Not quite the update we were hoping for as of the last newspost, but a good one nonetheless. Mostly bugfixes and workarounds, but with a few additional capship types (not that you see them, yet) and some changes to the Swarm Missiles. The graphics for the swarms are going to continue to undergo changes for some time yet, with new specialized cap-vs-cap versions in the works, but I think they're headed in the right direction. There's a specialized version of the Trident (the "Military Trident") which uses swarms, but is only a testbed, working towards a more significant goal.

We've been experiencing a nasty bug, lately, where sectors have been hanging due to a mysql connection error. The error, and the whole cause of the problem, are still not fully understood; but we've implemented a workaround that should keep sectors from hanging, and also notify us of further occurrences, so we can try to correlate the issue and otherwise debug what's going on. Andy had planned to be working on bot AI behaviour, but ended up spending most of his time on sectors-not-hanging, which was certainly critical. With luck, will be back on track with new content generation next week.

The Hive is coming along well, and should be in testing this weekend, perhaps seeing production sometime next week (fingers crossed).

I had hoped to have more turret defenses in place around stations this week, but I was also pulled off-task by some very high priority problems. Nonetheless, Ray and I were able to pull together some cool new features for the swarm missile system (mostly randomness functionality) which I look forward to playing with next week.

That's about it for now. Not a big update, but we'll settle for Stable. More content work next week. Thanks everyone. Brief changelog:

*** Vendetta 1.7.44

- improved swarm missiles
- bug fixes
- sectors will stop getting stuck now
- changing audio drivers in linux should actually work now