VO 1.8.240 includes:- Improved long press to add waypoints to navmap. The waypoint is added immediately after the long press instead of waiting until the press is released.- Fixed default font size on Kindle Fire HD 7" tablets so the station menu isn't clipped off the right side of the screen.- Fixed some lua errors.- You will now be sent to Corvus if your home station and nation hate you instead of being bounced back and forth between stations.- Temp KOS is now properly removed when you die in an empty sector.- If you acquire Temp KOS with your home station's faction, your home is moved to your nation's capital or Corvus if you are hated by your nation. - Increased convoy activity in station sectors: this is an ongoing testing process that will begin over this weekend. It may not appear immediately, but should solidify over the coming week.

Free play for previous subscribers! Happy holidays everyone. Anyone subscribed at any time in our history, prior to this past October, may now play for free through the new year. Have fun!VO 1.8.239 includes:- Fixed blank screen on certain Android tablets when running in joystick-support mode.- Fixed joystick configurations getting reset every time VO is run.- Fixed the problem with certain missions being displayed that cannot be taken.- When cancelling chat in touch-screen mode, the chat entry box in the HUD is also closed.- Added long-press support for the navmap to add waypoints. The long-press is .5 seconds.- Added a one-click mode for mobile devices to create a guest account without having to enter user info, which allows new players to get into the game quickly. A conversion menu is in place to add required information before you can convert the account to a subscription. A Windows Store update is required for one-click support on Windows 8, which is forthcoming.- Changed 'Android Market' references to 'Google Play' for the Android version.

The current Newsletter is now going out via email, recapping the development we've made since the last newsletter (some time ago) and laying out some of our plans for how we intend to use these improvements to expand the game moving forward.If you didn't receive a copy of the email (it can take a couple of days to get through, sometimes), double check your Account Settings, your spam folder, and try adding noreply@vendetta-online.com to your address book to reduce the chances of it being flagged as spam.Otherwise, you can also take a look at it online here:http://www.vendetta-online.com/newsletter.12.2012.htmlAs always, we're offering free play for all former subscribers (anyone whose account expired prior to October 1st), from December 24th through January 1st. We'll try to pull together some events during this time as well. Take care all, and have a Happy Holiday!

VO 1.8.238 includes:- A massive new 39-mission tree, developed collaboratively by a group of our PCC members, organized and evangelized by Phaserlight. Many thanks and congrats to him, as well as Pizzasgood and everyone else who contributed to building and testing these missions!- Graphics updates for the standard cargo-crate have been totally updated with a new asset. We will eventually also use this crate at multiple sizes to visually indicate crates that have larger quantities of items or use more cubic units of space.A couple of other changes were also intended for this update, but needed to be pushed back for further testing. So those can likely be expected next week. Have a great weekend, everyone, and please post any issues to the forums.

VO 1.8.237 includes:- Enhanced password security. Maximum password length has been increased to 64 characters.- Fixed problem with video options not getting saved.- Increased default settings for Adreno 320-based Android devices.- Removed storms in Deneb.The biggest news in this update are the major security improvements added with our new password handling system. Note: In order to take advantage of these improvements, you MUST update your password on the game website. We don't prevent you from re-using your old password, but we strongly recommend taking advantage of the new 64-character password length by making a fairly long, memorable passphrase using random words, the benefits of which are described in this famous xkcd comic. In fact, an xkcd fan even created this common word password generator to serve that purpose.For those interested in the technical details, I'll elaborate a little more. The old password system was quite state of the art for the time when it was created (the late 90s), albeit with far too short of a password character limit. The new design is very much like the old one, which was always similar to bcrypt, but is now enhanced with bcrypt's ability to increase the password CPU-cost in the future. This will let us react to the changing landscape of possible brute-force attacks, and increase security dynamically as necessary (and informing our userbase of the changes if/when they should occur). The current CPU cost is designed to take half a second for the game client to hash on a 1ghz NVIDIA Tegra2-based mobile device. We intend to also thread the client's hashing of passwords, to make the computation process less intrusive on the user interface, at which point we may increase the cost further.Beyond this, we've improved the cryptographic randomness of the unique salt used to strengthen each password hash, as well as the nonce used to mitigate replay attacks. These have always been features of the protocol, we've just updated and improved them.In addition, the game server and website still retain the measures to slow down any remote brute-force password attacks, which we added some time ago to mitigate the password length limitations we had at the time.Of course, all of these technical measures are in vain if the end-user chooses a password that is too short and too easy for computers to guess. So ple

VO 1.8.236 includes:- Added touch-to-select HUD feature to Android version. Just touch the target (making sure no other touch region is touched) and it is selected, depending on your HUD's "Target" mode.- Reduced network traffic when logging in.- Storms once again appear in Edras and Pelatus.- Fixed problem with Trade Guild mission choosing wrong destination stations.- Added code to the audio system to fix missing sound on some Windows Vista/7/8 desktop computers.It is also noteworthy that an updated Windows Store build of the game (for Windows 8 and Windows RT) has also passed certification with Microsoft, which enhances the default graphics on Intel Ultrabooks and fixes a number of bugs. It should also be possible to use plugins with this version, by placing them in the /user/your name/AppData/Packages//LocalState folder.

VO 1.8.234 and 1.8.235 include:- Fixed ice asteroid rendering problem on the Windows Store version.- Improvements to deal with higher latency connections.- Android version should no longer show a black screen if you press Home during the initial loading screens.- Added Options button to the PDA menu.The "improvements to deal with higher latency connections" should substantially help with logging into the game and acquiring the dynamic mission data on mobile devices and for those playing outside the US.

VO 1.8.233 includes:- New visual effects for Starflare rocket explosion.- Support for MOGA game controller for the Android version. Upon first launch, a MOGA menu will show what the controls are bound to. The menu is also available from the HUD by typing /help in chat.Our support for the recently-launched PowerA MOGA bluetooth game controller is worth noting. We've found this device to be a very cool way to play the game on an Android phone, providing perhaps the best mobile Vendetta Online experience we've seen to date. We have no vested interest in their success, this referral stems purely from our usage and impressions of the Moga, and our desire to see mobile gaming evolve to match the technical capabilities of modern devices. Flying with the controller still takes some getting used to, and it isn't a replacement for a mouse and keyboard; but Moga is a huge improvement over a touchscreen, and superior (in my opinion) even to the Xperia Play.We hope you like the new Starflare rocket effects. We have some more improved effects in the works that were actually patched into the game tonight, but we need to do a bit more development before they can become visible in the game.

VO 1.8.232 includes:- New visual effects for Iceflare and Sunflare rocket explosions.- Linux64 version now has experimental multithreaded rendering and physics support.We hope you'll enjoy the new Sunflare and Iceflare rocket explosions. We intend to eventually add graphical differentiation for all the major weapons, to add variety and make it more visually apparent what weapons are in use, even in the midst of combat.The new multi-threaded engine is being tested first on Linux64 to give us a smaller, yet technologically savvy, subset of the userbase for this initial release pass. As time goes on, we'll expand the engine release to include other platforms. The new engine makes extensive use of threading for physics, rendering, collision detection and response. In early testing this has substantially improved performance and scalability on systems with multi-core CPUs. As even cellphones are now offered with as many as four CPU cores, this client scalability is beneficial all the way from mobile to high-end PCs. It also lays the groundwork for us to further evolve our graphical and game content, leading to a grander and more epic galaxy.

VO 1.8.231 includes:- New visual effects for Mining Beams.- Fixed Linux joystick calibration menu.- Fixed rare "invincible" Hive Queens.- Fixed common case where Linux crash-reporter would fail to appear.- Orun Collectors in the training sector no longer leave.Anyone involved in mining should see a pretty drastic improvement in the related visual effects, marking the latest graphical update to the game. We think the new effect is pretty cool, and thus far the feedback as been very positive from all of you as well.The engine threading updates are still ongoing, we hit a few snags that have further delayed the tentative initial release, hopefully we'll be seeing them on Friday.