MMORPG Tycoon 2 News

Hi, everyone! It's been a little over a week to get here, but the long-awaited 'Abilities' update has finally landed!

• [h3]Add new abilities to your player and monster classes![/h3] You can now add or delete combat abilities from Player, Monster, and NPC character types; do it from the character editor's "Abilities" tab in the Design dialog.
  
  
• [h3]Players can now gain abilities as they level![/h3] Each ability can now specify the level at which it becomes available. Monsters and NPCs learn these new abilities automatically, but Players need to be taught by a class trainer. Learning a new ability is very rewarding for players, and makes them happier!
  
  
• [h3]Did I say 'class trainer'?[/h3] Yes I did! You can now place class trainers to train your players to use their new abilities, when they go up a level. Note that class trainers will only train players of the same class as they are, so be sure to place one for each class somewhere near wherever you’re expecting players to level up!
  
  
• [h3]Did I just say that class trainer NPCs can use the same classes as players?[/h3] Yes I did! All NPC types can now use any of the available character types, whether player, NPC, or even monster. Want to have a friendly bear who gives your players quests? You can do that now! (note: "Class Trainer" NPCs can only use Player model types; NPCs and monsters don't require training!)
  
  
• [h3]Did I say 'performance improvement'?[/h3] Er.. well, actually, no I didn't! But there's another big performance improvement in this build, as all our pathfinding calculations have now been moved into a background thread, and a few other expensive calculations have been smoothed out. This should give a nice frame rate boost to those really big games, and iron out the responsiveness troubles some folks had when setting the game to its highest speed in those games!
  
  
• [h3]Literally half the RAM usage! (for large games) [/h3] I fixed an issue which was causing players to store their complete play history in memory, instead of keeping only the history of their most recent play session. Purging this unused historical data, on extremely large games, tends to drop our overall RAM usage in half!
  
  
• [h3]Fly over the water![/h3] Players no longer die when taking a flight path over an inactive region; as long as they remain on the raven, they'll continue safely to their destination! There are still a few bits of UI awkwardness around placing such a long flight path, but it's now at least possible to use a flight path to travel to or from an island to a nearby bit of shoreline!
  
  
• [h3]Super-mega-ultra widescreen support![/h3] Fixed a bunch of rendering bugs which had been affecting players with extremely widescreen monitors! I am jealous of your monitors!
  
  
• [h3]UIScale improvements![/h3] For those on 4k monitors, our UIScale system is now much more reliable and should now 'just work'! I am jealous of your monitors, too!
  
  
• [h3]Want screenshots?[/h3] I've added a "HUD Toggle" function that you can bind a key to, in the 'options' screen, to clear the screen to make screenshot capturing easier.
  
  
• [h3]The Most Recent Save Problem[/h3] We've stopped trusting the OS to tell us what save file is most recent, and now track this ourselves, which means the game should no longer (for new saves after this build) ever pick the wrong save file, when you use the 'Connect' button!
  
  
• [h3]The "Level Two" tutorial![/h3] Added a new tutorial, triggered when your first player reaches level two, to explain character unlocks, point toward ability editing and class trainers, and give some basic advice about setting up a level 2 region. Just like the game's starting tutorial, this won't appear again after you've completed it once in any save (unless you start a new game with the "Play Tutorial" option enabled)
  

...and there's a list about four times that long of miscellaneous bug fixes and smaller improvements! This is definitely the biggest update we've sent out so far! Thanks so much for all your patience and feedback and bug reports while I was putting all of this together!

The plan for the next big new sprint of work is going to be working on bringing back multi-level region support, and then implementing basic localization support!

Hi, everyone! I've just rolled out one more set of hotfixes for various bug reports ("bugs report"?) since the last build!

New features in this build:

• Adds 'sideways' model part adjustments for costume editing.
  
• Adds a 'destroy' tool to the 'NPCs' action bar tab. For all your NPC-destroying needs!
  
• Players can now travel from one region to another purely by flight paths; it's no longer required to open a mountain pass in addition to the flight path.
  
  If they'll reach, flight paths can even cross over empty sea regions to islands, and players will now consider using them to spread out or to move to a more level-appropriate region, the same way they use mountain passes. EDIT: Oops, some of the other updates stopped this part from working! We'll get this going again in a near-future update. :)
  

Bug fixes in this build:

• Fixed players getting stuck if they accidentally stray over a region boundary into an inactive region (typically this would only happen at sea boundaries). Now those players are immediately killed for their trespass, and are respawned at the nearest available respawn point in the region they came from.
  
• Fixes players becoming stuck in too-high-level regions and being unwilling to move back into lower-level regions.
  
• Players no longer attempt to use buildings if they would be unsuccessful at doing so. For example, if a player can't afford to buy a weapon, they won't try to buy one and fail. If a hotel is full, players won't attempt to move into it and fail.
  
• Much improves the discrepancy between number of users who log in when the game is set to normal speed and when the game is set to fastest speed.
  
• Potential new subscribers now think about the value of your game's purchase price when deciding whether or not to buy. If your price is set much over the default price, then these customers may now decide not to purchase your game,
• even if* they could afford it! This resolves the mild exploit of setting an absurdly high purchase price, which new subscribers would pay out of their savings without even noticing that it was a surprisingly high price. (Apologies! This exploit was fun while it lasted!)
  
• Elite monsters placed inside a monster zone are no longer "owned" by that monster zone, so modifying or removing the monster zone no longer automatically destroys those elite monsters. (NOTE: This only affects newly placed elite monsters in this version or later; eilte monsters placed using earlier builds still belong to the zones they were placed inside)
  
• "Common Thought" heatmaps are now much more visible when "bloom" is disabled in the Video options.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused a subscriber to not discard the quest chain they were working on, if they gained a level from the quest XP reward while in the process of turning in a quest from that chain. They would discard all
• other* out-levelled quest chains they'd been working on, but not that one, which could result in high-level players continuing to do one low-level quest chain before deciding to move to a new region which better suited their level.
  
• Fixed a very subtle bug which could result in a single subscriber being logged in
• twice* with the same character, when a region's login queue is active. This would result in that character moving quickly, as if they were using a speedhack, and then continuing to move around in the world even after "logging out" (and could even result in a crash if they unsubscribed!) This bug fixed itself every time you saved or loaded, which made diagnosing this bug tricky!
  
• Fixed building placement/movement logic to actually only place/move buildings in regions where it thinks it's legal to do so, instead of only telling you that it couldn't place a building there but doing it anyway if you told it to.
  
• Vastly improved the generated meshes for bandwidth-covered areas on the network view (vertex counts are down about 90% compared against what they were in the last build!).
  
• Fixes "Negative buzz" HUD meter vanishing, after you've taken and released control of a monster.
  
• Fixes a lot of "daily" reports and graphs incorrectly "wrapping around" as we move from month 1 day 30 to month 2 day 1.
  
• Fixes flickering of network objects during placement.
  

...and the usual set of more minor miscellaneous bug fixes as well! Thanks for your patience and support as I've been gathering all of this together, everybody! I'm looking forward to focusing more on exciting new features, for the next update!

This is just a little update which fixes a persistent problem experienced mostly by players using Macs with AMD graphics cards. This update fixes terrain rendering for those players!

Changes in this build:

• Fix for Mac/AMD terrain rendering glitches! (I've had a report that this same fix also fixed a persistent rendering bug for one PC user with an NVidia GPU, which surprises me, but I'll totally take credit for that fix too!)
  
• Disables gamepad input, which previously was wired up to camera movement. This change means that folks who happen to have a badly calibrated gamepad connected to their computer no longer have to cope with a drifting camera!
  
• ...and a whole bunch of little bug fixes, based upon feedback and bug reports!
  

Thanks again to everyone who's been playing, sharing, and reporting feedback, requests, and bugs! I'm really excited to show folks what's up next for the game! :D

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!