VO 1.8.271 includes:
- Mine persistency! Your mines no longer disappear when you log out or change sectors.
- Because mines now persist, if you get Temp KOS with the faction that owns the station you're currently in, you will get launched out or thrown to your home station if you don't have a flyable ship.
- Added preliminary Leap Motion support for the Windows version. 6 new binds are available: LEAPOX, LEAPOY, LEAPOZ, LEAPTX, LEAPTY, LEAPTZ; where LEAPO* are the three axes of orientation and the LEAPT* are the three axes of position. When a Leap Motion device is detected at startup, flight-assist is enabled, mouse-look is disabled, and LEAPOX, LEAPOY, LEAPOZ, LEAPTZ default to Pitch, Turn, Roll, and Accel analog controls respectively.
- Fixed button positions in the one-click login menu for mobile devices.
- Default Moga binds have changed to be more usable.
- Changed the default invert mode for the Right-Stick Y axis on mobile gamepads.
- The D-Pad on Android gamepads can now be used to select controls in the UI.

We've delayed making this official announcement until we were pretty confident in the reliability of this recent release, which heralded major changes to the persistency of universe objects, while also giving a window on things to come. The persistency of player content will be a major thread running through much of our development in 2014, as we continue to add more tools with which players may impact and influence the face of the galaxy. This will eventually lead to our long-awaited goals of an explorable and conquerable expanded universe of massive scope.

In the meantime, we're still fixing issues and polishing up the new gameplay as we add it. You can expect improvements to HUD and mine friend/foe identification in the near future, along with other tweaks and fixes. Please continue to submit Support Tickets, Bugs forum posts, and Suggestions forum posts for aspects you think should be improved.

Beyond persistency, we've also done a lot in the last few weeks to improve the game's graphical fidelity on high-end Android devices, as well as the default interface experience on micro-console devices like the GameStick, OUYA and Mad Catz MOJO. Tweaks and improvements here will continue. It's not a trivial thing to shoehorn an MMO developed for a mouse-and-keyboard onto a mobile device, and it's even harder still to make it a pleasant experience with only a game controller, but we're working hard to improve the interface and polish that use case.

The Leap Motion is a fascinating device, a next-generation "air" controller, able to detect very fine movements in fingers, opening doors to a lot of really cool "sci-fi" interface possibilities and gestural controls. We have some friends at Leap, and we're happy to support them, but we also have some ideas for how Leap might play into our next-generation plans and give players a more immersive experience than ever before. It's a little early for me to go into details; for now we have a very simplistic interface and flight mechanic that allows the use of the Leap Motion, but does not yet illustrate the far greater plans for the device. Supporting the Leap Motion, while interesting, might seem like an unusual use of development time to some of our players: I ask that you bear with me, this basic implementation was pretty easy for us, and there are some really interesting possibilities on the horizon.

Thanks everyone!