MMORPG Tycoon 2 News

Hi everyone!

This is another maintenance update, just generally working toward full stability!

In previous builds, we were accidentally not submitting some crash reports. We now catch those! As a result, if you've ever had the game spontaneously close without a message, it'll probably try to upload that report the next time you launch the game. Thanks for your patience!

The other big thing in this build is that I believe I've identified the cause of brief stuttering (and occasionally even hard lockups) some people were reporting in medium/large games, when playing at the fastest speed setting, in Windows build. It seems the issue was coming from the audio middleware we're using. We'd been sending every audio event in the game to FMOD, and at our fastest speed setting that often seemed to be overloading FMOD. Now we're no longer sending every event to FMOD; only the ones we think might actually be audible. Net result: no more lockups on fastest speed settings!

Also, there were a few more pathfinding performance boosts in this build, particularly for games which include a lot of walls!

That's pretty much all that's new in this update; next plan is to arrange a publicly viewable development roadmap, and then I'll be onto adding more combat abilities and making them more configurable!

Thanks to everyone for all your feedback and patience!

Hi everybody!

This update contains basically zero new features, but I still find it extremely exciting! The biggest thing in this new update is actually quite small indeed; the game now uses about 80% less RAM than it used to, especially on big games with lots of subscribers! This means that folks should have a *lot* fewer problems with autosaves and general memory swapping than in previous builds!

The biggest saved game I've seen so far was about 60 megabytes in size, and with this change it came down to about 18 megabytes. When loaded into memory, it was taking nearly 10 gigabytes of RAM, and now it's down to 1.5 gigabytes. This is a *huge* improvement, especially for folks (like me!) who don't have 32 gigabytes of RAM in their computers!

Here's the full changelog:

• Switched from a precise subscriber knowledge model to an abstract one, which reduced our memory load substantially! Also, we now only store one day's worth of memory and thoughts for each subscriber.
  
• Dramatically sped up pathfindinding 'obstacle' checks; pathfinding in complicated regions should now be substantially faster than before.
  
• Fixed a pathfinding bug which caused players to sometimes travel diagonally through the middle of buildings which had been rotated during placement.
  
• Combat abilities now actually require their specified costs. (no more casting fireballs when you're out of mana!)
  

...and a lot of general game stability fixes! I'm now getting much better data from our automated bug reports, which has really helped me pinpoint exactly where the problems are coming from. So there are about ten of these big fixes in this build as well; they address all the stability issues reported through the automated in-game issue reporting system so far!

Thanks for your patience, everyone! And I hope that the memory usage reduction plus the pathfinding performance improvements help with some of the issues folks have reported as their games get larger and larger! As usual, I'd be thrilled if you'd leave comments either here or in our Discord (link is inside the game itself), to let me know how it's working for you!

UPDATE: This build had a bug which made many subscribers super-cowardly, so they'd do their best to avoid ever getting into combat. This is now fixed in the 0.17.26 build!

Hi everyone! v0.17.21 combines a bunch of different unrelated bugfixes into one new update. Here's the combined changelog:

New in this build:

• Worked around a Windows-only issue which caused the game to be unable to tell which save file was the most recent, resulting in a game's "Connect" button sometimes loading an old save file by accident. Note: this fix only affects new saves within a game; saves from before this fix may still be sorted incorrectly.
  
  
• If you somehow managed to get an NPC killed, they now respawn correctly after a minute! Also, they now play a death animation if killed.
  
  
• Players now behave better around dead NPCs; they no longer repeatedly try to pick up or turn in quests to them; now if they can already see that the NPC is dead, they won't attempt to interact with them at all, and won't be as upset by the NPC's unavailability.
  
  
• Fixed a bug which caused players to think that non-combat quests would take much longer to complete than they actually do, which made them highly reluctant to do them.
  
  
• Fixed a bug which caused players to get stuck inside Inn and Landmark buildings, when they were the target of a quest, and also fixed Landmark buildings to tell players to enjoy the scenery outside of them rather than inside of them.
  
  
• Fixed the text description of the Network Server to correctly specify how much extra capacity it provides to a region. (The text description previously said 100, while it actually provides 400)
  
  
• When a subscriber gains a level, they now emit a cheery “DING!” instead of a boring, outdated “+LVL”.
  
  
• Worked around an extremely rare map generation bug. (If you ever saw an error which complained about a "Complex clip", then you're one of the lucky winners of this bugfix!)
  
  
• Fixes drawing of playback speed icons so they always draw on top of the main button body, instead of sometimes being sorted beneath it.
  
  
• Fixes an issue which could result in the dev job queue to get stuck if you placed a building, the building developed a bug, you moved the building to a new region, and then destroyed the building. In that instance, devs could stop work and do nothing forever. Now fixed!
  

...and the usual assortment of other minor internal fixes and improvements!

Thanks to everyone for your patience and enthusiasm! With these fixes out of the way, I'm going to start looking at the next set of new features! Watch this space for updates over the next few days!

By far the most common piece of feedback we received on our original Early Access release was this; people wanted to be able to create more monster types! Just five monster types to populate a whole MMORPG world was, of course, far, far too few types of monsters. So in this build, we've shaken things up!

Now, you only get two player classes and three monster types to start. But! As soon as one of your subscribers reaches level two, you unlock another player class and two more monster types. This continues, with another new player class unlocking for every two subscriber levels (maximum 8), and two more monster types unlocking for every subscriber level (maximum 30).

If you're loading an older save file, you'll keep everything you had already unlocked, and further unlocks will happen once any of your subscribers reach the required subscriber levels. Check the 'Design' window in-game for unlock details.

I'm very interested in people's reactions to this design change! Is it too few player classes to start with? Are things unlocking too quickly or too slowly? Drop us feedback in the discussion forums!

Also in this build: We now send alerts when someone reaches a new level that no subscriber had reached before in your game, so you know it's time to look for new class unlocks!

And of course, the usual potpourri of general stability bug fixes!

Hi, everyone! This is another patch mostly containing bug fixes, but also fixes the performance degradation that came in as part of 0.17.6's changes to pathfinding. Here's the complete Changelog:

• Recovers the game performance lost by the pathfinding fixes introduced in 0.17.6. Games with lots of logged in subscribers should have much improved performance over the last few versions! (There’s still a lot more for me to do to further improve on this, but I wanted to get this improvement out quickly!)
  
• Stopped subscribers from attacking elite monsters which were already dead. (This would only happen when they were on an explicit quest to kill that elite monster)
  
• Drops default region capacity from 2000 to 800 simultaneously logged-in players, but fixed the 'server' network object to actually increase the region capacity, as it was supposed to be doing all along. Additionally, increases the effectiveness of an active server from +100 logged-in players to +400 logged-in players.
  

  Note: A region which has hit its player cap will begin using a login queue to slow down the rate of players entering the region; you can see the details of how many people are currently waiting in the queue in the region’s information window. Regions which are capped out draw in red, when in edit mode, to make it easier to spot that it's happening. The game also generates alerts to point you at the problem.

• Adjusting a monster type’s “base” statistics now also adjusts the statistics of elite variants of that monster type.
  
• Fixed a crash bug which could occur if you changed a region’s assigned level, and then destroyed a monster zone inside that region before all the monsters could have their levels adjusted to match the new region level.
  
• Fixed a bug in auto-buff and auto-nerf which incorrectly applied every change to the ability’s effects, even if the proposed change was supposed to be a change to the costs. (this could turn what was supposed to be a buff into a nerf, or vice-versa!)
  

…and a bunch of other, smaller and miscellaneous fixes!