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Unknown System, Sector I-10

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UIT Space Unified in KoS

All minor factions in UIT space now enforce a unified response, throughout UIT space, if a "Temporary Kill-on-Sight" state is incurred against any one of them.

The Union of Independent Territories is a conglomeration of minor factions, overseen by the "UIT Senate", unlike the Serco and Itani nations, which are singular cohesive major factions. Historically, this meant that each minor faction within UIT space would solely respect a separate "reputation", or faction standing, for a given player.

This created situations where players could attack others in Guarded UIT space, and still retreat to the relatively close proximity of another faction's territory, within the same major area of space. Not unlike someone committing a crime in a foreign nation, and then hiding in an embassy within that nation.

This has now been changed. Every faction (major and minor) still retains an independent long-term reputation for a given player. But, if a player takes actions with any UIT station that yields a "Temp KoS" response from authorities, all factions and stations within UIT space will now enforce it.

Coupled with the changes from last year, where TempKoS is now measured in "game time" (time spent playing), this has a diminishing effect on certain types of piracy and PvP in UIT space, bringing it more in-line with how Serco and Itani space have always worked.

Outside of UIT space, nothing has changed. Every Corporation and minor faction in Grayspace maintains complete independence of one another. Ultimately, the factions are competitors, and may even go to war; but only in unaligned Grayspace.

The relative security of major Nation Space, at the core of the established galaxy, will continue to increase in the future, while high-level content will focus on Grayspace and the newly unexplored systems.

This is intended to both give new players a place to find their footing, while also reserving the greatest rewards for those willing take the risks found at the edges of the known galaxy, and beyond.

Apple M1 and Metal support for Macs

Apple "M1" processors are now supported natively by Vendetta Online. Intel Macs continue to be supported as well, and will be supported for a long time to come.

Apple's proprietary "Metal" graphics rendering is now supported, through a Vulkan-to-Metal compatibility layer. This allows us to achieve native performance on MacOS, while also simplifying our own development process, as we prefer to work with open, industry-driven standards like Vulkan.

The Vulkan/Metal driver also supports "full-screen window mode", allowing fast switching between desktop "Spaces", as long as the game is also configured to use the native desktop resolution.

MacOS installation compatibility has also been substantially improved, particularly for the latest versions of MacOS.

Additional performance improvements have been made to the OpenGL 4.x renderer for M1 devices, if that fallback option should be needed.

Windows Performance, Vulkan improvements

Additional improvements have been made to the Vulkan renderer on Windows, which now includes:

• Improved support for vsync, allowing smooth gameplay with Freesync and G-sync gaming monitors.
• Expanded support for anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering.
• Rapid task and virtual-desktop switching, as long as the game is run in the same native resolution as the Windows Desktop.
• Manual GPU selection, so people with gaming laptops may choose between a power-efficient onboard GPU, or a high-performance discrete unit.
• Further performance and stability enhancements.

This is building towards our Vulkan renderer becoming the standard default choice for future installations of our game. This hasn't happened yet, but we expect it to happen in the near future.

Next-generation graphical advancements, in our game, will likely be built around Vulkan.

We will continue to support our other, older graphics APIs, but those will remain largely for compatibility, and will cease to get major updates.

User Interface Updates

VO's menu interface has been in need of improvement for some time. However, substantial technical limitations, and the uncertain (but lengthy) development time needed to solve them, caused us to keep "kicking the problem down the road".

Recently we've come up with an entirely new approach to designing and integrating interfaces in the game, which basically avoids most of the major development problems we were otherwise facing. It's still a bit early, but things are looking very positive, so far.

We hope to debut some prototype interface updates in the near future, although probably just on a single platform, to simplify testing.

These prototypes may not be very different in functionality from the existing UI. We're starting with the simplest interfaces, and going from there.

If all goes well this could be very helpful to our development process, since our prior UI system was arduous, time-consuming and "flawed" to use for development. We have a number of new interfaces we would like to build, and still others we'd like to re-do from scratch.

Similarly, it could also open up an additional level of user configurability. While the old system offered only the option of player-created "UI skins", letting people modify menu-color and texture, the new system could potentially allow players much greater creative power and control over the game's user-experience and functionality. But, no promises, this is all still in early development.

List of Upcoming Events:

• March 13th, 10pm UTC (4pm Central) - Corporate Sector Run
• March 20th, 10pm UTC (4pm Central) - Corporate Sector Run
• March 21st, Midnight UTC - Hive Ion Blaster War II

Update History

Here's a recap of other updates, since the last Newsletter. As usual, this doesn't really represent "everything we've been doing", but it shows some of the player-visible changes that have been made, along with a few additional details about items listed above:

• During the Corporate Sector Run, all systems that are part of the race-course will have a minimum of a two-second jump time for all players (sectors and wormholes).
• Fixed issue where rapid succession of purchases would display incorrect cost amounts.
• Fixed issue where kills made by explosions from capships with Enduring Titles were not being recorded in their histories.
• The "/report" command now visually responds with an error message, instead of nothing, if the character name was wrong or the reported player hasn't said anything since the reporter logged in.
• Reduced network traffic when rapidly scanning through objects in the sector.
• Incoming convoys of a faction different from that of the local sector/station no longer fire, within the NFZ, at characters hated by their faction. They will fire back if attacked.
• Fixed issue with trophies and other unique items incorrectly stacking.
• Remote capships no longer wobble when trying to align themselves.
• Navroutes that include the Unknown System now properly load if you've previously visited the system.
• Fixed issue with 'prepare for docking' remote capship not working.
• Fixed memory leak when resizing the HUD or reloading the interface, which may have contributed to recent crashes on plugin-heavy clients.
• Fixed bot pathfinding issues in the Hive Leviathan and other dynamic sectors.
• Background can now be disabled in Android.
• Fixed issue with faction penalty being applied when a strike force NPC destroys another strike force NPC while they are targeting you.
• Removed error message when Autojettison is enabled and your remote capship is mining asteroids.
• Fixed issue with players launching from their capship but being spawned at the wrong location.
• Remote capships now stop mining when they are given another command.
• The correct mining beam effect is now used for remote capships when they mine asteroids.
• Remote capships no longer attempt to mine if they don't have a mining beam equipped.
• Launching from your capship now stops any mining in progress.
• Fixed bots not attacking player-owned capships outside 4000m.
• Standard bots will now correctly limit their group numbers when attacking a capital ship containing targeted players.
• Fixed issue where players launching from their own capship would spawn them in the wrong location.
• Fixed bandwidth usage problem in sectors containing many hulks and debris.

..And many other changes.

Download the Game

You can install the game client for Android, iPhone and iPad, Samsung GearVR and Oculus Go, Google Daydream VR, as well as find the game on the Mac Store. Or, you can directly download the game installation for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

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