Cross-posted from News..

VO 1.8.574 includes:

- Added experimental CPU-side background-loading of collision models and textures on Windows.
- Background-loading of collision models added to Android's existing ability to background-load textures.
- Fixed crash on MacOS X 10.11 and earlier when reading the Locale.
- Changed Android model asset compression to now load more quickly.
- Added more internal analytics to the Android version, to debug loading-speed issues.
- Updated Android's background-downloading library.
- Experimentally removed localized-language warning dialogs from Android versions.

More tentative releases of major technical updates in the client, intended to make a lot of new functionality possible.

For example, while on first glance it may appear that the background-loading is primarily around performance during sector changes, it's also about adding the ability to offer more textural diversity to the universe. "Liveries", for instance, aka "ship skins", are far easier to increase in variety, and handle in large numbers, when they can be loaded in the background across all platforms. Visual differences of ships, enemies, even regions of space become simpler to accomplish, and seamlessly smooth to execute.

The final steps here will be improvements to the Vulkan, ES3 and DX11 drivers, to bring asynchronous texture updates, of all assets, completely into the GPU. That work is still on-going, and was not deemed stable for tonight's release, but should appear in the near future.

Have a great weekend, all.