14 DAY TRIAL // Vendetta Online is an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) developed and published by Guild Software Inc. Its makers are working on a major upgrade for the rendering engine and the first results are starting to show.
Vendetta Online have been growing steadily in the past couple of years and the developers have improved the game constantly. They are releasing updates almost on a weekly basis and some of those upgrades have been quite important. They recently pushed a new OpenGL 4 renderer for their game and they are making good progress with it.
Some of the changes they intend to make are actually quite ambitious, like near-infinity visibility, soft shadows for everything, and a much better experience for all the platforms, including Linux. As you can imagine, this will take a while and it can't be done overnight. The good thing is that they have regular upgrades, so all of these features are not as far away as they seem.
Developers explain how the game will change
Some users might think that it's easy to upgrade the engine of a game, but things are not all that simple especially since this is an MMO with a large surface area. Ships, objects, space stations, and all kind of items interact constantly in a living world, so they have to make sure that the changes they make don't break anything.
"There are some particular challenges that we face as an open-world game set in space, with sectors of unlimited scale. Shadows maps, for instance, have a set resolution and need to cover the entire viewable terrain. For most games, even some recent 'open world' shooters, that's still relatively modest compared to even our (current) view distance. Since 2002, we've had a 20 kilometer far-Z, which (for reference) would let any current player's view encompass about 3x the entire gameworld of Skyrim," wrote the developers from Guild Software.
Players who already have the game installed can just perform a regular update. If you want to download Vendetta Online right now you can get it from Softpedia. Please keep in mind that this is just a downloader and that the game needs a constant Internet connection.
