MMORPG Tycoon 2 News

Hi folks! This is a small update which is mostly for the Mac side; someone noticed that although our store page said that we require OS X 10.9 in our Mac build, our game actually required OS X 11.0 (which is a much bigger difference than it sounds like; the equivalent on Windows would be like us saying on the store page that we require Windows 98 but actually requiring Windows 10).

That's now been fixed! On Mac we now require OS X 10.10 (which is what's required by Steam); store page update is incoming!

Other updates:

New in this update:

• While editing combat abilities, we now simplify the combat ability after every edit. If you reduce a damage effect amount to '0', we remove that damage effect entirely. (You can add it back if you wish, though!) This fixes some issues we had with ability classification, where an ability with a 'damage' effect set to zero would still be classified as an 'attack' and by used and evaluated that way by the AI.
  
• When adding an ability effect to a character, healing ability effects now default to a heal amount of '1' (previous default was '0', which caused problems for the change above)
  
• Fixed a single-frame visual flicker in the game's "grid view" UI widget, which was most notable in the ability editor UI whenever you edited an ability.
  
• Fixed an important data initialisation error which could sometimes cause problems during a load, for some folks with computers of a very specific speed and whose computers were under a very specific amount of load. (multithreaded timing bugs are the
• best*!)
  
• Fixed z̵͝a̷͊l̴͂g̸͒o̶̒ text in the crash reporter.
  
• New log file format, and the logging starts earlier during game startup so that we don't lose some critical log lines that were being lost before.
  
• Adds a simple profanity filter, which screens the procedurally-generated names used by newly created players. Note that this filter only runs at the time that a new character is created; any already-generated names in saves or names manually edited by the player are
• not* currently being checked against it.
  

And with that.. I'm back onto working on dungeons! :D

I'm hoping to talk to you all a lot more about that soon!
-T

Hi folks, it's another relatively small patch dealing with miscellaneous small issues reported over the past few days, plus a couple small bits of new content!

New in this build:

• Owl flight points have been added! For when you'd rather swoop on silent wings rather than ride on the back of a giant crow! (requires 'Flight Paths' tech to be unlocked)
  
• Fixed the crediting of hunt quest kills. Previously, players only received credit for quest kills if they were standing inside the appropriate monster zone at the time they killed the monster. This meant that long-range players sniping into the monster zone from outside weren't getting quest credit for their kills! Now fixed; killing a monster which is from a particular monster zone now always awards quest credit, regardless of where the monster or the player are currently located.
  
• Some moderate speed and memory improvements during the load of large saved games.
  
• Fixed the visible title of the "Design" window when it's opened again after last having been closed while in a character-edit mode.
  
• Improved the data sent to us in crash reports on Windows.
  

...and miscellaneous other minor fixes and improvements! Thanks so much for your comments and feedback everyone!

-T

Hi everyone! This is another small set of hotfixes for recent updates, while most of my effort is still going into dungeons.

New in this update:

• Fixes crash reporting on Windows (one of two crash reporting mechanisms was failing!)
  
• Fixes fallback code for moving files. (in the event of errors while saving files, we have multiple fallbacks, and the
• third* fallback case had a bug in it which caused it to always fail. I've heard from just
• one* player who I think was hitting this situation!)
  
• Adds an "enable gamepads" checkbox to the game options, defaults to enabled. If you're having trouble with a drifting gamepad causing the game's camera to move around, you can turn this checkbox off and the game will disable all gamepad functionality. (previously, we always recommended people to unplug those gamepads, but now you can just make the game ignore them instead)
  

..plus some other miscellaneous bug fixes and localisation updates!

Thanks for all the bug reports and feedback, everyone!
-T

Hi folks! This is a very small patch with a couple hotfixes for the content update which went up a couple days ago.

[h2]New in this build:[/h2]

• Fixes a bug which caused some scenery items placed during builds 0.18.99 or earlier (basalt columns being one major instance) to convert into a different scenery item during load. Loading save files from 0.18.99 and earlier now correctly preserves those scenery items! (note that if you load a save which had already converted the scenery items into different types, that conversion will remain. To fix, you either need to re-place the intended scenery types or load an older save from before the conversion happened. Apologies for this trouble!)
  
• Players can now survive moving entirely off the map if they're on a flight path or on board a vehicle. (this still isn't great; there are problems calculating whether they're visible while they're over there, so they may unpredictably pop in and out of being drawn, but at least it's sort-of working now!)
  
• Fixed a crash bug which would happen while loading a saved game containing a dead player who was off the edge of the map.
  
• Players who die off the edge of the map no longer get stuck there; now, they respawn at the nearest owned region containing a functional respawn point.
  
• Fixed displayed version number in-game (which was showing the back-end build identifier instead of the public-facing one)
  

Thanks for your patience, everyone! I'm embarrassed that the 'changing scenery props' bug made it through testing without being caught, but at least I've got a good solve for it live now! Thanks so much to everybody who reported these and other issues, and submitted saves demonstrating them!

All the best,
-T

Hi folks! It's been a while since our last big content update, and we're making up for lost time by adding this drop of more than sixty new scenery objects for decorating your worlds, plus miscellaneous bugfixes and other game improvements!

[h2]Here's what's new:[/h2]

• [h3]All the plants![/h3] Did you want mangrove trees? Savannah trees? Mighty redwoods? Flowering vines? Venus flytraps? We've got something for everyone in this update with more than sixty new scenery objects added to the roster!
  
• [h3]New costumes![/h3] We've added a new "Fungoid" costume prefab and a new "Mantis" costume prefab, each of which works great either as player models or as monsters on their own, or (even better) mixing and matching them with other costume pieces to make your own unique chimeras.
  
• [h3]Better speed hacks![/h3] Speed hackers were inconsistent in the game before; now their speed hacks are always active, whether they're new players or old players, and whether they're on ground or on a flight path. This make speed hackers a lot easier to see without using any special tools!
  

[h2]And here's what's changed:[/h2]

• Players now complain about dying less frequently. Previously, they would lodge a "I'm dying too often" complaint if they died even once ever for any reason. Now, they only complain if they're killed in PvE multiple times in a row, and never complain about deaths within PvP duels.
  
• I've made under the hood modifications to our 'addiction' system which I'm going to be all coy about and not explain except to say that I'm happy with the adjustment and it should make it a little easier to wind up with players who are both happy with the game and also addicted to it at the same time.
  
• Finally found and fixed the longstanding bug which could result in repeat streamers sometimes logging out of the game immediately after logging in at the start of their stream. (this would only happen for streamers who were streaming the game for their second time, and mostly only happened for streamers with a negative addiction level)
  
• Fixed some audio issues with the terrain editing and monster zone editing tools.
  
• Made some small improvements to our save process which should make saving slightly faster and use slightly less memory during the save. (there's still a lot more work to be done here, but this was a good first step!)
  
• Fixed crash reporting on the OSX build.
  

...and all that plus a whole heap of smaller bug fixes!

Just as an update on us; our development's been a little slower than normal over the past couple months because we've been in the middle of a big office move (which hopefully should complete next week!) and so we've all been working from home on really weird schedules. But we're still making progress on the big Dungeons feature update, and I expect we'll begin to show some preview screenshots of that over the next couple of days; it's by far the biggest new feature I've ever added to the game, and it's requiring a major restructure to all the rest of the game just to accomodate it! I'm so excited to be able to show you all what I've been working on!

All the best, and we'll talk again soon,
-T