls and buttons when in headset-only mode (no game controller). Now a new automatic-fire mining system has been created to allow these players to invest in mineral and ore content as well.OpenGL users on Linux can expect some performance enhancements from the additional of Instanced Rendering on the platform, a feature we utilize much more intensively on mobile and we intend to expand drastically on PC as well. It's basically a best-case scenario for handling large numbers of identical objects, like asteroids, and helps enable much higher potential densities in asteroid fields. On the flipside: Players with old graphics chips, that are not OpenGL 3.1-compatible, will have to resort to using our older GL 2.x "Reference" renderer. Overall, we feel this compatibility matrix is the best fit for the game as a whole, as the vast majority of systems now have GL 3.1 support, and we should be targeting the game for the common-case and not the oldest machines out there. Support for older hardware, via the Reference driver, will be maintained for a very long time to come; but performance will not be guaranteed on slower systems, of course.Many other fixes and tweaks in this release as well. We hope you all enjoy it. We have bigger changes and announcements in the works as well. Have a great weekend, everyone!