The folks at Vendetta Online have posted a progress report on their official site.

Hey everyone, a few words about recent progress and where we're headed. In my last post, I talked mostly about the addition of Voice Chat, and mentioned that we were getting back to work on more "game" oriented aspects of development. Beyond some new missions and other stuff, you haven't really seen much of this as of yet, so a few explanations are in order.

For one, the last major release (1.8.25, last Friday) put into production some of the final touches of Ray's redux of our object-handling system. This has been in the works for quite awhile, I've made mention before of "database changes" and whatnot, and this is basically what I was referring to. Prior to this, all the actual game-content definitions in our game, the ships and weapons and so on, were statically defined in a Lua file contained within the game client. Whenever we wanted to add a new ship, change the behaviour of a weapon, and so on.. we had to release a new version of the game. This wasn't really too bad, since we have a frequent release schedule, but it became rather time consuming and unwieldy to prototype and test new ship or addon definitions. Plus, it made more "dynamic" content definitions more problematic, like those that might be used under special mission circumstances, or perhaps for player Events.

Read more here.