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.

Michael is cleaning up the last few bugs from his Escort, Hive Hunt and Pirate missions. It's important to emphasize that these missions don't just represent individual developments.. he's basically polishing up a whole new mechanism for us to make mission-based content. Once he gets these cases working, we should be easily (and very quickly) able to make a lot of other use-cases (like say, a CtC or border-conflict type mission). I know we've promised this in the past.. with things like the much-maligned "mission editor" project of last spring/summer, but Michael's work is bearing immediate fruit, and you can even help test it on the Test server (prepend your username with test: while logging in).
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