MMORPG Tycoon 2 News

Hi folks! This is a very small patch to handle a few issues reported with the Ruins Update.

What's changed:

• Possible fix for a rare multithreading race condition when subscribers are thinking about joining a social circle.
  
• Fixed pathfinder using vehicle paths that the player couldn't afford to use in situations where there were alternate routes that they could have afforded. (this could result in players appearing to get stuck in 'Thinking' state)
  
• Fixed a migration issue when travelling into certain complex regions if they contain completely walled-off areas which are unreachable by players, which could result in players just never migrating to those regions.
  
• Fixed slow model 'rez' effect accidentally introduced in the Ruins update. (and also improved the maths to make it cope with very large and very small models better!)
  

Big thanks to everyone who reported issues!

-T

[p][/p][p]Hi everybody! This update was originally supposed to just ("just") be a simple content update, but.. it's kind of expanded and morphed into something bigger, with a bunch of new features and AI fixes and improvements.[/p][p]Let me tell you about them![/p][h2]New stuff: [/h2]

• [p]This was supposed to be the core of this new update; we've added a new "Ruins" theme, which includes a full new functional building set, plus a new modular building set, plus several new scenery pieces! This is all unlocked via a new 'Ruins' art pack you'll find in the list of available development projects.[/p]
• [p]This was also supposed to be part of this update; almost every building model in the game has been tweaked, bringing the path markup up to date to match the newer models, adding a little flair to many of the older buildings, that kind of thing. A little spruce and tidy, along with better player movements when interacting with older buildings.[/p]

[p]And that was supposed to be it, apart from some small bug fixes. New models, fixes to old models, pretty standard for a content update between major new features.[/p][p]But then..[/p]

• [p]I fully redesigned the AI logic that subscribers use to determine how much gold they're willing to spend, with an eye to making it more flexible for players who have tuned their in-game economies and rewards differently than what I'd originally expected!
  
  With this change, it should now be much more viable to charge higher gold prices for most in-game services (buying things, travel, etc) especially as your players gain levels and accumulate more gold to spend![/p]
• [p]Based in part on discussions with players here on the steam discussion boards, buildings can now show and track multiple services, and AI players can distinguish between those services!
  
  As an example, graveyards now present two services; one service for spawning the ghosts of people who have been killed, and a different service for bringing those ghosts back to life.
  
  Previously, the first of those was just an automatic part of being a graveyard, but now it's been turned into another explicit service that's much more visible and has its usage tracked!
  
  Several other building types (inns, dungeon entrances, etc) also now have had their automatic "that's just something this building type does" functions turned into full, listed services, to make it all much more visible exactly what every building does, and how often people make use of those previously invisible functions.
  
  Of course, now being able to list an arbitrary number of services on each building and have the AI interact with any or all of them is just the first step toward several exciting new possibilities we've begun to cook up (and some of you can probably guess at a few of those future new features!)[/p]
• [p]...but the first of those new possibilities is that as of this update, any transport building (flight points, teleporters, etc) which has multiple travel paths now gets a separate service for each path they connect to, so you can now set separate prices to use each flight path, and have their individual usages tracked over time![/p]

[h3]Changes/Bug fixes:[/h3]

• [p]Fixed several major bugs in the game's pathfinding systems which were often resulting in players taking entirely non-optimal paths, ignoring roads, or even sometimes (and seemingly at random) just entirely ignoring individual transport buildings for a single pathfinding request, but then using them correctly the next time that same path was requested.[/p]
• [p]Fixed players attempting to migrate to other regions which they actually couldn't afford to migrate to (due to high prices on the travel options to get there).[/p]
• [p]Fixed players in party formation getting distracted and wandering off if they spotted a new quest giver.[/p]
• [p]Fixed players on moving ships falling off the back of the ship whenever they sent an IM.[/p]
• [p]Fixed players missing vehicle loading zones and instead standing in midair - often somewhat far away - while waiting for their vehicle to arrive, when they thought they weren't being observed.[/p]
• [p]Players no longer resist migrating to a new region just because it's a long way away.[/p]
• [p]Ghost players can now turn back human right where they are, while they are still inside the graveyard where their ghost appeared. (Previously, they would usually have to bounce around between different interaction pads within the graveyard, which looked a little weird)[/p]
• [p]"Most stable" and "Fewest cheaters" awards weren't awarding extra customer impressions as they were supposed to. Now they do! (the fix only affects newly received awards, sorry!)[/p]
• [p]Fixed several bugs which could each result in a player repeatedly "bumping" back and forth around a transit building, trying to use the building but then refusing to spend the money.[/p]
• [p]Fixed responsiveness of text entry when game FPS is low.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a region migration bug which caused migration to repeatedly fail for (rare) C-shaped regions whose geometric center point was outside the region.[/p]
• [p]Removed decorative and scenery buildings from the list of buildings in the region information window, to make it easier to see and find the functional buildings.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a bug which resulted in monsters being much weaker when not being watched.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a bug which resulted in both players and monsters being slower when not being watched and following a bent path.[/p]
• [p]Level up/down notification icons now remain visible for 1.5 seconds, down from 3 seconds.[/p]
• [p]Added a button to the "Developing tech" HUD element which will take you back to the development window, since this was a pain point for several new users who had closed the development window during the tutorial and then didn't know how to get back to it.[/p]
• [p]Moved building definition files into a new directory; this will probably break most building-adjustment mods, sorry! But because of the major changes to all the building definition files in this update, we needed to be certain to be loading the new-format building definitions, rather than files from old mods that maybe people had even forgotten they'd installed. Hopefully we won't ever have to do this again![/p]
• [p]Related to the above, we now show a simple "Active Mods" window in the in-game desktop interface if you have any mods installed. This is really just there to remind folks that they do have mods installed (if they do), to make things easier when people are contacting us for support![/p]

[p]...plus a whole bunch of other bugfixes and minor improvements![/p][p]As exciting as I think tracking multiple services separately on each building is (and I think some of you can probably guess several other things I'm planning to do with that ability in the future!), I'm even more excited for the next update, where I'm planning to add some exciting new map editing functionality, some of which has been requested for a *long* time, but I've only recently figured out how to make it work in the game without exploding our save file sizes![/p][p]I'm very much looking forward to talking again soon when I have things to show for that![/p][p]-T[/p]

Hi folks! This patch mostly contains bugfixes:

• Fixed an issue which caused some players to be unable to create new games (whilst still being able to load and play old ones).
  
• Fixed a pathfinding issue which could result in some vehicle depots sometimes being completely ignored for pathfinding requests.
  
• Fixed a possible softlock if you skipped a new release trailer while that trailer was showing the inside of a dungeon.
  
• Updated the "Unsubscribers Report" to show actual reasons for unsubscriptions. Previously we just showed the most recent negative thought of each unsubscriber, but that wasn't always (or even often) a full explanation. Now if somebody has unsubscribed because they were banned, we show that in the report. If it's because their character class got destroyed, or because they couldn't afford to pay the subscription fee, or because they thought they'd outleveled the game's current content, those will each show up in the report. Old historical "Unsubscribers Report" data from before this update will now show up as "Unknown Reason", but you'll still be able to see how many unsubscribers you had on past days from earlier builds of the game.
  
• Disabled the "dynamic batching" video option, since it was actually slowing down the game a lot when enabled, once a game got large. (I'll revisit this in future and try to find where the performance loss is happening! But until then I'm just disabling the option outright.)
  

...and a bunch of other, more minor, changes and fixes!

As always, huge thanks to everyone who reported the issues above and assisted in testing and verifying fixes!

-T

[p]Hi folks! We have a second part of the Accelerator update today, plus a bunch of bug fixes and more! Stay tuned below the changelog for an update on me.[/p][h2]Major Changes[/h2]

• [p]When we rolled out the Accelerator update two weeks ago, some players (mostly AMD users) had rendering problems, and so I hastily rolled back all the rendering-related optimizations and fixes from that update in a hotfix build. But thanks to some heroic testers whom I'll never be able to thank enough, we found the bugs and now we're ready to roll those rendering optimizations back out to everyone again, and that's most of what's in this update!
  
  Rendering data is now smaller and draw calls are now faster (and under the hood, the engine's rendering code is nicer! But probably nobody cares about that last part but me.). It's a small improvement if you compare it to the scale of savings from the CPU-side optimizations that went into the last build, but every little bit helps, right?[/p]

[h2]Other Improvements[/h2]

• [p]Fixed rare planning-related crashes immediately after destroying NPCs, Monster Zones, or after social circles disband. (we've seen about five of these reports in total over the last two weeks)[/p]
• [p]Added a game option to disable alerts about character types which don't have basic attacks. This should be considered an expert-level option, as it's basically removing the guard rails that prevent you from accidentally making character classes who can't fight at all (or who run out of juice partway through combat and then get completely stuck).[/p]
• [p]Fixed manually moving a player who is in a party which was traveling in formation so they actually get moved. (previously they ignored being moved and immediately teleported back to their party)[/p]
• [p]Fixed a visual bug in the network system which could cause some network cables to show themselves as carrying negative bandwidth.[/p]
• [p]Increased the amount of CPU time devoted to offscreen monsters, who sometimes weren't getting enough time in really
• packed* regions to keep up their combat effectiveness.[/p]
• [p]Fixed parties getting stuck if the party unexpectedly got split up across multiple maps.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a bug which could result in a toon getting stuck at a dungeon door forever.[/p]
• [p]Vastly sped up drawing the new icons used for XP, death notifications, level-up, and etc.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a possible crash if you quit the game while viewing the "Release Announcement" view.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a critical bug in text formatting of certain floating point numbers, which could sometimes cause incorrect values to be displayed.[/p]
• [p]Fixed the tool "cost" string not being visible when the "System Cursor" option is set.[/p]

[p]...and a bunch of other, more minor fixes and improvements![/p][p]As always, huge thanks to everybody who reported issues and with an extra special shout out to those who were affected by the rendering issues on certain AMD cards and helped me remotely debug what was going wrong to cause them![/p][p][/p][p]Okay, so now the update on me. Last time we talked (at the release of the Accelerator update, about two weeks ago), I had just tested positive for Covid. I've spent most of the time since then continuing to test positive, and *mostly* staying in bed and resting to try to recover. [/p][p]It seemed to be a relatively light case (as far as Covid goes), and I was feeling mostly okay apart from a lingering cough by the end of the first week (even though I was still testing positive), so I started spending an hour here or there doing little bits of work while still technically sick, which is where almost everything in the update above came from.[/p][p]On Wednesday last week I finally began testing negative for covid, but since I still have that cough I'm still mostly trying to take it easy; I don't want to risk long covid or anything like that by overdoing it immediately after recovery! (But also just resting for the whole day gets *so* boring, so I have to at least touch code from time to time!)[/p][p]Assuming all goes well, I'm planning to return to something closer to a normal work schedule and presence in the discussion boards and in our discord on this Wednesday, as the 1 week anniversary of when I first tested negative. I'm hoping that my cough clears up by then, too! But if not, I'll continue working from home until it does.[/p][p]Thanks so much for your well-wishes everyone, as well as for all the bug reports and suggestions![/p][p]-T[/p]

Hi folks! This is just a very quick hotfix addressing some rendering issues reported by a small number of players.

Big thanks to the folks who contacted us about them!