0.17.49

Hi, everyone! It's been a little over a week to get here, but the long-awaited 'Abilities' update has finally landed!

Let's talk about what's new:

[h3]Add new abilities to your player and monster classes![/h3] You can now add or delete combat abilities from Player, Monster, and NPC character types; do it from the character editor's "Abilities" tab in the Design dialog.
[h3]Players can now gain abilities as they level![/h3] Each ability can now specify the level at which it becomes available. Monsters and NPCs learn these new abilities automatically, but Players need to be taught by a class trainer. Learning a new ability is very rewarding for players, and makes them happier!
[h3]Did I say 'class trainer'?[/h3] Yes I did! You can now place class trainers to train your players to use their new abilities, when they go up a level. Note that class trainers will only train players of the same class as they are, so be sure to place one for each class somewhere near wherever you’re expecting players to level up!
[h3]Did I just say that class trainer NPCs can use the same classes as players?[/h3] Yes I did! All NPC types can now use any of the available character types, whether player, NPC, or even monster. Want to have a friendly bear who gives your players quests? You can do that now! (note: "Class Trainer" NPCs can only use Player model types; NPCs and monsters don't require training!)
[h3]Did I say 'performance improvement'?[/h3] Er.. well, actually, no I didn't! But there's another big performance improvement in this build, as all our pathfinding calculations have now been moved into a background thread, and a few other expensive calculations have been smoothed out. This should give a nice frame rate boost to those really big games, and iron out the responsiveness troubles some folks had when setting the game to its highest speed in those games!
[h3]Literally half the RAM usage! (for large games) [/h3] I fixed an issue which was causing players to store their complete play history in memory, instead of keeping only the history of their most recent play session. Purging this unused historical data, on extremely large games, tends to drop our overall RAM usage in half!
[h3]Fly over the water![/h3] Players no longer die when taking a flight path over an inactive region; as long as they remain on the raven, they'll continue safely to their destination! There are still a few bits of UI awkwardness around placing such a long flight path, but it's now at least possible to use a flight path to travel to or from an island to a nearby bit of shoreline!
[h3]Super-mega-ultra widescreen support![/h3] Fixed a bunch of rendering bugs which had been affecting players with extremely widescreen monitors! I am jealous of your monitors!
[h3]UIScale improvements![/h3] For those on 4k monitors, our UIScale system is now much more reliable and should now 'just work'! I am jealous of your monitors, too!
[h3]Want screenshots?[/h3] I've added a "HUD Toggle" function that you can bind a key to, in the 'options' screen, to clear the screen to make screenshot capturing easier.
[h3]The Most Recent Save Problem[/h3] We've stopped trusting the OS to tell us what save file is most recent, and now track this ourselves, which means the game should no longer (for new saves after this build) ever pick the wrong save file, when you use the 'Connect' button!
[h3]The "Level Two" tutorial![/h3] Added a new tutorial, triggered when your first player reaches level two, to explain character unlocks, point toward ability editing and class trainers, and give some basic advice about setting up a level 2 region. Just like the game's starting tutorial, this won't appear again after you've completed it once in any save (unless you start a new game with the "Play Tutorial" option enabled)

...and there's a list about four times that long of miscellaneous bug fixes and smaller improvements! This is definitely the biggest update we've sent out so far! Thanks so much for all your patience and feedback and bug reports while I was putting all of this together!

The plan for the next big new sprint of work is going to be working on bringing back multi-level region support, and then implementing basic localization support!