FAQ » Design and Technical

What are the game system requirements?
Are all aspects of the game design finalized?
Do you listen to user input on game design and direction?
How do you prevent cheating?
What about aimbots?
What game engine does Vendetta Online use?
Does Vendetta Online use advanced graphical features?
Does the game take advantage of multicore CPU systems?
What software do you use for modeling and texturing?
Does the game support Voice Chat?
What is Ogg/Vorbis compression?
Will the game be split among multiple "server clusters", each supporting a unique game universe?
Where are the game servers located?
Will the game ever be open-source?
Will Vendetta Online work through my firewall and Network Address Translation?
What will happen if I delete my installed copy of Vendetta Online and reinstall? Will I lose my characters?


What are the System Requirements?

Windows Minimum System Requirements:

Windows 10, Windows 8.1, or Windows 7
(Windows Vista and XP should work, but have more limited driver updates, and are not officially supported)
2ghz Processor: Core i-series, Phenom, Pentium4, Althon64, Atom, etc (SSE2 required, recent quad-core recommended)
1GB of RAM
DirectX 9.0c or better (DirectX 11 or better recommended)
3D Hardware Accelerator - Fully DirectX compatible 32MB videocard, Hardware Transformation & Lighting (T&L), and latest drivers.
(Recommended 3D Hardware - DirectX 11.2 compliant NVIDIA/AMD discrete GPU with 1GB+ of dedicated ram)
Sound Card
Keyboard/Mouse
500MB of uncompressed harddrive space
56k internet connectivity

Mac Minimum System Requirements:

MacOS X 10.8 "Mountain Lion" or newer
Any Intel Mac
1GB of RAM
3D Hardware Accelerator - Fully OpenGL compatible 32MB videocard with Hardware Transformation & Lighting (T&L).
Keyboard/Mouse
500MB of harddrive space
56k internet connectivity

Linux Minimum System Requirements:

Glibc 2.2 or better
GTK+ 2.0
1ghz Pentium III or Athlon processor (2ghz+ strongly recommended)
1GB of RAM
3D Hardware Accelerator - Fully OpenGL compatible 32MB videocard with Hardware Transformation & Lighting (T&L), and latest drivers.
Discrete NVIDIA or AMD GPU with gl_arb_es2_compatibility extension recommended
ALSA or OSS-compatible soundcard
Keyboard/Mouse
500MB of harddrive space
56k internet connectivity

Android Minimum System Requirements:

Android 4.x or better
1ghz ARMv7 or Intel SoC
1GB of RAM
Touchscreen (gamepad or keyboard also supported)
OpenGL ES 2.0 compliant GPU (NVIDIA Tegra, PowerVR or Qualcomm Adreno preferred)
500MB of available flash storage space
Reliable internet connectivity

iOS Minimum System Requirements:

iOS 8 or better
Second-generation iPad or newer (newer strongly recommended)
500MB of available flash storage space
Reliable internet connectivity

VR Recommended System Requirements:

Windows 7 or newer
Oculus Rift with 0.8 SDK support: Consumer Edition recommended, DK2 supported, Rift HD and DK1 will work with periodic re-centering of the head-mount orientation required. Visuals and interfaces are optimized for DK2 resolution or better, NOT DK1.
The fastest possible desktop CPU: Newer Core i7+. Clock speed matters more than number of cores, but both help.
The fastest discrete videocard you can find (NVIDIA/AMD DX11.2+ GPU with 1GB of dedicated ram or better).
The game will technically "work" with a slower machine, or laptop with discrete GPU, but VR "judder" (framerate drop) is very unpleasant, and it may require extensive tinkering with the Options settings (under "Video", "Graphics", "VR Options") to get a reasonable consistent framerate. The resulting game may also look ugly.
Keyboard/mouse for those who can touch-type without seeing their keyboard.
Approved Game Controller for those who prefer that experience: Xbox One, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4, or Logitech F710 ("X" setting, "Mode" light off). Other controllers are untested with VR and may require manual configuration or tuning.
Microphone for optional Voice Chat.


Are all aspects of the game design finalized?

Our direction and long term intentions for the game are pretty well established, with varying degrees of detail based on how distant the objective is on the total timeline. However, with any organic creation, a certain amount of leeway must be permitted as designs evolve through playtesting and are polished with user input. Our direction is well defined, but the specifics of our destination are not cast in stone.

Do you listen to user input on game design and direction?

Yes, by all means. It was for this very purpose that we created the Vendetta messageboard and IRC channels (irc.slashnet.org, #vendetta), to give our userbase a means of communicating with us and one another. This is not to say that we will change our plans or direction at the first hint of dissention. However, we are interested in ideas and constructive criticism. The Suggestions forum has been a big success for us, and has become an integral part of our development process. As time goes on, we hope to build on this by making more tools (polls and voting, plus new PCC features) available to the userbase. We are very interested in staying involved with our community, as we believe it will help us create a more polished, fun game.

How do you prevent cheating?

In a fully realtime game such as this, preventing cheating is not a simple task. We have taken a multifold approach to this problem. To begin with, the network datasteam itself is heavily encoded. Secondly, all "critical" game data, such as the user's character, inventory and other stats are stored entirely server-side. This information can only be modified by the server, and is secure from tampering. More frequently-updated data, such as the user's ship position, is sanity-checked by the server (making speed cheats and the like rather futile). Some cases are also passively logged for possible administrative action, with the suspected accounts automatically flagged for continued scrutiny by the server. Should a user be discovered to be cheating, this would be grounds for banning their account.

What about aimbots?

The game essentially includes an "aimbot", in your targeting computer. We actually spent a lot of time optimizing the predictive leadoff algorithms and making this feature of the game work well. Developing another external piece of software to do the same thing would not be of much benefit. Your ship would still not be able to maneuver any better. If your ship did somehow maneuver faster than it should, that would be noted and/or prevented by the server, as detailed above.
It's worthy of note that many of our users disable auto-aiming under certain PvP circumstances (depending on weapon type, etc). Even the best "auto-aim" doesn't work as well as a trained pilot, so any feature like this (or related "cheat") is of mixed benefit. None of our weapons are insta-kill, which rules out a lot of the "aimbot" cases that have plagued other games.

What engine does Vendetta Online use?

Vendetta Online makes use of the proprietary NAOS Engine, developed entirely in-house by Guild Software. The game client compiles to a vast number of platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, WinRT/Metro, and iOS. The server is a highly scalable architecture built around C++, Lua and Erlang. For more information on how the engine works, or information on future licensing of the engine, see the NAOS Engine Website.

Does Vendetta Online make use of advanced graphics features?

We intentionally keep the graphics of our game a little behind the capabilities of the most modern hardware, to improve the game's scalability across a large number of computers and other devices. That said, we utilize a number of advanced graphics techniques on hardware that is more capable, such as the refraction found in our ice crystals, etc. Scalability can be particularly challenging for an MMORPG, as we the developers have less control over how many people congregate in any one place at any given time, meaning that the upward limit of GPU utilization may be relatively high and difficult to predict.

As time moves on, we continually re-visit and update certain aspects of the game graphics and assets, re-targeting the new "middle ground" as the capabilities of modern systems continue to evolve. At any given time, some assets may be a little older, while others in the game are close to state-of-the-art. Thanks to our judicious balance of graphics utilization, Vendetta Online has long been one of the most scalable graphically-intensive titles in history, running on as little as a Motorola Droid 1 cellphone, while still looking relatively nice on a high-end gaming desktop with a large 1080P+ display.

It's also worth noting that the game originally was developed with a software 3D engine (as early as 1996), prior to the advent of consumer hardware 3D acceleration. Everything that you see today, all the assets and advanced shaders and effects, have been continually updated from an era when a high-end gaming desktop would not even match the power of even a midrage cellphone today.

Does Vendetta take advantage of multicore and dual CPU systems?

At present, only to a minimal extent. There is a separate thread for audio, but that's it. This is something we plan to improve, among other things we want to thread I/O, to let us load textures and models in the background without blocking the rest of the client. In addition, we're moving in a generally "procedural" direction, which also makes a good use-case for threading in a game environment.

What software do you use for modeling and texturing?

We use 3D Studio Max, Photoshop, and a smattering software that we developed in-house.

Does the game support voice chat?

Yes, we currently support a proprietary form of voice chat built into the client, and available on all major platforms (it may not work on Windows 98/ME). Within the client, go to the Options panel and then Voice Chat, and review the Help found there. It explains the basics of configuring the game for use with voice chat.

What is "Ogg/Vorbis" compression?

Ogg/Vorbis (http://www.vorbis.com/) is the audio compression standard used by Vendetta. OV is similar to mp3, but superior in quality and has a more developer-friendly license. The "/playmusic", "/stopmusic", and "/playlist" console commands of Vendetta Online can be used to play Ogg files in-game. The playlist command will play an m3u list of Ogg files.

Will the game be split among multiple "servers clusters", each supporting a unique game universe?

No. Our game is a single game universe spread contiguously across all servers. In other words, the entire population of the game will interact in the same universe, not be split into different "server universes" as it is in World of Warcraft, EverQuest and other MMOs. There are some technical challenges to this, but we believe it's worthwhile in terms of the game culture, interaction, and general benefits of having an increased population in one place.

Where are the game servers located?

Our servers are hosted at Red Anvil in Milwaukee, WI. They have a first-class datacenter with diverse fiber entrance, redundant power and cooling, and a location on three separate power grids. They also have great connectivity to several major networks, including a few hundred megs to RoadRunner.

Will the game ever be open-source?

We are a very open-source oriented group of people, several of us having contributed to a variety of projects, including the Linux kernel. However, because our business model includes the possibility of selling our game engine to other developers, we don't intend to open-source the game in the short term. We do intend to open up some limited portions of the game, such as Lua access in the game client, but this will be the extent for some time to come.

Will Vendetta Online work through my firewall and Network Address Translation?

The Vendetta Updater, the auto-update program that executes prior to game startup, makes an outbound connection to TCP port 21024. Once updating has completed and the game itself is fired up, a connection is established upon login attempt to UDP port 21141. Thus, any modern firewall capable of "keeping state" on outbound TCP/UDP should require no alterations. Other firewalls and packet filter implementations may require specific configuration changes. Both the updater and game work fine through Network Address Translation.

What will happen if I delete my installed copy of Vendetta and reinstall? Will I lose my characters?

No, your characters are stored completely server-side. The only things you lose from deleting your Vendetta install are any option changes you have made (in config.ini), and any specific keybindings (in wgaf.cfg). If a config.ini is not present when the game is run (as on a fresh install), your game and graphics settings will given a general auto-configuration based on your detected hardware.