We've had some major changes and additions lately, this will cover the high points of release over the last 7-10 days:

VO 1.8.258 included:
- High-resolution planet textures, drastically increasing the visible
detail of planetary surfaces.
- Totally new procedural nebula backgrounds with much greater resolution
and detail. (Nebula development is ongoing).
- For the moment, these new textures and graphics are only available on
PC platforms: Windows, Mac, and Linux.

VO 1.8.257 included:
- Conquerable stations now require you to stay in the docking bay for
30 seconds before you conquer the station.
- Capship pilots can now enter and leave their own turrets through the
Tactical menu in their PDA. (iPad and Windows Store versions do not
yet support this)
- Offline tutorial is now available to Windows/Mac/Linux PC platforms.
It will start on first run of a fresh install and are accessable
through the Options menu from the Login Menu.
- If a Green Throttle controller is detected, the on-screen HUD touch
controls will be disabled.
- PC platforms now use the same button-click sound that the mobile
platforms use.
- Fixed problem of not being able to control turrets when not in
mouselook mode.
- Fixed startup error on Windows XP when attempting to load the Windows
Vista/7 audio driver.

VO 1.8.256 included:
- Fixed black/wrongly colored ice asteroids on OpenGL drivers when
shaders are turned off.
- Capship owners now get Entered/Left messages in the capship's chat
room so the owner knows when someone docks/leaves their capship.
- Fixed a lua error for /key console command if any arguments are missing.
- Android version now ignores SIGFPE instead of crashing.
- Android controllers can now be used to open dropdown listboxes (with
the 'A' button) to change settings.
- Fixed problem with not being able to open the virtual keyboard on some
editboxes with the 'A' button on game controllers of the editbox was
already focused.
- Preliminary testing support for upcoming feature, TBA.

A few followup points on the latest graphics updates: nebula development is still ongoing, as it says in the MOTD, we expect to drop in some additional graphics in the near future.

We have quite a few smaller gameplay changes, fixes and improvements in the works, along with some pretty big ones a little further out.

Among other things, we've been "back-propagating" some of the advancements we launched on mobile, like the "offline tutorial" for new players, and other things, bringing the PC versions in synch with everything else and also updating the PC graphics.

As far as graphics go, you can expect more significant changes through the end of the year. This will not detract from gameplay development, which is largely unrelated and uses different personnel.

It is still a priority to release a public "roadmap", showing the plans with the intended milestones and targets. I don't have a release date on that yet, but I'd like to see it before the end of summer.