Guild Software, Inc is happy to present the Vendetta Test, version 3.0. This version introduces a lot of new code, and probably a number of new bugs, so please keep those bug reports coming.

Major Improvements:

The game now features complete persistency. Red, Blue, and Gold "Nation" characters are spawned at their respective home stations, at the corners of a new 9-sector Universe. Many of the sectors contain space stations, with which you may dock, repair your vessel, purchase (or sell) ship addons, and trade in commodities. Each station has a commodity (currently called "widgets") in which it specializes, making long-range trade between stations a lucrative venture. Destroying enemy Robots or rival Nation pilots will also convert their bounties into credits for your use. Friendly Fire damage is not possible between members of the same Nation, giving gameplay a more team-oriented spin. Chat messages are now broadcast across all sectors. A very basic, temporary navigational aid is now present on the HUD, to help you find your way through the universe.

Graphically, some enhancements have been made for owners of recent videocards (Geforce4, Radeon 8500, Matrox Parhelia, etc). The game should still be playable for users on low-end systems, but some sectors may be slower than others. Some users of older videocards (TNT1, G3s with Rage128s) may wish to disable Environment Mapping (Video Settings menu) to increase performance in some sectors.

All scores and characters will be wiped from the database. Sorry, too many changes have been made to preserve the information. On the upside, web-posted score data should be improved in the near future.

Things That Didn't Make It Into 3.0:

The sound system still sucks, and as such, no new sounds are present (new sounds will be added after compression is added to the soundsystem, and other improvements are made).

The skyboxes (starfields/planets) are repetitive. Our dynamic skybox generation stuff is not far enough along to put into "production" yet. As such, with the new 9 system universe, we were faced with the prospect of either generating 5 new skyboxes (which would greatly increase the download size), or simply re-use the old ones from the 4 old sectors. We chose the latter, for the moment, to try and reduce the patch size.

A lot of work has gone into the new Updater, but it won't be debuting with 3.0. Soon though.

Vendetta Test 3.0 is intended to give us a fundamental base on which we can develop more advanced, long-term features. This is still, very much, an early development release. Most of the gameplay we intend to create still has yet to be made. However, this release should put us in a good position to implement and test new major features, as we move forward in development of Vendetta.