MMORPG Tycoon 2 News

Hi folks! We discussed for a long time whether this should be consider a full update or a small update and in the end I decided to call it a small update because I honestly have no idea how you'd make branding images for an update that's all about sound!

New in this build:

• Lots of sound updates! We've added an initial pass of tool sounds to almost every interactive tool in the game, and have categorised sounds into several different groups which can now all have their volumes set separately, in the 'options' window.
  
• Ambient music tracks; every so often, the game will now sometimes play an ambient music track when the camera is brought down into a populated region. If you wish, you can add your own music tracks to this system by dropping audio files into a particular directory (the game will tell you where, in the "Ambient Music Tracks" interface in the audio options). We're expecting to add more tracks to the built-in list in the future!
  
• Adjusted sound volume slider ranges, to make the full range of the volume sliders more useful.
  
• Fixes a couple of situations which could result in players getting stuck forever while waiting for a PvP opponent to arrive, if that opponent changed their mind and decided to go do something else before arriving. (this would most commonly happen if they got attacked on the way to the PvP duel)
  
• Improves the layout of the "Features" page of the Design window to make it much more obvious when features aren't available, and to explain what must be done to unlock them.
  
• The game now notices if Steam tells us to quit, and acts as if the player had requested to quit. This performs an autosave and then quits.
  
• Disabled some spammy log messages which accidentally got included in the last update.
  
• In the 'intro' animation, the game now uses your Steam display name as the pretend 'login' name, instead of the hardcoded string 'admin'. (this is the first step toward some future plans)
  
• Fixed save file submission to be more robust and handle large save files much more reliably! (previously, large save files were often being silently discarded by the server; that shouldn't happen any more!)
  

Thanks for your patience and feedback, everyone! We're going to have a content update coming really soon, and then hopefully the dungeons feature update won't be too far beyond that!

Also, there'll likely be an interim update just to get an updated copy of FMOD into the game, just as soon as they release their 2.02.06 version, which is supposed to fix a few audio issues that a small number of players have reported. I'm crossing my fingers over that one, and hopefully I'll be back with another set of patch notes really soon!

-T

New in this build:

• Fixes weapon models not being drawn (this bug was introduced in 0.18.85); the simulation was still working as intended; it was just that players who were carrying weapons didn't have those weapons actually visible in their hands.
  
• Fixes a possible crash bug when placing teleporters very close to each other.
  
• Migrated all of our image saving/loading from using SDL_Image to using stb_image (and stb_image_write). This turns out to be simpler, faster, and easier, and also removes one of our more troublesome dependencies. Also fixes a Mac bug where game thumbnails weren't successfully being saved by SDL_Image!
  
• Worked around a "freeze on exit" issue which (to my knowledge) only affected the Steam Deck.
  

Hopefully this was the last of the rendering bugs I accidentally introduced in 0.18.85; apologies for the inconvenience! Assuming no more show-stoppers, the next update should be a small content update, and then after that, dungeons!

Thanks so much for your patience and for your bug reports! I'm super embarrassed that those rendering bugs slipped into the 'default' branch!
-T

Hi everyone! This is a hotfix for an important bug that accidentally got introduced yesterday in 0.18.86, which resulted in NPC badges not being displayed, which made it harder to visually identify NPCs such as guards and quest-givers.

That's now fixed! Apologies for the inconvenience!

Will talk again soon with a proper content update!

-T

Hi folks! About a week ago we put up build 0.18.82 in which we (amongst other things) updated our FMOD library to their latest release, version 2.2.05.

Pretty quickly after that we started receiving crash reports which our crash logs seemed to show happening deep inside FMOD. FMOD has now removed that version from their website while they investigate issues with it, and so in this build we've reverted to FMOD 2.2.04, which we hope will resolve the troubles that some players have been having.

If you had FMOD troubles in the previous build, I'd be really grateful if you could try again with this update, and let us know whether the troubles are still there! I'm contemplating pulling us all the way back to an FMOD 2.1-era build; that's probably my next step if this downgrade doesn't do the trick!

Also in this build, there are a couple of very small performance improvements, a fix for a tiny memory leak (7kb per time restoring from a saved game), and miscellaneous improvements for M1 Mac users.

Thanks so much for your patience with this one, folks! It took a long time to track down what could possibly be going wrong!

-T

Hi folks!

This is just a very small update which fixes a crash that some players were having when loading certain older saved games; it was a crash which could occur if a normal or elite monster had chased a subscriber all the way into a different region, and was then returning to their spawn point at the time of the save.

We now handle that situation properly and can successfully load those saves again; apologies for the inconvenience to everyone who ran into that bug, and many thanks for reporting it so that it could be tracked down and fixed!

-T