MMORPG Tycoon 2 News

Hi folks!

This is the first build in our "Creativity Spike #2" series of patches. It contains both some new features as well as a lot of bug fixes. New feature up-front:

[h3]New region environmental/weather effects![/h3] This adds half a dozen weather effects, complete with color customisation. You can choose from these effects by selecting a region and going to the 'FX' tab in its info window. Note that this is still early days for this system, but I feel like it's ready for real players to start playing with it. Note that some of these effects may stress your GPU's fill rate more than our default rendering does, and so maybe aren't recommended for those running on older Intel graphics chipsets! In this build, these new weather effects are all *off* by default. (We'd love to see feedback about what you think of these, using the 'Feedback' feature in-game!)

And bugs fixed in this build:

• Fixed window dropshadow rendering when UI scale is set to any value other than 100%.
  
• Fixed a crash if you changed UI scaling while an object was selected.
  
• Fixed a small memory leak that could happen during game shutdown. (this showed up as a "Not all instances returned to the pool" error message while quitting the game)
  
• Fixed a crash if you destroyed popular player classes and then created new ones all while the game was paused.
  
• Fixed a crash which could occur when a party entered a dungeon if that dungeon was the smallest dungeon possible and was oriented precisely in an east-west or north-south direction.
  

Over on our discord server, we've just started a competition for folks to create the most compelling boss monster. If you'd like to enter one of your creations in that or just take inspiration from other folks' entries then hit that link to take a look! That contest runs until March 25th.

As for myself, I'm continuing with some more intensive new features over this weekend, and hopefully will have more fun stuff to show off really soon! Thanks so much for all the feedback and bug reports everyone, and we'll talk again soon!

-T

Hi folks! Apologies for the delay on this update; we've been in the midst of a big office move over the last week, and I'm only just now finally coming up for air!

Here's what's new in this update:

• Fixed the "Party wasn't in the expected party manager?" error.
  
  This was occurring if a party was trying to travel from one part of a region to another, but the fastest path it could find involved traveling through another region using a teleporter, and if that other region was outside the party's normal level range. When the party teleported into that other region, it was disbanding because the region was the wrong level for the party, and the game was getting confused about where the party was being stored since it was changing region and disbanding at exactly the same moment. This whole thing is all now fixed; parties no longer disband due to traveling through wrong-level regions on their way to a right-level region, and even if they do disband instantly for some other reason, the game doesn't get confused and generate this error any more! Huge huge thanks to everyone♥ who submitted saves demonstrating this issue; it would have been an absolute nightmare to track down this bug without them!
  
• Fixed a rendering bug which caused dynamic point lights to not draw correctly until after you had viewed the inside of a dungeon at least once, each time you loaded into the game.
  
• Fixed a rendering bug which caused a player's weapons to stop being rendered once a player died. This was only a visual bug; the game knew they still had their weapons, they just weren't being drawn until the next time you loaded into a save.
  

... plus the usual assortment of small bugfixes and improvements!

I'm hoping to finish up the bulk of our office move tomorrow (we finally got internet up and working at the new office this afternoon!) Big thanks to everyone for their patience through the move, and I'm hoping to be back and showing off some new Creativity Spike #2 features in the very near future!

-T

Hi folks! The update today is either really big or barely worth mentioning depending on your point of view.

This build is almost identical to the last one, except that we've addressed the "multiple steam accounts on one computer login account" issue that I was talking about earlier in the week. We do this by putting each steam account's save files into separate directories, so that Cloud Sync won't get confused about which saves belong to which account.

The first time you launch the game after getting this update, we now split your save files out into a separate subdirectory linked to your Steam account, and then launch the game normally. This should be entirely invisible to you; you likely wouldn't even notice if I hadn't told you about it in these patch notes. But doing it should make Steam Cloud Sync a lot happier in that "multiple-account" scenario.

Thanks so much for your patience with this update, everyone! Even though it's a relatively small change, it involved moving everybody's save data around and so we wanted to take a little extra time to put it through a lot (*a lot*) of extra internal testing before rolling it out to everyone!

Note for Mac users: Also in this build, we've raised our Mac minimum requirements from OSX 10.10 to OSX 10.15. OSX 10.15 is about five years old (and no longer supported by Apple), and it gave us access to the more modern C++ filesystem APIs which we've already been using on Windows and Linux, and which make moving the save files around easier and safer. We don't believe we actually have any players on OSX versions older than 10.15 anyway, so hopefully this doesn't cause issues for anyone, but it definitely simplified making this update!

I'll be back again soon to talk about Creativity Spike updates, now that I can turn my focus back to those!

-T

Hi folks!

This is a very small update which is getting us ready for a more important update that's coming later this week.

A player reported to us about an issue which can result in Steam deleting a game's saves when logging out of one Steam account and into a different one on a single computer account, if both accounts have access to MMORPG Tycoon 2. This issue isn't just us; this affects any game which saves into a single file path per computer login. (often this happens through Family Sharing, and similar features).

I mentioned this in the last update, but I've been working on a workaround to stop Steam from doing this when switching accounts, and that change is being tested by the team right now. But I wanted to put up a build with a warning message on the desktop interface, to encourage people make backups of their own saves in the meantime, just for extra safety and so that even folks who don't read patch notes will see it the next time they run the game!

As I said above, this really only affects people who are logging out of their steam account and into a different one on the same computer and same computer login account, and I *think* (but can't absolutely confirm) that it probably only affects people who turn *off* Cloud Sync for the game. I *have* reported the issue to Valve, and am hoping they'll fix it because I'm pretty sure it'll be affecting a lot more games than just us!

Also in this update:

• Updated the compilers being used for Windows builds. This fixes a number of minor bugs around file operations for players who have Unicode characters in their usernames on their computer (these were silently failing attempts at file renaming, and were instead going through the 'slow path' of explicitly copying files into their final location before deleting the originals, instead of just renaming them in-place)
  
• Added a workaround for the persistent "couldn't open 'shot.jpg'" launcher screenshot errors that seem to pop up every time we release a new update. Now, if we can't open the image file, we just continue to run without it and we'll try again the next time we enter the desktop interface.
  

And that's pretty much it for this very small update! I was hoping to have an initial revision of multiselect ready for people to play with by now, but this save file issue has kind of put everybody here on panic stations as we try to ready an update and a migration process that's going to work for *everybody*. Right now, I'm expecting to be back working on multiselect from *tomorrow*, while other folks on the team carry on testing of the save file change.

Thanks so much for your patience everyone, and I'm sorry for missing this issue until now, and big apologies to anybody who was affected by it! Also, thanks so much to the players who finally brought it to our attention a few days ago! :)

-T

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

• The game will no longer load data from unpacked zipfiles. We've had way too many crash reports from folks who had extracted the zipfiles in earlier builds and are now trying to run the latest version of the game using data files from older builds! :D This should stop that from happening. (honestly, you want to load data from the zipfiles anyway; it makes loading into the game so much faster!)
  
• Fixed area-effect attacks used in PvP duels affecting players who weren't a part of the duel.
  
• Made party formation more attractive around taverns.
  
• Fixed 'stun' and 'root' status effects to work correctly. ('root' can't move but can still attack, 'stun' can do neither)
  

And of course a whole bunch of other miscellaneous bugfixes, fixing bugs reported to us both via crash reports and via in-game bug reports. Thanks so much to everybody who's been sending those through!

Also, while I'm here, here's
[h3]a general development update:[/h3]

We have another technical update coming very soon; we've had some reports of trouble with save files from folks using multiple steam accounts from a single Windows account, so I'm going to be moving game data into a different folder structure to try to make Steam Cloud Sync more robust in that situation.

This change will require us moving everybody's save data into a different location, which is frankly kind of a terrifying change for me, since it's touching literally everybody's save data all at once, but it'll put us into a much safer folder structure once everything has been moved, so it feels like an important change. We just need to test rigorously before rolling out the change!

We're into internal testing on this data migration process now; if the testing gives us the all-clear then I'm hoping to roll it out publicly maybe sometime next week!

In terms of new game functionality, I've begun making progress on multi-select, which I'm planning to have as the first new feature in the 'Creativity Spike' series of updates that we're working on now. The idea with multi-select is to make it possible to select a large group of objects and destroy them all with a single command, or (eventually) move them as a group, or maybe even create duplicates of whole groups of objects. The first release of multi-select will *probably* just do the "select multiple things and destroy them all at once" part, with other functionality to follow afterwards. But we'll see how I go with it!

As always, thanks so much for your support and feedback, everyone!

-T