Travel Update
Hi everybody! Thanks for your patience with this build that took a bit longer than I'd really intended! But we got here in the end! :D
[h2]New features in this build:[/h2]
[h3]Other Changes:[/h3]
[h3]Performance improvements:[/h3]
[h3]Bug fixes in this build:[/h3]
Next up, we're starting to work on the long-awaited Dungeons update! This is probably going to be a big big update, so we've planned some more content drops to land in between now and then, just so folks aren't waiting *too* long between the big new features! I've really been looking forward to getting to sink my teeth into this next big feature!
As always, thanks so much for all your patience and feedback and ideas, everyone! -T
[h2]New features in this build:[/h2]
- [h3]Vehicles![/h3]A selection of large vehicles have been added, which can provide fixed transport over long distances; ideal for transporting your subscribers between far-distant islands or over hazardous terrain! Vehicles are unlockable in the tech tree after you've unlocked flight paths.
- [h3]Teleporters![/h3]Vehicles not fast enough for you? Teleport there directly! Teleporters are unlockable in the tech tree after you've unlocked Vehicles.
- [h3]Scenery![/h3]Adds about 20 new scenery items to the game. Have you always wanted to place shipwrecks off your town's coasts? Now you can!
- [h3]Autosaving is absolutely a new feature now which totally deserves to be up in this top section wait where are you going[/h3]The game now displays a warning about 20 seconds before performing a periodic autosave, and offers to let you skip the autosave entirely, or even to trigger it immediately. Additionally, it now performs the preparatory autosave work (which requires the simulation to be paused) from a background thread, which keeps the game from feeling like it has locked up for a second, the way that it sometimes did for really large saves in the past.
[h3]Other Changes:[/h3]
- "Show All Tutorials" is now a setting you can set separately for each game, or change in between play sessions. When enabled, it will cause tutorials to play again even if you have already completed them. Find it on the 'Settings' tab of the game launcher, in the in-game desktop interface.
- Monsters no longer wait for space to clear around them before respawning. Previously they waited until there were no subscribers within 20 meters, to ensure that they wouldn't immediately aggro on unsuspecting players, but this could cause heavily farmed monster zones to simply run out of monsters because there were just too many players hanging around for monsters to have that much empty space around them. I feel like this change generally makes monster zones work better overall!
- Adds a "respawn now" button to the monster zone information window, so you can manually respawn all of the monsters in the zone without needing to use the old "change density back and forth" trick to trick the game into doing it! Caution: respawning monsters has always required bandwidth use, so respawning all of the monsters in a large monster zone can put severe pressure on your network layout!
- Adds a 'Quests' tab to the subscriber information window, which displays what quests the subscriber currently has in their list and their progression within each.
- Made terrain editing free! (yay!)
- MegaTooltips for building placement tools now select random building variants to display in the megatooltip each time they open, instead of always showing the "base" one.
- Improves complaints about buildings. Previously, any time a subscriber tried to use a building and failed, it generated a "too expensive!" complaint. But there are actually several other reasons why a building interaction might fail, entirely unrelated to cost! Now subscribers have a lot more types of thought which should give far more information about what's actually gone wrong.
- Time scales adjusted, since the vast majority of players began to have trouble running the game simulation at extremely high speeds. "Fastest" time scale has been dropped from 20x speed to 9x speed, as an experimental change to see how people like it. (I'd love feedback on this change!)
[h3]Performance improvements:[/h3]
- Dramatically improved the speed of pathfinding, which should fix the "players walking in place" problem which occasionally happened if every available background thread had become stuck in a long-running pathfinding request simultaneously.
- Improved the time taken to decide what regions could be travelled to when a subscriber was feeling crowded or outlevelled their current region.
- Fixed an issue where subscribers travelling to another region were discarding their planned path and rebuilding it every few seconds. This fix also reduces pressure on the pathfinding system!
[h3]Bug fixes in this build:[/h3]
- When taking direct control of a character, use that character's speed for movement. (Previously, a custom speed set on a character was ignored, when you took manual control over it, and a default speed was used instead)
- Fixes long, thin, meandering walls (fences, most commonly) sometimes accidentally generating small holes along their length that subscribers can pathfind through.
- Improved messaging if a file write operation fails for any reason.
- Fixes extra AI ticks being fed to both players and monsters during combat, which allowed them to spam attacks far faster than intended.
- Fixes the "kill", "heal", and "control" interaction tools to work correctly when targetting elite monsters.
- Fixes the displayed error messages for the lift and lower region tools, on the "Grid" tab of the action bar.
- Fixes class "Optimal DPS" calculation to not include damage inflicted upon oneself as part of the "Optimal DPS" value.
- Fixes adding blocks to modular buildings. Previously, with precise mouse positioning you could add blocks diagonally off of a building, which broke some of the building logic. Now we actually constrain block adding to only be directly adjacent from existing building blocks.
- Fixes parties to be less of an absolute jerk to their members. Previously, parties in "forming up" or "reforming" states would periodically check all of their members and demand they travel to the party. Now there are some exceptions; they no longer do this if the member is dead (they're allowed to respawn first before the party forces them to travel to the party), or if they're in combat (wait until they finish killing the monster before travelling to the party), or if they're on a vehicle or a flight raven (wait until they're off the travel path first)
- The game now closes cleanly and immediately if you try to close it in the middle of a load. (Previously, the game waited until the load completed before exiting)
- ...and a bunch of other minor fixes!
Next up, we're starting to work on the long-awaited Dungeons update! This is probably going to be a big big update, so we've planned some more content drops to land in between now and then, just so folks aren't waiting *too* long between the big new features! I've really been looking forward to getting to sink my teeth into this next big feature!
As always, thanks so much for all your patience and feedback and ideas, everyone! -T