People are going to need to adjust to some changes with the new client. Existing scripts and binds may need to be rewritten, for one thing. The use of the console is changing, we won't be chatting from there anymore. We are also getting rid of the DirectX 8.1 GKGL driver, and standardizing on the DirectX 9 driver. I know some people have experienced issues under DX9, so we'll need those people to give us feedback from testing with the new client. We hope to have the vast majority of problems sorted out before the client goes into production.

The new client also has a bunch of cool new features.. and will have a lot more once we can change the protocol version again (something we've avoided to date, so we can do concurrent testing with both old and new clients simultaneously). For one thing, the initial public Test should support the ability to set four different preset ship configs, to speed up the ability to buy/equip preferred ships with addons. This feature should be accessible both at the station-menu level as well as at the "buyback popup" that appears after death. This feature, along with a number of others that will come after official release (auto-calculated profit for cargo and so on) should prove to make the game a bit cooler.
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