MMORPG Tycoon 2 News

Hi everybody, I hope you've all had a lovely holiday period! We're back today with a somewhat larger than usual update!

Without too much ado, here's what's new:

[h2]Features[/h2]

• [h3]Sandbox Mode![/h3]We've finally added a proper sandbox mode to the game! Any game can be converted to or from sandbox mode at any time, from the "Settings" tab of the MMO's launcher. If you're in sandbox mode, you can buy stuff even if you have no money to pay for it. And that's all! Play whichever way you prefer; either in or out of sandbox mode. Sandbox mode is available for all games (including new and old games) once you've completed the initial tutorial in at least one game.
  
• [h3]Configurable Level Power Progression![/h3]Power progression has been completely rewritten. Previously, we used a linear power growth which caused players to gain too much power at low levels, and too little at high levels. Now power growth is exponential, with by default a 30% increase in power at each new level. And better, you can configure that growth amount yourself, from the Design interface!
  
• [h3]New Buildings![/h3]Adds a new suite of 'Sylvan'-themed functional buildings!
  
• [h3]New Old Buildings![/h3]A bunch of our older building models have been remodelled in this update! Same design and size, but now with stylish new triangles!
  

[h2]Changes[/h2]

• [h3]NPCs Must Be Accessible![/h3]NPCs can now only be placed onto walkable ground; it's no longer allowed to place them inside walls or other places where players can't actually reach them.
  
• [h3]Monster Zones Must Be Accessible![/h3]Monster zones can no longer be placed on mountains, or other areas where players aren't allowed to walk.
  
• [h3]Hey Buddy, Do You Like to Type?[/h3]Improved the typing experience by adding improved handling of arrow keys and adding support for control-A to select all text in a field (command-A on Mac).
  
• [h3]Blocked Building Notifications![/h3]There's now an on-screen notification if you've placed objects such that a building's entrance has been blocked and players can't figure out how to get inside. (the obstructions around some buildings are currently a bit larger than you'd expect, so it was easy to have this happen accidentally. Now there's at least a notification when that has happened! We're doing some more work toward making obstructions more closely match the shape of a building's footprint, but in the meantime this warning at least lets you know that things are placed too close together!)
  
• [h3]VIP Streamer Triggers Later[/h3]Adjusted the trigger for the VIP streamer event to happen when your first subscriber joins, instead of when you reach version 1.0.0. This makes it less likely that an enthusiastic builder will miss their Streamer event because they didn't immediately place a starting point after reaching version 1.0.0.
  
• [h3]Or Are You Just Happy To See Me?[/h3]A single run of network pipes (either cables or fibers) can now be placed across twice the distance, and may contain ten times as many curves as before.
  

[h2]Performance[/h2]

• Notable CPU performance improvements to the general maintenance of character attributes (health, mana, etc) (big improvements to locality for the data cache)
  
• Variable "tick rate" for characters on the map lets the simulation spend less time simulating characters who are just travelling and more on characters who are in combat. This makes a reasonably large performance boost especially at high simulation speeds!
  
• Optimised the engine's handling of MSAA render targets, which provides a small GPU speed boost for anyone with any kind of anti-aliasing enabled (either MSAA or SMAA)
  

[h2]Localisation[/h2]

• Added a lot more number and money formatting options, and separated them from language selection! So if you want to play in English but using Euros as currency but with the Euro symbol printed to the left of the number, that's now an option!
  
• Vastly improved the text drawn inside UI meters, for languages with longer label strings.
  

[h2]Smaller Changes[/h2]

• Spruced up various UI widgets, most notably combo boxes and tooltip windows.
  
• Tweaks to the window open/close visual effect.
  

[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]

• If a party drops to only one player remaining in it, the party now is correctly disbanded.
  
• When a party is disbanding for any reason, disband immediately; don't make everyone join up in formation first.
  
• In the "submit save to devs" interface, the "Upload" button is now disabled until you type something into the 'description' dialog. I have too many submitted saves and no clue what people wanted me to look at in them! :sadface:
  
• Fixed walls and turrets not visibly rezzing in during the initial load sequence.
  
• Fixed a terrain "overpainting" bug which could result in tiny slivers of a terrain type remaining in a region which couldn't be erased.
  
• Fixed a crash during game shutdown if at the moment of shutdown one of the game's subscribers happened to be considering travelling from their current region, through a second region, and then back into their current region again in order to reach a destination.
  
• Fixed a crash loading extremely old saves (from before March 2020) which were in the middle of the VIP Streamer event.
  
• Fixed player AI around dealing with quest-giving NPCs in multi-level regions, where they were deciding whether or not to pick up quests assuming that the quests would be of the multi-level region's lowest level, instead of looking at the actual levels of the quests.
  
• When the user destroys a road which AI are walking on, the AI now recalculate their path, instead of YOLOing their way straight over mountains and other obstacles to go to their intended destination.
  
• Fixed a crash which could sometimes happen after destroying a mountain pass or a flight path between regions if the game wasn't paused.
  
• Fixed a subtle bug which could very rarely teleport players dozens of kilometers across the map (often entirely
• off* the map), when the game was running at a very fast simulation speed.
  
• Fixed a bug which could cause one duelist to think that the duel had begun a few seconds before the other duelist, and get a couple free hits in before their opponent would react.
  

Progress is still ongoing with the big Combat 2.0 update, but I'm going to be trying to push updates over here to the main default branch more frequently than I have over the past two months; we really had a big backlog of new stuff on the 'test' branch this time and I waited much too long to finally activate it for everybody! Thanks for your patience across the holiday period, everybody! We're going to have some exciting new stuff to show off in the coming weeks. :D

Hi folks!

New in this update:

• It's once again possible to have regions support multiple levels of player. How this works is that buildings will all support the whole range of players supported by the region itself, and monster zones and elite monsters can have a level set on them when they're placed. (They can also have their level modified after being placed by selecting the elite monster or the zone and using the controls in their Info window)
  
• Updated player AI so that they'll find a correct region for their level, even if there isn't a directly accessible region of the right level. So your newly level 3 player needs to travel out of their level 2 region, through a level 1 region, then through a level 8 region, in order to finally reach a level 3 region, they'll now find that and do that (they might not be happy about the long journey, though!)
  
• Quests now are assigned a level range based upon their destination. A quest which sends people to a level 1-3 weapon shop will be a level 1-3 quest, while one that sends you to fight a level 3 elite monster will be a level 3 quest. Players will not attempt to do quests which are higher level than them, but they
• will* collect the quests and hold on to them until they've gained enough levels to do them.
  
• Monster zones now paint on with the left mouse button, and erase with the right mouse button, instead of having UI buttons to click to swap between "place" and "erase" modes.
  
• Adds 11 new achievements to the game. (yay!)
  
• ...plus a bunch of bug fixes!
  

And with this, I'm moving on to the combat system revamp that I've been talking about for a while, which should deliver improved combat editing, plus improved combat visuals and AI, as well as improved performance for games with a lot of logged in players. I'm really excited to get stuck into it!

Plus we have some new and revamped artwork coming within a few days, which I'm super excited to show off as well! :D

Hi everyone!

This is a small update with some new buildings and quality of life feature updates:

• [h2]Zoinks![/h2]Adds a suite of 'spooky'-themed buildings to the buildings list.
  
• [h2]Your party will not save you now![/h2]Fixed a bug which made it impossible to issue warnings to or ban players who were inside a party. Now you can ban people with impunity, again!
  
• [h2]Party Exploration[/h2]Fixed a bug which caused most parties to usually prefer to fight monsters in the same monster zone; now when there is more than one monster zone available, not every party should go to the same one.
  
• [h2]Explanations of Cheating[/h2]When inspecting players for cheats, cheating players now have a label drawn over their heads which actually explains what cheat they're using, and the effect it has, so you can decide whether or not you want to warn/ban them.
  
• [h2]Tier List Metagaming[/h2]Fixed the character class ratings to no longer be thoroughly dominated by the class's "health" rating. This should fix the problem of tank-style classes always floating to the top of the tier lists. Note that tier lists are only regenerated at the start of each in-game day, so you won't immediately see this change if you load into an old saved game; instead, it'll update at the start of the next day.
  
• [h2]More employees![/h2]By popular demand, the cap on number of developers and GMs has been increased from 30 to 50, for all you folks with really big games.
  
• [h2]Moving the Buzz[/h2]Moved the information about positive/negative buzz from the main header into the 'Rating' tab of the Overview report. This gives me a bunch more space to show useful information and explain what the values really mean, instead of jamming the values into a tiny meter and leaving folks to guess.
  

...and a whole bunch more localisation work, and other general bug fixes and improvements!

Next up is work on getting multi-level regions back in and working properly, and then onward to the Combat 2.0 update! Thanks so much for all your comments and feedback, everyone!

Hi, folks! Since we released the 'Party' update a couple weeks ago, we're starting another short period of smaller changes and "quality of life" features before we start work on Combat 2.0, the next major new feature update. Over the coming week or two, expect to see a bunch of quality of life improvements, plus we'll continue adding new models to the game.

New in this build:

• [h2]I don't always construct buildings, but when I do...[/h2]Adds a suite of functional buildings in a new "Elegant" theme. Also adds three new types of landmark building.
  
  
• [h2]If you love something, set it free[/h2]In edit modes, the camera is now allowed to move over unowned regions. This means that you can much more easily do fancy things like sending flight paths to travel across a water region and into a different island (which was difficult before because the camera wouldn't let you move over the water). We also now let the camera zoom out about 50% further than before, in edit modes.
  
  
• [h2]What is that other set of stairs for, anyway?[/h2]Players can now exit a starting point via either the front or the back, instead of always exiting toward the front. (They'll use whichever exit they think is more convenient for wherever they're trying to go)
  
  
• [h2]If you love something, tie it up and never let it leave[/h2]The camera is now constrained to the main map area; no more flying off infinitely over the empty oceans and then getting turned around and having no idea how to get back to the game.
  
  Sorry.
  
  
• [h2]At last I can hear myself think, again![/h2]Adds an 0.2 second delay to the "MegaTooltip" window opening and closing, so that it doesn't noisily pop up as your cursor brushes past a button on its way somewhere else, and similarly doesn't noisily close and re-open as your mouse is briefly in between two buttons while you're moving the cursor from one to the other. Did I mention that there are small quality of life features in this update? This update contains a lot of small quality of life features.
  
  
• [h2]Aah, this potion goes down smooth![/h2]I fixed potion shops so that their potions no longer look "chunky" when animating, which could get especially bad if the game had been running for a while. As part of this, I also made the potions brighter and more colorful, especially when the 'bloom' visual effect is disabled.
  

Thanks so much for your bug reports and suggestions, everyone! I'm really looking forward to getting started on all the new combat systems, but I want to knock over some of this little stuff first, since the combat system overhaul is going to be a big big change!

Hey everyone, the long-awaited Party Update is now here!

Here's what's new!

• [h2]Players now form parties![/h2]Your Subscribers can now form parties of up to four players to take on your MMO together! If you've developed the 'Parties' technology, you can enable this feature from the 'Design' window's "Features" tab, and then players will tend to gather around Taverns to form parties.
  
• [h2]New Artist, New Buildings![/h2]Adds a whole bunch of new building model variants. Almost every type of functional building now has two or three new versions of the standard model.
  
  We now have a new artist on the team, working on making heaps of new buildings and game assets, and this is just the first drop of those new assets; we're planning to continue with more regular art updates over the coming weeks!
  
• [h2]Unsubscription Report[/h2]There’s now a new “Unsubscribe Reasons” Report, which can tell you what players have given as reasons for unsubscribing from the game (along with tracking the total number of unsubscribers over time).
  
• [h2]Subscription Savings Plans![/h2]Previously, a lot of subscribers would unsubscribe when their subscription fees came due because they didn't have enough money in their daily entertainment budgets to pay the whole fee. Now, they'll save up toward the subscription fee in advance, so this should be much less of a problem!
  
• [h2]Solid Walls[/h2]Players should no longer walk through walls (or over mountains or etc), if you've completely walled off the place that they wanted to go to. (previously, if there was no legal way to reach their desired destination, they'd ignore obstacles in order to get there. Now they'll just fail to go there, instead)
  
• [h2]Littering is Bad, M'Kay?[/h2]Fixes the infamous “dropped weapons” bug, which would sometimes result in dozens or even hundreds of pure-white weapons being randomly strewn about on the landscape. (This mostly happened on larger games, when players bought weapons while out of view of the camera; the weapons were appearing wherever the character had last been visible on-screen, and stayed there until the next time you looked at the player who owned each weapon)
  

I'm really happy to have this update out for everyone to play with! Getting our AI systems to work reliably in parties was surprisingly tricky; this one is literally the third full implementation I did of the Parties feature, and the first one that doesn't terrify me to think about trying to maintain or extend in the future!

Please let us know if you encounter any issues with the new Parties functionality or with the new game assets, or with anything else in this update!

Next stop, the Combat 2.0 update!