http://www.vendetta-online.com/h/news.html

woo.

yay! although dont worry theres been loads of "new gameplay development" in the last week or so!

Thinking about the client side performance limitations, the obvious central factor is the number of ships in-sector. On my old G4 Mac, common and small hive skirmishes do well. Critical skirmishes are bad, and central skirmishes are unplayable, as are Boarder skirmishes. In critical skirmishes there are three distinct things happening: Queen-Cappy battle, Small craft battle, and mining. The only element that is relevant to the Critical skirmish is the queen-cappy battle. Why not make a light critical hive skirmish with only the queen-cappy battle? It would run well, and the extra mining bots and assult would not be missed. Likewise, a light Boarder skirmish with fewer ships could be effective too.

missioncreek: we're going to be making various scales of skirmish available, the smaller ones being more common. All the way down to fighter-only skirmishes that happen in dense asteroid fields. So I think some aspect of BS will be available to people on slower machines, at least that's the goal.

The performance issue on slower computers, as far as I can tell, really isn't the number of ships.. it's the sheer number of shots. All those effects tend to be pretty slow, and rough on older hardware. The poly-count of the ships is usually not nearly as bad as all the effects. Turning down effects can help, but that basically makes the shots invisible (not.. desirable, heh).

Thanks inc! I can see the fruit of your work in the last months. I am encourages to hear of your commitment to better performance on old machines as the purchase of a new computer is unlikely in this economy.