A number of releases on the Mankind website this month. They have partnered with Quantex to further develop Mankind. They have also released a couple of client updates and fixed a problem with Windows Vista.

Read on for the press release and release notes...

New Mankind Developer Announced

SHEUNG WAN, Hong Kong & FUVEAU, France - September 2008 - - O2 Online Entertainment Ltd. today announced the new cooperation with the french software development specialist Quantex to develop Mankind(R), it's long time massive multiplayer online build up strategy game, further and prepare the next versions of this innovative game project.

"It is a big step for us into a positive and solid future. Seeing this loved long time project continuing with a strong partner and being able to keep this gaming vision for the future does make everybody proud here at O2OE" said Samuel Ng, CEO and founder of O2 Online Entertainment. "We did invest so much time and enthusiasm into this project, which made us very sad to not being able to develop it further in the past few years. Anyway, we are looking into a very positive future now with this new partnership."

"We are proud to be chosen to develop this game due to our expertise, know how and possession of required technologies." said Pierre Couderc, COE and co-founder of Quantex. "We will endeavour, through our work, to keep for the players the same freedom and initiative they enjoyed before. We are confident to bring up actual code to an attractive format to satisfy more and more passionate players."

Mankind(R) got designed as a build up strategy war game and got initially developed by the french company Vibes SA.
In 2002, Vibes went into bankruptcy and O2 Online Entertainment Limited bought all assets as they did already market and distribute Mankind in Asia.

The initial development on Mankind started around 1996, when three friends created the company Vibes SA to develop their own MMOG dream. In january 1999 Mankind got first released and could be bought at stores all around the world. The french publisher Cryo Networks did market Mankind worldwide and Mankind went 'pay 2 play' around september 1999. During it's 'peak' in 2001, Mankind had almost 30.000 active subscribers where over 300.000 players did play Mankind world wide until today.

Mankind does currently support seven languages.

For further information about Mankind(R), please visit the official website at http://www.mankind.net.

Client Update September 4

We are very happy to announce the release of a new client update. Please find below a list of all changes:

bug / problem fixes

* splash damage calculation locked
The calculation of splash damage got locked to a fixed value and is no longer depending on the cinematic slider.
* registry path from Mankind changed
The Windows registry path to store Mankind setup details got moved from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE to HKEY_CURRENT_USER to avoid errors when trying to start Mankind without having full administrator rights.
The new registry path will be written automatically the first time the new game launcher gets started. The old setup at HKLM will remain untouched for backup reasons.
* DirectX version upgrade
The 3d-engine got slightly upgraded to fully support DirectX 9.0c and no longer crash with some new graphic cards.

game changes

* resize feature
Change your screen resolution at the Mankind launcher to play at higher resolutions either in window (still 16 bit color depth only) or full screen.
* maximum camera zoom out increased in space and planet
While the maximum zoom out in space got highly increased, it got almost doubled on planets and the the angle got slightly adjusted to get a better viewpoint.
* land and start speed increased
The speed units are landing and starting from stations on planets and space got increased.
* updated launcher window
While the lanucher got made a bit bigger to better show news it also got a nice background image.
* loading screens when changing environment
Whenever changing environments, a related full screen image gets shown... the old style text messages can always be shown again by simply pressing the escape key.
* automatic deselect on unit loading
When loading any unit into another unit, the landing units automatically get deselected and a related message get displayed.
* automatic deselect on unit repair
When any unit gets ordered to repair another unit, the related unit automatically get deselected.
* display F10 list and chat at the same time
Depending on the selected screen resolution the F10 list and game chat can now be displayed at the same time.
* new shortcut "7" to show/hide all war units
Pressing the "7" key at space or planet does now show/hide all war units within the 3d environment to reduce possible lag. However, in case of any battle all related units will be shown again.
The affected unit types are: Bomber, Destroyer, Cruiser, Intruder, Fighter, DCA
* new shortcut "8" to show/hide all civil units
Pressing the "8" key at space or planet does now show/hide all civil units (none war units) within the 3d environment to reduce possible lag.
* hide all units when base interface gets opened
All units in 3d environment will be hidden when the base interface gets opened to avoid lag on higher screen resolutions.
We have to mention that this behavior is like before but as only 640x480 resolution was available the unit hide not really got recognized as the interface opened full screen. This is why we want to mention it here again as it is a visual change not seen before.
* advanced logic on mass unit landing
When having more units selected than will fit into the desired unit not only all units to load straight away will get automatically deselected but also a dialog box gets shown to ask if you want to send the other ones into the waiting queue to land later anyway or want to keep them selected to load them elsewhere.
* advanced logic on mass factory order cancel
If you have more than one factory selected and click to cancel all orders, all orders in all factories will be canceled.
* selected unit count
The number of selected units gets displayed at top of the screen.

website changes

* submit player news available again
When logging into the account webpage you can submit player news again.