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Oct
25

Vendetta Online 1.8.309

VO 1.8.309 includes:

- Lightsources from weapons are now colored to match their visual effect.
- Added support for multiple lightsources to more ships.
- Fixed crashes when changing video drivers or resolution when in multi-threaded rendering mode.
- DirectX 11 driver now chooses window-mode if it cannot go to fullscreen-mode instead of falling back to the DirectX 9 driver
- Switching video drivers should no longer cause graphical artifacts.

This release brings the new lighting model in DX11 much closer to its intended goal, although still missing a few things. Fire effects from damaged ships don't yet emit light, nor do station floodlights or "floating neon" advertising signs, etc. A few types of materials still don't receive dynamic lighting (station solar panels), although most of them now do.

Many of the stability issues have been addressed as well. If anyone is still having problems changing to or using the DirectX 11 driver, please post to the Bugs forum and let us know (with screenshots, if possible). DirectX 11 will soon become the default driver for Windows, although we'll still retain the other driver as a compatibility fallback for a long time to come.

But, before it can become the default, there's some optimization work that has to happen, as well as adding a lot of the well-known options to the driver. Once the optimization work has happened, and the shaders have stabilized, we'll begin back-propagating support to the other PC platforms (Linux and Mac). A much newer OpenGL version will probably be required for advanced graphics features, possibly OpenGL 4.1; although again, we will still retain the older driver as a fallback for older hardware.

If the new lighting is slow for your computer, don't lose heart. Continue using the DirectX 9 version for now. We expect to speed things up quite a bit in the near future. We'll go into a bit more of a technical discussion about the nature of the changes once things have stabilized as well.

If graphics updates aren't your thing, no worries, it'll only be a few weeks and we'll be back to other topics :).

Have a great weekend, everyone!