Changelog:

*** Vendetta 1.7.22

- Mac version now uses multiprocessor-aware OpenGL by
default
- Optimized OpenGL particle rendering
- New ribbon/medal display
- Fixed fog problems with DirectX 8.1
- Medals & ribbons are now superseded by "higher level"
versions of the same medal, so for instance if you have
Level 3 Hive Queen Hunter, your Level 1 and Level 2
ribbons go away.

*** Vendetta 1.7.22

- Mac version now uses multiprocessor-aware OpenGL by
default
- Optimized OpenGL particle rendering
- New ribbon/medal display
- Fixed fog problems with DirectX 8.1
- Medals & ribbons are now superseded by "higher level"
versions of the same medal, so for instance if you have
Level 3 Hive Queen Hunter, your Level 1 and Level 2
ribbons go away.

[EDIT] HAHA! Mine is more correcternessly!

"&owned"

Yes, that is Mecha saying Reee! in the background.

"If you click a medal on the right, further information about will be displayed here."

Err... Your OTHER right. Commonly known as... Left.

I still see the first and second ribbons.

DO NOT GET RID OF THE FIRST/SECOND RIBBONS!

...OR YOU WILL BE EATEN BY A GRUE!
...or what? Why not?

Is that also possible on Linux? I mean the dual core aware OpenGL?

Changelog:

*** Vendetta 1.7.22

- Mac version now uses multiprocessor-aware OpenGL by
default
- Optimized OpenGL particle rendering
- New ribbon/medal display
- Fixed fog problems with DirectX 8.1
- Medals & ribbons are now superseded by "higher level"
versions of the same medal, so for instance if you have
Level 3 Hive Queen Hunter, your Level 1 and Level 2
ribbons go away.

>_>

The OpenGL changes have roughly quadrupled my frame rates, from ~15 to 60-70 docking, and about the same for swarms. This is at 1900 x 1200, all settings maxed, on a 24" iMac 2.33ghz Core 2 Duo w/ 256mb Nvidia 7600GT running OS X 10.4.9. Lowest fps I've seen is 30-40 while observing a HAC and 4 Teradons all firing at once at each other.

Awesome improvement. Thanks devs.

Christ. I hit the sack at 11: 30 last night after patiently waiting.
Figures I miss it by mere minutes.

Me and my slow-ass iMac will be online tonight briefly, if only to see what FPS improvements there are with this sucka. Yay for code tweaks that improve speed!

(BTW the ribbons/icons look damn nice. Excellent idea & artwork, devs.)

The Mac enhancements will only speed things up for people with multiple cores on the Intel platform. But, it's good to hear that it makes a noticeable improvement :).

I don't think the same improvement is possible on Linux, as what we enabled was an OS X specific feature. We may have made some other minor enhancements, however, that sped things up across all OpenGL platforms.

The ribbons are obviously still a work in progress. The changelog is somewhat incorrect, only *some* medals are superceded by "higher level" versions. The PVP Veteran badges, for instance, are not (although we considered making them that way, but it ended up not being worthwhile). The reason why some ribbons "replace", is because the ribbons of the same type are all of the same graphical style, and some of them have a LOT of levels. The new Hive Hunter ribbon, for instance, has *8* levels. I intend to add a whole lot of new ribbon types in the future, and I would like there to be room to actually see the variety of them without scrolling down for an hour. After all, the whole point is to get an "overview" idea of a character's accomplishments, not spend a lot of time scrolling through large numbers of ribbons that all look alike.

I did make a general optimization in the particle rendering system on all OpenGL platforms (mac/linux/win32).

The multithreaded setting is an OSX-specific driver setting. If nvidia or ati would make drivers that allowed the same thing on linux and win32, then we could try to support it.

Thanks, that's a lot clearer. I'll make a request on the nvnews forum ;)

If I fire 80 swarms into empty space with everything maxed (full screen glow, effects and texture detail at max etc), I get about 4.2 fps instead of the ~8 (can't remember exactly what I got before) fps I got before the update.

Awww, why not, inc? It'll make some feel like generals in a war campaign. "See THIS, son? I got this prospecting all the systems. Don't mess!" ;)

could instead of removing old badges, could you have the old badges appear at the bottom of the description when you click on a badge?

slime73: if you're on the mac, you can disable the multiprocessing opengl engine by editing the config.ini and changing mpengine=1 to mpengine=0
There may be cases where using the multiprocessing opengl is slower.