MMORPG Tycoon 2 News

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!

Hi everyone! It's been a couple weeks since the last feature update, and I've been hard at work! Here's what's new in this new build:

[h3]Big New Stuff[/h3]

• [h3]Quest Rewards Nerfed![/h3]By default, low-level quests now give far less experience on completion than they did before. Previously, a low level quest might give anything up to 1000xp or more when a player turned it in; that's enough to often catapult a level 1 player straight up midway through level 3! Now a default level 1 quest will give only 40xp. This means that your players will level up more slowly and more controllably, and will give you more time to build new areas ahead of them! But also, high-level quests now scale up their rewards to help them keep up with the increasing XP requirements!
  
  
• [h3]Quest editing![/h3] I've completely re-implemented the UI for quest editing! Now quests can be renamed, their rewards can be seen and edited, and (for combat quests) you can set precisely how many monsters must be killed, instead of having only a limited number of choices.
  
  
• [h3]Are you tired of quest editing? Because there's more quest editing![/h3] In addition to all of the above, you can now change the way the game automatically sets XP and Gold rewards for quests; set an approximate number of quests it should take to gain a level, and the game will set XP values for everything across your whole game appropriately! (and you can still override the defaults for specific quests whenever you like!)
  
  
• [h3]Editable leveling curve![/h3] Are your players leveling up too quickly or too slowly? The 'Design' window now has a new "XP & Leveling" tab where you can change how much XP monster kills are worth, as well as how many monster kills are required in order to gain levels! These settings interact with the default quest settings to let you specify how quickly you want your players to gain levels, and also how much of their experience should be coming from quests vs. how much from combat.
  
  
• [h3]Let's do the time warp![/h3] Slowed down the game's wall clock speed, but sped up its calendar! On 1x speed, it now takes 2 hours for a full in-game day to finish (previously was 1 hour); this gives your subscribers a lot more time to play before their playtime per simulated day is over! But at the same time, I've reduced the duration of a simulated month from 30 in-game days to just 5 in-game days. These two changes, taken together, mean that you'll get your first 'monthly' subscription payments after just 10 hours of play on 1x speed, instead of after 30 hours of play (and of course, much less than that if you turn the speed up!). Capitalism is easy, when you control all the clocks!
  
  
• [h3]I want to be big![/h3] Player, Monster, and NPC character types can now be scaled. This ability is available from the 'Adjust' interface on the character model's "torso" piece.
  
  
• [h3]Reduced-Bandwidth Monster Zones![/h3]Monster zones now have approximately half the network bandwidth upkeep requirements they used to have, which means you can have a lot more and larger monster zones using fewer network uplinks!
  
  
• [h3]Player/Monster Unlocks![/h3] You now start a game with three player classes unlocked (previously was two), and four monster types unlocked (previously was three). More player classes and monster types are now unlocked as you gain more subscribers! (Previously, unlocks happened based on maximum player level)
  

[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]

• Vastly improved CPU load when viewing the Network layer, when many regions were active!
  
  
• Miscellaneous improvements in our interactions with FMOD which hopefully should sort out launch issues for a few players who had unsupported audio devices connected to their computers.
  
  
• Stopped monsters from attacking players while the game is paused.
  
  
• Moved "Game Features" tab from the Overview report to the Design window. Same features, different window!
  
  
• Much better support for window resizing and window minimise/restore, especially during the loading screen!
  
  
• Much better support for UI scaling, for folks with much higher resolution screens than me! (I'm so jealous right now)
  
  
• In "Fullscreen Window" mode, we no longer grab the cursor, so you can now move the cursor to other monitors.
  
  
• Fixed "Optimal DPS" calculations to correctly handle attacks which use floating point numbers (previously Optimal DPS rounded everything down to whole numbers, which meant that an attack which did 0.9 health damage was treated s if it did no health damage at all)
  
  
• High level monsters now respawn with full attribute values! (Previously, they spawned with the health and mana values of a level 1 monster, and then healed up over a short time, which could make them easy kills if someone attacked them immediately after they spawned!)
  
  
• When leveling up, players now instantly heal up to their new maximum health and mana values!
  
  
• We now stop the player from giving two types of monster/player classes/npcs the same name, which could make the game confused.
  
  
• Fixes a crash if you take over control of a character with more than four attacks available.
  
  
• ...and a bunch of other miscellaneous fixes!
  

Thanks for your patience, everyone; this was a pretty big update touching a whole lot of areas! I'm going to try to keep them a little smaller and more focused than this one, in future! :D

-Trevor

This build is mostly minor bug fixes, and trying to improve stability for folks who were having trouble!

New in this build:

• A fix for a few rendering issues very early during the loading screen. These
• ought* to have been harmless, but I've seen a number crash reports -- mostly from very old Intel graphics chipsets -- which seem like they might be related, so.. I cleaned it all up, in hopes that it'd solve issues on those Intel graphics chipsets!
  
  
• Upgraded our FMOD library from version 1.07.04 to 2.00.07. (It was almost four years old!) This seems to have worked around problems for at least one tester!
  
  
• Fixed the ‘elite monster’ placement tool to only offer to place monster types, not player classes or NPCs. (oops!)
  
  
• Fixed monsters to immediately update their name and other information if you changed the name of their monster type.
  
  
• Fixed GUI 'meter' widgets to display values above their configured maximum. This can make a big difference for a region's capacity, or for a 'buzz' amount, or for the number of people waiting in a login queue, all of which would commonly exceed their default "maximum values". Now fixed!
  
  
• AI Change: Previously, new subscribers usually would not play as newly created classes until they had been awarded a FotM tier. Now, new subscribers will instead flock to new classes before they're rated, as they're new and exciting and
• might* be amazingly awesome!
  
  
• Fixed an only-reported-once crash if your ‘desktop.vrt’ desktop file has somehow become highly corrupt (say, by someone going into it and deleting all of its contents but not removing the file itself)
  
  
• Fixed an only-reported-once crash if the user has deleted some (but not all) of the crash data from a previous run which hasn’t yet been reported.