Vendetta Online 1.8.479 – Server side

VO 1.8.479 now includes some other server-side changes:- Ships that have been damaged more than 25% now require powercell energy equivalent to their damage to make any kind of jump. For instance, a ship damaged 50% now requires a 50% charged powercell to jump.- Teradon turbo max speed increased from 140 to 160.- Power Cell Baster auto-aim improved from 0.995 to 0.85.- Revenant MkI turbo energy drain reduced from 50 to 48.Server side updates from the last few weeks, along with the new powercell / jump requirements from last night. These jump-requirement changes stemmed from a Suggestions forum thread, that was largely well received. We'll see how the changes work in practice. If it becomes a problem, we can revert them, but it seemed like an interesting idea that could help improve a number of historically problematic situations. It likely has benefits to traders and may make piracy a little more challenging (if the trader makes efforts to defend themselves), but it should make the entire situation more "interesting", which is the overall goal.To clarify the change: there are no changes to jump behaviour at less than 25% *damage*. You only start to see this if you're down to 75% health. To jump at 60% health, you would need 40% charge in your powercell. To jump at 10% health, you would need 90% charge in your powercell. Etc. It makes jumping increasingly more energy-consuming, if you have taken damage, which changes the nature of "chasing" people across the galaxy (both for the pursuer, and the pursued).As always, feedback is welcome. See the Suggestions Forum for the specific thread.Other changes are still in the pipe. We're working on the same set of goals we set out in the last Newsletter in December, but one project has taken over a month longer than expected. This happens sometimes. Engine development can be really complex, especially when you're trying to scale across lots of CPU cores, there are a lot of things to keep synchronized, and a lot of performance/architecture trade-offs. Game engines do not "scale" easily, compared to other workloads, like video encoding or serving web-data, where there are much fewer timing and synchronization requirements.But, the results are tentatively pretty optimistic, and we'll have more to say about that in the near future. Having a new engine will go a long way towards making the "Universe Redux" plans a lot more interesting from both a "visual" and "gameplay" standpoints, and modernizing the look of the game in general. This will be extremely relevant across all platforms, and all types of systems, from big gaming PCs down to mobile and mobile-VR. In all cases, we'll be able to use the available system resources a lot more effectively, which is really important to next-gen content.We intend to spend more time on content as soon as we can, but we have to get through the engine project before we can start "dividing" our head-space. This