Newspost was delayed while we gathered some info on bugs.

Vendetta Test 3.3.3 most obviously adds the new Sector 9 station into the game. Adding the new station was mostly for the purpose of performance and bug testing, rather than the station having much of a "purpose" as of yet. We made a lot of minor shader and engine changes to add the new station, and we weren't sure what sort of impact this would have. We've discovered a number of issues because of this, thanks for bearing with us while we track them down.

Other changes and additions:

Added the "Rage128 Color Hack" option in Mac OpenGL Video Settings. This should be enabled only on Rage128s, and disabled elsewhere for a performance increase on non-Rage128s.

Users are limited to sending chat messages no more than 4 times per second (to prevent flooding attempts).

Users are limited to giving money no more than once per second (preventing flooding).

Reworked Vertex Buffer code for OpenGL, should result in a slight performance increase.

Antialiasing can now be properly enabled for 2x, 4x and 6x modes in DirectX.

Changing texture filtering modes now occurs immediately, instead of requiring the game to be re-run.

Progressive Meshes are now only affected by the Distance LOD settings, static LOD objects now only use Scene LOD.

Players can no longer home in enemy stations, timeout exploit also addressed.

Multiple stations now supported per sector.

AI Bots should now target mines.

Performance Issues on Mac OS X with ATI Radeon 9800 cards, etc:
There appears to be a serious memory leak and several other problems with ATI's latest OS X drivers (available on their website), when used with the Radeon 9800. It may also affect other DX9-capable cards (9700, 9600, etc), but does not appear to affect the Radeon 8500 or earlier boards. Again, this is an issue with the latest drivers, we aren't sure if it exists in the earlier drivers which ship with OS X. We reported the bug to ATI earlier this week and have been working with their Mac driver developers to resolve the issue. We do not have an ETA from them, for the moment the only workaround we can suggest is disabling shader support in Vendetta. This requires editing the "config.ini" located in the vendetta.app package/directory, and changing

doshaders=1

to

doshaders=0

It's unfortunate and ironic that this very performance-degrading bug should appear on the latest and greatest (and fastest) hardware. But, it's not entirely surprising, given that heavily Shader-laden games are still pretty scarce on the Mac (or any platform, for that matter), so bugs are bound to be exposed by products that attempt to use newer graphical features.

As always, please continue to report bugs as you find them, even if you know the bug has been previously reported. The more information we have the better.