VO 1.8.544 includes:- During the operation of the Corporate Sector Run (game event), all systems that are part of the race-course will have a minimum of a two-second jump time for all players (sectors and wormholes).- Fixed issue where rapid succession of purchases would display incorrect cost amounts.- Fixed issue where kills made by explosions from capships with Enduring Titles were not being recorded in their histories.- Fixed issue where, in certain circumstances, ship skins and liveries could be improperly applied to player vessels.- Fixed issue relating to Lite and Freemium players occasionally having improper access to capital ships with higher membership status requirements.- Windows version now saves crash info into a separate crash.log file, instead of in the errors.log file.The CSR jump-delay comes from a related post on Suggestions, which we're willing to try out specifically in the CSR case. We will not be rolling it out game-wide in all other cases in the immediate future, there are optimizations around load-times that we're still trying to improve. Ideally, we'd rather try and make everything fast for everyone, rather than equally slow for everyone. Still, for "racing" purposes, this is a reasonable thing to try.Otherwise, we've had some cool developments this week, in developing new tools to help us update the UI. Part of the historical delay there has stemmed from an *incredibly* time consuming design and implementation process; suffering from a lot of cross-compatibility and platform testing problems, due to the way our UI system worked. At some point, we would get so battered by the UI system, that we were just happy it was all working, even if it was kind of ugly or dated.Hopefully the new toolchain will help address that; it's still very early, but progress is promising.That's all for now, please continue to post any problems on Bugs, and have a great weekend, everyone!

VO 1.8.544 includes:- During the operation of the Corporate Sector Run (game event), all systems that are part of the race-course will have a minimum of a two-second jump time for all players (sectors and wormholes).- Fixed issue where rapid succession of purchases would display incorrect cost amounts.- Fixed issue where kills made by explosions from capships with Enduring Titles were not being recorded in their histories.- Fixed issue where, in certain circumstances, ship skins and liveries could be improperly applied to player vessels.- Fixed issue relating to Lite and Freemium players occasionally having improper access to capital ships with higher membership status requirements.- Windows version now saves crash info into a separate crash.log file, instead of in the errors.log file.The CSR jump-delay comes from a related post on Suggestions, which we're willing to try out specifically in the CSR case. We will not be rolling it out game-wide in all other cases in the immediate future, there are optimizations around load-times that we're still trying to improve. Ideally, we'd rather try and make everything fast for everyone, rather than equally slow for everyone. Still, for "racing" purposes, this is a reasonable thing to try.Otherwise, we've had some cool developments this week, in developing new tools to help us update the UI. Part of the historical delay there has stemmed from an *incredibly* time consuming design and implementation process; suffering from a lot of cross-compatibility and platform testing problems, due to the way our UI system worked. At some point, we would get so battered by the UI system, that we were just happy it was all working, even if it was kind of ugly or dated.Hopefully the new toolchain will help address that; it's still very early, but progress is promising.That's all for now, please continue to post any problems on Bugs, and have a great weekend, everyone!

VO 1.8.543 includes (tonight):- Performance and stability improvements to the Vulkan GKGL driver for Windows.- Added V-Sync, Antialiasing, and Anisotropic settings to the Vulkan driver.VO 1.8.542.1 included (last week):- Fixed issue with "Keystroke Receiving" request on the Mac version.VO 1.8.542- The "/report" command now visually responds with an error message, instead of nothing, if the character name was wrong or the reported player hasn't said anything since the reporter logged in.- Reduced network traffic when rapidly scanning through objects in the sector.- Minor technical tweaks and updates for improved compliance with the Mac StoreVO 1.8.541.2- Fixed issues with glow and ice effects on Mac OpenGL 4 and Reference drivers.Last week we completed a number of final bugfixes on the Mac version, and finished with updating the install in the actual Apple Store. Please let us know (via the Bugs forum) if you find any new problems on the Mac. As far as we know, it should be pretty solid at this point.This latest update is to the Windows Vulkan driver, which is definitively the highest performing way of running Vendetta Online on a PC. We've kept the DirectX 11 driver as the "install default" for some time, but now we're looking at migrating that to a "fallback" status for older hardware, and making Vulkan the default API for new installs (assuming Vulkan support is detected on startup).Stabilizing the Vulkan renderer opens the door to a lot of potential graphical improvements, such as those supported by recent, higher-end GPUs. This is not to say that a high-end GPU is going to become a requirement, simply that we have the ability to add support for next-generation features which would be otherwise impossible.If you have a somewhat-recent graphics processor (GPU) that supports Vulkan on Windows, we encourage you to switch over and try running on that, instead of the DX11 default, and let us know if you run into any problems (also via the Bugs forum). As of this most-recent version, it should be quite stable, and as I mentioned before, is considerably faster than the DX11 renderer.Aside from NVIDIA and AMD, even Intel Iris integrated GPUs do support Vulkan, although you will want to make sure you download the latest drivers for your particular hardware.If you have a higher-refresh gaming monitor that supports Freesync or G-sync, we recommend enabling vsync, to give you a smooth experience without frame-tearing artifacts.That's all for now, everyone, have a great weekend!

VO 1.8.543 includes (tonight):- Performance and stability improvements to the Vulkan GKGL driver for Windows.- Added V-Sync, Antialiasing, and Anisotropic settings to the Vulkan driver.VO 1.8.542.1 included (last week):- Fixed issue with "Keystroke Receiving" request on the Mac version.VO 1.8.542- The "/report" command now visually responds with an error message, instead of nothing, if the character name was wrong or the reported player hasn't said anything since the reporter logged in.- Reduced network traffic when rapidly scanning through objects in the sector.- Minor technical tweaks and updates for improved compliance with the Mac StoreVO 1.8.541.2- Fixed issues with glow and ice effects on Mac OpenGL 4 and Reference drivers.Last week we completed a number of final bugfixes on the Mac version, and finished with updating the install in the actual Apple Store. Please let us know (via the Bugs forum) if you find any new problems on the Mac. As far as we know, it should be pretty solid at this point.This latest update is to the Windows Vulkan driver, which is definitively the highest performing way of running Vendetta Online on a PC. We've kept the DirectX 11 driver as the "install default" for some time, but now we're looking at migrating that to a "fallback" status for older hardware, and making Vulkan the default API for new installs (assuming Vulkan support is detected on startup).Stabilizing the Vulkan renderer opens the door to a lot of potential graphical improvements, such as those supported by recent, higher-end GPUs. This is not to say that a high-end GPU is going to become a requirement, simply that we have the ability to add support for next-generation features which would be otherwise impossible.If you have a somewhat-recent graphics processor (GPU) that supports Vulkan on Windows, we encourage you to switch over and try running on that, instead of the DX11 default, and let us know if you run into any problems (also via the Bugs forum). As of this most-recent version, it should be quite stable, and as I mentioned before, is considerably faster than the DX11 renderer.Aside from NVIDIA and AMD, even Intel Iris integrated GPUs do support Vulkan, although you will want to make sure you download the latest drivers for your particular hardware.If you have a higher-refresh gaming monitor that supports Freesync or G-sync, we recommend enabling vsync, to give you a smooth experience without frame-tearing artifacts.That's all for now, everyone, have a great weekend!

VO 1.8.541.1 includes:- Fixed a crashing bug in Vulkan (Metal) driver on macOS.- Fixed black screen when using Vulkan (Metal) driver on macs with a discrete GPU, such as Macbook Pros.Thanks to the individuals who reported the new MacOS issues and helped us track them down. We're working to quickly find, fix and patch any problems.

VO 1.8.541.1 includes:- Fixed a crashing bug in Vulkan (Metal) driver on macOS.- Fixed black screen when using Vulkan (Metal) driver on macs with a discrete GPU, such as Macbook Pros.Thanks to the individuals who reported the new MacOS issues and helped us track them down. We're working to quickly find, fix and patch any problems.

VO 1.8.541 includes:- Mac version now supports Apple ARM processors natively, such as the M1.- Added new "Vulkan (Metal)" video driver for recent MacOS versions, using "MoltenVK" Vulkan-on-Metal API.- Vulkan + Metal driver supports "full screen window mode" on Mac, for ease of switching desktop "spaces".- Major performance improvements for OpenGL 4 driver on ARM-based Apple M1 devices.- Improved installation compatibility of Mac version with recent versions of MacOS.This is the most significant technical change to our Mac install in quite awhile, and we'd appreciate feedback on any issues you may find (preferably by posting to Bugs, or using the Support Ticket system if necessary).We now have essentially a Metal-native renderer, through the MoltenVK support for making our Vulkan renderer show up as a Metal renderer. Vulkan is itself a very efficient, hardware-level API, so bridging from that to Metal is not much of a leap that will impact performance, but it does make our engine easier to maintain. The proliferation of rendering APIs has been a big headache for us, over the long history of our game (we've been through: Glide, D3D, DX5, DX6, DX7, DX8, DX8.1, DX9, DX11, OpenGL 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 2.x, 4.x, ES 2.x, 3.x, etc), so we're really aiming to just focus on Vulkan from here on out.The MacOS version is also now includes support for both Intel / x86 CPUs, as well as the new ARM-based processors made in-house by Apple, such as the "M1". For those players who have Intel-based Macs, have no fear, we tend to support older Macs longer than anyone else. I mean, we finally dropped PowerPC just a couple of years ago.Our GL4 driver has also been significantly enhanced on newer M1 Macs, where it was really yielding terrible performance. The GL4 driver should no longer be necessary there, since we recommend using the Metal renderer on that device, but if there's a need for compatibility reasons, it should now be a far faster fall-back option. Notably, it was not slow because of anything we did, but rather an apparent issue in Apple's GL4-to-Metal driver, which we managed to work around.The GL4 driver on Intel (which is not nearly as slow as it was on the M1) has not been updated, because unfortunately a different Apple-side bug causes it to only render a black screen on certain older Intel-based Macs. This kind of thing is why we don't do a lot of frequent Mac technical updates, they tend to be fraught with a kind of debugging whack-a-mole that is often not related to our own software.Still, if your Mac works with the Metal driver, we suggest using that, and making us aware of any problems you encounter. That way we can focus on making that rendering-path as stable and performant as possible. Remember, if you don't report a bug, we may never know about it.. we only have a limited selection of Mac hardware and MacOS versions for testing.For those installing from scratch, as of this writing our direct-install do

VO 1.8.541 includes:- Mac version now supports Apple ARM processors natively, such as the M1.- Added new "Vulkan (Metal)" video driver for recent MacOS versions, using "MoltenVK" Vulkan-on-Metal API.- Vulkan + Metal driver supports "full screen window mode" on Mac, for ease of switching desktop "spaces".- Major performance improvements for OpenGL 4 driver on ARM-based Apple M1 devices.- Improved installation compatibility of Mac version with recent versions of MacOS.This is the most significant technical change to our Mac install in quite awhile, and we'd appreciate feedback on any issues you may find (preferably by posting to Bugs, or using the Support Ticket system if necessary).We now have essentially a Metal-native renderer, through the MoltenVK support for making our Vulkan renderer show up as a Metal renderer. Vulkan is itself a very efficient, hardware-level API, so bridging from that to Metal is not much of a leap that will impact performance, but it does make our engine easier to maintain. The proliferation of rendering APIs has been a big headache for us, over the long history of our game (we've been through: Glide, D3D, DX5, DX6, DX7, DX8, DX8.1, DX9, DX11, OpenGL 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 2.x, 4.x, ES 2.x, 3.x, etc), so we're really aiming to just focus on Vulkan from here on out.The MacOS version is also now includes support for both Intel / x86 CPUs, as well as the new ARM-based processors made in-house by Apple, such as the "M1". For those players who have Intel-based Macs, have no fear, we tend to support older Macs longer than anyone else. I mean, we finally dropped PowerPC just a couple of years ago.Our GL4 driver has also been significantly enhanced on newer M1 Macs, where it was really yielding terrible performance. The GL4 driver should no longer be necessary there, since we recommend using the Metal renderer on that device, but if there's a need for compatibility reasons, it should now be a far faster fall-back option. Notably, it was not slow because of anything we did, but rather an apparent issue in Apple's GL4-to-Metal driver, which we managed to work around.The GL4 driver on Intel (which is not nearly as slow as it was on the M1) has not been updated, because unfortunately a different Apple-side bug causes it to only render a black screen on certain older Intel-based Macs. This kind of thing is why we don't do a lot of frequent Mac technical updates, they tend to be fraught with a kind of debugging whack-a-mole that is often not related to our own software.Still, if your Mac works with the Metal driver, we suggest using that, and making us aware of any problems you encounter. That way we can focus on making that rendering-path as stable and performant as possible. Remember, if you don't report a bug, we may never know about it.. we only have a limited selection of Mac hardware and MacOS versions for testing.For those installing from scratch, as of this writing our direct-install do