v0.17.75
Hi, everyone! I argued with myself for a long time about whether to categorise this update as a "regular update" or as a "small patch".
From a programmer point of view, this is a pretty big change! But.. from a player's point of view, maybe less so? Here's what's changed:
...and the usual collection of other small fixes and improvements!
Over the next few days I'm going to begin setting up for localisation into other languages. Then once that's ready, I'll be moving straight on to making players group up into 'parties' to adventure together as a group!
Thanks so much for all your patience while I finished all the bits and pieces on this pathfinding update! It was a silly amount of work, but I think it's improved subscriber behaviour by a lot!
From a programmer point of view, this is a pretty big change! But.. from a player's point of view, maybe less so? Here's what's changed:
- I've done an almost complete rewrite of the core pathfinding system, switching us from our old "dynamic-node A*" system to a more traditional Navigation Mesh ("navmesh") system.
It's really just a different way to figure out the best path to travel from one place to another. But it's heaps faster and more reliable, and fixes all sorts of issues like players barging straight through walls and similar issues when they were travelling to a new region.
(caveat: subscribers still don't understand the idea that there might be somewhere where they simply can't go; if the pathfinding system can't find any legal way to reach the place where the subscriber wants to go (because you've built a solid wall all the way around that landmark, for example) then the subscribers will continue to just barrel through every obstacle in their way to get there. That's a fix for a future update!) - Impassable terrain now blocks traversal in a much more reasonable way.
Previously, whole square terrain blocks were being blocked off; now we only block the actual parts of the terrain which - look* like they ought to be blocked; this means more rounded edges, etc.
- Fixed the "out of space writing in vsStore" crash, by far the most reported crash bug over the past few weeks. Apologies for how long it took me to locate and squash this bug!
- Fixed some stability issues around alert popups which referred to players who unsubscribed shortly after the alert popped up.
...and the usual collection of other small fixes and improvements!
Over the next few days I'm going to begin setting up for localisation into other languages. Then once that's ready, I'll be moving straight on to making players group up into 'parties' to adventure together as a group!
Thanks so much for all your patience while I finished all the bits and pieces on this pathfinding update! It was a silly amount of work, but I think it's improved subscriber behaviour by a lot!