MMORPG Tycoon 2 News

Hi folks! This patch mostly contains bugfixes:

• Fixed an issue which caused some players to be unable to create new games (whilst still being able to load and play old ones).
  
• Fixed a pathfinding issue which could result in some vehicle depots sometimes being completely ignored for pathfinding requests.
  
• Fixed a possible softlock if you skipped a new release trailer while that trailer was showing the inside of a dungeon.
  
• Updated the "Unsubscribers Report" to show actual reasons for unsubscriptions. Previously we just showed the most recent negative thought of each unsubscriber, but that wasn't always (or even often) a full explanation. Now if somebody has unsubscribed because they were banned, we show that in the report. If it's because their character class got destroyed, or because they couldn't afford to pay the subscription fee, or because they thought they'd outleveled the game's current content, those will each show up in the report. Old historical "Unsubscribers Report" data from before this update will now show up as "Unknown Reason", but you'll still be able to see how many unsubscribers you had on past days from earlier builds of the game.
  
• Disabled the "dynamic batching" video option, since it was actually slowing down the game a lot when enabled, once a game got large. (I'll revisit this in future and try to find where the performance loss is happening! But until then I'm just disabling the option outright.)
  

...and a bunch of other, more minor, changes and fixes!

As always, huge thanks to everyone who reported the issues above and assisted in testing and verifying fixes!

-T

[p]Hi folks! We have a second part of the Accelerator update today, plus a bunch of bug fixes and more! Stay tuned below the changelog for an update on me.[/p][h2]Major Changes[/h2]

• [p]When we rolled out the Accelerator update two weeks ago, some players (mostly AMD users) had rendering problems, and so I hastily rolled back all the rendering-related optimizations and fixes from that update in a hotfix build. But thanks to some heroic testers whom I'll never be able to thank enough, we found the bugs and now we're ready to roll those rendering optimizations back out to everyone again, and that's most of what's in this update!
  
  Rendering data is now smaller and draw calls are now faster (and under the hood, the engine's rendering code is nicer! But probably nobody cares about that last part but me.). It's a small improvement if you compare it to the scale of savings from the CPU-side optimizations that went into the last build, but every little bit helps, right?[/p]

[h2]Other Improvements[/h2]

• [p]Fixed rare planning-related crashes immediately after destroying NPCs, Monster Zones, or after social circles disband. (we've seen about five of these reports in total over the last two weeks)[/p]
• [p]Added a game option to disable alerts about character types which don't have basic attacks. This should be considered an expert-level option, as it's basically removing the guard rails that prevent you from accidentally making character classes who can't fight at all (or who run out of juice partway through combat and then get completely stuck).[/p]
• [p]Fixed manually moving a player who is in a party which was traveling in formation so they actually get moved. (previously they ignored being moved and immediately teleported back to their party)[/p]
• [p]Fixed a visual bug in the network system which could cause some network cables to show themselves as carrying negative bandwidth.[/p]
• [p]Increased the amount of CPU time devoted to offscreen monsters, who sometimes weren't getting enough time in really
• packed* regions to keep up their combat effectiveness.[/p]
• [p]Fixed parties getting stuck if the party unexpectedly got split up across multiple maps.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a bug which could result in a toon getting stuck at a dungeon door forever.[/p]
• [p]Vastly sped up drawing the new icons used for XP, death notifications, level-up, and etc.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a possible crash if you quit the game while viewing the "Release Announcement" view.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a critical bug in text formatting of certain floating point numbers, which could sometimes cause incorrect values to be displayed.[/p]
• [p]Fixed the tool "cost" string not being visible when the "System Cursor" option is set.[/p]

[p]...and a bunch of other, more minor fixes and improvements![/p][p]As always, huge thanks to everybody who reported issues and with an extra special shout out to those who were affected by the rendering issues on certain AMD cards and helped me remotely debug what was going wrong to cause them![/p][p][/p][p]Okay, so now the update on me. Last time we talked (at the release of the Accelerator update, about two weeks ago), I had just tested positive for Covid. I've spent most of the time since then continuing to test positive, and *mostly* staying in bed and resting to try to recover. [/p][p]It seemed to be a relatively light case (as far as Covid goes), and I was feeling mostly okay apart from a lingering cough by the end of the first week (even though I was still testing positive), so I started spending an hour here or there doing little bits of work while still technically sick, which is where almost everything in the update above came from.[/p][p]On Wednesday last week I finally began testing negative for covid, but since I still have that cough I'm still mostly trying to take it easy; I don't want to risk long covid or anything like that by overdoing it immediately after recovery! (But also just resting for the whole day gets *so* boring, so I have to at least touch code from time to time!)[/p][p]Assuming all goes well, I'm planning to return to something closer to a normal work schedule and presence in the discussion boards and in our discord on this Wednesday, as the 1 week anniversary of when I first tested negative. I'm hoping that my cough clears up by then, too! But if not, I'll continue working from home until it does.[/p][p]Thanks so much for your well-wishes everyone, as well as for all the bug reports and suggestions![/p][p]-T[/p]

Hi folks! This is just a very quick hotfix addressing some rendering issues reported by a small number of players.

Big thanks to the folks who contacted us about them!

[p]Hi folks! What, this? Why, it's only the single biggest performance boost we've ever shipped, why do you ask? :D[/p][p][/p][h2]Headline features:[/h2]

• [p] [h3]Much faster game simulation![/h3] With this update, even the largest saves we've received from players are now running at or near full speed on our test machines! This is a CPU-side optimisation, and I expect that the biggest improvements will be seen by players with large games, many players logged in at once, and at least three or four active world regions, with bigger savings the larger your world gets. There will likely be little or no difference for people who currently have just one or two regions active, and folks who are GPU-limited due to huge amounts of placed scenery will still be GPU-limited. (But hopefully running the simulation at max speed at least won't make their frame rate actively worse any more) [/p]
• [p] [h3]More use of background threads for AI![/h3] In this update, all player planning has been moved from the main thread to background threads. This means that (for example) five players all randomly happening to choose the same frame to rethink what they want to do will no longer cause frame rate microstutters! Those big choices about where to go and what to do are all now happening from background threads.[/p]
• [p] [h3]Compressed model data for all buildings and scenery models.[/h3] Making models require less data in VRAM improves rendering performance! (this will matter more for folks on low-end hardware, though) [/p]
• [p] [h3]Icons as event indicators![/h3] In this update we replace the "+XP", "+LVL", "-LVL", "DEAD", and "IM" floating text indicators with localization-friendlier icons. There are still a few more of these text indicators to convert over to icons, and the specific icons being used in this build are not final, but I feel like this is already a big improvement! These new icons can still be turned off using the view options settings button near the top right of the HUD, the same way the text ones could.[/p]

[p][/p][h3]Other notable changes:[/h3]

• [p] Fixed a bug which caused GMs who are currently searching through game logs to find evidence to incorrectly show their status as "Failed to find evidence" while they're doing it. Oops![/p]
• [p] Fixed a bug during panic logout scenarios where players would not consider nearby potential inns as places to go to logout if the inn had a high price set. (the 'price' on an inn is the price to move into that inn as a permanent home; merely logging out there - especially in an emergency - is always free). This was causing spurious "Couldn't find an inn to log out" messages, even when plenty of inns were available![/p]
• [p] Fixed dungeon ambiance sounds continuing to play if you quit directly from a dungeon view to the in-game desktop.[/p]
• [p] Fixed a bug which caused buzz to stop giving any new-subscriber benefits at all if buzz grew past a total value of 1,000. (the intention was for the benefit-per-extra-buzz to reduce at that point, but what was actually happening was that the whole benefit was being removed once you were past that threshhold. Now fixed!)[/p]

[p]...and a whole bunch of other more minor tweaks and bug fixes![/p][p][/p][p]So, an update on me: A week ago, I tested positive for Covid. Luckily, this build had entered testing several weeks before that, so I didn't have to do a lot more work on it; just monitor the bug reports from players and QA, and it all went quite smoothly, so delivering this update hasn't disrupted my rest too much! (honestly, writing these release notes is the most work I've done since testing positive!)[/p][p][/p][p]In terms of the illness, I actually feel pretty good now; almost all my symptoms have gone away over the last few days, leaving only a small cough and a gravelly voice to remind me that I'm sick. But the rapid tests are still returning positive Covid results, so I'm going to continue taking it easy and mostly just resting until they say otherwise! I'm hoping it won't be too long; I'm *super* excited to get moving on with the next big update![/p][p][/p][p]We'll talk more soon, and I'll post another announcement with how I'm doing if the Covid diagnosis drags on too much longer.[/p][p][/p][p]-T[/p]

Hi folks! A small bugfix/quality of life patch today:

• Weapon sizes for a character can now be adjusted in the costume editor. (use the 'Weapon Scale' slider while adjusting the character's right arm to change the weapon's scale). We also now do some better placement of weapons if you change the model used for the character's right arm!
  
• Fixed an issue which could cause the character type buttons in the class, NPC, and Monster design lists to occasionally flicker for a frame if you had more than 9 of one type of character and scrolled down in the window.
  
• Prevent the user from setting a buggy building as 'online' while a developer is trying to debug it (naughty naughty!) :D
  
• A few other miscellaneous fixes to the behavior of certain UI widgets inside grid widgets.
  

As always, big thanks to folks who've reported bugs and issues! Next up is a new 'Performance Update' (official name yet to be determined), which will soon enter public testing and should come to the live build in a few weeks!

Talk more soon,
-T