(Cross posting from News)

VO 1.8.199 includes:

- Bots no longer drop cargo if they are not damaged at all by players. If a player damages a bot but does not destroy it, cargo is still dropped.
- Nation choices are now randomized in the Character Creation menu.
- Added support for Android devices with PowerVR graphics.
- Further reduced raw materials needed to manufacture the Trident.
- Trident Type M cargo expanded to 600cu.
- Mass of Fused Composite Plating significantly reduced.

Bot Drops - We had developed a bit of an issue with people "mining" bot drops by having NPCs fight one another, and keeping the sector artificially "alive" by flying out into the distance. This was both troublesome for my ability to create rare drops that couldn't easily be mined, as well as a load on the server (some of these NPC battles are pretty intensive, meaning server resources are being used where no one is actually playing).

Thus, the solution was to have bots only drop items when they have sustained damage from a player character. We didn't do that originally, in the interest of maintaining a kind of "equality" between PC and NPC characters, but it really wasn't worthwhile given the later tradeoffs.

Trident Changes - Hopefully this will make the tridents more easily constructable. We are planning more capship changes, but all development has to be juggled by immediate priority. To get a more complete list of what changed in the Trident Type M build tree, see this Suggestions Forum thread.

PowerVR support on Android - This is a big deal, and has been a long time coming. We had to put in quite a bit of work to make this happen, along with support from our friends at Texas Instruments (OMAP CPUs) and Imagination Technologies (PowerVR GPU series). Aside from the challenging ARM Mali GPU series (Galaxy SII, etc), we now support the major game-capable Android chips of NVIDIA Tegra, Qualcomm Snapdragon and now PowerVR (TI, Samsung). We welcome testing and reports (good or bad) posted to our Android Forum.

Happy Thanksgiving! - To all our US-based players, and frankly all our friends everywhere in the world. We have a lot to be thankful for. All the best.

This will be the planned "release" for this week (barring major bugs). Some of us have family events on different days, and while we'll still be working, this will probably be it for content changes until next week.

Happy Thanksgiving, to all the folks at GS enjoy a well deserved break and some turkey.

Grats again! and Happy Thanksgiving for you all!

Heh... I always called that "farming" since we already have mining...

Well, so much for scooping up 1000's of cu's of scrap metal to boost your trade license while doing Border Skirmishes. :/

Wow... those "huge" hive skirmishes are going to have a lot less radar clutter.

Aw, any chance scrap metal could still be made to drop regardless? I had an idea for a mission I was considering making that will no longer work: spawn an NPC and destroy it immediately so that scrap is left behind as an indicator to the player that a battle had taken place in the sector. Are there any missions currently available on the production server that this change breaks? I can't think of any off the top of my head...

And what about seekers? I'm thinking those should also be made an exception given their kamikaze nature, and I don't believe they ever attack NPCs anyway.

The change in bot drops is also going to make salvaging drops more difficult without the drops from NPC kills around to refresh the cargo and keep it from expiring (i.e. if you are killing bots for 8 minutes then spend 2 minutes changing to a cargo ship, you'll only have 5 minutes left to collect all the cargo before it times out). It would be nice if the 15 minute timeout was extended a bit longer in light of this update. It would probably also be a good idea to rethink the mechanics of how/when cargo gets combined (I believe something like qty 200 of an item is needed before it will combine).

I'm pretty sure the cargo combines not to make it easier to pick up, but to make it easier for the server to keep track of it all.

Next up: those ion storm skirmishes that aren't really in an ion storm?

also helps some players on older hardware/ slower connections arf, dunno if you remember the cargo balls that would result from a moth with 120cu of bus guns (back when weapons dropped as individual cargoes) 3 or 4 would effectively kill a sector for just about anybody

Daily Trade Report: Act of god creates extreme Synthetic Silkseel shortage

Not a fan of the drop change. Being able to carefully salvage weapons from skirmishes as a new player was fun. Now you'd have to find one where another human was active to get anything, and you'd get much less.

Edit: Maybe have it so drops only happen if a human is within the 15 km radar range.

thats a damn good idea, but id start it out closer, something like 5k.

Hmm, I'm a bit surprised that a relatively few number of folk farming hs for manufacturing drops has that much of an effect. However, I appreciate I am seeing vo from below, the devs see it from above. Let's see how this works out ...

The drop size for SSS will need to be drastically increased to compensate or SSS is going to become a severe problem.

Happy Turkey day and enjoy some well earned face time with those you love.