MMORPG Tycoon 2 News

Hi, folks! This is a fairly small update as most of my time is still going into the Party Update.

Here's what's new!

• [h2]Improved game simulation speed![/h2]Vastly improved the speed at which the game simulation runs; this should make a
• big* improvement for anyone with a medium-to-large-sized game world. There's still more work to be done here, but it's kind of a night and day difference for the bigger game worlds I've seen! Notable improvements came from optimising logic around when characters need to be animated, about finding monsters in range to aggro, and around calculating 'convenience' and 'beauty' ratings for paths and quests.
  
• [h2]Rendering speed improvements![/h2] There have also been more rendering improvements, using cheaper shaders when we don't need the complicated ones and faster ways to pass data into the shaders.
  
• [h2]No more lazy Guards![/h2]Previously, each Guard felt that killing a monster once was really all that they needed to do; they'd ignore it if it respawned and aggroed again! This fix also fixed a problem which could cause NPCs to rarely use attacks during combat, on computers running the game at higher than 100fps. Also, if you take control of a player and make them attack a guard, the guards will now attack back (previously, they would only ever attack monsters, no matter what the players did).
  
• [h2]Fix startup audio crashes![/h2]There was an issue before where if your computer had only one audio device, and that audio device was locked by another process such we couldn't open it (this was very rare, but seemed to most often happen with USB headphones), then the game would crash while trying to find another audio device to use. Now we instead start the game up in "no sound" mode in that situation.
  
• [h2]Path placement fixes![/h2]Fixed a bunch of issues around path and wall placement, most notably fixes for the rendering of walls that extend out into the water, and detecting where walls and paths intersect with other walls and paths. This also fixes a UI bug which would allow you to place a wall turret
• on top* of another wall turret. And also fixes a bug which would sometimes result in paths not being able to be deleted.
  
• [h2]Scenery moves with the terrain![/h2]At some point I seem to have broken scenery tracking the ground as it's edited. This is now fixed! And especially for the case where you sink a region into the sea and then lift it up again; the scenery now correctly moves into place, as intended.
  
• [h2]The world turned upside down[/h2]Fixed a camera bug which could result in the game camera turning upside down if you moved the camera right down to the ground and looked straight down, then moved the camera a short distance back up. Now fixed!
  

And in addition to the above, I've fixed a *bunch* of localisation issues which were especially affecting the German language build. I'm definitely interested in feedback about how things look in that language! And there's been the usual collection of other smaller bug fixes and minor improvements.

Hi everybody! This update is a big rendering tech update, with some new features thrown in as well.

[h3]New in this build:[/h3]

• [h3]Painting Terrain![/h3] Terrain types are now "paint on" like monster zones, instead of being locked to a grid. (this also speeds up load times by a fraction of a second, but nobody except for me cares about that! It saves about five seconds in the non-optimised development builds that I usually use)
  
  
• [h3]Where did I leave that quest giver??[/h3] The Region Information Window now has a "Contents" tab which shows you a list of every building, monster zone, and NPC placed in the region, along with their status. Click on one to send the camera directly to it.
  
  
• [h3]More network diagnostics[/h3]The Region Information Window (shown when you select a region) now shows the amount of network bandwidth coming into the region, the amount being usefully consumed within the region, and how much is being lost to overheads from WAN nodes and similar network devices.
  
  
• [h3]The Eponymous Inn[/h3]Buildings and monster zones can now be given unique names - select the building or zone and click on its name in the Information Window.
  
  
• [h3]Rendering Speed Improvements[/h3]Hugely speeds up shadow rendering (now takes about 10% as long to render as before), and substantially speeds up drawing everything else as well.
  
  
• [h3]Simpler shaders for lower-end graphics cards[/h3]Adds optional "simple" shaders, which switches the game to draw using traditional video game lighting, instead of modern PBR lighting. I'm hopeful that this will make things run better on some of the lower-end integrated graphics chipsets I've been seeing (and which we still don't officially support). Simple shaders can be selected from the 'Video' tab of the options dialog.
  
  
• [h3]One for folks whose keyboards aren't quite as tiny as mine[/h3]Adds support for forward-deletion using the 'delete' key during text editing.
  
  
• [h3]Flight paths display the correct price![/h3]Fixes displayed costs for placement of flight paths to include the ending flight point, when an ending flight point would be required at the cursor's current position, and to correctly not charge you for the placement, if you can't afford both the flight path cost and the cost for any required flight point.
  
  
• [h3]A fix for the infamous "infinitely thinking giants" bug![/h3]Fixes players sometimes failing to log out when they chose to unsubscribe, which left them static and stationary on the map (and sometimes the wrong size).
  
  
• [h3]Is the water supposed to be so.. chunky?[/h3]Fixes a bunch of shaders to continue animating smoothly even if the game is running nonstop for a long enough time (multiple hours) that floating point precision starts to be lost.
  
  
• [h3]Regarding conga lines...[/h3]Improves road following behaviours, making it less likely for players to walk single-file along roads.
  
  
• [h3]Get a hold of yourself, soldier![/h3]Made an AI adjustment to make subscribers slightly less scared of being near monsters (-0.1 -> -0.05). Should make certain of the more timid subscribers less hesitant to venture into monster zones to do quests or gain levels. (this seemed to mostly affect 'Explorer'-type subscribers, in my experience)
  
  
• [h3]Saved game list updates[/h3]Fixes save game file list to refresh correctly after deleting a save. (Fixes a crash bug some folks ran into where they first deleted a save and then tried to load that same save, because it hadn't been removed from the UI even though the file had been deleted)
  
  
• [h3]Game data correction[/h3]If the game tries to load a file which doesn't seem to exist, we now notify Steam that it needs to re-verify files before the next run. (I suspect these reports were due to people moving around or deleting game data)
  
  
• ...and a whole lot of other miscellaneous bug fixes!
  

There are *lots* of GPU rendering improvements in this update, and also a lot of CPU-side improvements, but I feel like there's a lot more work still to be done on the CPU side.

My plans now are to finish up work on the Party Update, and then really focus in on those CPU performance improvements that are so needed as games get larger!

Thanks for your patience with this lengthy update, everyone!

Hi, folks! Today's update wasn't a big one; it's just some miscellaneous fixes for bugs which have been reported over the past few days. The new stuff is all happening over on the 'test' branch, and will be migrated into the main default branch just as soon as I'm sure there aren't any major new bugs caused by the updates (but feel free to take a look if you're curious!)

Thanks so much for your patience as I add the new functionality! :)

Hi, everyone!

This is a small update that's coming in now just to address a bug I've finally tracked down. Some changes made recently had resulted in combat abilities having their level changed unexpectedly. And.. this was causing a bunch of problems; subscribers who couldn't attack and so were becoming frustrated in combat, things of that sort.

Worse, if a frustrated player was trying to grief other players by kiting a dangerous monster into a low-level area, the game wasn't checking whether that player actually had any combat abilities, and the whole game crashed when they tried to attack the monster with a non-existing ability. Oops!

So here are the things that I've changed to fix that whole AI bug:

1. I found a bug which could result in abilities changing their set level without the user being aware (it involved closing the design window or the whole game quickly, immediately after switching between abilities in the ability editor); that bug is now fixed.
   
2. The game now checks for that situation during load; if a player class has no attacks available at level 1, then it does its best to fix that situation before the load completes.
   
3. The game now checks once per minute that every class has at least one combat ability available from level 1, and will show an alert pointing you to the problem. So even if the game wasn't able to fix the issue on its own, it'll show you exactly where the issue is and let you fix it manually.
   
4. ...and finally, if somebody attempts to kite a monster into other players but doesn't actually have any attacks available, the griefing attempt just fails, and the subscriber becomes a little more annoyed that they weren't able to annoy the noobs.
   

Also in this update:

• Tutorial completion state is now synchronized between computers via Steam Cloud Sync.
  
• The costs of using various tools is now shown in localised units.
  
• Fixed selecting subscribers from the Overview's subscriber list window.
  
• Fixes time formatting in the clock UI panel (it was displaying the time '12:05:02' as '12:5:2')
  
• Fixes pause indicator to match the size of the screen, if the screen is resized during gameplay.
  

..and a few other bug fixes/improvements.

So like I said, just a small bugfix update that I wanted to get out to folks ASAP, because of the crash fix and AI fix. New game features are in the *next* update. :)

Hi, everyone!

This update is really big to me and possibly small to you, unless you're excited for one of the (spoiler) newly supported languages!

• [h2]A brand new text drawing method![/h2] I'm
• super* excited about this; It's an exciting new approach which makes our text drawing require less data and less memory and also makes the text draw far more sharply, especially when I need to squeeze the text to fit somewhere or when UI Scale is set to a non-default value. Text just looks
• better* now, pretty much everywhere and all the time.
  
• [h2]New languages![/h2]This new text drawing system makes it possible for us to support languages with different alphabets or with additional accent marks, so we've added support for playing the game with text in simplified Chinese, Czech, Russian, and Polish! These can each now be selected from the language menu in the options screen.
  
• [h2]Why isn't this building activating?!?[/h2]Added a big new on-screen "Paused" indicator, to make it a lot more visible when you've forgotten to un-pause your game! (This can be disabled in the game options, if you dislike it)
  

And of course, some miscellaneous bug fixes!

• Fixed display of error messages when placing NPCs.
  
• Fixed NPCs being too low-level to properly defend their area. (NPCs are supposed to be ten levels above the level of the region they're placed into; in the last build they were being set to be of equal level, which meant that they could sometimes be killed by an errant monster that wandered too close!)
  
• Fixed the "Object deleted itself" error message that some folks were encountering while editing monster zones.
  
• ...and a bunch of other little tweaks and fixes!
  

Next big new feature is *super* exciting and not announced yet, but I'll be talking about it more within the next couple of days, and hopefully showing it off by the end of the week! :D