MMORPG Tycoon 2 News

[p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Hi everyone, happy new year![/p][p]Today, we have a tech update; largely due to the big performance improvements we achieved last year (and there are a few more in this build, too!), I've been able to turn on a feature that I never thought we'd be able to afford to do:[/p][p]Players now avoid walking through large scenery objects! This is most notable around trees and various large structures. Note that we only do this for large, solid-looking objects on the ground. They'll still quite happily trample straight through your meticulously placed flower beds (sorry not sorry!)[/p][p]There's a big change list this time, so let's dig into it![/p][h2]Changes[/h2]

• [p]Several performance boosts for large maps, especially when there are a lot of parties in combat on the main map, and double-especially when on the network view![/p]
• [p]Monster zones, terrain type boundaries, obstructed ground markers, and other terrain markings are now much less visible in most view modes, which gives you a much cleaner view of what you're building![/p]
• [p]Monster zones now remember their original painted shape. While they still reshape themselves around any obstacles within their boundaries, they now restore themselves to their original painted shape if those obstacles are later removed. (previously, holes in the monster zone were left behind where the obstacles used to be)[/p]
• [p]Fixed a bug which was sometimes allowing players and monsters to walk through walls or other obstructions, most commonly during combat while kiting or being kited by an enemy.[/p]
• [p]If a developer has put a building into maintenance mode to fix a bug, you can now overrule them and manually put the building back online, which will cancel the bugfix. (to allow the bug to be fixed later, either put the building back into maintenance mode or else schedule a fix for it from within the Development report's bug list)[/p]
• [p]Added the ability to customize the lighting direction in each region. (you could already set color and brightness; now direction is also customizable!)[/p]
• [p]Natural attribute changes (health and mana recovery, rage decay) now happens smoothly, instead of in periodic 'ticks'. This makes it much more visually distinct from Heal over Time or Damage over Time effects, to make it easier to see what's going on.[/p]
• [p]When placing or moving buildings, the tests for collisions between buildings and other obstructions are now substantially more precise.[/p]
• [p]When placing or moving buildings, we now show the building's entrance points, including whether they are obstructed or not.[/p]
• [p]If all of a building's entrances are obstructed (say, due to impassable scenery items being placed over them), then it now will go into "Maintenance" mode until at least one entrance becomes accessible again.[/p]

[h2]Bugfixes[/h2]

• [p]Social and PVP groups now try to avoid forming inside scenery objects.[/p]
• [p]Better navmesh obstructions around walls which have large end pieces (such as castle walls, arid walls, and others)[/p]
• [p]Untangled the Damage over Time and Heal over Time code to make them work much more immediately and reliably.[/p]
• [p]Fixed pathfinding systems sometimes using offline travel buildings when they shouldn't have (which would lead to players going to those buildings and then becoming annoyed that they weren't working)[/p]
• [p]Fixed handling of 'Maintenance' modes when multiple developers were fixing multiple bugs on a single object at the same time.[/p]
• [p]Fixed needs not appearing to decay while a player is in a party (and then that decay being applied all at once in a single hit as soon as they left the party).[/p]
• [p]Fixed a single-frame visual glitch which could happen when starting to move a scenery object.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a once-per-run frame rate stutter when opening a character placement or design tool for the first time.[/p]
• [p]Fixed buildings failing to remove grass underneath themselves.[/p]
• [p]Fixed the character 'stun' animation to play correctly.[/p]
• [p]Small improvements to grass rendering (which should result in fewer cases of grass appearing to 'float' above steep slopes)[/p]
• [p]Fixed a rare crash around changing resolution or UI scale while on the desktop interface.[/p]
• [p]Fixed 0% 'Weaken' ability effects being displayed in the UI as if they were 0% 'Protect' ability effects.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a few bugs about the handling of regions which contained no walkable ground.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a bug which caused subscriber 'need' decay to be accumulated when in a party and then be applied all at once upon leaving the party, instead of applying it in real time while still in the party.[/p]

[p][/p][p]It's been a short creativity spike this time, as I'm eager to get moving on the upcoming major Factions feature -- I'll be sharing details about the design and implementation of that new feature soon![/p][p]In other news, the community art pack poll over on our Discord server has concluded with "Eldritch" being the big winner, so Liam has begun digging into interpreting what that'd look like in our art style! No immediate announcement about when it'll be completed, but it's coming! (And I imagine it's what Liam's going to be focused on while I power away on Factions!)[/p][p]Anyway, as always I want to send huge thanks to everyone for your feedback, your bug reports, and your support! We'll talk again soon.[/p][p][/p][p]-T[/p]

[p]Hi folks! This is just a quick hotfix build to address a couple of issues people have found in yesterday's "Confection" update.[/p]

• [p]Fixed a crash which could occur if a subscriber was interrupted while flying on a flight path and then changed their mind about what they wanted to do.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a few tools not working correctly; most notably the manual "warn" and "ban" tools, which weren't correctly detecting subscribers under the cursor.[/p]
• [p]Fixed some pathfinding issues related to subscribers being interrupted (typically by monsters) while walking on a road which they expected to be safe.[/p]

[p]Huge thanks to everyone who reported those issues![/p][p]-T[/p]

[p]Hi everyone![/p][p]This is a small holiday update for everyone, containing a new exotic art pack and a bunch of bug fixes and other minor improvements.[/p][h2]Here's what's new:[/h2]

• [p]Exotic Art Theme: Confection.
  Contains a new functional building theme, modular gingerbread houses, scenery items, and a customisable gingerbread man costume for your players (or your monsters, if you prefer!)[/p]
• [p]Improved bounding box generation for flex objects.
  This should make it much easier to click on bridges and walls![/p]
• [p]Restructured how status effects are processed which should make Damage Over Time effects far more reliable in terms of how much damage they do and how quickly the damage is applied![/p]
• [p]Added a missing scenery item to the Wild West exotic art pack (an animal skull).[/p]
• [p]Fixed transitions into cutscenes when UIScale values are below 100.[/p]
• [p]Fixed spurious extra logo redraws when opening the logo editor UI. They seem to have been causing trouble for very old graphics cards/chipsets/drivers (>10 years old). Hopefully this fixes it, but even if it doesn't I've added a lot more logging around the trouble to hopefully help me debug it further if it happens to anyone again![/p]
• [p]Improved player region migration, especially in the case where the destination region is carved into multiple disconnected walkable regions (for example, if a chasm splits the region into two halves). This still needs more work, but that situation is handled a lot better now than it was before![/p]
• [p]Fixed a rare crash around combat ability editing.[/p]
• [p]Simplified pathfinding cleanup, speeding it up and slightly reducing memory usage during this cleanup process.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a single-frame white flash which could happen at the start of the intro cutscene.[/p]
• [p]Improved the game's handling of corrupted saves.[/p]
• [p]Fixed players sometimes spuriously changing weapons when the design window for their class was opened or closed.[/p]

[p]So, looking forward. After being away for basically all of last month to spend time with my family after the sudden passing of my mother, I'm now back home and have been settling back into work on the long-awaited Factions update, and I'm looking forward to talking a bit more about that in the new year! But my first job on that is setting up full world PVP, so that everybody is able to fight everybody else (as currently players can really only attack monsters, and NPCs don't yet have a full aggro system, which means that taunts don't work against them and etc. All of that needs to be fixed to get proper world PVP working!)[/p][p]Big thanks to everyone for their patience while I dealt with family dramas! The words of support have really helped, along with the usual comments, suggestions, and bug reports! I'm looking forward to showing of what I'm working on next sometime early in the new year. :)[/p][p][/p][p]-T[/p]

[p]Hi folks![/p][p]It’s been a minute since I was last here saying hi, so allow me to reintroduce myself! I'm Leanne and I handle all things communications related here at VectorStorm and today I'm here to present you with the results of our first ever player survey![/p][p]Here are a few of the insights we've taken from the surveys:[/p]

• [p]In total, there were 1,729 responses![/p]
• [p]49% of those responding also play World of Warcraft, which definitely tracks with some of the amazing builds we've seen players share in Discord.[/p]
• [p]64% of responders say they basically no-life the game. Nice! [/p]
• [p]Number of names I had to delete from the name suggestion list: so so many. This is why we can’t have nice things.[/p]
• [p]The top requested features were; Guilds, Raids and Crafting/Gathering. [/p]
• [p]Factions & World PVP is the most anticipated roadmap milestone (honestly, we didn’t need a survey to tell us that!)[/p]

[p]And now, for the thing you really want. We asked for suggestions for future building item themes and you really delivered. So many awesome submissions, it took a while to cut the list down to a few. Without further ado, your options are;[/p]

• [p]High Elves[/p]
• [p]Druid[/p]
• [p]Eldritch[/p]
• [p]Jungle[/p]
• [p]Log Cabin[/p]
• [p]Atlantis[/p]

[p]We’ll have a poll posted shortly on our Discord, so make sure you come join us there so you can get your vote submitted. We’ll also have some reference images of the types of things we’re thinking about, based on other games, to give you an idea of what we’re aiming for. Please note that whilst ‘Atlantis’ would thematically be as if it were under water, actual underwater zones aren’t in the game and aren’t planned. [/p][p]That about wraps it up for me for now, so as always come find us on Discord! We’re very active there, with regular test build updates and insights into development, so come say hi.[/p][p]Thanks,[/p][p]-Leanne[/p]

[p]Hi everyone![/p][p]In this big content update, we've gone outside our usual box and have two new art packs with styles outside of our usual high fantasy genre![/p][h2]New themes:[/h2][h3]Wild West[/h3]

• [p]A full set of functional buildings in an old west style![/p]
• [p]A new modular building type, perfect for making frontier settlements![/p]
• [p]A mine cart bridge type![/p]
• [p]Two new customisable character costumes - the cunning Desperado and the implacable Gunslinger.[/p]
• [p]Almost a dozen new western-style scenery items![/p]

[h3]Pulp Sci-Fi[/h3]

• [p]A full set of functional buildings made from repurposed rockets and spaceships![/p]
• [p]A sci-fi laser wall![/p]
• [p]Two more new customisable character costumes - the Astronaut and, of course, we couldn't do pulp sci-fi without providing a green-skinned alien![/p]
• [p]Almost two dozen new pulp sci-fi era scenery items, including even more spaceships! (we might have gotten a little carried away with these)[/p]
• [p]Did somebody ask for ray guns? This art pack also contains a full "ray guns" weapon category with about twenty ray gun models which progressively upgrade as your players gain levels![/p]

[p]Both these new art packs are being classed as "exotic", and are available to be developed from the usual development projects menu; the same place where you start work on normal art packs.[/p][p]And of course, there's also the usual collection of bug fixes and small UI improvements. We hope you'll enjoy this little diversion from our usual world look and feel, and we'll definitely be adding more exotic art packs in future updates! (We'll have a poll about this and other things in the near future, as well as finally delivering the long-awaited results of the last user poll!)[/p][p][/p][p]On a personal note, I want to give a huge "thank you" to my fantastic producer and artist pair of Liam and Liam (respectively), who managed to pull this whole content update together almost entirely on their own while I've been away from home, helping out my father after the sudden death of my mother earlier this month. Liams, you two are the best.