Vendetta Online is a space-based MMORPG with true realtime combat and a vast persistent galaxy. Available for Linux, Windows and Mac.

Vendetta Online 1.8.117

2010-03-06T07:05:37-06:00

VO 1.8.117 includes:

- Manufacturing the Teller-Ulam Mine in the Conquerable Station now has reduced requirements (Queen Processors instead of Queen Matrix). Mission can only be taken twice per day.
- Missile turrets around Conquerable Stations now do less damage and have a lower top speed. Other missile turrets are unaffected.
- Web page submission system for in-game player-created events. See http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/events for more information.
- Audio system now has a limiter to prevent clipping when too many loud sounds are played at the same time.
- Audio system resamples the sound to the sampling rate that the OS reports. This only affects Windows Vista and Windows 7.
- Fixed 'Empty Convoy' bug.
- Fixed a bug where turreted ship weapon group tab would permanently hide the turret ports.
- Fixed a bug where taking an escort mission, launching, and then changing the nav route would cause the jump navpoint to be too near the station.
- Fixed a bug where two people would try conquering a station at the same time and they're both let in but only one can set a key.
- Station conquer timer is now shown to players who enter the sector after the 2 minute countdown already started.
- Conquerable station docking bay no longer says 'Press the Activate key to dock' during the time the station isn't conquerable.
- When in a capship turret, the 'Target too far to scan' message is no longer displayed on the HUD.
- High-density sectors in Deneb can no longer have storms appear in them.
- Fixed a bug where Intel GMA950-based PCs running Windows XP would default to showing the station in the menu instead of hiding it for performance reasons.
- Fixed a bug where the player who conquered a station wouldn't get free ship repairs until they redocked.

Be sure and check out the Event system, among other things. Lots more changes and major gameplay additions are coming in the next few weeks!

Vendetta Online 1.8.116

2010-02-27T02:57:03-06:00

VO 1.8.116 includes:

- Behemoth Heavy Miner MkII now available in mining stations, requires Basic Miner III. Integrated 1000m mineral scanner, 3 large ports.
- Fix for case causing human-only Hive Skirmish to be started/posted.
- More reliable reward mechanisms (get rewarded for escorts even if you are warping).
- Navroute set again when leaving station after death in Border Skirmish.
- Windows 7 audio driver now properly plays at the correct speed when the audio device is not running at 44.1 KHz.
- Fixed UTC dates in Events menu and Keychain Menu.
- Station radar blip for conquerable stations is only visible to players who have docking privileges.
- A sector message is now displayed when the conquerable station is actually conquered.
- Giving a User Key through the Owner Key no longer creates a new User Key.
- Client build number in Credits menu now shows the downloaded version.
- Added auto-detection and changed initial default settings for certain Intel graphics chipsets, for improved netbook support (GMA500, GMA950, GMA3150).

There's a lot of stuff in this version, but among other things, players with Intel Atom-based Netbooks should have a much easier time getting started in the game. The station-blip visibility is another important change, as it will lead (quickly) to new "secret" conquerable stations appearing in the galaxy. You can expect more station/conquest related changes in this coming week, to further refine the gameplay and address certain issues, like increasing the physical size of turrets (so they don't make for such tiny targets). There may also be some new stations appearing. But who knows? If we add them, we'll let you know, but you'll have to find them for yourselves!

Vendetta Online Merchandise

2010-02-23T01:24:31-06:00

Just a quick note that we've added some new merchandise designs to the Vendetta Online Store. We'll be continuing to create new designs and items for the store whenever time is available. I have plans for faction and ship-specific products, etc. Feel free to take at look at the store:

http://merch.vendetta-online.com/

Vendetta Online 1.8.115

2010-02-20T03:48:00-06:00

VO 1.8.115 includes:

- Player-owned ships with turrets no longer accumulate area-effect damage based on the number of turrets on the ship.
- Vista Audio driver under Windows 7 tries to set the audio playback rate to 44100 Hz.
- Events/Newspost menu is wider so longer titles aren't clipped.
- 30 second logoff timer is now properly enabled when a private message is received from someone in the same sector regardless of whether the sender is ignored.

Not quite as significant a release as we've been doing recently, but still some useful bugfixes. More gameplay changes were planned for this version, but were not completed in time. They'll hopefully be ready next week (improvements to conquerable stations and other areas).

Vendetta Online 1.8.114

2010-02-13T03:51:25-06:00

VO 1.8.114 includes:

- New Events and Newsposts menu shows Game Events that are scheduled and the last five Newsposts that are on the web site. The menu will auto-display whenever a new Event or Newspost exists and there is an option to disable auto-display.
- Three new Axia-based missions, located in Verasi, courtesy of Phaserlight.
- The Conquerable Station now has a unique Manufacturing mission for the Teller-Ulam Mine.
- The Conquerable Station conquering timer is now displayed on the HUD similar to mission timers.
- Added threat-to-shields logic, enabling more responsive queen (and other shielded-ship) defense.
- Fixed bug causing old instances of the Border Skirmish advertising-mission to remain posted.

A few notes about this update: The Events and Newsposts game interface will improve as time goes on, we were only aiming for basic functionality in this version. One request as been showing the local time for the scheduled event, in addition to GMT/UTC (gametime), this we will add. People have also requested options like something that ties into their Google Calendar; we'll consider this but don't expect anything immediately. The Event system also has a whole web-based component that is not yet ready for release: subscribed players will be able to create their own Events for registration, and Guides/Devs will be able to approve them or volunteer to help administer them (when requested). Hopefully the rest of the Event system will appear this coming week.

The Conquerable Station manufacturing mission uses a "rate limiting" feature that's a little unusual, as it is measured from when the mission "Info" is clicked rather than when it is "Accepted". For now, you can take it twice every five minutes, but as we improve the rate-limit feature, it'll become more like once every day or so. There is also a hard 8-mines-per-character limit, at present, but another mission will eventually appear and allow characters to decrement that Accomplishment counter and regain access to Teller-Ulam Mine manufacturing. These are both stopgap measures, for the moment, as hedges against runaway farming.

The new shield-attacked threat system is quite cool, but be more careful around big capships in your home locales (such as the Nemesis in Serco space). They should not be trivially aggressive, but they will respond to significant shield impacts.

Scheduled Outage - Tues Feb 9th, 18:00 UTC.

2010-02-09T00:05:12-06:00

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.

Vendetta Online 1.8.113

2010-02-07T15:56:16-06:00

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.

Vendetta Online 1.8.112

2010-01-30T13:10:38-06:00

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).

VO 1.8.111

2010-01-26T02:17:29-06:00

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!

Vendetta Online 1.8.110

2010-01-23T02:28:46-06:00

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.

The MMOsite 2009 Reader's Choice Awards

2010-01-19T17:35:37-06:00

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

New company website and other ongoing work.

2010-01-16T01:22:06-06:00

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

Vendetta Online 1.8.109

2010-01-09T01:25:17-06:00

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.

Duel Stats updates

2010-01-07T00:03:53-06:00

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.

Vendetta Online 1.8.108

2010-01-02T02:09:42-06:00

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.