I think it's rather important to note that the current Vasari have had no direct contact with the mysterious foe - they have only seen the crew of the one ship that returned from the battle, driven insane, and based on that decided to flee.  So, they likely have no idea that the phase jump inhibitor is the (likely) cause of their plight, and have probably still been leaving them behind all throughout their exodus.  This makes them the perfect way to track the Vasari, if they are indeed some sort of beacon.  That the other races are now stealing and redeploying them worsens this danger, and I'm interested to see where the plot goes with regards to this.

Guys.. its in the game code.. not textures..

Nanites could be a possiblity. Maybe during the experiment of transporting nanites through phase space they became self aware and turned on their creators. The nanites are drawn to the energy of the PJI and use those to track the vasari and to destroy their creators.

We have no idea where it is

just say that instead

This is getting far too specific for the information we have.  Speculation is fine, but not to the point where it no longer follows in any obvious way from the lore.

Well of course its speculation I never said this is canon and deal with it lol. It just seems like a possibility. It could be scary watching your own creations obliterate your dark fleet and you can do nothing stop them

So I had a bit of free time and wanted to go with one of my favorite things I "found" in the textures (even if it probably isn't one of the actual chasers).  On the left is my 3D rendition of the thing selected from part of the Rankulas on the right.

Since the Steam achievement says something about ponies, I have been thinking some kind of insufferable, effete, cartoonish ponies were chasing them.  But your notion sounds cooler by far.

No, ponies is a random planet perk like Expert Crystal miners that does nothing I think. 

My bugs will eat their ponies.

Space Ponies is a joke achievement.

Volt, that is an awesome rendering.

opps wrong post...

They said it was in the game code... so its in the game code -__- it was something for modders to find.

It was indeed

but after checking EVERY .entity file

EVERY .str entry

and

EVERY .window and .brush entry

nothing came up

EDIT

and this was no search parser

I actually went through every one by hand

Also this WAS for modder's to find and in a sense it is a code, just not the computer language type. 

Regarding speculation on what has the Vasari running, just my theory.

Perhaps the beginnings of it are already here. Perhaps the salvers are slaves themselves. The Loyalist are already defeated and the Rebels are the only hope to save their kind. The Vasari home systems are completely destroyed and now there is nothing but machines and they are expanding, at the moment unstoppable.

IIRC, his words were that he was going to "encode some top secret messages in the game itself."  Interpretations of that are that it is only observable as resultant behavior (such as things only visible in-game) or it is in the code itself.  I've done my best to search through the code of the executable itself and short of decompiling, I don't think anyone's going to get any better.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90D44l8qiBM

The actual quote:

"It's my personal mission to encode some top-secret stuff into the code that's going to give you some really good hints about what's going on...and I know the modders are really smart and they always go through all our data files to try and reverse engineer and find out what everything is, so I'm not putting it in there.  I'm gonna actually encrypt it into the code so that they don't just find it right away and reveal it to everyone else."

Well, if it is in the code itself, let's consider the ways in which he could do that.  

Someone who's more familiar with it than me: if you write part of your program in assembly, what will the compiler do to it?  Does it leave some sort of indicator around that block that it was written by a human and not made by the compiler itself?  Surely they're running some optimizations when they're compiling the code so ordinary code is going to get obliterated and replaced by the magic workings of the compiler.  Writing assembly blocks manually is the only thing I can come up with that might get around the compilers.  Does anyone familiar with writing in that know if that does actually bypass the compiler magic that would completely scramble any other clues they might put in?

Anyone got any other ideas how it might be stored in the code?

They said they encrypted it somewhere where modders wouldn't instantly find it. So..

DARN IT

3 HOURS OF EFFORT

*$&^*%#&*%&*#&$*&#@*&@*&*$&*@&*$#

Not sure where that would be as im not a modder, but its definitely not in your normal area.

Zombie might know....he does software development and presumably works with Java at the very least (since he works with Eclipse)...don't know what he does with C++ though....

Just a thought. Perhaps if its encrypted in the code, maybe its like the textures of the Vasari Corvettes, in that you need to put code from one thing together with code of another.