A few bugfixes (a few new bugs as well, now fixed) and a lot of huge background changes. Upgrading from Lua 5.0 to 5.1.2 was a big and scary thing for us to take on, but worthwhile from a bunch of different standpoints. It has better debugging, which will be a huge help for tracking down problems, more advanced memory management, and it allows us to entertain the possibility of compiled solutions like LuaJIT to further improve performance. We've had a few issues crop up during this Lua transition, but we think we've addressed the major bugs, please report anything else and we'll track it down as quickly as we can. As a side effect of this update, game plugins will cease to work properly or need updates. This is because the plugins were written in 5.0, and the upgrade changes around some of the language concepts. We had to do much of the same updating to all of our lua code over this past week. So.. check with the author(s) of any plugins you're using for updated versions, many of which have already been posted to the General and Community Projects forums.

Wednesday of last week saw another major update, which went out with no fanfare. We completely changed how our game connects to the database. It's now much more robust and scalable, not to mention a lot faster at things like.. loading non-running sectors for the first time. After a week and a half of running on it, things seem to be pretty solid.

I know none of this is terribly exciting, but it's making a lot of things possible. We'll be wrapping up this big "infrastructure development" period in the very near term, probably another week or so, and you'll begin to see more appreciable changes to gameplay. A new hive is already in development, and we're looking to improve on that a lot, bring back pirates (but much cooler) and so on. Some of you may have seen some of the capship battles I've run recently: part of this is testing to find a happy medium for doing this kind of thing on a regular basis (think of a vastly expanded border skirmish concept). I have more tweaks to do on the capship side as well, but things are moving along really well. We've had some pretty crazy battles in the last couple of weeks, with a hell of a lot of stuff flying around. I can't wait to build on that.

That's it for now, just a quick note. I'll post more next week about our forward direction and more specifics about game changes you can expect to see.

Changelog:

*** Vendetta 1.7.40

- NPC convoys should now drop the cargo they are supposed to carry
- Fixed TCPListen object in Windows
- Lua has been upgraded to 5.1.2 on the client. You may need to disable your Lua plugins until the authors have a chance to update them. See this URL for more details:
http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/1/17462