MMORPG Tycoon 2 News

Hi everyone! This is a small bugfix/quality of life patch.

Here's what's changed:

• Global settings for monster respawning can now be set in the "Design" window's "Combat" tab. By default, monsters respawn 60 seconds after being killed, and do not check whether there are any players close to the spawn point before respawning, but either of these can be changed. The eventual goal is to make these settings customisable per monster zone, but making the global values editable is the first step toward that.
  
• Fixed a weird edge-case which allowed you to add a block to a modular building in an illegal spot. This could result in the modular building getting into an invalid state which would prevent you from further editing of the building.
  
• Adds the ability for players to explicitly try to pathfind to another region, rather than two a specific point in the other region. This fixes bugs which sometimes occurred when two regions were connected in more than one way where the player tried to enter the region via one entrance, but the pathfinder would return a path using the other entrance and then walk over to the entrance that the player had been expecting to use. Wow this is becoming a long explanation. I guess what I'm trying to say is that migration between regions is better now, yay!
  
• Adds a status message which appears in the 'Info' window for a player when you select them, if they're migrating to a different region. This replaces the embarrassing "Traveling (Traveling)" message they used to have. (seriously, how has it been years of development and testing and I never noticed that until now?)
  
• Removed some leftover old AI code which was making players believe that every other region was far more exciting and more beautifully decorated than the region they're currently inside, and so they could end up running back and forth between two adjacent regions instead of ever really playing the game. Just run back and forth forever!
  
• Fixed another cause of AI appearing to "bounce" back and forth between regions, which happened while traveling from one region to another along a mountain pass, only when the player was traveling to the other region in order to grind for another level or to do a hunt quest; if a player was halfway between regions and somebody else killed the monster that the player had been planning to kill, then the player would select a
• different* monster to attack, and back up to the start of the mountain pass, before turning around and resuming their path toward the new monster they'd selected. This could happen dozens of times, if the selected monsters kept being killed before the player managed to get all the way through the mountain pass! (this one was a surprisingly challenging bug to figure out!)
  
• Fixed the rendering of point lighting, which had been inconsistent before.
  
• Fixed the highlighting of widgets in "precise" placement mode for buildings and scenery objects. (they're supposed to highlight on mouse over and on click/drag, but sometimes it would take a second or more before the highlight was applied; now fixed!)
  
• Vehicle, Flight Path, and Teleporter placements now use the same building placement system as regular building placement. This means that you can now use the 'Z' key to rotate the buildings, or can even use 'Precise' placement mode to put them exactly where you want.
  
• Extra safety code to make sure that players won't remain in "resting" state if a monster is attacking them. (this shouldn't have been happening anyway, but there seems to be an edge case which is allowing it to happen sometimes; going to be keeping my eye on this one!)
  
• Fixed an AI bug which caused players with long-range attacks to not kite their enemies during combat, which meant that missile attacks weren't as much of a tactical combat benefit as they ought to have been. Now fixed!
  
• Improved the game's error messaging when trying to load corrupt/damaged save files.
  

...plus miscellaneous other small bug fixes and improvements!

Thanks for all the feedback and suggestions, everyone! :D

-T

Happy spooky season, everyone; we're back with another big Spooky content update!

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

• [h3]Two new modular building themes![/h3] We've added new "Gothic" and "Pillaged" modular building themes, for all your spooky village needs!
  
• [h3]A new functional building set![/h3] We now have a new "Corrupted" functional building set, which contains corrupted variants of some of our favourite building models!
  
• [h3]Set sail with sinister seagoing spectres![/h3] Adds a new 'ghost ship' vehicle to the unlockable Vehicles system!
  
• [h3]Spooky scary scenery![/h3] Adds lucky number 13 spooky new scenery items, including candles, cauldrons, summoning circles, and more pieces of thematic set dressing!
  

[h2]Other Changes:[/h2]

• Remodeled the "Civilised Tavern" model to better match the visual style of other "Civilised" buildings.
  
• Fixed subscribers occasionally falling off depot platforms when they noticed a new quest giver nearby.
  
• Fixed several bad edge cases while triangulating polygons, which occasionally was causing problems for terrain generation or navigation mesh generation.
  
• Renamed "Shops" to "Market Stalls" and updated the tutorial messaging, to make that step of the tutorial less likely to cause confusion for new players.
  
• Fixed "Bard" and "Knight" character model prefabs, which were missing data for where tails should go.
  
• Fixed "Chicken" and "Tortoise" character model prefabs, which were missing data for where hats should go.
  

...and of course a whole slew of other little bug fixes!

Additionally, we're running a little screenshot competition alongside this update, over on our Discord server. Check over there for more details!

So now that we've had our treats and our tricks, it's time for us to set our sights back toward Dungeons!

As always, thank you to everyone for your continued enthusiasm, feedback, and ideas, and hopefully we'll be back with another update not too long in the future! -T

Hi folks! This is a very small patch with a couple hotfixes for the Travel Update which went up yesterday.

These are:

• Fixed subscribers falling off vehicle depot platforms if they noticed a new quest giver NPC nearby.
  
• Added some extra safety checks in pathfinding, to cope with the destruction of buildings while a pathfinding operation was ongoing in a background thread.
  
• Converted a few minor errors from being treated as fatal to merely outputting a message to the game's log.
  
• Updated the German localisation data.
  

Thanks so much for all the support and feedback, everyone! -T

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]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

Hi folks!

This is just a hotfix update. Updates in this build:

• Fixes a crash which could happen if you selected a scenery item on the very same frame as pressing backspace.
  
• Fixes some spurious error messages which sometimes got displayed while placing NPCs.
  
• Fixes a handful of missing triangles on the south face of the 'arid landmark' building.
  

Thanks for reporting those issues, everyone!

-T