Vendetta Online

Friday, May 09, 2008	Another news update
Well, I had hoped it wouldn't be another whole month between News posts, but here's what's been going on: The mailing list is basically finished, and has been successfully tested on the PCC userbase. We're currently working towards some changes to make our first wide-access newsletter more worthwhile, but we expect it to go out this month. If you are interested in receiving the mailing list newsletter, or especially if you are part of the PCC, please check your account to make sure your listed email address is up-to-date. We're also in the middle of re-working how new trial signups and subscriptions are handled. New trials will now require a functional email address, and confirmation via a special URL mailed out to the new account holder's email address. This is being done because of the excessive overhead we've experienced on people wanting to recover old accounts, forgetting passwords, or generally not having any way of being contacted by us for administrative problems. Signing up for the newsletter is still totally optional and opt-in (double opt-in, technically, considering the address is also confirmed on signup, and the email confirms their selections). This process will also make sure people have more information on how to subscribe, how to cancel, where to find more information, and hopefully handle a lot of the common-case scenarios that we usually have to address via support email. Only one account will be permitted per email address. If an already-used address is entered, a button will allow the person to send a single account recovery email. New trials will also get 16 hours of gameplay, instead of the previous 8 hours, but will not be able to join or create guilds. For those of you who have guilds built on trial accounts, please take notice, you'll need to restructure your guilds with real people (if a previously subscribed guild member becomes unsubscribed, they will still remain in their guild, this only covers new, never-before-subscribed trial accounts). With some luck, this revised trial behaviour will go into production next week. I know I said I would be looking at Border Skirmish in the immediate future, and I have a long list of changes based on user feedback and my own time playing, but this work has not yet been completed. Hopefully we'll be back to that very soon as well. I'll be posting a general "todo" list to Suggestions once it's more finalized. Some of our time is being absorbed by a very cool feature addition that we can't really talk about yet. Hopefully you'll all be able to see the results within a couple of weeks. I hate to be vague and secretive like that, but this involves another company and some outside technology. I do want to mention that it's happening, simply because it is using up some of our time, and looking at the list of things above would probably incline one to wonder "what are they doing?". Michael's also been doing some cool work on PCC features. Hopefully we'll have the PCC more "production-ready" within the next couple of weeks, in time for our newsletter and other announcements. I would like to have posted more broadly exciting stuff in here, rather than a lot of fascinating administrative changes, but this is work that we need to get out of the way before we bring in more players. What with there being only four of us, the administrative overhead of, say, answering billing questions, is higher than we would like, and detracts from our actually developing the game. The better we can optimize this through more streamlined signups and information availability, the better. Thanks everyone, I'll try to post again within another week or two, and get these newsposts back to being a more frequent event.
Friday, April 11, 2008	Finally, an update.
Sorry it's been awhile since the last newspost. The truth is, we've really had our noses to the grindstone, working very hard and trying to get the game, and our various administration infrastructure, ready for marketing over this coming summer. "Summer" being just a couple of months away, so you can imagine we have a lot to get done, which is why I haven't been poking my head up as often to write newsposts or comment on the Suggestions forum. There are a lot of projects going on in parallel lately, I'll just cover a few high points that you should see manifesting over the next couple of weeks: I've spent most of this week upgrading the hardware and software on the machine that serves our Trac system, as well as email and other functionality. Part of the historical problem with exposing Trac, was that if people found it interesting, the machine would be crushed under the load of serving (the machine was slow, Trac is also kind of.. slow). This is now vastly improved (about 50 times faster, literally), and it should be able to handle a pretty decent amount of traffic (digg/slashdotting? who knows, perhaps we'll find out). In any case, it's at least feasible now, and there are some simple fallbacks we can use if we have to scale up capacity in a hurry. I'm not saying that I'm exposing Trac next week, I still have a lot of work to do on the content, but I am shooting for a significant (and publicized) release in early summer. I know I've set and blown a lot of different goals for releasing our forward design documentation (via our Trac/Wiki), but this one's pretty concrete, and we're gearing up in a lot of different ways.. which I'll go into below. Making sure the machine won't totally explode is one small piece of the puzzle. The other thing I'm bringing online with that same machine, this week, is the Vendetta Online email list. We've had this little check-mark thing in the user info for.. ever, saying "hey, do you want to receive email from us, game updates, event news, etc?" But, we've never actually gotten the email list online. I should have this running by later today, and next week Andy will be tying it into our database and web system. An email list may seem like a pretty boring thing to be adding, but we see it as one step towards having a more cohesive community, where we can announce different Events and things going on in the game (which is also incentive to.. actually have more things going on in the game), and hopefully bring our community together a bit more. I think it'd be really cool to set up some big events, and send out some emails and try to get a whole bunch of people on at once. It'd be useful for our scalability testing as well. This will be work hand-in-hand with various other, related, non-game changes.. like making the PCC into a fully "production" quality system. Player Contribution Corps members can testify that we've been making quite a lot of changes and improvements to the mission editor over the past month or two, and we're going to continue with this over the coming month. Once the PCC system is considered "release" quality, rather than the various alpha/beta stages we've had over the past year or two, we'll probably do a related press release. I expect the PCC system to be released and integrated into the website as a whole, within the next few weeks. Ray has been completely reworking how the game is aware of player-usable content. Such as ships, addons, trade items, ores, etc. Much of this has been held in static Lua files to date, and this has been slowly moved into the database over the last couple of months. The whole point of this being to let us add new items more quickly and have greater control over how they're put into the game, and even manipulate them dynamically. Historically, we've always had to do a client patch and release in order to add or change any little thing (from a ship's mass to a weapon's ammo capacity or firing effect). This has caused us to be rather.. slow about adding new "Stuff" into the game, and Ray's new setup should be far more elegant. Of course, it's taking him some time, since we keep pulling him off task to fix bugs, or add functionality for someone else's project, or the other day-to-day stuff that comes up. Regardless, this is a long-term project, and it's coming along well, and I just wanted to give an update on that. On the more short-term front, we're looking at putting some potentially very cool (and unexpected) new functionality into our client Rather Soon Now. But, we cannot discuss the specifics of it at this time, due to confidentiality agreements and other developments in the works. Things are still a bit tentative, but if integration goes well, you'll be seeing it within weeks (not months). Aside from PCC changes, I've had Andy doing some rather boring, but necessary improvements to our signup system and administrative consoles. Basically, we're looking at doing quite a bit of marketing within a couple of months (July?), and when that happens, we need to put our best foot forward while keeping our administrative overhead as low as possible. The more time we spend talking to confused users who subscribed the wrong trial account and want their characters moved, the less time we spend actually making the game better, and this will only get worse with more new users. In addition, we're going to be expanding the trial period to 16 hours, along with.. a lot of other changes, mostly minor but significant to us. You should see this take shape over the next couple of weeks. Gameplay! Yes, we're still working on that too. Next week I'll be taking another look at Border Skirmish and our other recent gameplay, and see about pushing that to the next level, along with getting back to basics on fixing the faction system and economy. Both of those are huge, and we may be hard pressed to pull together the resources to make them happen within 2 months, but we're gonna try to improve things as much as we can. We may have a need for further large-scale Border Skirmish testing as well, to get a fairly solid idea of exactly what we can push on the server side, so we may be using the new email list to bring in a lot of players to participate at once in multiple skirmishes, and see how that works. I need to re-organize a lot of content on the Trac system, and write a bunch more, before it's ready to roll, but as I stated earlier.. that's actually going to be something we're going to announce with some publicity by early summer, so I'll be spending a lot of time on Design over the coming weeks. Because of this, I may continue to.. not be real visible. I still scan the Suggestions forums, and I reply if necessary; but I've been trying to stay focused and Get Stuff Done Right Now. I am sorry that more of our productivity hasn't been real visible, except perhaps to the PCC people (who seem more inspired by our changes, which is great!). Of course, the PCC people can't really talk about PCC stuff publicly, so you'd probably never hear. You'll have to take my word for it that we're working our respective asses off, and that's the only reason for the somewhat sporadic presence of myself and others on the forums and in-game. Personally, I am the most focused and productive that I have been in, well, years, which I take as a very good sign. So, again, sorry it hasn't been all that visible in terms of content drops, but a hell of a lot's going on behind the scenes, and I think you'll start seeing it bubbling to the surface over the next week or two. Going back to the Suggestions forums again: please DO continue posting, there've been some good ideas and discussions on there lately. Ones that I would have liked to have weighed in on, but I tend to write large, involved posts that take up a lot of my time, and well.. see the time-management stuff above. But, please be aware that I AM reading the posts, and would like to continue seeing that feedback. As I get deeper into updating Trac, you may see me reviving some older threads, looking for additional commentary, before it gets Officially rolled into our design docs. So, please continue the feedback on Suggestions, it is well received, even if you aren't seeing as many of my replies as you used to. Umm.. come to think of it, after I finish writing this, I'll be posting on Suggestions, asking for Border Skirmish feedback, so feel free to post your impressions.. I'll be considering them next week when I'm re-assessing that aspect of the game. Last but not least, we also have some server rearchitecture work to do, which will bring about some scheduled outages, hopefully very short. Michael and Andy have completely redone how server startups are handled, it's faar more elegant now, which is a big benefit to our ongoing administration and maintenance (server startup become a hell of a lot more complicated with Kourier and such, and that's been simplified). We're also renumbering to a new and larger netblock, moving to a VRRP enabled routing setup on the upstream side (redundant router fallover, less likelihood of downtime), migrating three servers around and bringing three more online, all of which should make for a VO server cluster capable of handling a significant player influx and a lot of intensive gameplay (Skirmishes, etc). An additional 10-megabit permanent torrent seed is coming online, which should speed up new downloads even further, etc etc. Anyway, that about wraps it up for now. I need to go write that Suggestions post, and finish up some of this systems/engineering work. I know none of this is as exciting as us.. I dunno, pilot-able capital ships that land on planets or something, but it's all work we've needed to do for a long time, and it pretty much has to happen before we try taking the game to the next level. As always, thank you all for your support and long-suffering patience. It's these times when we (the developers) are the most silent, that are usually the hardest on our userbase. And yet, our silence only stems from the intensity and focus being applied to the game which carries our collective hopes. -john
Monday, February 25, 2008	Skirmishes and Excitement
It's been awhile since the last newspost, due to my recent absence / fun with trying to fly during snowstorm season, so here's an update on where we are now: Border Skirmish: Andy and Michael are working to improve the way NPC targets are allocated, to make for cooler interaction with the NPC pilots during skirmish events. As it is right now, there's a tendency for fighter craft to completely ignore other fighter craft (players or not) and fly directly for the capships, where they immediately die in a colorful fusillade of turret fire. This happens, because the current NPC targeting prioritizes those enemies who have done the most damage. Since the capital ships in these big battles tend to last a lot longer than the fighters, they build up high priorities. All of this ends up looking kind of dumb, and not being as much fun for the real player participants. So anyway, a fix is in the works, probably an evolutionary step towards more complex NPC/PC grouping and targeting behaviour. You may also begin to see "bombers" appearing as a more visible class in these battles, at least for the purposes of testing these behaviours, but without actual Torpedo class weapons (until further turret modifications take place). Once we rework some of these back-end mechanics, it'll make the expansion/improvement of the various skirmishes (Border, Hive, etc) easier and faster to implement. Hive Changes: A bug was causing the Leviathan(s) to be effectively impossible to defeat, once all the Bastions had been destroyed. A fix for this will be going in tonight, along with a general Hive expansion-restart (jumpstarted to four Bastions). So, once this is in place, a well-organized group of 7-10 players should be able to destroy a Hive once again. As this whole expansion/destruction process becomes a bit more tested and streamlined, we'll start to make the drops and destruction bonuses more valuable and important to other gameplay (like, say, crafting). Small UI Changes: Some development has gone into creating new mechanisms for various Kourier (and other) based gameplay to communicate with the UI (for example, displaying battle progress). This is important for a lot of the new "big battle" and other large-scale "event" type gameplay that we're working towards. You should see some small examples of this in production this evening. PCC Missions: Ray has written a bunch of cool improvements to the mission system, to allow us to keep clear, dynamic lists of the current mission objectives in actual mission log. We're going to try to start using these features in some of the more obvious missions that need them, such as the various mining missions ("Go mine us 50 crates of ore", etc) where there's been a lot of confusion arising from the existing objectives and descriptions. Information on how this all works will also be posted to the PCC forum in due course, for the benefit of our PCC members. Addons & New Stuff: Ray has been working, off and on, to move a lot of the "content definition / creation" information from static Lua files into our database. This week he's moving forward with building a new web-based tool suite that will allow us (and specifically, me) to create new addons, ships, and other types of content, test them easily, and push them into production. The benefits of this kind of system are significant, they make the prototyping of new weapons or other items a lot simpler and less time consuming, and also make it possible me for to add or edit items without requiring a client patch. All of this will be very important, going down the line, with crafting systems and other usages of items/ships/addons. Having all the data definitions be dynamic and database-accessible will play a big part in future gameplay mechanics, which is part of why we're trying to get it out of the way now. Bugs: We've had some server-stability problems over the last few weeks, which we've managed to track down and temporarily work around, while we fix it properly. On the upside, we've had upwards of 40,000 NPCs in the game, doing various things in both virtual "simulated" sectors that aren't actually running, as well as in running sectors with other players, and the continual transitions between the two. This is a good sign for future scalability of the new Erlang-based back-end we call "Kourier", and we're continuing to add fault tolerance features and instrumentation to let us watch how the whole system is performing. This will hopefully let us foresee some of the more obvious system-scalability problems in advance, and also give us good data on our working limits from occasional stress-testing. Server Changes: Related to fixing the above instabilities, I'll be doing some maintenance this coming week on our server cluster. Because of this, we'll probably have a small scheduled downtime somewhere in the next two weeks (an hour or two, during low usage time). During this combined bugfixing / upgrading process, we'll also be bringing online five new dual-core cluster servers, to further improve our capacity to handle various large-scale gameplay (Border-Skirmish-like stuff, and so on). I'll post about the scheduled downtime when I'm closer to being ready to roll out. That's about it for now, please let us know of any problems you see, and continue posting new ideas to Suggestions (for newbies, it's recommended you read the sticky listing previously made suggestions before posting).
Friday, January 18, 2008	Look! A newspost!
Hi, it's been a little while since the last update. Holidays and so on, hope yours were all happy ones. Anyway, the game is coming along pretty well, a lot of work still going into the same major areas as last time I posted, but with a few cool new updates: For one, you may have noticed we've hit our Vendetta Online 1.8 milestone. This isn't really a very exciting milestone from an external standpoint.. the game doesn't look much different (there are three independent Hives now). It is a very important milestone from our perspective, however. We've spent a little over a year rewriting a large chunk of how our game's back-end works. How bots get sent around and told what to do, even what language is used to develop certain areas. This has been slow work, but we've finally hit a point now where it is considered "production quality" and we're ready to move forward with new actual gameplay (yes, amazing, I know). The first appearance of this New Actual Gameplay should be the redux of Border Skirmish, which, with luck, will be appearing in production this weekend. If something bad should crop up, of course, we'll hold off, but so-far so-good in testing to date. This version of Border Skirmish is written a little differently than the previous one, and stems from a few basic ideas: The skirmish takes place every four hours, between the Serco and Itani (currenly only in Deneb B12, but more on that later). There's a persistent mission posted to "advertise" the event, as a placeholder (shows starting time, etc, auto-aborts if taken), and is replaced by the "real" mission when the actual event starts. Each side has a certain number of "casualties" they are willing to take before retreat (1000). Each side uses fighters (1 casualty each) as well as capships (varying by scale up to 800 for the Heavy Assault Cruisers). Participants will have a little graph on their HUD, displaying the number of casualties remaining per side. The first side to hit 1000 (arbitrary number, all of which are subject to tweaking) will retreat and "lose" that skirmish. Weekly Border Skirmishes are planned to lead up to a major battle held on the weekends, probably at 8pm CST on Saturdays or some such (still working on this). Win/loss outcome will affect factional item availability (not sure how yet), and medals, ribbons and newspost mentions will be awarded to those deserving. UIT people will be able to take part on either side, but will be locked into their choice of side, and in the future will not be able to hold higher-level positions in the respective nation militaries (this is still a little ways off, but just an FYI). This new version of Border Skirmish is written entirely within the Kourier framework, the "production-ization" (is that a word?) of which is a big part of the above-mentioned 1.8 milestone. When this new Border Skirmish goes online, that will mark the end of Deliverator and hopefully a new road to scalable and interesting new gameplay. Anyway, back to the gameplay and where we're going with it. We have always intended to have some form of continuous conflict, representing the Serco/Itani war; and potentially also sporadic conflicts in other areas, representing the shifting alliances of the various corporations and their sometimes cutthroat competitive enterprises. The exact form this warfare will take is still not entirely certain, but the general idea is that individual sectors will be able to swing from one side to another, giving the winning side access to the resources therein (minerals, ores, stations?). This new form of Border Skirmish is a testbed of some of those concepts, on a smaller scale; much as the original version tested the usage of capital ships in combat. For the moment, we'll play with this, and use it to see how well things perform, what sort of gameplay mechanic tweaking is necessary to keep things balanced and fun, and so on. As time goes on, the conflict in Deneb will probably expand, until control of the entire system may fluctuate. It is worth noting that we originally planned to do this.. a year ago. Things didn't go quite as planned, a relatively common thing in the software world, but we're happy to be here now, and very excited about where we're headed. In other news, Ray is still hard at work making a cool new item editor that will allow us to much more easily create, test and roll out new gameplay content. Andy has had a lot of tweaky back-end stuff on his plate, related to the 1.8 milestone, but will shortly be getting back to making the bots a lot cooler and more useful in the sort of large-scale galactic conflict towards which we're headed. For those curious about some of the other goals, like the Faction System Redux, no worries, those are still coming.. in fact, the faction system has to be redone before we can really do this conflict thing on a large scale. As it is, we're forced to just keep conflicts to unmonitored space, but this will change. Station assaults, here we come! Anyway, that's about all for now. Hopefully you're as excited about this as we are. A lot of different areas of gameplay are finally starting to change and come together, and I'm excited to see how it plays out. Think of it as fresh rains coming after a lengthy drought. Except it's raining.. capital ships. Yes. Ok, losing the simile. Have a good one. -john
Sunday, December 09, 2007	Steady Progress
It's been awhile since we had a newspost, so here's a brief one to mention a few things in the works over the last few weeks (and weeks to come). We're still working towards our 1.8 milestone, which will hopefully include three different Hives and a fully distributed Kourier back-end. Erlang (the language used to develop Kourier) is built to be distributed, but so far we haven't done so. Now that the system is beginning to go "prime-time", we're going to balance it across the entire cluster, to make sure we have a stable and scalable base on which to build future gameplay features. Michael is working on this, at present, and once we've done ample testing, we'll be rolling that out. Andy has been working on his bot redux for some time now, but keeps getting sidetracked (by me, and others) to work on more immediate priorities. For the last couple of weeks he helped me out tremendously by adding a lot of new functionality to the PCC mission editor. We also have a greatly-rewritten version of the editor "engine" that is not yet in production, but has vast speed improvements. Part of the problem with writing missions has always been that the editor becomes very sluggish once the mission reaches a certain level of complexity. This was due to decisions we made early on to try and keep the editor compatible with all browsers. We've since abandoned this and required Firefox (as PCC members can attest), and now we've also scrapped most of the "compatibility" oriented code for an editor with better performance. Editing large, complex missions, like the recently-released "High Risk Courier" mission from Corvus, are now much easier to develop and fix. Some of this work is still ongoing, however, as the "new" editor still has some outstanding problems, and there's a few features we have yet to add (like the ability to pick a random asteroid sector without a storm). These changes will make a big impact on mission development, and even make it possible to release some already-submitted PCC missions from the userbase (a common problem has always been the desire to use asteroid sectors, and then the mission breaking if there happens to be a storm there when the user tries it). For those who have no idea what a "PCC" is.. I'm referring to our Player Contribution Corps, a group of players who have applied to help create content for the game in various ways, the biggest of which is currently creating missions. The PCC has been somewhat in "testing" over this past year, and hasn't really been fully launched, hence why it isn't linked directly from the website. We are hoping to launch it more definitively in the near future; once we get some of these problems ironed out, work out some issues with the PCC application/approval process and add some features to help the PCC community collaborate on their creations. Ray is currently on vacation, spending some time with his family, but he'll be back shortly. Over the last couple of weeks he has been moving a lot of "item" data into the database. Historically, we've stored most static information in flat Lua files, which we would change to add or update various objects and items and the like. Unfortunately, this makes it impossible to do anything interesting or dynamic with the items (like, say, rolling out a new economy), and it also makes it troublesome to add new "stuff" into the game. To create an addon I have to edit some Lua files, then push them onto the test server and run a special development client (which may or may not work, depending on development state), and then eventually do a full client patch to push them out to the userbase. We made this choice, a long time ago, as it minimized the amount of data that had to be downloaded by a user when they entered the game (remember, we started development in 1998, the dialup era). We're now moving towards more of a "hybrid" situation, where most data is in the game database and can be updated on the fly, and potentially cached on the client. With this, we can create an "object editor" much like the PCC editor, accessible within a web browser and allowing one to create any kind of object.. ship, addon, trade good, etc, using pre-existing art assets. One could then test this on the Test server, and then push it directly onto the production server, just like we do with PCC missions. At first this sort of tool would be only for developers, but down the road it might be another way that the PCC playerbase could help contribute. Obviously, creating new ships, addons, and other content has a lot of gameplay ramifications, so I wouldn't expect PCC access in the immediate future, but even solely as a Dev tool it will make the creation of gameplay content a much less arduous task. And that's without even touching on the benefits to a new economic system and the like. Since everyone else is working on critical-but-invisible development (not like anyone's going to go "Woo woo, the Hive is spread across the entire server cluster now, I just can't tell!"), I've been trying to keep a steady stream of new Stuff rolling into the game, such as I can. A bunch of new higher-level missions have been released, along with some interesting new content (Centurion Superlight, Corvus Widowmaker, a.. certain BioCom addon, etc). The Grid Power system is in effect and seems to be working fine and well received. I have taken note of all the requests to drop the Grid Usage of certain non-combat addons, like mineral scanners, mining lasers, radar extenders and the like. I will be doing this. To date, I have not done this because, with Ray in the middle of moving a lot of the related information into the database, trying to update that information before he's totally completed his implementation would have been.. dangerous. So, I've delayed for a little while while he finishes that up. Over the coming weeks I hope to push my focus more towards some longer-term design stuff, and bringing the Trac online and all that. I had expected to be able to do a lot of this mission stuff much more quickly, but Andy and I found a whole lot of mission-related bugs and editor problems, so we dedicated some (well-spent) time to eradicating them. I also want to add a bunch of new addons and missions to the lower levels of the game. Particularly for miners and other areas which are very starved for content at present. My "hacked-together crafting" missions on the upper levels of the game seem to be fairly well received (and, functional, after a few fixes), so I'd like to add some of that for lower level miners, and some interesting/useful new addons. We're also trying to add more capship related missions.. the High Risk Courier mission was my first big use of capships thus far, they previously had a lot of reliability issues relating to the whole "bot rewrite" stuff that Andy is trying to get done. Anyway, they're pretty functional now, although still not ready for player usage (still working on that), but at least ready for more mission usage. I'd like to see more Group missions involving capships, and.. general military track missions and the like, so hopefully we'll see some of that in the near-term. Some of the PCC people (like PsyRa) have also been working on cap-related missions, and I look forward to those being ready for production. That's about it for now, I hope everyone's having a happy holidays. It's rather cold and snowy here in Wisconsin, home to Guild Software, but this makes for a lot of time spent indoors productively coding :). As always, please post about any problems to the boards. Oh, and as a sidenote, a user suggested we try Twitter for realtime announcements of new production content (like missions), so if you'd like to follow our new Vendetta Online Twitter, you can get immediate instant messages or even cellphone SMS messages whenever we push out anything new. Take care, all.
Monday, November 12, 2007	The Ongoing Process
Another quick post to say what's going on, sorry it's been awhile. I hoped to speak more from actions rather than words, and there's been some good progress, but also some delays. Ray is trying to fix the capship shield issues, which allows the shields to be dropped via some unusual collision situation. We think this may all go back to our original "wingbug" collision problem, so he's going to try and construct a simulation and fix things once and for all. If that doesn't pan out, we have a few workarounds in mind that will at least allow us to move forward with making gameplay hinge on capship destruction. For instance, I don't want to make killing the Leviathan (or Queens, or whatever) a particularly important thing, until I'm fairly certain that it is at the intended difficulty level and does not have any major exploitable aspects. Speaking of the Hive, Michael is continuing to make good progress there, stabilizing things and getting the overall system to work. We had some nastiness crop up over the last couple of months, including a strange and sporadic problem with our MySQL database server, which we haven't yet been able to track down or fully articulate yet, but which resulted in the Hive going down last week. Michael and Andy and I came up with some stopgap measures to alleviate the issue and reduce the chances of it happening, but obviously we want to fully sort that out before we hinge more gameplay there. On the upside, you have seen changes rolled out in the form of hierarchical reorganization of the Hive, with eventual goals towards a mixture of general low-level "assault" missions, and a final epic confrontation with the Leviathan. The intention has always been that completely taking out a given Hive would require the well-organized efforts of a group of players over a period of time (perhaps, say, 10 people or so, over 6 hours. Eventually scaling in difficulty as the userbase increases). In this way, pursuit of the upper level Hive echelons will fit into player acquisition of capital ships and other high-level items, via rare drops and unusually-processed ores and the like. We're heading towards this, we're just trying to make it all work right in the meantime. Andy is reworking how bots.. work. Primarily how they're controlled and what mechanisms are used to transfer authority for their behaviour around the universe. This will be very useful to making more interesting Kourier-based gameplay (Hive and otherwise, Border Skirmish type stuff, even PCC missions with a lot less limitations on what can be done with NPCs). This is not intended to be a gigantic redux process, and he's doing in the background between helping out with other short-term issues (like, say, tracking down strange database connection failures), but he hopes to have it done within a matter of weeks. Last but not least, it's my intention to get some new addons into the game, and some new missions. I have to balance these tasks against problems that come up (database problems, administrative user drama, whatever), as well as getting ongoing design documentation written for Michael and others. I had hoped to get some new missions and addons into the game last week, using the new Grid Power system, but it didn't pan out, and I'm aiming for that again this week. I've actually been playing the game a lot more (imagine that), incognito, with an eye towards improving and reworking a lot of the lower levels of the game, and building out new missions that inform about the game as much as anything else. We certainly have a gameplay deficit, which we're working towards solving (and soon, not Soon(tm)), but we're also pretty bad at informing the new user about the gameplay that's already there. Without pointing people in the right direction, the game seems even more sparse than it actually is. This won't be the sole focus, of course, there will also be high level missions, and the new addons (using the Grid Power) will be largely high-level. If you're waiting for things like the faction and economic redux (or the open Trac), those are still in the works: I'm focusing on this addon/mission stuff this week, as everyone else is mostly working on infrastructure (aside from Michael), and I wanted to try and get as much actual interesting content into the game as I could in a relatively short period of time. On a final note, we're shooting for a milestone (yes, we have those!) around the end of the month, rolling out 1.8.0 with a fully production Hive in all three locations, fully distributed Erlang/Kourier, and the Grid Power system in production and in use with new addons. Getting to this point will be really nice, for us, and mark a major point of progress after all the boring debugging and infrastructure work of the past 12 months. That's all for now, please let us know if you find any problems, especially with the Hive or related conquests (like destroying the Leviathan with concussion mine hacks). We need to get that all fundamentally stable and not-exploitable, before we can move on with making it actually.. interesting, valuable and worthwhile.
Friday, October 26, 2007	Vendetta Online 1.7.45-1.7.57
A few new features and a bunch of bugfixes. To recap the last couple of weeks: The Kourier-based Hive is now in production, and has undergone a lot of testing and bugfixes (thanks to our awesome userbase for their reports). We still haven't moved forward with changing the Hive gameplay, or expanding on it, we've just been trying to get everything stable before we start adding new stuff. So far so good on that, so hopefully we'll begin expanding on it next week. There is now a Guild Bank feature, wherein guild members may deposit sums into a joint bank, allowing themselves and others to withdraw. There's plenty of logging and security features, allowing the guild management to determine who can withdraw money, and how much per day. Transactions are logged, and withdrawals can be submitted with a justifying description, which then go into the log (ie: "To buy new ship for event" or some some such reason). We released this on Monday, and then had a number of minor bugs crop up, all of which should be now fixed. If anything else crops up, please report it on the forums or via the bug reporter form/program. There were some MacOS X crashes related to changing resolution, which we've fixed, and a bunch of other issues here and there. Moving forward from here.. in the immediate future we hope to focus on improving Hive gameplay, eventually resulting in the appearance of three different Hives (one in Itani territory, one in Serco, one in grayspace) once things are fleshed out and stabilized. In addition to this, we hope to have some new addon-tweaking parameters available to.. me, in the near future, which will make it possible to release new addons without as much concern over "what will four of these be like on a Hornet". I'll post the details of the system before long. I've mentioned it several times on Suggestions, but never in full detail. That's about it for now. Other development is still continuing in the background, like Andy's redux of bot mechanics, but you will be seeing regular advancements in actual gameplay on a frequent basis for awhile, I think. Yes, the Trac thing is also coming, but you'll have to deal with my newsposts for a little while longer. As always, thanks much, please post any problems you find. Changelog: * Vendetta 1.7.47 - Added group kill/death notification message and interface option to enable and disable it - Fixed bug with guild bank buttons being greyed out for members who are both council and lieutenants - Fixed last aggressor selection command - Fixed bug when active ship was not listed in ship selection menu if there are no other owned ships at that location - Fixed bug with setting guild logaccess - Fixed default text in right-side region of the Commodities Sell tab * Vendetta 1.7.46 - Guild bank feature added, with a transaction register and an activity log - Brand new hive code: quadruple rewards for hive skirmish in storm sectors - Asteroid ring in Leviathan's sector now contains ore consistently - Fixed bug which would spew "duplicate remote add" to the log - Other miscellaneous bugfixes *** Vendetta 1.7.45 - New PCC missions available - Client bugs fixed
Wednesday, October 17, 2007	Progress this week.
Just a quick update.. I haven't posted recently due to some server problems and other issues (fun with machine reboots). Anyway, we're aiming to have a few things show up around the end of the week. One will be a Guild Bank system, allowing guilds to pool their finances into a special account, members to retrieve from that account, and so on. There will be plenty of access control mechanisms to allow the guild leadership to determine who can withdraw, and a "log" that displays who did (and why, if they use a description) and so on. This will hopefully appear on Friday, bugs or major issues notwithstanding. Of course, this iteration will be open to feedback and further revision once you have all had a chance to play with it. We're also moving ahead in the direction of making such banks have more future uses.. further developments in capships and such. Andy is in the process of reworking some of the bot behaviour code, hopefully we'll begin testing parts of that very soon. This will be a major boon to making NPCs of different sizes actually try to behave/fly differently (and more intelligently, according to their scale), as well as opening the door to further bot-behaviour development. Some of the NPC code is rather old, and kind of a nightmare to modify, and as we've been pressing forward with making capships and things more.. useful, we've been running into some limitations. A related aspect of this will be an enhanced toolset to allow Guides and Devs more articulate control over NPCs (especially capships), increasing the persistency of the ships as well as letting us DO a lot more with them in the sense of "Events". This is a stepping stone towards user controllability.. we want to make damned sure the controls work (they don't, right now) before we make critical gameplay hinge on such a feature. The new Hive is also moving along, a big thanks to all those who have helped test the versions on the Test server. Once that goes into production, we'll be looking at modifying that gameplay, to try and make it more interesting both for large assault-oriented groups as well as for singular players. On the bugfix front, we hope to have the missile-launch-damage issue sorted out in the near future. It was an unforeseen repercussion of changing how bot-to-bot missile collisions worked, to allow NPC capships to fire torpedoes and other weapons at one another. And last but not least, I am still trying to get the Trac ready for everyone to see. I have not been able to dedicate nearly the amount of time that I had hoped to, due to.. unforeseen problems and short-term fires of one kind or another (like servers not working properly); but getting the Trac together, and making it public, is critical for both you guys and ourselves as a dev team. This sort of work, of course, has to be balanced against my getting new design written out on a weekly basis (and anything else immediate), so people can move forward with development of the game in a cohesive manner. One topic of design, which will hopefully appear before long, should allow me to greatly increase the variety and utility of addons in the game. To date, I've been kind of hamstrung by the great "balance" conundrum, but we're looking at adding a few more parameters that should make things a lot cooler (for everyone else) and less troublesome (for me). Eventually we have an eye towards totally expanding the paradigm of "damage" within the game, but that's a topic for a public Trac article.. I'll focus on making that happen instead of reinventing the wheel on here :). Anyway, that's it for now. Here's to a solid and stable release on Friday with a few cool new features. Nothing mindblowing, yet, but we're trying to get there.
Saturday, October 06, 2007	Vendetta Online 1.7.44
Not quite the update we were hoping for as of the last newspost, but a good one nonetheless. Mostly bugfixes and workarounds, but with a few additional capship types (not that you see them, yet) and some changes to the Swarm Missiles. The graphics for the swarms are going to continue to undergo changes for some time yet, with new specialized cap-vs-cap versions in the works, but I think they're headed in the right direction. There's a specialized version of the Trident (the "Military Trident") which uses swarms, but is only a testbed, working towards a more significant goal. We've been experiencing a nasty bug, lately, where sectors have been hanging due to a mysql connection error. The error, and the whole cause of the problem, are still not fully understood; but we've implemented a workaround that should keep sectors from hanging, and also notify us of further occurrences, so we can try to correlate the issue and otherwise debug what's going on. Andy had planned to be working on bot AI behaviour, but ended up spending most of his time on sectors-not-hanging, which was certainly critical. With luck, will be back on track with new content generation next week. The Hive is coming along well, and should be in testing this weekend, perhaps seeing production sometime next week (fingers crossed). I had hoped to have more turret defenses in place around stations this week, but I was also pulled off-task by some very high priority problems. Nonetheless, Ray and I were able to pull together some cool new features for the swarm missile system (mostly randomness functionality) which I look forward to playing with next week. That's about it for now. Not a big update, but we'll settle for Stable. More content work next week. Thanks everyone. Brief changelog: *** Vendetta 1.7.44 - improved swarm missiles - bug fixes - sectors will stop getting stuck now - changing audio drivers in linux should actually work now
Friday, September 28, 2007	Vendetta Online 1.7.43
Mostly bugfixes, not much for big changes. There should be some more visible stuff next week. We have some Swarm Missile changes in the works, in part for cap-vs-cap swarm usage, which I think people will dig. The new Hive is also still coming along and will hopefully debut next week. Plus, Andy's working on a bunch of behavioural projects, starting with making bots dock more intelligently, and working up to making capships navigate better. I also plan to create several new capship variants next week, with different weapon loadouts intended to allow better server utilization, and therefore bigger capship battles. That doesn't mean they'll be any less scary.. they'll still pack a big punch, it may just come in fewer overall turrets and shots than say.. the current Teradon. Military variants of the Constellation and Trident can be expected to debut in the near future. On a sidenote, I'm also working on getting the Trac stuff ready for public debut (I know I've said that like 50 times), which includes moving it to some beefier hardware. The current Trac server would be a little too easy to overwhelm (P2 233mhz with 160MB of ram), which would be inconvenient for us. That's all for now, please post about any problems, and have fun. Changelog: *** Vendetta 1.7.43 - modified Strike-Force respawning behaviour - fixed obscure bug when trying to send buddy note to someone via interface while they are logging on/off - CHAT_MSG_INCOMINGBUDDYNOTE [colors] chatcolors.incomingbuddynote=ff0000 [chatformat] incomingbuddynote=[Note from <name>] <msg> - forbid multiple spaces in a row in usernames - forbid multiple spaces in a row in character names - fixed bug in Intel 915/945 Mesa check to disable shaders in Linux - fixed crash when video card runs out of memory in Windows - fixed crash when calling GetPeerName() on an unconnected lua TCP object - lua load and loadstring run in the sandbox environment now - proper lua support for clicking on empty regions of listboxes - try to prevent crashes when using a lua-referenced iup handle after the control was deleted. It generates a terminating lua error now.
Thursday, September 27, 2007	Scheduled Outages
Our ISP will be having a brief downtime between 11:30pm and midnight CST, tonight, to swap out a failing switch blade. There may be two brief outages, each lasting a couple of minutes. There will also be followup maintenance on Sunday morning between midnight and 4am CST to migrate to a completely new switch. The actual downtime during this period should be very short, 15 minutes worst-case. Please be aware and factor these periods into your plans. Thanks.
Friday, September 21, 2007	Vendetta Online 1.7.42
Mostly bugfixes. We had a small number of crash reports from people under certain unusual situations, and managed to track down and squash those particular bugs. So, if you've had any problems with the game crashing lately, it should now be improved. Strike Forces behave a little differently now, launching in increasing waves with a pause in between. This is part of a buildup towards the Faction / Friendly Fire changes. The number and types of bots in the waves, as well as the timing between waves, will both continue to be tweaked. Drag and Drop has been implemented in the UI, and the first release (technically we're on 1.7.42.1 now) had it in there, but a few odd bugs were discovered, so we disabled the feature and released a patch. Hopefully we'll get this straightened out and there may be a 1.7.42.2 on Friday with a fix, but if not, then expect it next week. Drag and Drop is a pretty cool feature for our UI, as many have noted, futilely wishing they could drag weapons onto their ship. The basic functionality has now been created, but it'll still be a little while yet before we rework the UI to use it to full advantage. We've never had D&D before, so some functional UI redesign will be needed. The Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboard may now have some support for "G" macro keys under Linux (untested). No guarantees, and Logitech does not officially support Linux. For more information on using the keyboard in this OS, see here. Aside from this, the new Hive is still in the works, hopefully it will be in testing next week. I imagine there'll be some tweaking time with that, and we'll eventually move towards new hive-related features, but in the immediate term it'll be nice just to have everything running under Kourier, and Deliverator totally turned off. That's it for now, hopefully Drag and Drop will appear in a release Fri evening. Please report any issues you see. Changelog: - Fixed client crashes. - Strike-force bot group behaviour is different now. - errors.log file is line-buffered again. - lua event UNLOAD_INTERFACE is raised when the interface is reloaded. - lua 5.1 vararg compatibility mode has been removed. You must use ... and the implicit arg table no longer exists. You can do this: local arg={...} - drag-n-drop support but not implemented in current UI - Support for Logitech G15 'G' macro keys in Linux version with this: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LogitechG15 - Force OpenGL shaders to off for 915GM and 945G drivers in Linux.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007	Scheduled Maintenance
There will be some game outages between 3pm and 6pm CST on Weds, Sep 19th. We will be completing the rollout of server-cluster upgrades we put into small-scale testing a few weeks ago. The website will continue to be up during this time. We will keep the outage(s) as brief as possible during the defined maintenance window, but please be aware of the downtime possibility and schedule accordingly. Thanks.
Friday, September 14, 2007	In Progress
No release tonight. One of our people is on vacation, and the rest of our work is not yet ready for prime time. Work is progressing on some actual gameplay changes, including some efforts on the factional / friendly fire modifications. We have new Strike Force behaviour in testing, which may prove better than what we have currently. The overall automated defenses of the galaxy are being scaled up, towards something that will be more vigilant, but hopefully also a bit more interesting than a continuous unpaused stream of bots. Border defenses will be scaled up, and you can expect Capitol systems to go "guarded" in the not-too-distant future. These are all pieces of the "faction / FF" puzzle that will need to be in place before we do the most significant changes. In other news, a new Hive is also in the works, built entirely within the newer Kourier framework. This will hopefully mark the end of the Deliverator era, and potentially bring some gameplay improvements with it. On a final note, I do intend to try and roll out some new missions this weekend. Our PCC people have submitted some cool new stuff, which I need to review and push out to the game. I've been a bit distracted lately, but sometime in the near future I hope to illustrate for everyone what we'll be doing in the coming months. It's a lot of exciting stuff, and I think most of you will agree. At the very least, it'll be good to be back to making game-changes again. As always, thanks for your support, please post any problems or ideas to the respective forums on the boards.
Saturday, September 08, 2007	Vendetta Online 1.7.41
Mostly bugfixes, and a few minor improvements. We're wrapping up the infrastructure changes. We didn't fully complete the work slated for the scheduled downtime today, opting instead to only migrate one machine do some more testing. We'll finish the rest of the cluster next week. This will result in a more stable and well-monitored environment for the game to run on, and greater capacity for doing things like.. cap ship battles and other server-intensive gameplay. In other news, our internet connection has been a bit spotty today. Cogent had a router card fail in Chicago this afternoon, and we're continuing to have intermittent outages. Hopefully this will clear up soon. Sorry for any inconvenience. Changelog: *** Vendetta 1.7.41 - Fixed unknown price values for addons given by missions - Spy missions should not choose wormhole sectors anymore - Promoted toggleautoaim from macro to internal command. a one-time error in the console will appear. This is normal. - Added AutoAim indicator to HUD - Added AutoAim indicator/notification interface options. - Changed 'Select Weapons' to 'Select Weapon Group' in HUD Help menu - Fixed 'Select Weapon Group' value in HUD Help menu to properly show '1-7' - Changed 'Fire * Weapon' to 'Fire * Weapons' in menus - Removed missionhelp command because it is obsolete - Windows Sound driver should work in rare cases where it doesn't find any audio devices - assert and error are exported to public lua interface - Added custom 'thread' api to the public lua interface - gksound.GKLoadSound{soundname="soundname", filename="filename"} function. "soundname" is what is sent to gksound.GKPlaySound("soundname")