Changelog:
- New visual effects for Starflare rocket explosion.
- Support for MOGA game controller for the Android version.
Upon first launch, a MOGA menu will show what the controls are bound to.
The menu is also available from the HUD by typing /help in chat.

Cross-posting from News:

VO 1.8.233 includes:

- New visual effects for Starflare rocket explosion.
- Support for MOGA game controller for the Android version.
Upon first launch, a MOGA menu will show what the controls are bound to.
The menu is also available from the HUD by typing /help in chat.

Our support for the recently-launched PowerA MOGA bluetooth game controller is worth noting. We've found this device to be a very cool way to play the game on an Android phone, providing perhaps the best mobile Vendetta Online experience we've seen to date. We have no vested interest in their success, this referral stems purely from our usage and impressions of the Moga, and our desire to see mobile gaming evolve to match the technical capabilities of modern devices. Flying with the controller still takes some getting used to, and it isn't a replacement for a mouse and keyboard; but Moga is a huge improvement over a touchscreen, and superior (in my opinion) even to the Xperia Play.

We hope you like the new Starflare rocket effects. We have some more improved effects in the works that were actually patched into the game tonight, but we need to do a bit more development before they can become visible in the game.

Does that interfere with using /help as a shortcut to channel 1 without having to actually make it active, as in: "/help how do dock?"

/help with nothing else will bring up the help screen.
Typing /help with text will still go to channel 1.
So /help is no longer a shortcut to channel 1.

That may need to be changed back to /help activating channel 1 without saying anything.

That sounds like an improvement. Lots of people would type plain "/help" expecting something to happen, and in my opinion having it just make a blank message appear in channel 1 didn't make a good impression. It does make the function of /help more apparent, but in my case I was annoyed because I wasn't looking for human help, only a list of commands. Having it send a chat other people could see bothered me.

I do like using /help+message to help newbies without having to change back to 100 when I'm finished, so I am glad that functionality was preserved.

So about that Gatling Cannon MkII....

You sneaky kids went and published those new cap gauss explosions didn't you!

I think it was just the capgauss hit using the same effect as the old starflares so when they changed them they changed the capgauss too.

No cap gauss had that stupid little purple circle effect when it hit. I'm pretty sure this is a similar looking animation. It sure as hell looks better than it did before

Interesting. We did add a new cap gauss hit effect a week or so ago, but then realized that no one would see the thing because all "remote" capship hits get removed as an efficiency thing in the protocol, to help make big cap-battles more network-feasible (sometimes we forget things we did years ago). I opted to not change that right away, as it would impact our cap battles and that's not something I'm willing to fiddle with just yet. So, I'm guessing that people are seeing cap-gauss effects on player-owned Tridents?

There's actually a fancy new hit effect for the giant golden ball of scary that the Teradons shoot as well. Which unfortunately no one will see until you can either fly around a Teradon or we change the network layer to allow specific capship hit effects.

How the heck would we see cap-gauss FX on player-owned Tridents that can't equip cap-gauss turrets? Devs and guides are the only ones who get those toys.

I saw those shooting convoy ships from a convoy Trident's own turrets. It looks like the blue poofy cloud thing from the new Starflare FX and it's actually pretty cool.

Interesting, so you were docked with the capship, and turreted on it? That might make sense too, I guess. They are pretty cool effects, it's a bummer that they're not widely visible as of yet.

Yeah I was. It shows up on BS ships too, but your target has to be close enough for you to see it.

I first saw it when jumping out of a conq sector while it was stormy.

The turrets still shoot at everything that jumps out btw.. I think you may want to fix that at some point.

hahaha

I got all excited there Incarnate, as if you were under the impression that you long ago implemented player owned capgauss but just forgot to turn it on all this time or something.

But actually me and spuck saw both effects playing around with teradons on the test server. I actually assumed the teradon gun effect was always there but because of the netcode thing we never saw it.

Video time!