*** Vendetta 1.8.290
- Replaced some asteroid chunks with higher resolution models and textures for the Win/Mac/Linux versions.
- Added support for Oculus Rift HD.
- Oculus Rift is no longer required to be in mirror display mode. It should now auto-detect the secondary display.
- Added code to the experimental sector code to try to identify why sectors are being randomly lost.
- Fixed a crash bug when exiting early from the offline tutorial and attempting to log in.

I rather like the new roid textures. Thanks devs.

Yeah the new roids look awesome. Especially Jallik C-12 :)

They do seem to change color pretty drastically in the distance though. Is that some kind of anomaly with the LOD setting and lighting on the more complex models?

I've got my distance detail all the way up...

I believe the LOD meshes' UV texture coordinates are not exactly the same so there may be some noticeable popping, but otherwise they are supposed to be using the same textures and lighting.

Do you guys already have it figured out or plan to fix it?

It's an asset change. I didn't personally test these assets prior to release. They are being fixed.

I'm not sure I like these new silicate roids (the carbonic ones are fine). I think the problem is the discrepancy between the texture and the sharp edges of the models. When they seemed smooth, the sharp straight edges were easier to believe. Now that they look all rumply, it creates more dissonance with the edges, even if the edges are a little more jagged.

Then again, it's also possible you've simply undone four years of desensitization, so I dunno.

I know what you mean, although we're going to be using a variety of different textures on those same model assets. So, for me, the trade-off is sufficient when amortized over a larger variety of textures and situations (for instance, the same objects may appear as "ice crystals" as well). Plus, there is a lot more surface detail, and I think the value of the assets will be increased when we add dynamic lighting.

Plus, if we wanted to really make the new textures "perfect" for the respective object, we would need to make them specific to each object (much as they are with the "bone" asteroids). The memory requirements would go way up.. instead of, say, 10 objects using 3 textures (diffuse, normal, specular), you would have 10 objects *each* with three textures.. 10x the amount of resident memory and download size. I'm not against using up a lot of memory and increasing download size for the PC version, but I guess for now I would rather spend it on other assets (space stations, etc).

We can always drop in "custom, per-object" textures as well, at a later point. The dynamic asset management stuff we've added gives us a lot of flexibility.

Anyway, like everything it's a work in progress.. it at least removes the "super-low-poly" silhouette issue that so many people seemed to complain about.

I really wish I'd stop seeing updates about how things look, and start seeing updates about what things are in the game.

Then again, that's been the way of things since I joined in 2005, so I'm not wishing too hard. Might strain something.

Why is it that people think artists need to be able to magically program up new gameplay content?

Everyone other than Curt is working on exactly what you would (probably) want. Either direct content, or things that critically need to be fixed to allow bigger/better content (debugging no-hit problems, etc).

The no-hit issue was by far one of the bigger frustrations to veteran players in the game, I thought it was worthy of a real try at fixing it. Which we kinda did, except the sectors were crashing, except we found a way to kernel-panic the host OS, except 17 other things we have to work through.

This kind of complex debugging-development is not very predictable. We originally intended to just spend a week on it..

Those of us who play really appreciate the no-hit fix, Inc. :)

We've had at least a week of battles now where even with bunches of NPCs and capital ships involved, things still run relatively smoothly.