Vendetta Online 1.8.181

VO 1.8.181 includes:

- Ship damage percentage should now display properly on player-owned Trident Type M capital ships.

- Trident Type M turbo drain reduced to 45.

- New mission: "Intermediate Combat Practice" from Phaserlight!

- Mission "High Risk Courier Needed" now records failures and will become unavailable if too many take place (along with some other changes).

- Some weapons (Rails, Posis, etc) now reach much higher trade value peaks (up to 12k for Advanced Rails), with smaller drop per unit sold, but are profitable to sell only at demand-driven stations.

- Users piloting the Trident Type M can now participate in Ship Chat.

- Selecting a small ship (Behemoth, etc) that has attached turrets will now target only the ship and not the turrets.

We expect to fix more bugs and perhaps drop in a few more features next week. We're prioritizing bugfixes in what time we have between some of our current major projects. Please keep the feedback coming on Suggestions, some of the above changes were made based on recent threads on that forum.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

Vendetta Online 1.8.177

VO 1.8.177 includes:

- Guild Commanders can now vote with the same privileges as Council members.

- Guild votes now last for 7 days instead of 1 day.

- It should no longer be possible to create more than one User Key for a given Owner Key.

- Added a condensed group view for the HUD in anticipation of increased group size limits, but the limit has not yet been changed.

- Deneb nation scores should now be properly retained across server restarts.

Vendetta Online 1.8.176 - PLAYABLE CAPSHIPS

VO 1.8.176 includes:

- Prototype player-owned capship is now constructible through a series of missions.

- New versioning system for plugins and interface replacements. See the PCC Lua Forum for more information.

- Added Capship Access Key dialog when launching from a station with a capship for the first time. There's a time limit of 1 minute to choose an access key before a new one is automatically generated. Once a capship access key is chosen, it cannot be changed and will apply to all your capships. This is subject to change in the future.

- Unknown binds no longer get deleted from the wgaf.cfg when the game exits.

It is important to remember that player-owned capships are currently a PROTOTYPE RELEASE. That means, this is for early play-testing, but we expect there to be problems, and we would like to hear feedback from the userbase.

The process of acquiring a Trident Light Frigate - Type M (currently the only available capship) is quite arduous, and involves a great deal of "manufacturing" (crafting missions), utilizing items from high-level bot drops to rare ores and minerals. All three hidden conquerable stations must be accessed to gain all the necessary items. One of the most difficult missions, construction of the ship's reactor, results also in access to the Latos Shipyards, a secret black-market shipyard for large-scale vessels, constructed outside the oversight or purview of the major nations.

For answers to other questions, see this forum post. Please post any bugs you find, or general feedback, on the forums. We hope you enjoy this new content, and we expect to greatly expand upon it over the coming year!

Vendetta Online 1.8.172-4 and Capship Updates

VO 1.8.174

- Added Secondary Fire option for Android Tablets, as a selectable option for the Mission/Nav button on the right-side of the tablet UI (hold down until all options appear, then select Fire 2).

VO 1.8.173

- Rescaled the capship station (it is now very.. very large).

VO 1.8.172

- The Android tutorial no longer asks if you want to play the demo or tutorial.

- The demo is now run directly from the Android updater instead of through the tutorial.

- You are asked if you want to play the tutorial after the initial Android update (after the initial download) instead of after the initial download.

- The game should now be visible to more Android tablet devices on the Android Market, including the Dell Steak 7 and others.

An Update on User-Constructed Capships

User-constructed capships have been delayed until next week (again). What follows here is some background information as to why.

We've been promising some minimal form of user-owned capships (Trident Light Frigates) for some time now. The original intention was to release in January, which was then delayed (Android, Xoom release, OEM issues, trade shows, and so on). There is actually not a lot standing in the way of this release, but one change needed for functionality will result in altering the current plugin API, causing existing plugins to potentially cease functioning due to incompatibility. (Plugins, for those new users, are player-made programs utilizing an open Lua-based API for constructing new game functionality. There is more information here, some plugins are quite popular and complex).

Whenever we make a change that breaks the plugin API, we immediately get a bunch of "reports" from users about how the game is broken, when actually it is the user-created plugin that needs updating. This is essentially our own fault for not making the entire plugin apparatus a bit more robustly designed to support API changes and upgrades and the like. But, like many things, the plugin system was built to have something "working", with the idea of making it more elegant later, along with telling people that plugins were "user-beware". Having them give the appearance of our game being unstable, however, is not ideal.

Next week we will drop into place a new API that will automatically disable any plugin on startup that does not match the current API-version, as well as informing the user that the plugin has been disabled and requires an upgrade.

We're going to put this into place before we drop in the API change for capship control, in order to hopefully create a less confusing and game-breaking scenario for all our new users with plugins.

Aside from this, there are some new capship-related missions and objects need to be added to the production game, the current capship-station will probably be moved to a slightly more clandestine location, and a few optimized collision hulls added to improve server-side utilization where the new station components are concerned. We expect this all to be ready next Friday.

With a little luck, we'll also drop in some long-planned (and requested) improvements to Groups, Guilds and other areas. However, the release of player-owned Tridents is the main focus for the coming week, barring some other sort of Android-OEM-based panic (like the one that has been unexpectedly occupying us for the last few weeks).

Obviously this playable capship solution is well past due, and we appreciate your ongoing patience.

Vendetta Online 1.8.170

VO 1.8.170 includes:

- New capship stations in preparation of player-owned capships.

- New offline tutorial for Android that shows players how to look around.

- Android updater now times out after 30 seconds if initial download fails.

- Android updater progressbar is now set to indeterminate mode until progress actually occurs.

- Fixed occasionally crashing sectors.

The new "capship station" is only a prototype and does not represent the final, intended artwork or content. There will be some development time before these new objects are fully realized.

Vendetta Online 1.8.169

VO 1.8.169 includes:

- When in Turret-mode, the 'Press Activate to leave the turret' no longer fades away.

- Added the ability to invert the x/y axes of the Android HUD aiming touch region.

- The Android Controls Defaults button now properly resets the controls to the Android version.

- The Android virtual keyboard's Shift button now acts as a shift button instead of a shift-lock button.

- Updated Android's off-line flight tutorial to have the touch regions outlined in green instead of blinking.

- The Android updater displays errors if there is no internet connection or the initial download fails.

- Email verification notifications have been reworded to be more consistent.

- Email addresses need to be verified before support tickets can be submitted.

- We have also increased the user limit on the primary update server, so many more people should be able to connect before you start to see an update queue.

Many of these were much-needed short-term changes and fixes for the recently-release Android build. We have not forgotten the capship content, and we're in fact very much in need of finishing that up and releasing it in the near future.