RSS Atom  Tuesday, February 09, 2010  Scheduled Outage - Tues Feb 9th, 18:00 UTC. We will be having a scheduled outage on Tues Feb 9th, roughly 12 hours from now, at 18:00 UTC. We will be debugging the server startup problem that plagued the game during our release over the weekend, as it only appears to occur in production and we have been unable to duplicate it on our test or development servers. This outage window will only last about 30 minutes, so the game should be back up by 12:30PM CST, or 18:30 UTC. We only need to collect a minimal amount of information, and we can continue our debugging elsewhere. Thanks for your patience and understanding.  Sunday, February 07, 2010  Vendetta Online 1.8.113 After a few hiccups in the release process, VO 1.8.113 includes: - New Keychain tab in Inventory tab of PDA to manage your keys. Suggestions to improve usability are always welcome. - There is now a restriction of one User Key per Owner Key. - Slight changes to /key command. /key user access command no longer takes a sector name. It instead only works when you are docked to the station you control. - Fixed defense behavior of static queen escorts. - Fixed a recently-introduced bug with Border Skirmish scheduling. Further improvements and changes to the key management system, and expansions of Conquest, will be forthcoming. We will eventually allow more than one User key per Owner key, but we want to put the UI mechanics in place first. Plus, there aren't enough individual authentication options to merit it yet. As always, please post feedback or ideas to Suggestions.  Saturday, January 30, 2010  Vendetta Online 1.8.112 VO 1.8.112 includes: - New user keys and key command. Type /key for an explanation. A user interface to manage keys is forthcoming. - Hive skirmishes no longer appear in Latos I-8. - Fixed capship drifting problem in Border Skirmish. - Fixed Border Skirmish advertising mission. - Fixed conquerable Station turret targeting. - Improved bot aggressiveness behaviour. Although Station Conquest and the key system still have a lot of work and improvements to be made, we have definitely delivered on our promise of releasing some implementation of a basic conquest system during the month of January. We hope you all are still enjoying it. You can expect more improvements and tweaks in the coming weeks, along with changes to other areas of the game (bot AI, in-game Event advertising, etc).  Tuesday, January 26, 2010  VO 1.8.111 VO 1.8.111 includes: - EC-89 and free battery are now available at the conquerable station so players cannot strand themselves there. - Conquerable station defense turret hitpoints have been quadrupled. - Conquerable station defense turrets now respawn after 10 minutes instead of 15 minutes. - Conquerable station defense turrets should now try to fly back to their position if knocked away. - There is a 2 minute wait period between when all conquerable station defense turrets are destroyed and the station can be docked to in order for the station to be conquered. - Improvements to conquerable station defense turret targeting system. - Trade Guild mission no longer disconnects the player when the mission is taken. As has been stated elsewhere, this is still only a baseline "initial testing" version of Station Conquest, and thus any expectations should take that into account. Still, we hope this latest update will alleviate some of the issues that cropped up in the initial release. Please continue to post any obvious bugs to the Bugs forum, and thoughts on future improvements to Suggestions. Also, don't forget to Vote!  Saturday, January 23, 2010  Vendetta Online 1.8.110 VO 1.8.110 includes: - Basic Station Conquest: A new station located in Latos I-8 may now be conquered by players. This is a very limited, basic implementation of station conquest, only for testing purposes. Once all turrets are destroyed, the first person to dock may generate or select an Owner Key for use. The console command /listkeys can be used to show the current keychain, which each have a number next to them. Then /giveownerkey (key-number) can be used to give an owner key to another player. Any player with a key for the station will be able to dock and not be fired upon by the turrets. - Bounty System Revival: We've brought back the old Bounty system, with a 1-million-credit upper limit on bounties. For now, only NPC-driven bounties may be allocated, handed out by governments for illegal activities, such as killing station guards. You can talk to NPC Marshals in Capitol stations for more information about becoming a bounty hunter. - Warthog Mineral Extractor now features an integrated Free Mineral Scanner (Range: 500). - Improvements to Game Updater. The game patching system now handles certain situations more elegantly, such as running out of disk space. - The current Mac client version is now present in the app metadata, under "Get Info", the Finder and elsewhere.  Tuesday, January 19, 2010  The MMOsite 2009 Reader's Choice Awards It's that time of year again, and MMOsite is hosting their Reader's Choice Awards. Last year, our ever-supportive userbase voted us "Favorite Game Company", beating out heavy hitters such as Blizzard Entertainment, NCsoft, Square-Enix and SOE. This year the categories have been re-organized, but we've been nominated to several of them, including "Best Community" and "Favorite MMORPG". The competition opened on Jan 15th, so some of the other games have a head-start, but it doesn't close until Feb 22nd. In the meantime, every vote we get, per day, helps us get a little closer to winning. And this year, winning will mean actual prizes, including some free advertising on MMOsite. We could use the exposure, so we'd appreciate your support. Per the instructions from the MMOsite personnel, we've created a special page where you can go and vote for all categories with one simple click, or read more information about the voting process. People can keep voting every day, so check back and vote whenever you can. So, if you'd like to support us in this competition, please do so here. There's also a related forum thread on General for other questions. Thanks everyone! -Incarnate  Saturday, January 16, 2010  New company website and other ongoing work. As you may have noticed, there was no Friday-night release, this evening. We have several major projects working in parallel, most notably the Station Conquest system (hopefully in early testing next week) and the re-working of NPC behaviours (improving the static bots). Neither project is ready for release yet. In times like this, it usually falls to me to generate something new to release towards the end of the week. A new item drop or other bit of content, something that can be added on short notice. This week, however, I was kept busy creating the new company website, which publicly debuted a few minutes ago. It does not have much content that was not already present on the old site, but has a bit more updated design, and there are plans for a lot more relevant content there in the future. It isn't really "finished" yet (is anything? ever?), but it was good enough for me to put online and drop in to replace the old website. I could understand if people would think my time would be better spent in other areas than doing a website redesign (like improving the game), but for the moment I'll just say that it is important to future plans. Plus, all of our other development resources are being applied directly to significant gameplay improvements, which should hopefully bear fruit within the not-too-distant future. We are still shooting for our station conquest during the month of January goal, and it still appears realistic at this time. We'll see how things shake out next week when we get into first-generation development testing. A few tidbits about the implementation: * You can expect to see several new conquest-specific stations added in grayspace. * Defeating the defenses of these stations (disabling all the turrets, for now) will allow the first person to dock to take control of the station, initiating the key system for authentication and access control. Other features will come along in due course. We're mostly trying to make things fundamentally work for now, and handle all the unusual edge cases (like "what happens when someone is disconnected after they conquer a station and dock, but before they define a key?" Answer: a key is auto-generated for them.. so on and so forth). That's all for now. Have a great weekend, everyone! -Incarnate  Saturday, January 09, 2010  Vendetta Online 1.8.109 VO 1.8.109 includes: - Raptor MkII now available in Latos N-15 (same requirements as Dau). - Corvus Greyhound now features an integrated cargo scanner and turbo energy usage dropped to 45. - Combat level 4 required to be featured in Duel Rankings. Characters less than 4 may participate in Duels, but will not gain or lose points. - Duel Rating k-factor is now scaled by rating number. Players over 2000 (Master) now gain/lose points at half the normal rate, over 2400 (Grandmaster) at one quarter the normal rate. - Duel Rating lower limit clamped to 900, only characters above 900 are displayed on the ranking page. - Middle Mouse button click now acts as ^v (paste) when an editbox has focus. - Sun flare effect is no longer rendered in foggy sectors.  Thursday, January 07, 2010  Duel Stats updates We have significantly changed the way we calculate Duel Stats, to try and enhance competitive dueling in the game while also keeping rankings within the realm of sanity. - We are now scaling the K-factor by the duel rating. The original K-factor is still used between 1000 and 1999, allowing people to quickly gain (or lose) duel rating points. Between 2000 and 2399, half the original K-factor is now used, making making people ranked in that area less volatile in their changes (increases are slower, but so are decreases). Above 2400, the K-factor drops to 1/4 the original, further reducing volatility for the top-rated players. This slows the process of rank inflation, but still keeps relative ranks comparable between strong players. - Combat Level 4 is now required to be rated in Duels. Players under that may participate in Duels, but will neither give nor receive any changes in rating. This is to allow new people a little breathing room to learn, and also to prevent trivial exploitation of duel rating by continually fighting trial account characters (still possible, just now more involved). - Rating lower limit is now clamped to 900. This was done to allow people who have experienced many duel losses to recover more quickly if they desire, instead of bottoming out all the way to zero. At the same time, since continually defeating these opponents would not diminish as quickly (as the rating is now clamped), we had to artificially reduce the amount of ratings gain that could be accrued by defeating someone with a rating under 1000. So, there is now another special K-factor for situations where a person over 1000 defeats a person under 1000; in that case the K-factor is reduced to 1/2 of normal for the winning person of over-1000 rating. If a person under 1000 rating should win, their K-factor will be unchanged, so they will gain quickly. If two people under 1000 should Duel, their K-factor will also remain normal, allowing the usual fast gains and losses. People with a rating of 900 are no longer listed on the main Duel Ranking page, although they still show up under the individual wins/losses. Hopefully allowing people to recover from a losing streak more quickly will help increase dueling activity. For more information, see the related thread.  Saturday, January 02, 2010  Vendetta Online 1.8.108 VO 1.8.108 includes: - Dueling badges are now awarded based on Duel Rating. "Duellist" at 1600, "Master Duellist" at 2000, "Grandmaster Duellist" at 2400, and Legendary Duellist" at 2800. - Race track badges and credits are awarded on a monthly basis to players with the best track times for the previous month. See earlier newspost for details. - Fixed bug with the Search feature of the Duel Stats page.  Friday, January 01, 2010  New Year Progress Hello again, and welcome to another edition of "Incarnate Writes A Newspost". Tonight we'll be discussing some of the work we have in progress, and what it all means. And, as usual, I'll probably be apologizing for not writing newsposts often enough. Moving right along.. - Station Conquest. This was widely requested not too long ago, spawned a variety of posts and an RFC thread (don't post to that thread, start a new one if needed), etc. We had a few irons in the fire already, at the time, such as implementing the now-available PayPal direct payment system. Beginning next week, we will be looking at, hopefully, having some sort of simplistic conquerable-station scenario, in production, during the month of January. However, like all great goals, this is uncertain and entirely dependent on what issues crop up. You guys know we can't make promises, but this is what we're trying to do. I don't know what form this initial conquest scenario will take, probably something along the lines of a handful of new "conquerable" stations scattered around grayspace. But, we shall see. We'll start small and Make It Work. - Static Bot Redux. We've been using the same fundamental mechanics for non-Kourier bots for a long time. A scarily long time. Longer than Blizzard has been making MMOs. Due to continual maintenance and tangential improvements to other, connected areas of the codebase, somewhere along the line the static bots stopped working properly. The Kourier stuff still works as intended (albeit always with room for improvement), but the static bots have been fundamentally dumb for awhile. Michael is currently tasked with re-writing this system, and bringing it up to date to serve a variety of long-desired functionality. This will, at the very least, address issues like Collectors failing to ever become aggressive, or Queen escorts sitting idly by while the vessel they're escorting is destroyed. Hopefully this will make for a more engaging environment for new players, as well as for older players seeking new drops on some of these static bots. - The Universe Redux is still ongoing. We have some high-density test sectors in the central ring of Deneb, as you are all probably aware. We're still working on optimizing a couple of areas of the game to make these sectors work as efficiently as we need, with the many thousands of added asteroids and other objects. Work on this will probably slow a bit, as we spend more resources on Station Conquest, but it will be ongoing. - The Return of the Avalon Torpedo (and the general family of torpedo weapons). Ray has been working on making this a reality. The big critical factor has been constructing a new targeting system for capships, allowing their turrets to prioritize incoming torpedo ordinance. I expect torpedoes to have a lot of limitations: they'll be big, expensive, slow, heavy, and probably have a fixed absolute speed along with a minimum arming distance (so they can't be accelerated by the launching ship, and they'll need some flight time to arm themselves). Even with all that, they should inject another much-needed "bomber" component into our capship battles, and potentially into station conquest and other general scenarios as well. So, this is in the works, but no ETA, as again.. station conquest is the current priority. - Other Short-Term Changes. Coinciding with the desire for station conquest was a general list of other "wanted" items, with a related thread. We've added a bunch of the suggested content: Cargo scanners/blockers, AWACS, re-acquisition of occluded radar targets, etc. There'll continually be more work going into these sorts of items when we have time or when it's appropriately simple due to some other related development. Later tonight, in fact, you should see: * Dueling Badges - Four levels of badges available based on the Duel Rating of the individual character. Each badge level replaces the previous one, and they include: "Duellist" (1600), "Master Duellist" (2000), "Grandmaster Duellist" (2400), and "Legendary Duellist" (2800). Keep in mind that the Duel Stats Page only lists those who have dueled recently. Older veterans fall off after awhile, if they haven't fought under the Duel framework in the last couple of months. So while no currently-ranked player rates the Grandmaster status, we do have two veterans who do, unsurprisingly Ghost and martin. The possibility of Legendary duellists is one for the future. I have not tied the duellist badges to any items as of yet, although I think that would be cool to do at some point (some special-looking ship skin, perhaps). I definitely want to add more regularly-scheduled gameplay that brings player duels together in a weekly, monthly, and even yearly (best of the best) competition. Rather than relying on an Event to do this, we'll probably do some custom development to make it an automated function, and then add in some interesting prizes and things for major winners. One-on-one PvP has always been one of the most fascinating and unique aspects of our game, completely unlike any other (that I've experienced, anyway), and I'd like to do more to celebrate that aspect if possible. * Race Track winners. Placed around the galaxy in various locations are a few Race Tracks. We're changing this up a bit by resetting the "best times" every month, and giving the character with the fastest time (per track, per month) a special badge and reward. Then the best monthly times will be exported to a webpage, so everyone can see how incredibly fast you are at a given track. That's about all I have for now. We are still going to improve the economy and fix the faction system. Really. Honest. I'm also going to make the damned Trac thingie public, so our developmental flounderings are visible to all (yay..?). I had really hoped to get most of the Big Stuff Fixed in VO during 2009, that was kind of my master plan. Unfortunately, we had a massive unforeseen setback occur that I haven't publicly discussed, but at least things are more-or-less back on track again now. So, time to focus on the future and all of the Awesome we can bring to the game. I hope you've all had a fantastic holiday, and I wish you the best in the coming year. Thanks again for all your support and patience.  Saturday, December 26, 2009  Vendetta Online 1.8.107 VO 1.8.107 includes: - 64bit and 32bit Linux copy-paste with CTRL-C in edit boxes updated to support X Selection event protocol. It now works with other X apps like xterm. Also, there is an Event planned for later today.  Saturday, December 19, 2009  Vendetta Online 1.8.106 VO 1.8.106 includes: - Server-side sector load time optimizations. Further improvements can also be expected here, as we move towards larger and more complex sectors. - High Density Sectors. Most sectors in the central ring of Deneb (not those with stations) have been replaced. These sectors were already statically fogged some time ago, in anticipation of the increased object count. The new sectors have much higher crystal density, and represent the first production test case for the "Universe Redux" process. Future sectors will be even larger and denser, but more development work remains before this can happen. - VO "Happy Holidays to Long Lost Vets" promotion: All un-subbed accounts that were last subbed in September or earlier may play through Jan 1st!  Saturday, December 12, 2009  Vendetta Online 1.8.105 VO 1.8.105 includes: - Nation Defense turrets for Latos H2, Ukari A10, Edras B11 and I2 have been moved inside of their respective Nation space, and are no longer in grayspace. The turrets in Helios B7 and Ukari L2 still remain, as Capitol systems (Arta and Pyronis respectively) use turrets on both sides of all wormholes. - Devus D3 Guardians drop Cargo Spoofer MkI (50% chance). - Helman K3 Overseers drop Cargo Spoofer MkII (25% chance). - Dentek Collectors drop Cargo Spoofer MkIII (1 in 50 chance). - Prosus Assaults drop Addon Scanners (25% chance). A little more detail: The new Cargo Spoofer addon has the same basic feature as the previously-released Cargo Scanner Blocker, it prevents people from scanning your cargo hold. However, it also returns a false signal to their scan, showing a specific set of items rather than "Blocked", making the blocked state more difficult to detect. Each type of Cargo Spoofer (MkI/MkII/etc) returns a different cargo hold status (different items), and more Spoofers may appear down the road. The Addon Scanner allows you to scan a remote vessel and see what addons they have equipped. Both items are not sold at any station and may only be obtained as drops from the above mentioned Hive bots (both dynamic and static hives).  Friday, December 04, 2009  Vendetta Online 1.8.104 VO 1.8.104 includes: - Small-port Cargo Scanner and Scanner Blocker (available in capitol stations) - Fix for convoy traders repeatedly bumping convoy capships. - Slower top speed for convoy capships. - PCC Mission Editor additions: give-item-to-npc, park and drift actions, gave-money-to-npc event. We look forward to feedback on the cargo scanner and blocker. The scanner has a range of 2000 meters and allows you to see cargo on other ships (including the types of ore being mined by bots, in realtime). The blocker prevents your cargo from being scanned. Additionally, we are now offering official Vendetta Online merchandise! Many of the items are Limited Edition, only for the current Five Year Anniversary celebration period. They will only be offered through the 2009 holidays, so get them while they last.