MMORPG Tycoon 2 News

Hi folks! This is a small general update with some performance improvements and some placement tool improvements. These include:

• Improved the wall placement tool to make it easier to join walls together.
  
• Walls now do a much better job at reliably building obstructions into the navigation mesh. (previously they would sometimes be truncated or have small gaps in tight corners)
  
• Vast speedups to navmesh generation, especially in regions containing a lot of walls.
  
• Fixes an issue with pasting multi-line text into a single-line text edit box.
  
• Fixed a lot of activities which weren't testing the 'island' system to validate themselves, which could result in subscribers getting stuck in a pathfinding loop, which would then hog pathfinding threads and cause other subscribers to spend a lot of time standing around and waiting for legitimate paths to generate.
  

Big thanks to everyone who submitted saves to demonstrate these issues! They made it a lot easier to track down the problems!

-T

This is a very small update which contains bugfixes to address issues reported by the community, mostly to do with destroying cross-region teleporters and vehicle paths.

We've had a few reports of crashes-on-load in the update from a couple hours ago; they pointed to trouble in one of our debug visualisations (which are all disabled by default, but were being generated whether or not they were visible). In this build I've temporarily disabled those visuals while I figure out and fix the issue. Sorry for the inconvenience!

This change has no effect on the game except for temporarily removing one of the debug visualisation options while I figure out the underlying issue.

-T

Small update this time, mostly focused around character movement. It gives us better behaviour in general, improves our "worst case" scenarios, and even slightly improves performance, too!

There's actually a *big* new system under the hood powering these changes; it was developed for use in the upcoming Dungeons update, but it gives us enough benefits on the main map that I thought I should backport it into our live build so you can see the benefits now!

New in this build:

• While idle, monsters now remain strictly inside their monster zones (previously they could wander up to 20 meters outside of their monster zones). Additionally, they should no longer walk through obstructions (walls/fences/etc) at any time.
  
  
• While kiting enemies, players would sometimes accidentally travel through obstructions or over mountains or into the sea -- this shouldn't happen any more!
  
  
• When considering what to do, players no longer consider activities which are unreachable from their current position. This fixes the old (old!) problem of players sometimes getting stuck repeatedly trying to figure out how to reach a building which was fully walled-off and inaccessible.
  
  
• Various pathfinding bugfixes and performance improvements, especially related to detecting impossible paths.
  
  
• Buffed "consult online guide" action to give a much wider knowledge of the subscriber's surroundings and made it last longer (33% chance to expire at the end of each play session, instead of a 100% chance).
  
  
• Guards on patrol no longer accidentally teach nearby subscribers to fight better; they now only provide directions, as intended. Guard directions now give region knowledge similar to that acquired from online guides (but are much faster and don't require the subscriber alt-tab out of the game).
  
  
• Fixed a rare bug which could result in a player's combat abilities getting stuck in a 'charging' state such that the player thought they were using the ability but no attack ever happened. (this would usually end up looking like the player repeatedly approaching and then running away from monsters, when they actually thought they were kiting the monsters)
  
  
• This build also contains an experimental fix to our data file format, to theoretically make them work much better with Steam's delta patching system, which should result in smaller patch sizes for future patches.
  

...plus a bunch of smaller UI bug fixes!

-T

Hi everyone!

We wanted to post a small news update for you today to give everyone a first look at the progress we've made on dungeons so far. If you're already hanging out with us on Discord, you've seen the odd sneak peek here and there, but as we get closer to putting the first part of this feature on the Test build, we thought we'd show a little of where we're at right now.

First up, a couple of disclaimers! These definitely aren't done yet. What you'll see in the below screenshots are mostly representative of what we're aiming for, but they are not the final product and are very much subject to change. It also doesn't represent everything we have planned! But we also don't want to over-promise.

Let's start by taking a look at your experience with creating dungeons!



We want this to feel like the same robust and familiar building toolsets you have in the open world, but working to the confines that are required in creating a dungeon-type space, and we're feeling pretty good about where it's at!

Now, on to what your players will see.



So, that's where we're at with dungeons right now! It's coming along nicely, and we're still confident it'll be done and with you the first half of this year (with the test build getting it a bit sooner!)

If you have thoughts & feedback for us, head over to our Discord and let us know! The whole team is active on there and we try to be as available as we can! 🙂

--Leanne