MMORPG Tycoon 2 News

Hi folks! This is the final update in our current Creativity Spike series of updates; there will be more Creativity Spikes in the future, but after this update we're moving our attention back entirely onto core game features and mechanics!

Here's what's new in this build:

• Adds more than 60 new placeable scenery items!
  
• In simple placement mode, you can now place scenery items on top of or against other objects in the game world, and can optionally orient them to match the surface they're placed against.
  
• In "precise" placement mode you can now freely rotate scenery items along any axis, and can lift them up into the air or sink them down into the ground.
  
• Scenery items can now be drastically scaled up and down.
  
• Fixed the default scales of several older human-scale scenery items to actually be closer to human scale. (Note: This only affects newly placed instances of those items; already-placed ones will retain their previous size, so that folks who have been making sculptures from scenery items won't have those sculptures broken when loading the save into this new update!)
  
• Modular building themes now support special wall models at ground level. For themes which use them (right now these are the arid, fortress, elegant, and village themes), existing modular buildings placed in a save will be converted to use these new ground-level walls during the load.
  

Notable bug fixes:

• Fixes a bug with modular buildings which resulted in underhangs never being removed even when they were no longer needed.
  
• Fixes the centering of modular buildings. (The calculated center point was previously being offset by about 6 meters)
  
• Fixes a tutorial non-progression bug which allowed the instantaneous destruction of the last respawn point in a region, even though the UI was indicating that it couldn't be done at all.
  

...and a bunch of other smaller miscellaneous bug fixes and improvements!

As I mentioned above, this is the last commit in our current Creativity Spike; from here we're
moving back onto adding a few more core game features and mechanics, and then
will be launching straight into development on the long-anticipated Dungeon Update!

Thanks so much for all your patience and feedback and ideas, everyone!

All the best, -T

Arid Update: v0.18.25

Hi folks! This quick update isn't canonically part of the Creativity Spike, but
is just adding a new theme of buildings to the game, the 'arid' set.

Major changes in this build:

• Adds new 'Arid' model variants for the inn, tavern, shop, potionshop,
  blacksmith, landmark, graveyard, and starting point functional buildings.
  

Other changes:

• Improvements and fixes to wall placement, especially around the 'wall snap' feature..
  
• Pressing 'escape' can now cancel an in-progress drag-rotate without actually leaving placement mode.
  
• Fixes a crash loading a saved game in which there's no land at all.
  
• Fixes an AI logic bug which could make players in a multi-level region get stuck trying to pick up a quest from an NPC who doesn't offer any quests for their level range.
  
• Further refinements to navigation mesh generation to better handle a few more esoteric edge cases.
  

Hi folks, just a very small one today!

New in this build:

- Fixes bad behaviour of the wall placement tool, if you deactivated the tool in the middle of placing a wall which was snapped to another wall.
- Added some more logging to try to track down the cause of a few rare bugs.

That's all! And with that, I'm back to work on feature updates again. :D

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