VO 1.8.475 includes:- Fixed issue with mining beam effect not staying connected to ships.- Fixed memory leak.- Goliath powercell grid changed from 125 to 55- Hive Queen top speed increased from 140 to 180- Hive Queen turbo thrust increased from 1640 to 16400- Hive Queen braking thrust increased from 1290 to 12900- Stronghold-specific Hive Queen blaster powercell drain increased from 80 to 160- TPG Goliath description changed to remove the term "freighter", as all VO ships are multi-role.Still a lot of technical work going on in the background, major changes and improvements to the physics engine, which could have far-reaching implications for future large-scale gameplay.

VO 1.8.474 includes:- Windows version is now using new experimental multi-threaded job system.- Windows version now includes a Vulkan graphics driver. To try it out, go to Options -> Video -> Change Driver.Tonight's Windows-only release is the first public test of a long-running project to re-architect the Vendetta Online engine, and bring it up to a point where we can deliver the kind of next-generation content required from many of our goals.From our benchmark testing, we've seen about a 15% performance improvement over the previous version of the game, across the board. The new engine is only partially utilized at the moment, so we expect things to continue to get better from here.We'll discuss this a bit more in the next newsletter, but basically, the new engine should make much better usage of systems with many cores, while still being very efficient on systems without them. Even low-power devices have a lot of cores now (8-core phones, and the like, and new Windows-on-ARM laptops), so multi-core scalability is increasingly important.Similarly, we're very excited for the future of our new Vulkan renderer, which has been in development for quite some time. At the moment, you should not expect major performance improvements for using Vulkan over DirectX 11, as we're still in the process of re-tooling the greater engine to make better usage of Vulkan's advantages. However, we still encourage you to try the new renderer, if you have a reasonable Intel, NVIDIA or AMD GPU with recent drivers. Please post any issues to Bugs, and revert back to DX11 if things don't work for you. Basically, expect this to be a "beta" renderer, right now.To those not on Windows: Yes, the improvements will be coming to you as well. As always, our world is very cross-platform, and one of the big benefits of Vulkan is the potential to use a single API across both mobile and PC.. unlike the need for DirectX, OpenGL, and OpenGL ES. On Apple devices, there are translation layers to allow Vulkan renderers to work via Apple's "Metal" API.We released this only on Windows, as it's better to have a narrower test-case when the code is still relatively "early". We'll expand the engine testing onto other platforms, once we're a little more confident. If something goes awry, it's a lot easier to debug the process on just one platform at a time.As always, please post any issues on the Bugs forum, and have a great weekend!

VO 1.8.473 included:- Stronghold Queens are now more dangerous.- Added numeric entries to joystick axis dead zone menu.VO 1.8.472 included:- Fixed crash when a drop-down list control's selected item is set to nil.- Fixed crash on Android when searching for gamepads too many times.- Fixed crash on Gear VR when the Back button on the remote control is pressed too many times.

VO 1.8.471 includes:- Added a slight 200 millisecond delay to auto-fire, to equate it to average human reaction time, and mitigate usage with the Railgun.- Fixed issue with turret fire delay exploit.- Buddy invites now persist across logins and invites/accepts/declines work when the other player is not online.- Fixed issue where your buddy list doesn't update when you accept your first buddy invite.