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

Vendetta Online 1.8.219

2012-05-05T00:02:32-06:00

VO 1.8.219 includes:

- 'Entering Universe' takes time on your first post-release login, but is much faster from then on.
- Fixed problem with leaving the gunnery position of a ship while that ship is docked to an npc capship. You are now sent to your home station.
- Removed Voice Chat errors from in-game chat log. They now only appear in the errors.log file.
- All finished Border and Hive Skirmishes should now be removed from the mission list.

We still intend to improve the "initial" login length for new users, which currently downloads a lot of dynamic mission data. However, for our existing users this patch should be a major improvement.

Vendetta Online 1.8.217

2012-04-28T12:58:59-06:00

VO 1.8.217 includes:

- Added a progress indicator in the "Entering Universe..." dialog.
- The F9 camera mode toggle now toggles through the 3rd person modes in the correct order.

We will still be further optimizing the "lengthy login" issue that was created by all missions being available from everywhere. In the meantime, the addition of a progress graph will help to tell people that their game client is taking a bit longer to log in.

People should also be aware that quite a few Events are scheduled for this weekend. Be sure to stop by and check them out!

Vendetta Online 10-year Anniversary!

2012-04-20T16:11:14-06:00

It was 10 years ago that Penny Arcade first linked to us as we began the completely-public stage of our game's never-ending development. For us, this was a huge transition, marking the moment when we had our first influx of users, and when we ceased to be a "theoretical" game and became an actual live service with a vibrant audience. Some of those players from 2002 are still here with us today, sometimes indicated with their special character badges. It has been an incredible and humbling experience to come to know many of our players, watching young teenagers become adults, seeing entire families playing together across three generations (grandparents, parents, grandkids). Since the launch of Vendetta Online for Android last March, we've had users playing from their bus commute through the jungles of Thailand (where, apparently, they have great cell coverage). We have come this far thanks largely to the unflagging support and dedication of our player base, always pushing us to make the game a little better with each passing week, and for this we are very grateful. To our players, past and present: thank you, this anniversary is really about you.

The landscape of the MMO market has changed vastly since our initial public release in 2002, and even more since we started on this journey. I first posted about our game's development on our early website back in February of 1997. By then we already had an engine and a prototype game in internal testing, with which we had been tinkering in spare time since 1996; but we had never even heard the term "MMORPG", coined shortly thereafter by Origin's Richard Garriott. Ultima Online, the game whose widespread popularity arguably launched the modern MMO genre, wouldn't even be released for another half a year. I had only the idea that I wanted to make this "huge, online space game", where people would fly around in a persistent world and share in much of the gameplay I associated with classic single-player titles, like Tie Fighter or Wing Commander. We knew this was technically possible, but no one was around to tell us how hilariously difficult or lengthy the process would be, especially with a development team of only four people building such a game and engine from scratch. Perhaps that's just as well, as they might have dissuaded us from the pursuit, which has definitely been an amazing and educational experience.

There have been definite challenges in bringing an indie MMO to market with such a small development team, then maintaining and expanding a live product throughout the years; but this makes us all the more proud to be where we are today, and to have seen such a wonderful community grow up around our title. I don't think any MMO is ever really "finished", and ours is no exception; but our plans for the coming year and the eventual launch of Vendetta Online 2.0 are intended to finally fulfill much of the original game vision from the late 1990s. Of course, the original vision never included things like our current playability on now-common smartphones, which will make this all the sweeter.

By way of a small thanks to our userbase, this weekend will offer free play to all previously subscribed players, along with a number of special Events, starting with a special developer-hosted event this evening. For those interested, we also shipped a press release, which has also been picked up by our friends over at Massively. You can expect some other cool promotions to launch in the coming week.

Thank you, and Happy Anniversary Everyone!

John "Incarnate" Bergman
Guild Software, Inc.

Vendetta Online 1.8.214-216

2012-04-20T14:28:29-06:00

VO 1.8.214-216 has included:

- All missions that you can take are now visible, across the galaxy. Each mission shows the nearest station to you that has the mission.
- Serco/Itani and Valent/Axia factions are now mutually exclusive above Neutral. All players with characters that violate this are given the option to select on which factions they want keep their standings.
- Temp KOS now persists across logins and sector jumps for 15 minutes.
- If your ship is jittering while you are stopped, you should now be able to log off without the log off timer aborting.
- 3rd-person camera now moves away from your ship instead of towards your ship when you accelerate.
- Capships can no longer dock to small docking bays.
- Fixed crash on Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) when attempting to use a plugged-in joystick.
- Added 'Route' button to the mission extended description dialog when the mission is not at the local station. Pressing it will create a nav route to the station with the mission and display the navmap.
- Missions no longer lose their category when they are accepted.
- Fixed problem with faction choice dialog not displaying properly or displaying with clipped text.

Clearly, to our veteran player base, the last few releases have included some quite significant changes. Certain faction standings being mutually exclusive has been desired for a long time; this is only the first step in that factional redux, but a very important step. Temporary Kill On Sight status persisting across logins and sector jumps will make things more immediately challenging for those who choose to behave aggressively at stations.

All missions becoming visible from everywhere is a huge step forward in making our game content more discoverable to players (especially new players). But this is only the beginning of our goals for a centralized mission system. Player-postable missions will become available, helping people find one another for specific activities, like posting a mission for someone to help hunt the Hive or take down a Leviathan, or find a combat escort for a dangerous trade run. As player-owned stations become more common, users will be able to post missions to their own stations, requesting deliveries of raw materials for their Manufacturing projects, or simply replenishment of other items to support their guild or common gameplay.

We hope you are as excited about these changes as we are, to us they're only the tip of the iceberg.

Vendetta Online 1.8.213

2012-03-24T01:57:43-06:00

VO 1.8.213 includes:
- The ship in 3rd person camera mode no longer jitters at low frame rates.
- Joining or creating a group when you have an active mission will now tell you to complete or abort the mission instead of immediately aborting the mission without warning.
- Updated Lua to 5.1.5.
- The HAC explosion effects are now pre-cached so the demo doesn't stutter the first time it explodes.

We have a lot of significant changes in the works, which will hopefully debut next week.

Vendetta Online 1.8.210-212, other news.

2012-02-18T04:10:22-06:00

VO 1.8.212 includes:

- Fixed rendering problems on Samsung Galaxy S2 and Galaxy Note.
- Sector list now properly updates when a player is controlling a turret of a capship after the capship has changed sectors.
- Storm exit navpoints now appear when leaving a station during a storm if the player logged in to the game and is in the station.
- Interface work for upcoming faction changes.

VO 1.8.211 included:
- Added support for Arm Mali devices such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7. Support is currently only available through the sideload apk because the Android Market does not show VO as being available for those devices.

VO 1.8.210 included:
- Added ice effect for Kindle Fire.
- Fixed lua error when client connection times out when trying to create a new character.

Aside from this, I should recap some other developments from the last two weeks:

Vendetta Online released for the Kindle Fire

That's right, Amazon's wildly popular 7" Android tablet now has Vendetta Online available in the AppStore as a free download. This version includes some special graphics work to make things look as cool as possible on the Kindle Fire. The device actually runs the game pretty well, if you have one be sure and check it out. As with all our other ports, it logs into the same game universe, so you can pretty seamlessly switch from PC to Tablet to Phone and back.

Ongoing development of Faction System changes

Tonight's release includes some as-yet invisible menus and interfaces specific to the upcoming faction changes. The updated faction system will include degrees of mutual exclusivity to faction standing, meaning that one will no longer be able to maintain the highest standings with two factions that hate one another. These newly-added menus will permit the user to select, for any given character, which of the mutually-exclusive standings to keep at the higher level. This is primarily just to convert us over to the new system, once it is in place people will be expected to be aware of their relative standing changes.

More involved information about the mechanics of the new faction system and implementation specifics will be posted to Suggestions before the changes actually go into effect.

A nice new article about Vendetta Online on Massively

In a very unexpected and cool turn of events, a new article on Vendetta Online recently appeared on Massively. The reviewer appeared to enjoy his time in our galaxy, appreciating our strengths while also acknowledging of some of our weaknesses. Check out the article, it's worth a look.

Vendetta Online 1.8.208-209

2012-02-04T01:04:36-06:00

VO 1.8.209 includes:

- Teller-Ulam mine changes: Timeout increased to 1 hour, damage increased to 15k, capacity increased to 2, reload cost reduced by half.
- Added ability for capship owner to dismiss a player from a turret through a new turret tab in the Tactical tab of the owner's PDA. Also added a /gunner dismiss "character name" and for lua a Gunner.Dismiss("character name") function.
- Capship turret list now shows what weapon is attached to each turret.
- HUD mission icon is removed when the mission ends.
- Loading screen image when changing texture resolutions is now properly scaled.
- Fixed screendump /dump command on Android devices.
- Tegra 3 Android devices now properly default to Super High background detail.
- Fixed some cases where a player may not receive their mission rewards while they are jumping/warping.
- New turret weapon: Gemini Homing Missiles. Same stats as non-turreted Geminis. Available in certain grayspace locations, to those with standing and required levels. This adds to the selection of existing turrets: Shield, FireCracker, Neutron MkIII, Gauss MkII, etc.

VO 1.8.208 included:

- Fixed problem with ice asteroids on Tegra 3 devices running Android 4.0
such as the Transformer Prime.
- Tegra 3 devices now render in 32bit mode

Please let us know how the various capship changes and turret weapons are working in practice. The factional change is still the top priority for major gameplay (perhaps next week?), but didn't make it in for this release.

As always, thanks for your support, and please post any issues to Bugs.

Vendetta Online 1.8.207

2012-01-14T12:38:57-06:00

VO 1.8.207 includes:

- If nothing is selected, the target direction arrow now points to your next jump-out location (jumppoint, wormhole, storm exit point).
- Next jumppoint sector is now displayed above the navpoint reticle.
- Xperia Play now defaults to Flight-Assist mode for new installs.

Vendetta Online 1.8.206

2012-01-07T02:05:18-06:00

VO 1.8.206 includes:

- Added new 3rd-person flight camera modes for all platforms. It is the default for new Android installs and can be changed in Options->Game->Flight Camera Mode Turn off mouse-look when using them on PC platforms.
- Added Auto-Fire mode for Android version when in Touch-screen mode for a better new-player experience. Auto-Fire is default to on and can be toggled in Options->Game->Auto Fire and is an optional setting for the 'Activate' HUD touch button. Auto-Fire only fires when the selected target is an enemy ship outside the No-Fire-Zone and is close enough to be hit. Only the Primary Group is hooked up to Auto-Fire.
- Flight-Assist mode now has the ability to fly backwards. When the desired speed is zero, pressing decelerate further will cause the ship to fly backwards.
- Android HUD touch regions no longer release when dragging out of them. This mainly affects the Look Direction touch region in the lower right of the HUD.
- Escort, Border Skirmish and Hive Skirmish missions are now aware of partial damage and will credit players for "assists."
- Border Skirmish mission descriptions now include an indication that there are players in the opposing mission.
- Fixed Trade Guild missions to count ore given to the mission as being sold to the station for Mining Badge credit.
- Fixed a broken docking bay in the Training Sector.

A Few Comments:

The addition of "reverse" to Flight Assist has been requested for a very long time, and we're happy to finally add it for all those who favor this control method.

Third-person flight might not seem that useful to experienced people on the PC, and aside from the control of capships, first-person remains the best option (especially for combat). However, for new users on phones and tablets, the display of the ship helps bring across a certain rapid understanding of distances and helps make the overall experience a little more intuitive. Playing VO on a touchscreen is no picnic to begin with, so these improvements are pretty meaningful. It is notable that there are actually two different 3rd-person control models available, which can be selected from the Game area of the Options menu.

The addition of auto-fire may cause controversy in some circles. Generally we aren't big on automating the control of weapons or flight. VO is a very skill-driven game, and we prefer to stay pretty close to the recipe. For touchscreens, however, some improvement needed to be found, to let people play with only two inputs (fingers/thumbs). Auto-fire allows one to aim with one hand, strafe/accel/decel with the other, while leaving the firing up to the client when the ship is properly pointed to the target's leadoff reticle. The improvement in combat usability on a tablet is pretty dramatic. One can actually do some low-level botting of collectors and the like. Touchscreen devices will still be hilariously crushed in PvP interactions, this is no real "advantage"; and in any case, I don't think serious PC pilots would use the feature anyway (auto-fire overuses energy by firing constantly at the maximum rate, and is generally wasteful and inflexible). But as far as basic PvE, the ability to take on some bots with a touchscreen and actually succeed, it is a night and day difference.

The Escort and Skirmish missions properly recording "Assists" is a big improvement in the fairness of allocating XP and the like. Plus, it is also another step towards having a lot of cool stats on the website, showing off the Skirmish skills of pilots.

Border Skirmish missions now indicating when people are playing them will hopefully make it a bit easier to locate other player-pilots within the Skirmish framework.

Thanks all, please report any issues you find on the Bugs forum (or the Android forum for Android-specific stuff).

Vendetta Online 1.8.205

2011-12-31T03:01:24-06:00

VO 1.8.205 includes:

- Fixed crash on exit after changing certain Video Options on Mac/Windows/Linux versions.
- PCC Missions now have an optional Begin/End Time requirement that allows missions to be visible for a certain time.
- Ore taken by missions now count as being sold to the station for awards such as Basic Miner badges.
- Accomplishment and faction awards now cause the station Buy menus to update automatically so new items are available immediately.
- Added Front/Rear text labels to Front and Rear HUD radars that disappear when you hit Combat license 3. The labels are also togglable in Options->Interface->HUD->"Show Radar Labels when Combat < 3".

In addition to the above, another change should be mentioned that was accidentally left out of a previous patch log. We altered PvP collision damage to do only a fraction of the damage it did previously. Thus, when player ships ram other player ships, it does less damage than when they ram stations or NPCs. This was done to help alleviate a certain exploitative tactic of PvP killing designed to avoid faction loss in monitored or guarded space. The lack of faction loss for collision deaths was itself a previous work-around for a much older exploitative tactic where players could get others to lose their faction by suiciding themselves against their enemies. So, let's hope this latest alteration removes some of the issues for the moment, until some future problem is discovered stemming from players colliding too much (heh). Until then..

Have a happy new year, everyone!

Vendetta Online 1.8.203-204

2011-12-24T00:01:23-06:00

VO 1.8.203-204 include:

- Five new PCC missions from Phaserlight.
- Added support for Sony Tablet P.
- Bots no longer attack their defend target if the defend target damages itself.
- Bots that damage their defend target no longer get attacked by other bots with the same defend target.
- New players are now notified when they fly too far away from the station in the training sector and will be given the option to return to the station.
- Newsposts accessed from the character selection menu are now properly formatted.

Holiday Gift to Past Subscribers

As has also been posted via our Newsletter, Facebook, Twitter, and other outlets.. past subscribers whose accounts expired before October 1st of this year, may now play for free through January 1st! Have fun!

Vendetta Online for Android Phones

For any who missed it, the official press release went out this past week, announcing Vendetta Online support for many Android phones (Tegra, Snapdragon, PowerVR), as well as the recently added Joystick and Voice Chat support in the Android version.

Vendetta Online 1.8.202

2011-12-10T13:21:59-06:00

VO 1.8.201-202 include:

- Added joystick support for Android 3.1 and above.
- Added PLUGINS_LOADED plugin lua event that triggers after all
plugins are loaded.
- Fixed another bug with changing channels in Voice Chat.
- Added experimental Voice Chat for Android version.
- Added Heyzap Check in button to Android Updater.
- Fixed problems with switching between group and guild voice chat.
- Fixed problems with Border Skirmish.

On the face of it, this may not seem like that significant of a release. However, a few of the things added over the past week have some meaningful ramifications:

Joysticks for Android - The biggest complaint about playing VO on Android mobile devices is usually the control mechanics, especially when one attempts combat. Our touch interfaces will always be improving and evolving, but there's only so much that one can do with a touchscreen: it gives no tactile feedback (you don't "know" you've pressed the button by feeling it depress downward.. haptic shakes and things are not the same), and it gives no positional feedback (you don't know that your thumb is in the right place by the "feel" of the button). The custom interface on the Xperia PLAY does a little better in this regard, and keyboard-mode has always worked pretty well (Asus Transformer tablets, etc). But for the average phone or tablet owner, there have been limited options for good gameplay control.

Hopefully, joystick support will be a solid step towards improving that situation. General support for joysticks and gamepads was added in Honeycomb 3.1, only available to tablets, and unfortunately was only added for java-based Android "activities" (we prefer to use "native" activities, also something added in Gingerbread and Honeycomb, for potentially improved performance and reduced memory usage). So in order to support joysticks in the meantime, we had to come up with a way of spawning a java-based version of the game in cases where joysticks are desired. As of this release, you can plug in a joystick, then run the game. It will detect the presence of the joystick and offer you the option of running a java-based activity that will support the controller.

We've tested this with an Xbox 360 controller, an older Logitech wired-USB gamepad, as well as a flight stick and some other devices. We'll also eventually test it with the Logitech F710 wireless joystick. You still have to manually define and configure the joystick, setting up the axes and buttons and so forth, and use our not-super-intuitive joystick interface (we'll improve on that at some point), but it should work. We welcome feedback.

Now it is notable that joystick support is only present on Honeycomb 3.1 or better. Honeycomb is a tablet-only OS, and joysticks are not supported on Gingerbread (2.3), the more common phone OS. So for phones, anyone on less than the very recently released Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0 (Galaxy Nexus) will be unable to use a joystick or a gamepad for the time being. As phones are upgraded to Ice Cream Sandwich, joystick support will be propagated out to more of the devices that need them. Also, you may need some sort of micro-USB-to-USB adapter to physically plug a joystick in to most of these devices. There are also bluetooth joysticks in development; we've heard some of the prototypes are working well, but we haven't personally used any yet.

Integrated Voice Chat for Android - This is still pretty high on the "testing" curve, and we've also juggling a few issues on the voice chat server (we made some big updates lately), so don't expect this to be 100%. However, we do have voice chat support in Android now. People will immediately ask things like "does it work with my bluetooth headset", etc. I honestly don't know. Things are still very early, we're mostly focused on "does it.. work." If you would like to play around with the released version, feel free. Be aware that voicechat can use significant bandwidth, far more than the game itself, so either play from Wifi or be sure you have some kind of unlimited data plan.

Where is all of this Going? - The goal is to eventually see phone-based devices as equal citizens in their ability to play Vendetta Online. Mobile support was always approached with the idea of the "best playability that we could manage", and the Android version has met (our) expectations of that. To date, it has been a great platform for checking in on the game while mobile, or doing some mining or lower-intensity missions. It has not been the best platform for involved combat, or especially PvP (arguably the strongsuit of our game). Hopefully joystick support will eventually help close the gap, and Voice Chat will add more equality to bigger game experiences (Border Skirmish, Guild activities, etc).

The end-run is to be able to really play the game no matter where you are. This could be sitting in a hotel room, with your phone hooked to the TV via HDMI (wireless HDMI is also coming), with a wireless mobile joystick hooked to your device. Or it could be with a tablet propped up on a table outside somewhere, and a wireless controller. Or it could be using a phone with one of those nifty little micro-projectors (which have been built into certain phones) to let you play the game on a "bigscreen" with any nearby wall. These cases are all basically possible now.

We want Gameplay Changes! - A fairly significant amount of our userbase is not super overjoyed by Android-exclusive changes, especially when they come (sometimes) at the expense of gameplay changes. We understand this. Please appreciate that the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is happening in January, this is a big deal for the electronics world, and can yield cool opportunities if we are able to showcase the game. For instance, CES earlier this year directly resulted in our presence in Verizon's Xoom TV launch ad. All that said, there will be more (and more significant) gameplay changes coming. As I said in-game the other day, fixing the faction system is currently slated as my Next Big Project. I'll post some reflections on the changes in the near future.

PLUGINS_LOADED event - This is something we added at the behest of those players who choose to also develop Lua-based plugins for the game (which, as of recently, also work on Android). This feature will help them create libraries of functionality, so one plugin can depend on others, rather than everyone having to re-invent the wheel. We will continue to expand and improve on the plugin system when we can (this was an easy change).

HeyZap for Android - HeyZap is a San Francisco based startup that maintains a kind of social network for mobile gaming. This makes it pretty easy to check in with friends and say that you're playing such-and-such a game, which is particularly beneficial for online and multi-player titles. It was an easy addition for us, and seems to have minimal annoyance for those who don't want to use it, so we thought it was worthwhile. The first time you run it without the HeyZap app being installed, you will see a message in the notification area about the benefits of HeyZap, but only the one time. You will not be bothered by it again, if it isn't your style, simply ignore the icon on the game launcher.

That's all for now, have a great weekend everyone!

Vendetta Online 1.8.200

2011-12-02T23:09:24-06:00

VO 1.8.200 includes:

- Fixed a client crash when logging off while a capship shield effect is active at the same time.
- Hotkeys are removed from the Forgive Kill dialog so typing when the dialog appears does not cause accidental forgiveness.
- Removed extra PLAYER_ENTERED/PLAYER_LEFT_SECTOR lua events.
- Border Skirmish accounting will no longer be incorrect after server restarts.
- Consolidated bounty news reports now display correct locations.
- Best prices of addons in ship cargo are now properly updated when jumping between sectors.

Some much needed debugging and fixing across the general game, while we've also released stability improvements to the Android build in the background (Samsung-based PowerVR devices are reportedly working better, albeit with reduced graphical quality).

Vendetta Online 1.8.199

2011-11-24T00:34:20-06:00

VO 1.8.199 includes:

- Bots no longer drop cargo if they are not damaged at all by players. If a player damages a bot but does not destroy it, cargo is still dropped.
- Nation choices are now randomized in the Character Creation menu.
- Added support for Android devices with PowerVR graphics.
- Further reduced raw materials needed to manufacture the Trident.
- Trident Type M cargo expanded to 600cu.
- Mass of Fused Composite Plating significantly reduced.

Bot Drops - We had developed a bit of an issue with people "farming" bot drops by having NPCs fight one another, and keeping the sector artificially "alive" by flying out into the distance. This was both troublesome for my ability to create rare drops that couldn't easily be farmed, as well as a load on the server (some of these NPC battles are pretty intensive, meaning server resources are being used where no one is actually playing).

Thus, the solution was to have bots only drop items when they have sustained damage from a player character. We didn't do that originally, in the interest of maintaining a kind of "equality" between PC and NPC characters, but it really wasn't worthwhile given the later tradeoffs.

Trident Changes - Hopefully this will make the tridents more easily constructable. We are planning more capship changes, but all development has to be juggled by immediate priority. To get a more complete list of what changed in the Trident Type M build tree, see this Suggestions Forum thread.

PowerVR support on Android - This is a big deal, and has been a long time coming. We had to put in quite a bit of work to make this happen, along with support from our friends at Texas Instruments (OMAP CPUs) and Imagination Technologies (PowerVR GPU series). We now support all the major game-capable Android chips, with the exception of ARM's problematic Mali GPU (Galaxy SII, etc), which may work with uncompressed textures. Currently, our official support includes NVIDIA Tegra, Qualcomm Snapdragon and now PowerVR (TI, Samsung). We welcome testing and reports (good or bad) posted to our Android Forum.

Happy Thanksgiving! - To all our US-based players, and frankly all our friends everywhere in the world. We have a lot to be thankful for. All the best.

This will be the planned "release" for this week (barring major bugs). Some of us have family events on different days, and while we'll still be working, this will probably be it for content changes until next week.

Vendetta Online 1.8.198

2011-11-19T00:37:07-06:00

VO 1.8.198 includes:

- Avalon Torpedoes now do 15,000 damage and require only 60 energy per shot.
- Newsposts and Events being no longer marked as 'New' once it is read.
- Show Station in Login/PDA menus options for all platforms.
- Added graphical enhancements for NVIDIA Tegra 3.
- Fixed a condition where depositing credits into a guild bank took the player's credits but didn't deposit the credits into the guild account.

Please continue to post feedback about the Avalons and other areas to gameplay to the Suggestions forum. More changes are in the works.