MMORPG Tycoon 2 News

Hi folks! This is our traditional post-update 'hotfix' build after a regular update to catch stuff that wasn't caught during testing.

This time we have:

• Tweaking navmesh generation just slightly. We're seeing a lot fewer navigation mesh problems than in previous builds, but it hasn't gone entirely to zero yet, so this is just tweaking the procedure a little to see whether we can't minimise those issues.
  
• Fixed the "click and drag mouse to rotate" building placement interface when angle snap is disabled; it was feeling very weird and unresponsive in the last build. Now fixed to be like in previous builds!
  
• Fixed an string in one of the help messages which was using the wrong localisation key.
  

Oh.. and this build also adds four new wall visual styles! So I guess maybe it's not only a 'hotfix' build as I first said! ;D

Thanks for your patience and support, everyone! Next up on my list during the Creativity Spike is going to be a revamp to scenery placement!

-T

Hi folks! This is part two of our "Creativity Spike" updates, this time focused on the long-neglected "Set Dressing Buildings", now renamed to "Modular Buildings".

Major updates:

• "Set Dressing Buildings" renamed to "Modular Buildings".
  
• Tools for editing Modular Buildings have been consolidated into a single action bar button with its own tool palette, and have been moved to the Building tab of the action bar.
  
• Modular Building tools have been updated to the newer UI styling used by most other tools, and a whole raft of bugs were fixed in them.
  
• Quality of life improvements to the Modular Building tools, including a visible brush showing exactly where a block would be added or removed, and where an entrance would be added or removed, when using those tools, plus explanatory text when a block cannot be removed or added somewhere.
  
• Adds 'grid snap' and 'angle snap' options to the game's general placement logic (currently only accessible for modular buildings, but this will be added to other tools in near future Creativity Spike updates!)
  
• Separated "Scenery" objects out into five separate categories of scenery items, with separate icons on the 'Scenery' action bar, to make it much easier to find the particular objects you're looking for.
  
• Big performance improvements to pathfinding cancellations. When pathfinding requests needed to be cancelled (either due to somebody being attacked by a monster and switching into a combat mode, or due to the player changing the contents of a region in a way that would invalidate pathfinding results), it was possible for the game to get stuck for a little while trying to cancel those pathfinding requests safely. This is now handled in a much faster, and even safer way!
  

Other updates:

• Modified how subscribers value gold when choosing whether to spend their money on for-pay flight paths, so that players with lots of gold should now be willing to spend more of it on flight paths than they were before. This makes valuations for gold prices work more like how valuations for real-money prices work, where people with more are usually willing to spend more.
  
• Fixed a crash which could occur during a load, when the saved game somehow had alive subscribers located inside an inactive region.
  
• Elite monsters now award double XP when killed.
  
• Misc UI fixes around wall and building placements.
  
• Adds a subscriber thought if they decide that a flight path is too expensive.
  
• Stopped AI from even considering taking a flight path to another region (for the purpose of reaching a correct-level region, or for avoiding crowds, or similar) if that flight path is too expensive for them to be able to afford to take it.
  
• Updated FMOD library from version 2.00.07 to 2.01.10.
  

...and the Creativity Spike updates roll on! Hopefully I'll be back in a couple days with the next one. :D

Thanks so much for all the feedback everybody!

-T

Hi folks!

This is a further patch for a series of relatively rare crash bugs that have been reported over the past few days, involving the placement of walls. There should be no big obvious changes in this build!

We've also tweaked some error messaging, as we've seen a surprising number of people getting errors when the game tries to access their saved games, due to permission errors; as though the OS had set their saved games so that they didn't have read access to them. (I honestly don't know how that could happen; maybe 'Run as Administrator', and then trying to load the saves from a non-Administrator account?)

Thanks for your patience with these teething issues, everyone!

-T

Hi folks! This is a hotfix patch for the 'walls' update, containing these fixes:

• Fixes erroneous claims of walls being 'obstructed' when they're precisely parallel to other walls (most easily caused when the "angle snap" placement option was enabled)
  
• Various fixes to wall placement, particularly re: placing multiple separate walls without deselecting the tool in between, walls snapping to other walls and enforcing minimum wall lengths.
  
• Fixes cursor collisions vs. walls to more closely match their visible model.
  
• Improvements to navigation mesh generation (especially in the corners of tightly bending walls)
  
• Fixes display of addiction status in the player information windows, which was actually displaying completely the wrong message (claiming that players were addicted when they weren't, and that they weren't addicted when they were) because I was being too clever by half and confused myself when setting up those messages for localisation! All fixed now!
  

...and miscellaneous smaller fixes. Many thanks for your patence, everyone, while I sorted out these kinks in the system!

-T

Edit: Added one more fix to this a few minutes later, fixing a potential crash bug if you took control of a character, and then destroyed that character, and then took control of another character.

Hi folks! With this build we're starting our "Creativity Spike" series of small updates which update the game's placement and creation tools.

First, up, walls!

Headline features in this build:

• Walls now use real models! When selecting the wall placement tool, you're now given a palette of wall styles to select from, ranging from the old castle walls (now with battlements!) to fences and even giant walls of ice.
  
• When placing walls, you can now optionally lock them to specific angles, and choose whether they should snap together.
  
• Big improvements to the model palettes used for most model pickers, so far less scrolling is required to find things. (Exception is the Set Dressing buildings, which will receive the same fixups in the next update)
  

Other notable updates:

• Nerfed the 'Social' MMO type's starting stats to bring it in line with other types:
  - Hugs 15->14
  - Gibs 2->1.
  
• Quality of life improvements to the UI for changing quest destinations.
  
• Fixed a bug where AI were repeatedly failing to do quests to kill elite monsters.
  
• Dramatically reduced RAM usage while loading really large saved games.
  
• Fixed a bug which was generating "These monsters are too easy" thoughts when players completed a quest which had been given a 0 XP reward.
  
• In the "Player Info" window, we now show total logged in time using simulation time, not real-world clock time.
  
• Adds a slider to the ability editor, which lets you display the ability's effects at different player/monster levels.
  
• Improved comically bad "Optimal DPS" calculation for classes. (It's still not doing quite the right thing to estimate DoT attacks, but it's a whole bunch closer than before!)
  

...plus a bunch of other small improvements and bug fixes!

We should be back soon with set dressing building updates in the very near future, and then more exciting new stuff shortly after that!

-T

EDIT: Just pushed out 0.18.1, which contains a hotfix for a bug regression which made it difficult to change the name of combat abilities. That should be fixed now!