VO 1.8.328 includes:- Fixed rendering errors when switching to the OpenGL 4 driver.- Fixed glow effect showing through objects.- Fixed shadow rendering errors.- Alt-tabbing should be more robust for the DirectX 11 driver.- Fixed inventory list and other tree-controls jumping around when selecting items.- Fixed Google Play Achievements being given at the wrong time.- Updated account creation process on mobile devices.A slightly belated announcement on this version, as I was out of town last week at the Game Developer's Conference.Most of this version continues our process of cleaning up and debugging the new GL4 and DX11 shaders and related code. We still have some more fixes to drop in, further fixing some Linux renderer problems that have appeared recently, but those will have to wait until next week.Big announcements are coming soon, describing more specifics for our plans for 2015. In the meantime, you'll also see some newer "HD" assets appearing on the PC version, and other tweaks intended to polish things up prior to the Steam launch. Further enhancements to our VR support are also planned (Oculus, Leap Motion, etc).Have a great weekend, everyone!

VO 1.8.326 and 1.8.327 include:- Fixed issue with not being able to type in chat while jumping and warping.- When alt-tabbing out in full screen DirectX 11 mode, alt-tabbing back will return to full screen mode.- The wireframe radar extender effect is now visible in DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.- The Windows executable binaries are now signed with a certificate.- The DirectX 11 version now uses a different shadow technique (Poisson PCF with slope-based depth bias), also implemented across all OpenGL 4 versions.- Very experimental, optional OpenGL 4 driver added to MacOS X. Switching drivers is a little strange, and a full game re-start may be needed to avoid graphics corruption. We're still working on it, this is an optional early-access, use at your own risk.- Fixed the capship shield effect not rendering properly.- The glow effect should now work on the experimental OpenGL 4 driver.- A plugins/ folder is now automatically created on first run for the Android version.- Changed the default active button for the EULA menu.- The 'Play' button is now automatically made the active button when changing characters.- When a menu is closed and it doesn't have active focus, the current active focus control no longer gets unfocused.- Fixed a couple of lua errors.Obviously a lot of changes being made in the past week, as 1.8.326 dropped on Monday, followed by 1.8.327 on Friday. The biggest news here is probably the experimental GL4 driver for the Mac, which will finally bring our new rendering engine across all our major PC platforms (Windows/Mac/Linux).There are still other changes coming to the new rendering engine, before it will be considered "production ready" and actually become the default on supporting hardware. But, we are making good progress, and in the meantime, we greatly appreciate people testing things and reporting any issues via the Bugs forum. The more feedback we get, the more solid the new graphics engine will be.Many other fixes and tweaks in the works, with much more significant gameplay changes intended to follow this period of graphical/engine work. Stay tuned!

VO 1.8.325 includes:- Improved experience of using the UI with a gamepad on Android.- Fixed flickering button in touch-hover mode on Android.- The /givemoney command is no longer case sensitive.- Successful /vote mutes now last for two hours.Beyond our release from Sunday night, this actually fixes several additional problems that faced players trying to use a D-pad type gamepad to navigate the game interface. We've improved a lot of the scenarios to make D-pad navigation much easier. There are still some areas that could made better still, but we think those with gamepads will find this helpful. It should be particularly beneficial for those on the FireTV, the NVIDIA Shield, OUYA, GameStick, Moga Pro, upcoming AndroidTV, and other similar hardware.Improved controller support also has long-term benefits for use cases like VR (Vendetta Online being one of the first titles to officially support the Oculus Rift, back in 2013). Playing the game on a mouse and keyboard can be optimal, but tracking key-positions while "blind" (wearing a VR headset) is challenging for a lot of people. To them, it's more accessible to play with a game controller, and a small number of tactile controls that can be trivially identified without looking.

VO 1.8.324 includes:- Increased usability of gamepads to navigate through the UI using mostly just the D-Pad and A button. The D-Pad now performs a key repeat for quicker scrolling.- D-Pad Left/Right no longer scrolls up/down. Instead they switch to the previous/next control.- Changed the default mouse-over/focus highlighting of buttons and tabs to be more noticeable.- Reduced the number of votes to mute someone to 10 votes.- Increased sound falloff of new ship and swarm explosions.- Added a reminder that chat channel 1 is only for Help questions and to /join 100 for main chat after every fifth time you chat in channel 1.- Experimentally tweaked Crystal acquisition rates, for upcoming improvements to level caps and other F2P barriers.A whole array of minor gameplay tweaks, intended to improve the game in a number of cases, including Controller Improvements enhance playability on the Amazon FireTV, OUYA, GameStick, and other "10 foot experience" platforms (ie, where you're 10 feet from a TV and only have a game controller). This will also improve upcoming AndroidTV support, as well as gamepad-centric experiences like the Moga Pro and NVIDIA Shield.Beyond this, administrative tweaks to help us manage our growing userbase, as well as some tweaks to Crystal balance. We've been very busy for the last couple of months on rendering updates, you can expect a lot of small changes and adjustments to the free-to-play business model, as we approach our major iOS update (again, those who want to be a part of testing for ios, should check out vendetta-online.com/ios).That's all for now, expect more graphics updates, and other tweaks, in the coming week!

VO 1.8.313 includes:- Mine explosions no longer do double-damage to the person laying them.- Weapon shot visual-effects are less likely to pass through objects.- Re-arming free equipment during Deneb War military missions now includes text to say the purchases are free.- Touch-screen HUD graphics slightly improved, to indicate the left input area is a region, as opposed to buttons.- Initial single-player tutorial now uses the TPG Raptor instead of the EC-89.Also: iPad owners, if you're interested in helping test the next iOS version of Vendetta Online, then sign up here. This initial build is iPad-only, but future versions will include support for the iPhone and iPod Touch (devices with iOS 7 or better required). The beta testing pool is limited, so sign up now!In other news, we're continuing to develop and optimize the next-generation graphics engine. We managed to get another 25% performance boost out of a new version of the dynamic lighting shader; we have not yet released this shader update, as we're continuing to work on enhancing framerates.Gameplay changes are also coming up, but the rendering engine work needs to be "done" all at once, so we're pushing to get that out of the way.Have a great weekend, everyone!

VO 1.8.312 includes:- Added dynamic lighting to asteroid mining effect.This was actually a very productive week, as Ray has been working really hard to back-propagate many of the newer DX11 effects to OpenGL. Unfortunately, this also uncorked a whole slew of new issues, related to particular chipset drivers and various incompatibilities. He's pushed through and straightened out much of it, but we still have more work to do before this will be production-ready.In the meantime, Curt has added some cool new lighting effects for those who can see it , with the mining impact-area now illuminating things (the asteroid, for instance). It is not currently colored, as the actual mining flare itself is always white. But, we may change that, to make the flare match the color of the mining beam, to add a little more color (and information) to the universe. For the moment though, we think it jazzes up those skyscapes of NPCs mining in the distance.Have a great weekend, everyone.

VO 1.8.311 includes:- Improved two areas of player hit-checking to make hits more accurate under all circumstances. This should improve PvP for everyone, whether individual player ping-times are high or low. - Added dynamic lighting to ship damage fire effects.- Fixed problem with dynamic lights sometimes not being removed.We think these recent improvements to the network code will be quite helpful to a lot of PvP situations. Please let us know how it works. We also have some further ideas, which take a bit more development time than we could dedicate this week, but we'll be continuing to work on this area.Visual effects continue to be enhanced for dynamic lighting and other features. The flames of a burning Teradon now illuminate its surface with a dimly fluctuating orange glow, as well as other nearby objects, adding a little more immersion. Dynamic lighting will be added to wormhole effects and other things in the near future.Beyond that, we've done a lot more consolidation and optimization of the new dynamic lighting engine as a whole, and have begun to back-propagate development into a new OpenGL 4.1 renderer. Linux and Mac people with OpenGL 4.1-compliant graphics hardware can look forward to the updated visual effects.Lastly, remember to stop by Sedina D-2 on Sunday, 2014-11-09 20:30:00 GMT, for the 414th weekly Nation War! A great opportunity to test out the new hit-check network code improvements.

VO 1.8.310 includes:- Fixed X-based multithreaded rendering crashes on Linux.- Fixed problem with not being able to enter the universe on very lossy network connections.- Changed the fallback MTU network packet size if MTU discovery fails.- Dynamic lighting now supports DirectX 10.0 hardware using the DX11 driver.Please immediately report any major/recurring problems in connectivity or game-login via support tickets on the game website. We've done quite a bit to improve the game's robustness under unusual networking situations, but there could always be side effects to what we've changed.If you have DX10 hardware, definitely check out the new dynamic lighting implementation. But be aware that we intend to make it considerably faster.

VO 1.8.309 includes:- Lightsources from weapons are now colored to match their visual effect.- Added support for multiple lightsources to more ships.- Fixed crashes when changing video drivers or resolution when in multi-threaded rendering mode.- DirectX 11 driver now chooses window-mode if it cannot go to fullscreen-mode instead of falling back to the DirectX 9 driver- Switching video drivers should no longer cause graphical artifacts.This release brings the new lighting model in DX11 much closer to its intended goal, although still missing a few things. Fire effects from damaged ships don't yet emit light, nor do station floodlights or "floating neon" advertising signs, etc. A few types of materials still don't receive dynamic lighting (station solar panels), although most of them now do.Many of the stability issues have been addressed as well. If anyone is still having problems changing to or using the DirectX 11 driver, please post to the Bugs forum and let us know (with screenshots, if possible). DirectX 11 will soon become the default driver for Windows, although we'll still retain the other driver as a compatibility fallback for a long time to come.But, before it can become the default, there's some optimization work that has to happen, as well as adding a lot of the well-known options to the driver. Once the optimization work has happened, and the shaders have stabilized, we'll begin back-propagating support to the other PC platforms (Linux and Mac). A much newer OpenGL version will probably be required for advanced graphics features, possibly OpenGL 4.1; although again, we will still retain the older driver as a fallback for older hardware.If the new lighting is slow for your computer, don't lose heart. Continue using the DirectX 9 version for now. We expect to speed things up quite a bit in the near future. We'll go into a bit more of a technical discussion about the nature of the changes once things have stabilized as well.If graphics updates aren't your thing, no worries, it'll only be a few weeks and we'll be back to other topics :).Have a great weekend, everyone!

- New prototype DirectX 11 driver has been added. To try it out, go to Options -> Video -> Change driver... and select 'DirectX11 GKGL driver'. Multiple dynamic lights are enabled with this driver if your GPU supports DirectX 11-level features. Dynamic lights include weapon fire, rocket/missile/ship exhaust, and explosions.- Corvus Greyhound (and Painted variants) changed from 250 to 190 thrust, 8250 to 7500 armor. This version includes a significant renderer change, that being the addition of dynamic lightsources. For the moment, this includes a limited subset of the flare "lights" in the game, but does cover a lot of the most common (ship engines, rockets, energy weapons, as mentioned above). The light color is not yet correct to the visual effect in some cases.This is still early in development, and we're still testing, but we think it looks pretty cool thus far. For now the feature is limited to those with DirectX 11 support, using the DX11 internal driver on Windows. You can manually select the DX11 driver in the Video area of Settings. Once the lighting has been stabilized, we'll add support to Linux, Mac and possibly other platforms. These improvements are primarily directed at the PC, where the performance margins are quite large.There will be other renderer improvements coming as well. We have a lot of gameplay work to do, but for specific reasons we needed to get this renderer development out of the way quickly. Thus, it's been bumped up a little in priority. On the flipside, the game should get a lot cooler looking in a short period of time. I hope you all enjoy it.Have a great weekend, everyone!