« News

Dec
23

Vendetta Online 1.7.11

(1.7.10 had some minor fixes and implemented a new shader model).

VO 1.7.11 relases the new Storm Effects (using fog) and fixes a few bugs. This is the first-time usage of the first-generation fogging effects. There's still quite a lot of things we can do to make it look more varied and interesting, and a lot that needs to be done to make gameplay *within* fog more interesting (reorganizing sectors, more densely packed fields, various radar and stealth enhacing addons, etc). But anyway, it's a start. The next project on the list is fixing the Faction system, although there may be some in-line work on fog and storms as we move forward (minor improvements, any bugs that crop up, etc). Also, people should not notice any major speed impact from the fog, we've tested it on relatively low-end hardware without significant impact.

Fog effects of some kind will be used more widely than just storm sectors. They should eventually appear in heavy mining regions and mining / refinery stations. The fog level in a sector can vary dynamically, so it's possible to have a sector gradually fog as people (or the Hive) mine it more heavily, etc.

As most are probably aware, our biggest overall priority is the implementation of a new Erlang-based backend, which will take the high-level bot spawning load off of Deliverator (the monolithic Lisp process which is currently unstable). As soon as that's done, we can move forward with more of the high-level behaviour (group missions, nation battles, dynamic trading / economy, expanded Hive, etc). The work is coming along well, we hope to start internal testing of the initial hybrid Erlang/Lisp system next week. In the meantime, certain Deliverator-specific content (the hive and a some of the trading missions) will continue to experience some instability. Thanks for your patience on all of this, I know this unexpected breakage in our usually-solid game has been aggrevating for everyone.. both developers and users. It shouldn't be long before we're back on track to new content.

On a lighter note, Linux and MacOS people should now be able to see certain Pixel Shader 1.x features which were not available previously (2.0 has been available for a long time, but not all functionality is duplicated in both shader versions). So, Linux and Mac people should see environment-mapped bumpmapped ice crystals and the like.

In addition, some shader priorities have been shuffled around on the Mac. Previously, ATI cards always used a 1.4 shader path (using ATI-specific ati_text_fragment_shader instead of the newer universal arb_fragment_program). This was a legacy thing for us, based on what was important some years back, and has now been changed. The result is that Mac users may now find that new shaders are enabled, hopefully making things look better. This is only for Macs with later ATI cards (9500+, X-series). People who have those cards can select between which shader model they desire in the Options/Video, in the event that the newer shaders are slower, or if some other problem crops up. Users with Nvidia cards/chips are unaffected by this, the option may still appear in Video, but it will not do anything useful.

This release also includes a fix for a sporadic and infrequent crash which was probably specific to people in Windows on multiprocessor or multicore machines.

That about wraps it up. Have a great weekend and happy holidays to all. If anyone should turn up any issues, please post to the forums and let us know. Thanks.