MMORPG Tycoon 2 News

[p]Hi everyone![/p][p]I wanted to take a moment to talk a bit about what's coming in the Factions Update. It's still a little ways off, but hopefully this little taste will give you some insight into what's coming![/p][p]This update is divided into several different parts. Let's talk about them one by one.[/p][p][/p][h2]Starting points for specific groups or classes[/h2][p]To support different factions, you'll want to be able to set different locations for different factions to spawn; or even different locations for each specific class in each faction! [/p][p]I've been upgrading our starting points to allow that. Here's some work-in-progress on an interface to specify what can spawn at each starting point:[/p][p][/p][p]In the future, this same interface could allow you to add and remove services from other types of buildings! I expect that in the initial Factions Update it will just be starting points, but I definitely want to enable this sort of thing for potion shops, blacksmiths, and other buildings![/p][p][/p][h2]Character Variants[/h2][p]Here's one that people have been requesting forever, and it's finally happening to support Factions; once you develop the technology for it, you're going to be able to create variants of player classes, monster types, and NPCs. Variants inherit all the attributes and combat abilities of their base class, but can be given a different name and a different appearance. And of course can be part of a different Faction![/p][p]Apart from not taking up a character type slot, they are otherwise treated as if they are a completely normal character type; here's a shot showing three Spider variants with separate monster zones placed next to each other:[/p][p][/p][h2]Factions[/h2][p]My current plan is to have Factions be handled similarly to character types; you'll get access to a certain number (probably two) when you first unlock the Factions tech, and then will be able to add more. There will be no limit to the number of Factions you can have (although there will probably be a cost)[/p][p]Each Faction will get a name, a space for lore, and a customizable banner, which will work a little like our current costume editor to let you make unique banners to visually identify your different Factions![/p][p][/p][p]And of course, there will be a selection of scenery items that let you place these customized banners around your world. Here's some early models, as an example:[/p][p][/p][p]Individual regions and districts will each be able to set the Faction which owns that part of the map. Buildings inside those owned areas will (by default) not serve players of opposing Factions.[/p][p][/p][h2]World PVP[/h2][p]Everything I've talked about above is at least partly implemented now, but the stuff below is just my current plans for the update. Obviously, it may change wildly before the update comes out! So.. watch for future Dev Blog updates to stay up to date! :)[/p][p]The idea is that you'll be able to specify where PVP is allowed to happen; you'll be able to enable or disable it globally, per-region, and per-district, so that you can restrict PVP to exactly the spots where you think it should be allowed for your particular game. [/p][p][/p][h2]Contested Zones[/h2][p]In addition to the above, where particular areas can be set as statically 'owned' by a particular Faction, they can instead be set as "Contested", in which case ownership can change hands between Factions based upon holding particular control points you've placed within those areas. If one Faction can take control of enough of the control points and hold them for a long enough duration, they'll take over ownership of the zone, which will also transfer ownership of all the buildings within that zone![/p][p][/p][p]So that's what I've been up to! There's a bit more to it, but those are the broad brushstrokes that show approximately where we're aiming! I'll be back in a couple weeks to talk about how I'm tracking on the implementation![/p][p]We do also have some other stuff going on in the background, including some awesome work on the Eldritch art theme as voted upon by our player survey, and some further performance improvements especially around load times and memory usage. I'm very much looking forward to getting to share some of that with you in the coming weeks![/p][p][/p][p]-T[/p]

[p]Hi everyone![/p][p]This is another small update with bugfixes for various issues reported by players:[/p]

• [p]Fixed a bug which could cause a small percentage of potential new subscribers to decide that they couldn't afford to pay your game's purchase price when they actually could.[/p]
• [p]Fixed some misplaced graphics sometimes visible in the grid map view.[/p]
• [p]Fixed the selection highlight remaining on an object after deselection, if you made a particular sequence of UI actions quickly enough.[/p]
• [p]Fixed parties managing to squeeze their way through the walls of dungeon layouts and going for a wander in the negative space elsewhere on the dungeon map.[/p]
• [p]Fixed an issue in map generation which caused New Map seeds to generate differently on Mac builds than on Windows or Linux builds.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a crash which would happen if you deleted a dungeon while your view was inside that dungeon.[/p]

[p]As noted before, most of my time at the moment is going into the upcoming Factions update; I'll be posting a preview announcement later today or tomorrow (depending on your time zone), showing off some of what will be coming with that![/p][p][/p][p]-T[/p]

[p]Hi folks![/p][p]This is just a small patch with a couple very targeted fixes:[/p]

• [p]In the last patch, I accidentally broke our map seeds system, so a seed from an earlier build was now building different maps than it did before; this commit fixes that, and we're back to our traditional map seeds![/p]
• [p]Also in the last patch, sometimes (although rarely) a map would be generated containing one or more empty spaces (they appeared as large grey areas on the map), and all sorts of bad things would happen if you tried to interact with those empty spaces, sometimes including just moving your cursor over them. We've now fixed that to stop it from happening any more, and for saves which have already been generated containing those empty spaces, we now fill them in with ocean during the load, so those saves should all be good now![/p]
• [p]There's also a fix for an issue that could happen if a subscriber who isn't in a party but is inside a dungeon gets so angry that they decide they want to grief other subscribers, and starts to try to figure out whether there's a monster they can lure into a starting area. Now fixed![/p]

[p]Most of my time is still going into the upcoming Factions feature build. I'll have more details on that once I have things to show off![/p][p]-T[/p]

[p]Hi folks, this is just a very small maintenance patch to address a few stability issues we've seen reported over the past week or so.[/p][p]Changes:[/p]

• [p]After continuing to see (admittedly very rare) triangulation failures reported by a few players, we're switching to a new triangulation system which hasn't yet had a single failure reported after a week in our 'test' branch, so.. hopefully this time we've cracked it! (this system is responsible for taking painted shapes and turning them into geometry we can render in the world; monster zones, districts, things like that)[/p]
• [p]Fixed a new crash bug if you tried to paint a dungeon floor without first selecting the color you wanted to paint it (oops! This one snuck in while I was consolidating all of our painting tools to use a single set of logic instead of having big chunks of duplicated code everywhere)[/p]
• [p]Improved the performance of entering/leaving the character costume editor screen, so the stutter is now much less bad. (it's still worse than it should be, but I'm saving further improvements for a larger patch with a longer testing period!)[/p]
• [p]Updated our (very!) old version of GLEW from 1.11 (1.10 on Linux!) to version 2.3.1), which slightly simplifies the game startup process and works better with modern OpenGL drivers, and just is slightly less embarrassingly old now. (version 1.11 was released almost 12 years ago! I feel so old...)[/p]

[p]Big thanks to everybody who has reported issues! I'm hoping that this addresses all the critical ones.[/p][p]We'll talk again soon, once Factions gets to a stage where I'm ready to start showing it off![/p][p]-T[/p]

[p]Hi everyone![/p][p]Ordinarily I'd put this information down below the changelog, but it's important enough to put it up top; we've had multiple reports from players that Discord's latest overlay seems to be causing severe performance problems for MT2, even when the Discord overlay is disabled for the game. [/p][p]It doesn't appear to be affecting everybody -- we're still trying too figure out the common factors between the people experiencing the problem -- but if you think it's affecting you, a temporary workaround is to turn Discord's overlay feature entirely off. In Discord's settings, in the "Game Overlay" tab down near the bottom of the list, turn off both "Enable Overlay" and "Enable Legacy Overlay". Alternately, I'm told that some players have had success by putting MT2 into either regular "Windowed" or a true "Fullscreen" video mode, in its video options.[/p][p]If this issue has affected you, we'd be very interested to hear about it! Even if the above fixed it for you, it'd be super helpful if you could send us a bug report in-game from the computer which showed the problem -- those bug reports tell us some details about your hardware and drivers that might help us figure out the common factors to who is being affected![/p][p][/p][p]Anyhow, enough about that; you're here to hear about what's changed in the patch! So here we go:[/p][p][/p][p]Changes/fixes in this patch:[/p]

• [p]Placement tools now work correctly when the camera is rotated or moved while the placement is happening. (so for example, you can now make a ring of scenery items by rotating the camera around a point while holding down the left mouse button in the scenery painting mode)[/p]
• [p]Improved the speed of middle-click camera movement, which previously was far too fast![/p]
• [p]Improved selection outlines to improve the look of bridges and some other structures which descend below the ground, when selected.[/p]
• [p]Fixed the "Tech" list in the Development window to update immediately when dev projects become available or unavailable. (previously they only updated when you closed the window and then reopened it)[/p]
• [p]Fixed a crash bug if the user destroyed a district (using the 'backspace' hotkey) while in the middle of an interactive drag changing the district's height or spread.[/p]
• [p]Fixed camera jitter when focused on parties.[/p]
• [p]Fixed the descriptive string shown when an ability has no effects assigned to it.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a crash bug if a player tried to enter (or exit) a modular building which had no entrances.[/p]
• [p]More aggressive polygon simplification of dungeon floor paints.[/p]
• [p]Fixed the display of entrances on modular buildings during placement and movement.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a bug with the 'Custom XP Amount' spinner widget in the boss monster information window, which wasn't responding to clicks correctly or allowing a value to be typed directly into it. Now fixed![/p]
• [p]Switched NavMesh generation back to a newer, more advanced system which I think should now be working for everyone![/p]
• [p]Improved wall-vs-wall obstruction detection during placement, and fixed a bug which could result in a newly placed wall being drawn in red instead of the correct colors.[/p]

[p]Thanks so much to everyone for your patience and help while these fixes came together and while we figured out what was going on for some players re: performance! [/p][p]I'm now well and truly onto faction development and I'm super excited to talk more about that in the near future![/p][p][/p][p]-T[/p][p][/p][p]Edit: This note was originally published for version 0.26.13. I've since updated the build to 0.26.15, which contains a fix for a monster zone placement crash which snuck in when I unified all of our various painting tools into a single paint system as part of this patch. The crash occurred if you tried to place a new monster zone without first setting a monster type for it; we missed that in our testing! Apologies to any players who bumped into it![/p]