MMORPG Tycoon 2 News

[p]Hi everyone! I'm still working on the next big feature update, but I wanted to release this side update which contains various bug fixes and small improvements I've made to the current build over the past few weeks.[/p][h3]Here's what's new:[/h3]

• [p]Fixed subscribers in parties panicking and forgetting about their party each time they face-pulled a new monster when they were already in combat. (this would often lead to the subscriber abandoning the combat and running away toward the dungeon exit until they had a chance to calm down. If they actually reached the dungeon exit, they actually would leave and then get kicked from their party for desertion). [/p]
• [p]Fixed a timing-related multi-threaded game crash which could rarely occur if the last member of a party left the party on the same frame when a save happened to begin. (the save would fail)[/p]
• [p]Fixed a timing-related multi-threaded game lockup which could rarely occur if you were editing the map using a terrain painting tool on the same frame when a save began. (the save would still succeed, though)[/p]
• [p]Fixed combat ability ranges to ignore height differences between characters, as intended. This fixes cases where a player would repeatedly move into a spot that they thought was in range for a combat attack to be legal, when it actually wasn't, if the combat was occurring on a steep slope.[/p]
• [p]When using the 'Destroy' tool, if the cursor is over a road that runs through a monster zone, prioritize destroying the road, instead of the monster zone.[/p]
• [p]Tweaked the game simulation scaling code for really large saves, just to give players and monsters in really packed regions a little extra time to think, This won't have any effect on most of the saves we've seen from players, but if you have a really big game with really densely packed regions, this adjustment might help for you![/p]
• [p]Made a small rendering performance optimization to outline rendering.[/p]
• [p]Fixed the game getting stuck in the load screen while loading a specific user save we've received. Somehow a NaN (which stands for "Not a Number") had gotten into a monster's aggro threat table and the code which was trying to fix it was getting trapped in an infinite loop trying to remove it. (Fun Computer Science reasons, NaN is defined as not equaling itself. So if you go looking for the NaN value by checking to see whether it equals NaN, you'll never find it!)
  
  Anyhow, If you're that user, thanks for sending the save to us and this fix was for you! :D[/p]

[p]As I mentioned above, I'm currently midway through work on the next big feature update, which is planned to include a some exciting new terrain editing features (because I finally figured out how I could implement them without exploding our save file sizes!), along with new placeable bridges, and a few other bits and pieces.[/p][p]There's no definite date for that update yet, but I'll be posting a 'Preview' announcement once it's ready for early testing; I'm very much looking forward to that![/p][p]Talk more soon,[/p][p]-T[/p]

Just a few more small bug fixes for this week's main update:

• Fixed undo and redo for edits which created two or more travel buildings in a single action.
  
• Fixed dead players who got teleported into a graveyard sometimes sitting down there and trying to rest to recover health as if they were alive, instead of turning into a ghost as they were supposed to.
  
• Fixed players who logged off while dead being brought back to life the next time they logged in - but still on zero health, so they just immediately re-died wherever they were standing.

-T

Hi folks, another small update fixing issues which have been noticed over the last 24 hours:

Fixes:

• Fixed 'undo' to correctly restore building services and their pricing when undoing the destruction of a building.
  
• Fixed ghost players occasionally getting stuck inside their graveyard.
  
• Fixed a crash that could sometimes happen while destroying transit buildings.
  
• Fixed a severe performance regression in yesterday's update, which mostly affected really large games with lots of heavily overloaded regions.
  
• Fixed the 'active mods' window not showing up on the desktop interface unless you resized the screen first (or otherwise changed video format).
  

As always, big thanks to everyone for your feedback!

-T

Hi folks! This is a very small patch to handle a few issues reported with the Ruins Update.

What's changed:

• Possible fix for a rare multithreading race condition when subscribers are thinking about joining a social circle.
  
• Fixed pathfinder using vehicle paths that the player couldn't afford to use in situations where there were alternate routes that they could have afforded. (this could result in players appearing to get stuck in 'Thinking' state)
  
• Fixed a migration issue when travelling into certain complex regions if they contain completely walled-off areas which are unreachable by players, which could result in players just never migrating to those regions.
  
• Fixed slow model 'rez' effect accidentally introduced in the Ruins update. (and also improved the maths to make it cope with very large and very small models better!)
  

Big thanks to everyone who reported issues!

-T

[p][/p][p]Hi everybody! This update was originally supposed to just ("just") be a simple content update, but.. it's kind of expanded and morphed into something bigger, with a bunch of new features and AI fixes and improvements.[/p][p]Let me tell you about them![/p][h2]New stuff: [/h2]

• [p]This was supposed to be the core of this new update; we've added a new "Ruins" theme, which includes a full new functional building set, plus a new modular building set, plus several new scenery pieces! This is all unlocked via a new 'Ruins' art pack you'll find in the list of available development projects.[/p]
• [p]This was also supposed to be part of this update; almost every building model in the game has been tweaked, bringing the path markup up to date to match the newer models, adding a little flair to many of the older buildings, that kind of thing. A little spruce and tidy, along with better player movements when interacting with older buildings.[/p]

[p]And that was supposed to be it, apart from some small bug fixes. New models, fixes to old models, pretty standard for a content update between major new features.[/p][p]But then..[/p]

• [p]I fully redesigned the AI logic that subscribers use to determine how much gold they're willing to spend, with an eye to making it more flexible for players who have tuned their in-game economies and rewards differently than what I'd originally expected!
  
  With this change, it should now be much more viable to charge higher gold prices for most in-game services (buying things, travel, etc) especially as your players gain levels and accumulate more gold to spend![/p]
• [p]Based in part on discussions with players here on the steam discussion boards, buildings can now show and track multiple services, and AI players can distinguish between those services!
  
  As an example, graveyards now present two services; one service for spawning the ghosts of people who have been killed, and a different service for bringing those ghosts back to life.
  
  Previously, the first of those was just an automatic part of being a graveyard, but now it's been turned into another explicit service that's much more visible and has its usage tracked!
  
  Several other building types (inns, dungeon entrances, etc) also now have had their automatic "that's just something this building type does" functions turned into full, listed services, to make it all much more visible exactly what every building does, and how often people make use of those previously invisible functions.
  
  Of course, now being able to list an arbitrary number of services on each building and have the AI interact with any or all of them is just the first step toward several exciting new possibilities we've begun to cook up (and some of you can probably guess at a few of those future new features!)[/p]
• [p]...but the first of those new possibilities is that as of this update, any transport building (flight points, teleporters, etc) which has multiple travel paths now gets a separate service for each path they connect to, so you can now set separate prices to use each flight path, and have their individual usages tracked over time![/p]

[h3]Changes/Bug fixes:[/h3]

• [p]Fixed several major bugs in the game's pathfinding systems which were often resulting in players taking entirely non-optimal paths, ignoring roads, or even sometimes (and seemingly at random) just entirely ignoring individual transport buildings for a single pathfinding request, but then using them correctly the next time that same path was requested.[/p]
• [p]Fixed players attempting to migrate to other regions which they actually couldn't afford to migrate to (due to high prices on the travel options to get there).[/p]
• [p]Fixed players in party formation getting distracted and wandering off if they spotted a new quest giver.[/p]
• [p]Fixed players on moving ships falling off the back of the ship whenever they sent an IM.[/p]
• [p]Fixed players missing vehicle loading zones and instead standing in midair - often somewhat far away - while waiting for their vehicle to arrive, when they thought they weren't being observed.[/p]
• [p]Players no longer resist migrating to a new region just because it's a long way away.[/p]
• [p]Ghost players can now turn back human right where they are, while they are still inside the graveyard where their ghost appeared. (Previously, they would usually have to bounce around between different interaction pads within the graveyard, which looked a little weird)[/p]
• [p]"Most stable" and "Fewest cheaters" awards weren't awarding extra customer impressions as they were supposed to. Now they do! (the fix only affects newly received awards, sorry!)[/p]
• [p]Fixed several bugs which could each result in a player repeatedly "bumping" back and forth around a transit building, trying to use the building but then refusing to spend the money.[/p]
• [p]Fixed responsiveness of text entry when game FPS is low.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a region migration bug which caused migration to repeatedly fail for (rare) C-shaped regions whose geometric center point was outside the region.[/p]
• [p]Removed decorative and scenery buildings from the list of buildings in the region information window, to make it easier to see and find the functional buildings.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a bug which resulted in monsters being much weaker when not being watched.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a bug which resulted in both players and monsters being slower when not being watched and following a bent path.[/p]
• [p]Level up/down notification icons now remain visible for 1.5 seconds, down from 3 seconds.[/p]
• [p]Added a button to the "Developing tech" HUD element which will take you back to the development window, since this was a pain point for several new users who had closed the development window during the tutorial and then didn't know how to get back to it.[/p]
• [p]Moved building definition files into a new directory; this will probably break most building-adjustment mods, sorry! But because of the major changes to all the building definition files in this update, we needed to be certain to be loading the new-format building definitions, rather than files from old mods that maybe people had even forgotten they'd installed. Hopefully we won't ever have to do this again![/p]
• [p]Related to the above, we now show a simple "Active Mods" window in the in-game desktop interface if you have any mods installed. This is really just there to remind folks that they do have mods installed (if they do), to make things easier when people are contacting us for support![/p]

[p]...plus a whole bunch of other bugfixes and minor improvements![/p][p]As exciting as I think tracking multiple services separately on each building is (and I think some of you can probably guess several other things I'm planning to do with that ability in the future!), I'm even more excited for the next update, where I'm planning to add some exciting new map editing functionality, some of which has been requested for a *long* time, but I've only recently figured out how to make it work in the game without exploding our save file sizes![/p][p]I'm very much looking forward to talking again soon when I have things to show for that![/p][p]-T[/p]