Some people have been asking for comparisons of the before/after graphics updates. I pulled some rough comparison shots together. The "old" images ironically a bit more anti-aliased, because they're resized from a much higher resolution, where the "new" shots were done at only 800x600. But, the difference in texture detail should still be pretty apparent.

Also, keep in mind these are some of the oldest assets in the game (in fact, they use very dated shader techniques which were challenging to update and required various work-arounds). So the meshes are still lower-poly, but overall there's a definite improvement. The differences are even more striking if you see the objects shifting compared to the lightsources, displaying the various shaders.

Marauder, before


Marauder, after


Prometheus, before


Prometheus, after

Much sharper, Inc. Very cool work. The Marauder in particular is a big improvement with the added detail on its forward claws.

A blue prom??? Inc please :)

Snazzy!
The new valk textures look good too. The little details like seams and hatches are more defined now.

You're [Deleted by Whistler]ing kidding us, right? I really hope this project didn't take more than an hour, two max. Polishing the pitted chrome trim on a rusted-out beater does not an improvement make.

Grats! Small, but very good improvement... I just prefer those surfaces more "metallic" instead of "rocky"...

As a reminder, these ships are now using half the texture memory they were previously. So this was not purely a visual update. And yes, it did only take a couple of hours, combined, for all three nation ships.

Regardless of whether a given asset is rusted or not, I would prefer the level of detail be similar across as many assets as possible. As opposed to the EC89 or Raptor looking detailed, while the Maud looks blurry.

I was also only working with the existing original assets, I couldn't spend the drastically greater time required to do new work. So yes, that which is rusty, continues to be rusty.

When I refer to a rusted-out beater, you need to think more macro than given assets. How's that economy redux coming? Faction redux? They do look better, glad to hear it didn't eat up much time.

We're locking for pre-load onto some new holiday-season devices shortly, plus also (still) trying to release the phone build. Both of which require pushing assets out to other companies and not being able to update them for lengthy periods of time (or possibly ever, in the case of device pre-loads).

At the same time, any large updates that happen after those launches will put more pressure on our patch servers and resources (and in the event of a device selling well, or a lot of phone interest.. it could be a huge amount of patch-server pressure and bandwidth utilization). Given that, we either needed to not change any graphics at all (for probably six months or more).. or change it all in a big hurry, which is what I've been trying to do. Some of our upcoming opportunities would greatly benefit from some spruced up graphics, plus I'm trying to rework some unused assets for future use in things like the "mysterious roving pirate station" type gameplay and other things we've talked about on Suggestions.

So, that's what I've been trying to do for the last few weeks, is tweak as much as I can in a short period of time, while we're wrapping up other development. We also lost a major server on Friday (not one directly serving the game), which has been a big inconvenience and delay.

So, no, the economy and faction redux are not my priority for this week, or probably next week.

We are still juggling priorities, we are not yet able to just try and focus on gameplay for awhile. That was the goal for sometime after shipping broadly to handsets, which has been interminably delayed by time spent debugging problems (like the SonyEricsson bug that Phaserlight just helped us fix), corporate delays, and other stuff.

Just wanted to say the Xperia Play is radicool and has taken my Vendetta to all new heights ;-). Great work on the controls and the interface.

I know, it's always something. You can't realistically talk about these fundamental issues not being the priority for given weeks or even months--we're talking years here.

I get that. Leaving aside various dramas and chaos from earlier, the priorities really stem from a choice I made in March of 2010, which was between "try for mobile, investment positioning, etc" vs "fix / finish the game". The latter was the most appealing (by far), the former is obviously what I chose. Looking back, although I'd be a lot happier to have the game "finished" now, so to speak; I think we probably would have folded in the interim. Maybe I'm wrong, but I made the choice knowingly, and given the various evils and what I've seen in the meantime, I'm ok with that choice.

The problem I have now is too many big opportunities, and not enough resources to take advantage of them all and also do forward gameplay development. That's a pretty "good" problem to have, relative to our painful situation in the PC MMO market in Q1/2010.

Anyway, there are still unforeseen shoes dropping now and then, but we're firming up on a specific date for a major gameplay-related milestone (completion date) within the next six months. I've been working to align some cool marketing partners to help us get the word out. So, while I'm not going to speak specifics yet, there is an attempt at a concrete goal and an upcoming top priority that has nothing to do with phones. It'll probably go out with the next newsletter, after the phone build is out.

Thanks for the update, I hope I'm not broke and can enjoy the upcoming improvements and exciting growth of your business.

Heh Inc, will there ever be an iphone version?

I would like there to be an iOS version, but I'm not comfortable saying "yes, absolutely", as Apple's policies and enforcement are still kind of an unknown. If we were unable to release a self-patching version, that could become kind of a maintenance mess. But, we'll see. I hope so?

That's true. Maybe you should have a word to Apple's executive :)

According to Apple's iOS SDK agreement, I don't think you can have an automatic patcher.

Although you could have the updater pop up with a window saying "accept update" or "decline update" when the user runs the app. That might still be unacceptable for Apple though... they really hate 3rd party devs

Didn't they also have some issues with apps that can download and run their own executable code like scripting languages and such? If i recall correctly, that was one of the reasons they used to block Adobe's Flash-as-an-app packager thingy a while back.