VO 1.8.572 includes:- Improved startup load time on Android.- Android version now includes descriptions of what is being loaded at startup and has individual progress bars for them.This is one of those “minor looking” releases, which understates both the long-term value it adds to the game, and the complexity of development required to implement it.Just on measured Android load-time improvement, we’ve gone from an average Android startup-time of over 40 seconds, to somewhere under 15 seconds. In itself, that’s a pretty big deal, and we aren’t even done improving that yet.This is very important, because a lot of Android users appear to install the game to cheap MicroSD cards, which are quite slow. The game prefers installation to “internal” memory on devices, which is almost always faster; but a lot of people want to save the internal space, and they move the game without understanding the impact that will have on performance (at startup, between sectors, and elsewhere).So, we’ve gone to some lengths to try and speed up the loading of the game overall, partially because it is critically important for brand-new users. A lot of new players will just “bail out” and uninstall a game that takes too long to load the first time, something we’ve seen from our analytics.But, overall, these improvements will be helpful to all platforms in the future, as we are simply using Android as a test-case for improving performance everywhere.Faster loading doesn’t just impact game startup times, but also loading times when someone *else* jumps into your current sector, or moving between sectors. It brings us closer to possibility of “no loading on jump”, particularly with improvements to asynchronous “background” loading that are currently in development.All of that opens up a lot of possibilities, in terms of changing the assets and universe of the game, and important aspects of future gameplay. It fits in with the “network streaming” functionality that was added in 2020 to improve load-times. Both features work together to enable a more persistent, immersive and complex universe.