Hi everyone, we've been rather quiet lately as we've been quite intensely productive. Also, I'm really tired of being repeatedly wrong about when we'll release the persistent mine feature, so I've been a little reluctant to keep posting "Still working on it@!#". But, we are. Fingers crossed, you will see it in a Vendetta Online near you Very Soon Now. Perhaps days, perhaps only hours?

In other news, we've had some people testing the new "Event Commands" that we've built over the last month or so, creating some cool new scenarios and content that will hopefully be pretty fun. The general goal is to have a whole bunch of cool events and things going on during our usual holiday-season period (Christmas to New Years), and I think this one is going to be better than ever.

There seems to be a lot of market interest around Android-based micro-consoles and set-top-boxes this holiday season. Devices like the GameStick and Mad Catz MOJO in additional to the OUYA and other players. As a result, we're doing a little quick work to improve and polish up the experience on these devices. In some cases, fixing simple bugs (the pitch axis default was reversed by accident, in a mistaken commit some time back), in other cases adding a few easy features (basic menu navigation with the D-pad). These changes are beneficial to everyone, as they impact the general playability of VO with a game controller on any platform, including possible future cases like Steam Box "Big Picture mode" and the like.

We may have a bit of an influx of newbies sometime soon, although we don't know exactly when. But we've been trying to spruce up our various different sites and listings, from the front page of vendetta-online.com (iOS AppStore link, soon new screenshots) to the Android Play Store, to Amazon, and so on. Keep an eye out, and as always, please be kind to the new folks.

Graphical changes are still in the works, they'll debut as soon as I can get a chance to test and roll them out. This includes capship skins, Vultures and so on. Unfortunately, everything is always more complicated than one hopes; so some of my goals, like a clear "Military" class of vessels, require re-vamping some AI definitions to make sure the skins are used in the right situations.

We're also working on new replacement asteroids, for certain types, that will drop in seamlessly on the PC, as their shapes are very closely matched to the existing asteroids, but with more polygons and detail. Don't expect these to roll out immediately, the work is still in process, but this is one example of a multi-pronged effort that's going to drastically change the way the game looks in 2014, building towards the Vendetta Online 2.0 goal set. Big changes to lighting, shaders, and content density. Do you have a super fast video card in your gaming desktop, and expect to max out all settings? Great! Expect your power bill to go up.

We will retain compatibility with mobile, by mainly using the (current) older assets on those platforms, with their current lighting and shaders. As always, we'll have options to disable shader features and reduce graphical quality for those on PCs with more modest capabilities.

As soon as we get some of this mine/capship persistency work in place and stable, we'll get back to things like content changes and automated-Events.

That's all for now everyone, thanks so much for your support, and please continue to post any issues you run across, to ether the Bugs Forum or via Support Tickets.

- John "Incarnate" Bergman, Guild Software Inc.