VO 1.8.199 includes:

- Bots no longer drop cargo if they are not damaged at all by players. If a player damages a bot but does not destroy it, cargo is still dropped.
- Nation choices are now randomized in the Character Creation menu.
- Added support for Android devices with PowerVR graphics.
- Further reduced raw materials needed to manufacture the Trident.
- Trident Type M cargo expanded to 600cu.
- Mass of Fused Composite Plating significantly reduced.

Bot Drops - We had developed a bit of an issue with people "farming" bot drops by having NPCs fight one another, and keeping the sector artificially "alive" by flying out into the distance. This was both troublesome for my ability to create rare drops that couldn't easily be farmed, as well as a load on the server (some of these NPC battles are pretty intensive, meaning server resources are being used where no one is actually playing).

Thus, the solution was to have bots only drop items when they have sustained damage from a player character. We didn't do that originally, in the interest of maintaining a kind of "equality" between PC and NPC characters, but it really wasn't worthwhile given the later tradeoffs.

Trident Changes - Hopefully this will make the tridents more easily constructable. We are planning more capship changes, but all development has to be juggled by immediate priority. To get a more complete list of what changed in the Trident Type M build tree, see this Suggestions Forum thread.

PowerVR support on Android - This is a big deal, and has been a long time coming. We had to put in quite a bit of work to make this happen, along with support from our friends at Texas Instruments (OMAP CPUs) and Imagination Technologies (PowerVR GPU series). We now support all the major game-capable Android chips, with the exception of ARM's problematic Mali GPU (Galaxy SII, etc), which may work with uncompressed textures. Currently, our official support includes NVIDIA Tegra, Qualcomm Snapdragon and now PowerVR (TI, Samsung). We welcome testing and reports (good or bad) posted to our Android Forum.

Happy Thanksgiving! - To all our US-based players, and frankly all our friends everywhere in the world. We have a lot to be thankful for. All the best.

This will be the planned "release" for this week (barring major bugs). Some of us have family events on different days, and while we'll still be working, this will probably be it for content changes until next week.