We’ve been pretty silent on development for the last few months, and I wanted to take a moment to shed a little light on a few of the things you may see in the near future.Several projects have been taking up development time, some of which are externally-related projects that are still secret, and others have been a critical “cleanup” and housekeeping of certain game related features. The process of building and releasing a game across so many platforms can be challenging, so some work to make the system more manageable was sorely needed. We also have some servers that require upgrades, and other chores that take up time, but don’t directly impact the game in any visible way. We did a lot of this work over the past summer, and while some of this work is still on-going, at this point we’re aiming to dig more deeply in gameplay-related changes.So, without further ado, here are a few of those projects in the works (for the next few weeks):New ships, new graphics assets. We’re making changes to the engine to allow us to do a lot more dynamic creation of graphical assets, to better depict a particular enemy pirate clan, or allow a player to configure the “look” of their first constructed station. Our initial experimental implementations of this are the Vulture and the Trident, which have not yet debuted, but hopefully the “new” Vulture will be showing up in the near future.Perhaps the most important aspect of this development is that we’ll be able to create a lot of content procedurally, without increasing download size and even minimizing impact on client memory overhead. That’s always been a big struggle for us.. the desire to add a lot of cool looking stuff, to give people more “unique” looking content, but without ending up at a 30GB download like other well-known MMOs.Lots of bugfixes, some of them greater, others smaller. This spans the distance from gameplay that has had broken aspects for a long time, all the way to low-level architectural improvements to make current and future gameplay possible. A few examples: capship battle scalability, making AWACS radar work properly (a feature of player-capships that is important for the future), etc.Long-requested feature implementations. Again, some bigger and some smaller, but even the smaller ones could have major ramifications to the universe. Example: fully persistent mines, no longer requiring the player to be present in the given sector. The mines will persist across sector restarts, be destructable by anyone, and will still impact the faction standing of a remote player in the same way as if the mine-laying player had been present for the “kill”. Overall, we think mines will open up a lot of interesting tactical potential with minefields, and defense of conquerable assets, will also play into..Expanding the very nature of weapons and armo