A bit of a composite update, that started back in march, and was only finalized a day ago:VO 1.8.482 includes (recently):- Enabled multi-threaded rendering on all Android versions.- New collision sound effects.- New jettison sound effect.VO 1.8.481 attempted to include (back in March). Everything in here was released, except the threaded rendering was reverted at the time:- New mission tree "Salvage Your Goliath", allows players to break their Goliath capital ship back into constituent parts. There is a cost involved in utilizing this mission, and the salvage process does incur some degree of loss, so not 100% of the contents are returned. However, this is still an effective way to recover most of the capital ship components.- Missions that transfer cargo content to players will now allow the player to temporarily exceed their station cargo limit, for the sake of preserving everything that comes from the mission, such as manufactured components. No additional cargo may be manually added to the station, until it is reduced below the limit. Other costs and limitations may eventually be added for those who exceed the station storage limit.- Sectors will now require full game-client load of all newer-style debris and dynamic objects before spawning the player. This may cause the perception of longer load-times for a few sectors (Pirate Stronghold, etc), but gameplay performance will not be marred by "loading" while in-sector.- The multi-threaded renderer is now enabled by default on both Android regular and "HD" versions. This enhances the performance of CPU-intensive sectors, like the Pirate Stronghold, across all device types.- Android players should be advised, however, that the best performance is from the ES3 renderer that's currently only offered with the "HD" version, because this version specifically requires newer and more capable hardware for installation. The more modern hardware has special features that improve CPU efficiency, which can make the ES3 version twice as fast as the ES2 version, on the same hardware. This is particularly true in CPU-intensive sectors, like the Pirate Stronghold. We will eventually make the ES3 renderer available in the Free version, but we will have to develop more logic to detect whether the device has entirely stable capabilities for using the newer renderer; it may be some time.- Improved sector load times across all platforms.Updated explanation:Basically, this multi-threaded improvement was intended for mid-March, but ended up having some unforeseen stability problems. This caused us to revert and hold the release until we could really thoroughly run it through testing on a wide variety of systems and cases, and make as certain as possible that everything was completely stable, before releasing it again.Android players using the "Free" version of the game should see a noticeable performance bump from this update, and there will probably be more to come. W

The last month or so has been very busy, with a lot of intense development, as well as the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco soaking up our time. Despite a lot of tweaks and changes being made during this period, our reduced availability has made testing and Q/A for releases a big challenge, leading to a lack of recent patches.This should be coming to a close in the near future, however. We don't know exactly what will be in the next patch, or precisely when it will ship; but it's likely we'll take another run at Android performance issues, as well as perhaps some new sound effects and other small modifications.Bigger changes are still in the works, but the bigger the change, the more complex and lengthy the release process to make sure the game remains stable (across 5+ native platforms, not including VR). Thanks for your patience in the meantime. Once we have something more concrete to announce, you'll likely see it emerge in the next Newsletter.