VO 1.8.238 includes:

- A massive new 39-mission tree, developed collaboratively by a group of our PCC members, organized and evangelized by Phaserlight. Many thanks and congrats to him, as well as Pizzasgood and everyone else who contributed to building and testing these missions!
- Graphics updates for the standard cargo-crate have been totally updated with a new asset. We will eventually also use this crate at multiple sizes to visually indicate crates that have larger quantities of items or use more cubic units of space.

A couple of other changes were also intended for this update, but needed to be pushed back for further testing. So those can likely be expected next week. Have a great weekend, everyone, and please post any issues to the forums.

Cool. The drafts of the missions did look good, can't wait to play them!
Will have to take a look at the cargo crates before I comment on that... :P

Congrats and Thanks to Phaserlight and Rin, and everyone else involved.

The new crates are quite good, will solve a lot of problems with people having issues running over the cargo in smaller ships. I took a cap to show relative size with a mixed bundle of goodies. There's a majority of vismetal there in one of those piles so it would be good to have the increased crate size.



Also it is quite an achievement to build a 39 mission tree, as far as i'm aware it's more than double our existing story driven content in VO at the moment. If anything this contribution should highlight the case for changes to the PCC so even more people can build the missions they've always wanted to but have been limited from building by the current state of the editor.

Well done phaserlight & co.

Congrats to everyone involved with that tree. Quite the feat of engineering.

My humble thanks and gratitude go out to all who were involved in the project. It was a team effort.

Make your way through the ancestral tree before arriving at these missions. It follows one must have Combat license 3.

The first two missions in the linked-to tree can be attempted once per day, the third mission can be attempted 3 times per day. If you do not see a new mission after making your way through, check your faction standings to see if you have low faction with your home nation or are unable to dock with any of the minor factions. If you are a new player, you should see the beginning of the new tree unless you have done something egregious against your home nation. The new missions will affect your faction levels depending on the outcome.

The new missions are sensitive to player choice; there are often multiple ways to complete a mission, and the tree has many outcomes. Depending on your nationality and a decision made at a seemingly insignificant yet critical moment in the prerequisite tree, you may be presented with an entirely different set of missions than your fellow player.

The new missions involve persistent characters. These characters each have a background, personality, and motivations. It will be left to the player to uncover more about each character by making his or her way through the new tree. There is some crossover between characters. There are tie-ins to the backstory, and also to missions that are already in production.

Special thanks to Pizzasgood, co-author, and meridian, editor. The project would not be here as it is today without them.

Lastly, thanks to:

William James
William Gibson
Philip K. Dick

Missy
Isaac
Marcia

Julie

the VO devs.

I know that was a lot of hard work Phaser - Congrats to you and your team -> can you do it again? :}

Nice update

Hey Inc, will players running VO on the Surface with windows RT also see the new missions? or will that have to be a windows store update?

Missions are a server-side change, you should have access to them, assuming you've met all other requirements to do the missions.

Thanks Phaserlight and crew!

Looking forward to checking out the missions.

I hear tell these are serco missions? I'm having trouble locating them.... help? Or is it an extension of the Haz Site Inv?

I like the new crates when it comes to up-close visuals. But when it comes to viewing them from a distance, I think I liked the old ones more.

Greenwall: They are split between each of the three factions.

Hey Inc, will players running VO on the Surface with windows RT also see the new missions? or will that have to be a windows store update?

Like Draugath says, it's a server-side thing, so yes, you instantly had access to the new missions as soon as you logged in.

I like the new crates when it comes to up-close visuals. But when it comes to viewing them from a distance, I think I liked the old ones more.

When we have more varied sizes based on capacity, I think that'll show the new textures off a bit better.

I see the new update shut off the multithreading by default.
I am wondering how much use multithreading is for VO. I suspect the CPU load is not all that high on even the low end systems since most of the work is done by the GPU's.

Perhaps this is a case where the feature sounds nice but not having it would save a lot of problems at little real cost to the players...

Maybe this is a feature you should simply remove completely and devote your efforts to areas that could provide a noticable improvement to everyone. (Not trying to be mean/critical here) Other then all the crashing I didnt really see any differeance....

CPU load can get pretty high in big sectors with lots of ships like the Border/Hive Skirmish missions. I saw a noticeable increase in framerate when i went from an Athlon 64 X2 to a Phenom II X6 without changing any other hardware.

VO is mainly CPU bound, not GPU bound. Threading is a big difference (60% gains in some of our tests), especially with physics and collision intensive situations that represent our forward-looking goals. It's an important step forward for us, and one that is also valuable in our relationships with other tech companies (the engine threading development was subsidized by outside parties; I generally view it as a good thing if others are willing to pay for improving your stuff, without strings).

We launched threading into Linux64 with the intention of debugging and solidifying the issues and making it the standard for all versions and platforms. However, this followup was not done, leaving it buggy for too long, and I recently decided to revert it until sometime early in the new year when we can devote more time and focus to it.

Threaded VO will be the standard installation.

Seems a bit counter intuative but if there is a benefit to it....

I'm not really sure what you're saying is counter-intuitive, but yes, there is a benefit to it.

Could someone explain exactly what threading is in this context?

Parallel computing. Doing multiple things at the same time, to take advantage of multicore processors. Basically, instead of doing task A, then task B, then task C, you could have separate threads running each of those tasks simultaneously. But designing them so that they can be run that way can be tricky, since they might want to modify things that the other ones need.

TerranAmbassador - Basically it allows VO to make use of multiple processor cores. In the past it's only been capable of using one at a time even though most computers (and phones!) these days have two or more.