MMORPG Tycoon 2 News

Hi, everyone! It's been a long time coming, but we're finally rolling out proper support for game localisation, with our first drop of language support covering German, French, and Brazilian Portuguese.

Also in the build are work-in-progress translations for Italian and Spanish, but we're not yet confident enough in the translations for me to feel comfortable ticking the boxes on Steam saying that they're officially supported, yet. If you're fluent in Italian or Spanish (or other languages!), you can contribute to the translation effort by visiting our site on Localizor!. Those languages can be selected from the 'Language' tab in the Options window.

I'm also working on integrating some new font rendering tech which will allow us to localise into languages which aren't using Latin scripts; Chinese, Russian, etc. (Additionally, it'll make our text sharper even for English text!) Expect to see those new translations being added really soon!


But for the moment, let's talk about what's new in this build that went up maybe twelve hours ago (as of the time I'm writing this)!

• [h2]Translations![/h2]Okay, I already talked about translations above. But it really is the headline feature of this update, and more languages are coming; most notably I'm expecting to see Czech, Russian, and Chinese in the very near future! For French, German, and Brazilian Portuguese you can now select a language in the Settings for the game within Steam. For other not-yet-officially-supported languages, you can select them within the options screen inside the game.
  
• [h2]Number formatting![/h2]Also on the 'Language' tab of the options screen, you can now choose how you want numbers to be shown; either US-style "1,000.50" or European-style "1.000,50". Similarly, you can choose what currency symbol you'd like to see for money amounts!
  
• [h2]Charging for flight paths[/h2]Flight path prices are now being enforced, and their usage is being tracked! Note: Players currently will not ever pay real-money to take a flight path; I just couldn't figure out a way to convince the AI that a flight path could ever provide enough value to be worth actual dollars. I'm definitely going to be returning to this in future updates! But at least the flight points correctly graph how many people have used them, now!
  
• [h2]UI Descaling[/h2]It's now possible to lower UI scaling below 100%. I'm not sure why someone would want to do this, but.. it's there now, since a few folks asked for it? :D
  
• [h2]More complaining about bugs![/h2]Buildings which are suffering from more than one bug now contribute extra toward an MMORPG's "bugginess" rating.
  
• [h2]No more losing changes![/h2]Changes to anything in the 'Design' interface now automatically 'Apply' when you close the window, instead of being cancelled! This means you'll no longer lose that perfect character model design because you forgot to click 'Apply'!
  
• [h2]Empty Intros![/h2]If you very methodically removed every single scenery item in your first region and then opened it up to the public, it was possible to make the game lock up as it was trying to find something for the introductory cutscene to look at. This is now fixed!
  
• [h2]No more playing forever[/h2]Previously, if a player wanted to log out but couldn't afford to set their home at an inn, they would keep playing forever. Now they just log out wherever they are, instead.
  
• [h2]No more long ad campaigns[/h2]Previously, due to calendar changes in an earlier build, it was possible for an ad campaign to be lengthened dramatically when loaded in a newer build of MT2 than it was saved from. Now we fix that problem during load!
  
• [h2]Auto-adjust quests[/h2]If you change the level of a region which has already been set up, the quest-givers within the region now automatically adjust their quests to match the level's new region. Similarly, monsters now correctly adjust their levels to match the region!
  
• [h2]YOLO LOL[/h2]Fixes a game crash if you ban the VIP streamer during a streamer event. You monster.
  
• [h2]Looks Buggy![/h2]Replaces the infamous old "red cube" indicator that a player was being affected by a bug with an actual, comprehensible bug icon.
  
• [h2]...and a Screensaver?[/h2]The in-game desktop interface now has a screensaver, if you leave it alone for ten minutes or so. Folks who are keen can launch the game straight into the Screensaver by starting MT2 with the command line parameter `Screensaver`. (Press escape to exit, in that mode)
  

...and of course heaps of other smaller bug fixes and minor improvements!


Apologies for posting this announcement a little later than the build went up; I've been having serious internet troubles for the last few days and it was a struggle to even get this build up to Steam, much less post an update with an image! I'm now tethered to a phone which is mostly working; hopefully I'll be back properly online soon!

Thanks everyone for your support and patience through this huge update!

Hi everybody! It's been a little longer than usual between updates to the main Steam build; I've been working on localisation support and it's taken longer than expected! the base systems are now *mostly* in place (I'm aware of a couple things which still won't get translated, but the vast majority of the game is now ready for translations).

Ordinarily I'd wait for the feature to be fully complete, but there were a couple important new features and bug fixes I wanted to push to the default branch, so.. as a bonus, you're also getting a preview taste of translations!

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

• Fixed an important bug about destroying a network fiber which extends across a region boundary.
  
  
• Fixes an important bug which caused things keyed to the current date to read the wrong date. This fixes the daily finance report, the finance graph, and advertisements ending earlier than they ought.
  
  
• Fixes a few important bugs around orphaned roads/flight points.
  
  
• Fixes a few navigation mesh generation issues.
  
  
• Re-enables save file deletion within the game, from the 'load' or 'save' dialogs.
  
  
• Monsters will no longer attack players who are traveling on flight paths (oops)
  
  
• Adds an in-game "Submit file to devs" button, which automates the process of sending me a save file to investigate. (If I've ever asked you to provide me with a save file, this will make that process a
• lot* easier!)
  

And a bunch of other little features!

Oh.. and of course the preview of localisation support that I mentioned at the top! It's not yet *technically* supported; I'm sure I've missed some text which isn't going through the translation system, and the translations themselves are in a very early state and aren't yet verified as being correct.. but if you'd like to take a look at them, you can switch languages from the Options window's "Debug" tab. Note that you can't yet set your language through Steam settings (as I'm not ready to declare that these other languages are 'supported'), and we don't save your language selection yet, but.. that's all coming pretty soon!

Right now we have an initial set of translations for French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese-BR, all generously supplied by the game's community and wrangled through Localizor. If you're fluent in English and another language, and have an interest in helping out with translations, please visit that link and take a look!

Thanks for your patience everyone! Setting the whole game up for localisation was a *lot* more work than I'd expected, and has taken a lot longer than I'd planned! But we're very nearly there, now, and the full proper Localisation Update will be here soon!

Apologies for the lack of new features over the past week! I've been working really hard toward localisation support and I'll have another announcement about that probably later today! But I've just updated the default steam build to 0.17.78 with some bug fixes, and wanted to talk about those a little!

New in this build:

• Fixed a number of (thankfully, rare!) stability issues around the new navigation mesh generation.
  
• Player badges now vanish correctly when they log out.
  
• Show a visible error message if OpenGL initialisation fails (due to OpenGL not being supported on the device)
  
• Fixes a crash if the user attempts to close the game in the middle of a loading screen.
  
• Improvements to region styling algorithm during map generation for a new game.
  
• Extra safety around deactivating regions which players might be pathfinding inside.
  
• Extra safety around attempts to print non-printable strings
  

...and a bunch of other more minor fixes/improvements!

Most of the navmesh stability issues only happened if the map was generating really small navigation triangles; it would mostly only happen with triangles that were less than 1cm in size! (which could happen if you were packing buildings really really close to other obstructions, but not *quite* touching them)

I promise the next update will be much more exciting! :D

Hi, everyone! I argued with myself for a long time about whether to categorise this update as a "regular update" or as a "small patch".

From a programmer point of view, this is a pretty big change! But.. from a player's point of view, maybe less so? Here's what's changed:

• I've done an almost complete rewrite of the core pathfinding system, switching us from our old "dynamic-node A*" system to a more traditional Navigation Mesh ("navmesh") system.
  
  It's really just a different way to figure out the best path to travel from one place to another. But it's heaps faster and more reliable, and fixes all sorts of issues like players barging straight through walls and similar issues when they were travelling to a new region.
  
  (caveat: subscribers still don't understand the idea that there might be somewhere where they simply can't go; if the pathfinding system can't find any legal way to reach the place where the subscriber wants to go (because you've built a solid wall all the way around that landmark, for example) then the subscribers will continue to just barrel through every obstacle in their way to get there. That's a fix for a future update!)
  
  
• Impassable terrain now blocks traversal in a much more reasonable way.
  
  Previously, whole square terrain blocks were being blocked off; now we only block the actual parts of the terrain which
• look* like they ought to be blocked; this means more rounded edges, etc.
  
  
• Fixed the "out of space writing in vsStore" crash, by far the most reported crash bug over the past few weeks. Apologies for how long it took me to locate and squash this bug!
  
  
• Fixed some stability issues around alert popups which referred to players who unsubscribed shortly after the alert popped up.
  

...and the usual collection of other small fixes and improvements!

Over the next few days I'm going to begin setting up for localisation into other languages. Then once that's ready, I'll be moving straight on to making players group up into 'parties' to adventure together as a group!

Thanks so much for all your patience while I finished all the bits and pieces on this pathfinding update! It was a silly amount of work, but I think it's improved subscriber behaviour by a lot!

This is just a few small fixes and updates. Nothing tremendously exciting, but I'll tell you all about it anyway! :D

New in this build:

• Fixed an AI bug where if a subscriber decided themselves to discard a quest from their list (often due to gaining a level), they could become annoyed as if you had destroyed the quest while they were trying to complete it.
  
  
• Fixed another way that saved business records could get jumbled, breaking a few of the daily financial reports. Saves with that problem will automatically be fixed during load.
  
  
• Fixed roads (and maybe other things?) being indestructible when placed too close to the ocean.
  
  
• Fixed road intersections sometimes being left behind when a road is destroyed.
  
  
• Fixed a bug which could cause subscribers to be charged an extra monthly subscription fee during a load.
  
  
• Fixed rendering of the network layer if the game window is resized to a different aspect ratio.
  
  
• Fixed setting custom quest XP and gold amounts greater than 1000.
  
  
• Fixed wall turrets sometimes not being visible immediately after being placed.
  

...plus the usual assortment of minor fixes and performance improvements!