This is mostly a condensed restatement of the last couple of months of updates, which have not been regularly cross posted from News onto the forums.

There's a quite a lot in here, not all of which has been entirely "revealed" in-game yet, but all of which tracks with our previously-stated "Development Direction" goals.

For this post, however, I'm putting more emphasis on the latest updates and how we'll continue to need people to watch out for any bugs, and please report them clearly on the Bugs forum (along with date/time/sector/device-platform).

We've recently been working on improving the collision detection system, which is both quite important, and also really complicated. There are some longstanding bugs and concerns that I want to see fixed, but also some generalized improvements that are required to let us explore certain gameplay changes.

But again, going back to the "really complicated" side of things, there's a hell of a lot of unit testing that needs to be done to make sure we don't introduce any bugs, and performance testing to make sure there aren't any regressions (collision performance has little impact on the game client, but definitely matters on the server, where collisions of hundreds of NPCs and tens of thousands of shots can get pretty complicated).

There have also been a lot of smaller "new user experience" improvements, which will eventually come together into an improve set of game defaults for different platforms, to try and help people have an easier time learning to play the game.

Anyway, please do keep an eye out for problems and let us know on Bugs if anything crops up.

VO 1.8.713
- Improved collision detection for Avalons/rockets/missiles.
- Fixed issue with incorrectly receiving Cargo Full message when the cargo isn't actually full.
- Changed 'Your cargo hold is full.' message to 'Insufficient cargo space.'

VO 1.8.712.1
- Improved alignment of name text under 2D selection box on the HUD.

VO 1.8.712
- The range of the Cargo Tractor Beam for non-capships has been extended to 15 meters, acceleration increased to 80 m/s^2, and an extra conic tractor region has been added to the front of the ship.
- Fixed rendering issue with missing shadows on certain ships on Android.
- Improved robustness of sector shutdown under extreme conditions, to fix a rare problem.
- Lua bug fixes.

VO 1.8.708
- Fixed issue with collision sound effect being played when picking up cargo in space.
- Fixed issue with '?123' button on the in-game touch keyboard not always displaying the numeric keypad.

VO 1.8.707/.1
- Fixed issue with new Third-Person Improved camera mode for capships.
- Auto-detection of Quest 3, with improved default graphical settings.
- Workaround for recent, rare issues with Quest devices, where the app loses focus on startup.
- Workaround for Quest lifecycle bugs apparently introduced by a recent Horizon OS update.
- Improved crash reporting for the Quest version, to help us react more quickly to future issues.

VO 1.8.706
- Added Third-Person Improved camera mode to PC platforms.

VO 1.8.705
- Added a new "Third-Person Improved" camera mode, selectable in the Game Options menu, intended for mobile/touch devices.
- Increased range of cargo tractor beam from 8 meters to 10 meters.
- Added more server monitoring and automatic responses to better handle certain uncommon conditions.
- Fixed several Lua errors.

VO 1.8.704 includes:
- Fixed Lua errors for new Event Advertisements in the Nav Map.
- Added accumulated "player damaged NPC" event, for Persistent Missions, tracked per-player.
- More analytics to track down a rare but persistent sector bug.
- Added more server alarms and monitoring to better handle certain uncommon conditions.
- Fixed bug with display of pre-scheduled events on the Nav Map, discovered last week.

VO 1.8.703
- Added ability to set the volume of or mute the Hit Confirmation beep sound in Audio Options.
- Added client functionality to allow Persistent Events to self-advertise their locations and schedule start time on the client Nav Map.
- Fixed issue with turret firing rate being reset when the capship owner switches turrets.
- Fixed issue with the faction standing menu showing the capship's aggregate faction standings instead of your own.

VO 1.8.702
- Improvements to allow the Persistent Event system to allow probabilistic definition of item-inventory and drops for NPCs.
- Persistent Event enhancements to permit the usage of Private Drops, visible only to individually tracked player-participants.
- Enhanced anonymous game analytics to help debug problems with new mobile users encountering interface problems.

VO 1.8.701/.1-2
- Added preliminary support for Razer Chroma RGB effects. These can be disabled from Options.
- Fixed Lua error when attempting to take a mission just as it was removed from the list.
- Fixed rare crashes in IUP and timer functions.
- Added more server-side analytics for enhanced performance analysis at scale.

VO 1.8.700
- Fixed rare lua error when the UI is reloaded.

VO 1.8.699
- Fixed crash in IUP if a radio group or frame is empty.
- Touch Mouse Look mode is now turned off when Tilt-to-Steer is enabled in the Accelerometer settings.