VU 0.5.7 - Silent But Deadly

Hello Everyone, and welcome to the official release of VU 0.5.7...

"Wait, what?... What happened to VU 0.5.6?"

Well... To keep a long story as short as possible, we released the 0.5.6. version silently as a sneak preview to a select group of our most fanatic supporters. Our reasoning behind this was that we still had a lot of things to test, which could have taken us another week or so to get it ready for an initial launch. With all the people on IRC eager to test the new version we decided to test the essential mechanics ourselves, and call in the troops to test the rest.

Despite some hesitation on our part this turned out to be an excellent choice. Especially thanks to all of you who filed bug reports and provided feedback, we were able to track and fix most of the big issues present in 0.5.6.

This approach also provided an opportunity to test our first patch release, which went so smoothly that we're thinking of ways to build it into the client. The only downside to all of this was that we had to increase the version number to 0.5.7. for
consistency with our version checker. And that is the story about the VU with the shortest lifespan in the history of Project Ion...

Before continuing with the dry release notes I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all the bughunters and feedbackers for helping us deliver so many improvements in just a few days. Your help is very much appreciated and we tried to prove it by slipping a fresh radar design into VU 0.5.7.

release notes 0.5.6 - 0.5.7

- fixed: The window state is now remembered correctly between sessions. (full screen/window mode)
- fixed: Latitude and Longitude are now displayed correctly. (were switched around)
- fixed: Receiving damage from a mob which is attacking another player.
- fixed: The top-down reviver is now working as intended.
- fixed: Textarea used to enter amounts only accepts numerical input again. (got bugged after engine upgrade)
- fixed: Mob AI was changed to improve positioning and preventing mobs to go through the floor.
- fixed: Prevented cursor toggle while dragging GUI elements to prevent the loss of windows.

- changed: Distribution of items in loot and resources in mining claims. (ongoing balancing)
- changed: Increase life expectancy for weapons and tools, improved efficiency balance.
- changed: More efficient networkcode avoiding network instantiates. More improvements to follow.
- changed: Friends list limit increased from 25 to 45. (per request)
- changed: Improved the positioning of GUI windows on screen size change. Customized GUI Layout is not (yet!) persistent between sessions.

- new: Three separate chat channels accessible from the chatwindow. (Global, Local and Team)
- new: The 15 most recent messages sent can be recalled using the up and down arrows while chatting.
- new: Three new alien species were discovered. (Big thanks to Kalamona for kindly donating these assets.
- new: A message when "The End of the World is near". Now there's a feature!
- new: Project Ion Dinar was added as currency with the Ion Bank providing credit backed by gold and silver.
- new: Mister QuickFix took over the basic items market selling basic weapons and tools at costprice.
- new: The Pwnshop buys and sells items applying a small fee. Basic items can be sold here but won't be offered for sale.
- new: Capture screenshots using F12. The capture will be confirmed by printing the save location in the global chat.
- new: Unity engine updated to 4.0 to use (limited) hard shadows. A very nice gesture that we hope to see more of...   
- new: Items, Icons and pickups. Scavenge around for freebies and gather a nice startup budget selling to the Pwnshop.
- new: Radar was redesigned as thank you to our supporters and another step towards more eye-candy.

This list could be a lot longer though we think some things might be more fun to figure out by yourselves. There are bound to be more bugs crawling about somewhere so we'll keep an eye out for your reports and release more patches in the next couple of days.

Thanks again and we hope you enjoy VU 0.5.7.

TestBuilt Development Crew.