Frequently Asked Questions

Design and Technical

What are the System Requirements?

Windows Minimum System Requirements:

Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP
1ghz Pentium III or Athlon processor
256MB of RAM
DirectX 9.0c or better
3D Hardware Accelerator - Fully DirectX compatible 32MB videocard, Hardware Transformation & Lighting (T&L), and latest drivers.
Sound Card
Keyboard/Mouse
200MB of uncompressed harddrive space
56k internet connectivity

Mac Minimum System Requirements:

MacOS X 10.2.8 or better (10.3.5 or better recommended)
1ghz G3/G4, or any Intel
384MB of RAM
3D Hardware Accelerator - Fully OpenGL compatible 32MB videocard with Hardware Transformation & Lighting (T&L).
Keyboard/Mouse
200MB of harddrive space
56k internet connectivity

Linux Minimum System Requirements:

Glibc 2.2 or better
GTK+ 2.0
1ghz Pentium III or Athlon processor
256MB of RAM
3D Hardware Accelerator - Fully OpenGL compatible 32MB videocard with Hardware Transformation & Lighting (T&L), and latest drivers.
ALSA or OSS-compatible soundcard
Keyboard/Mouse
200MB of harddrive space
56k internet connectivity



Is the game design finalized?

Our direction and long term intentions for the game are pretty well established, with varying degrees of detail based on how distant the objective is on the total timeline. However, with any organic creation, a certain amount of leeway must be permitted as designs evolve through playtesting and are polished with user input. Our direction is well defined, but the specifics of our destination are not cast in stone.

Do you listen to user input on game design and direction?

Yes, by all means. It was for this very purpose that we created the Vendetta messageboard and IRC channels (irc.slashnet.org, #vendetta), to give our userbase a means of communicating with us and one another. This is not to say that we will change our plans or direction at the first hint of dissention. However, we are interested in ideas and constructive criticism. The Suggestions forum has been a big success for us, and has become an integral part of our development process. As time goes on, we hope to build on this by making more tools (polls and voting, plus new PCC features) available to the userbase. We are very interested in staying involved with our community, as we believe it will help us create a more polished, fun game.

How do you prevent cheating?

In a fully realtime game such as this, preventing cheating is not a simple task. We have taken a multifold approach to this problem. To begin with, the network datasteam itself is heavily encoded. Secondly, all "critical" game data, such as the user's character, inventory and other stats are stored entirely server-side. This information can only be modified by the server, and is secure from tampering. More frequently-updated data, such as the user's ship position, is sanity-checked by the server (making speed cheats and the like rather futile). Some cases are also passively logged for possible administrative action, with the suspected accounts automatically flagged for continued scrutiny by the server. Should a user be discovered to be cheating, this would be grounds for banning their account.

What about aimbots?

The game essentially includes an "aimbot", in your targeting computer. We actually spent a lot of time optimizing the predictive leadoff algorithms and making this feature of the game work well. Developing another external piece of software to do the same thing would not be of much benefit. Your ship would still not be able to maneuver any better. If your ship did somehow maneuver faster than it should, that would be noted and/or prevented by the server, as detailed above.
It's worthy of note that many of our users disable auto-aiming under certain PvP circumstances (depending on weapon type, etc). Even the best "auto-aim" doesn't work as well as a trained pilot, so any feature like this (or related "cheat") is of mixed benefit. None of our weapons are insta-kill, which rules out a lot of the "aimbot" cases that have plagued other games.

What engine does Vendetta use?

All aspects of Vendetta were developed in-house by Guild Software, Inc.

Does Vendetta use Pixel Shaders, Vertex Shaders, and other advanced graphics features?

Yes, our engine makes use of Pixel Shader 1.x and 2.x features, and Vertex Shaders. Our engine has always been much more graphically capable than the content we've displayed in it. In part, this is intentional: our game was always meant to scale as broadly as possible, over a wide variety of systems. At the same time, we try to keep things looking nice on the higher-end machines. We're usually a generation behind the cutting edge of graphics, but given the variability of an MMO (you can never plan how many ships or people there will be in one place at one time), it works pretty well for us. We enhance our engine and content every year or two, to bring things more in-line with the current generation.

As a point of reference, our game started out as an entirely software engine, and then later supported the first-generation 3D accelerator cards made by 3Dfx (using "glide"). It's a testament to our continual upgrades and enhancements that the game still looks pretty current. This is a good example of how the system requirements for MMOs will change over time.

Does Vendetta take advantage of multicore and dual CPU systems?

At present, only to a minimal extent. There is a separate thread for audio, but that's it. This is something we plan to improve, among other things we want to thread I/O, to let us load textures and models in the background without blocking the rest of the client. In addition, we're moving in a generally "procedural" direction, which also makes a good use-case for threading in a game environment.

What software do you use for modeling and texturing?

We use 3D Studio Max, Photoshop, and a smattering software that we developed in-house.

Will the game ever feature voice chat?

We've given considerable thought to the development of an in-game voice chat system, and while it would be of great benefit to gameplay, it is not currently a high priority for us. Our soundsystem is designed to handle compressed audio streams, and was built with this possibility in mind. For the moment, we recommend that people use third-party voice chat products.

What is "Ogg/Vorbis" compression?

Ogg/Vorbis (http://www.vorbis.com/) is the audio compression standard used by Vendetta. OV is similar to mp3, but superior in quality and has a more developer-friendly license. The "/playmusic", "/stopmusic", and "/playlist" console commands of Vendetta Online can be used to play Ogg files in-game. The playlist command will play an m3u list of Ogg files.

Will the game be split among multiple "servers clusters", each supporting a unique game universe?

No. Our game is a single game universe spread contiguously across all servers. In other words, the entire population of the game will interact in the same universe, not be split into different "server universes" as it is in World of Warcraft, EverQuest and other MMOs. There are some technical challenges to this, but we believe it's worthwhile in terms of the game culture, interaction, and general benefits of having an increased population in one place.

Where are the game servers located?

Our servers are hosted at Red Anvil in Milwaukee, WI (see the link at the bottom of the page for more information). They have a first-class datacenter with diverse fiber entrance, redundant power and cooling, and a location on three separate power grids. They also have great connectivity to several major networks, including a few hundred megs to RoadRunner.

Will the game ever be open-source?

We are a very open-source oriented group of people, several of us having contributed to a variety of projects, including the Linux kernel. However, because our business model includes the possibility of selling our game engine to other developers, we don't intend to open-source the game in the short term. We do intend to open up some limited portions of the game, such as Lua access in the game client, but this will be the extent for some time to come.

Will Vendetta Online work through my firewall and Network Address Translation?

The Vendetta Updater, the auto-update program that executes prior to game startup, makes an outbound connection to TCP port 21024. Once updating has completed and the game itself is fired up, a connection is established upon login attempt to UDP port 21141. Thus, any modern firewall capable of "keeping state" on outbound TCP/UDP should require no alterations. Other firewalls and packet filter implementations may require specific configuration changes. Both the updater and game work fine through Network Address Translation.

What will happen if I delete my installed copy of Vendetta and reinstall? Will I lose my characters?

No, your characters are stored completely server-side. The only things you lose from deleting your Vendetta install are any option changes you have made (in config.ini), and any specific keybindings (in wgaf.cfg). If a config.ini is not present when the game is run (as on a fresh install), your game and graphics settings will given a general auto-configuration based on your detected hardware.