MMORPG Tycoon 2 News

Small update this time, mostly focused around character movement. It gives us better behaviour in general, improves our "worst case" scenarios, and even slightly improves performance, too!

There's actually a *big* new system under the hood powering these changes; it was developed for use in the upcoming Dungeons update, but it gives us enough benefits on the main map that I thought I should backport it into our live build so you can see the benefits now!

New in this build:

• While idle, monsters now remain strictly inside their monster zones (previously they could wander up to 20 meters outside of their monster zones). Additionally, they should no longer walk through obstructions (walls/fences/etc) at any time.
  
  
• While kiting enemies, players would sometimes accidentally travel through obstructions or over mountains or into the sea -- this shouldn't happen any more!
  
  
• When considering what to do, players no longer consider activities which are unreachable from their current position. This fixes the old (old!) problem of players sometimes getting stuck repeatedly trying to figure out how to reach a building which was fully walled-off and inaccessible.
  
  
• Various pathfinding bugfixes and performance improvements, especially related to detecting impossible paths.
  
  
• Buffed "consult online guide" action to give a much wider knowledge of the subscriber's surroundings and made it last longer (33% chance to expire at the end of each play session, instead of a 100% chance).
  
  
• Guards on patrol no longer accidentally teach nearby subscribers to fight better; they now only provide directions, as intended. Guard directions now give region knowledge similar to that acquired from online guides (but are much faster and don't require the subscriber alt-tab out of the game).
  
  
• Fixed a rare bug which could result in a player's combat abilities getting stuck in a 'charging' state such that the player thought they were using the ability but no attack ever happened. (this would usually end up looking like the player repeatedly approaching and then running away from monsters, when they actually thought they were kiting the monsters)
  
  
• This build also contains an experimental fix to our data file format, to theoretically make them work much better with Steam's delta patching system, which should result in smaller patch sizes for future patches.
  

...plus a bunch of smaller UI bug fixes!

-T

Hi everyone!

We wanted to post a small news update for you today to give everyone a first look at the progress we've made on dungeons so far. If you're already hanging out with us on Discord, you've seen the odd sneak peek here and there, but as we get closer to putting the first part of this feature on the Test build, we thought we'd show a little of where we're at right now.

First up, a couple of disclaimers! These definitely aren't done yet. What you'll see in the below screenshots are mostly representative of what we're aiming for, but they are not the final product and are very much subject to change. It also doesn't represent everything we have planned! But we also don't want to over-promise.

Let's start by taking a look at your experience with creating dungeons!



We want this to feel like the same robust and familiar building toolsets you have in the open world, but working to the confines that are required in creating a dungeon-type space, and we're feeling pretty good about where it's at!

Now, on to what your players will see.



So, that's where we're at with dungeons right now! It's coming along nicely, and we're still confident it'll be done and with you the first half of this year (with the test build getting it a bit sooner!)

If you have thoughts & feedback for us, head over to our Discord and let us know! The whole team is active on there and we try to be as available as we can! 🙂

--Leanne

This is a hotfix for a couple major issues in yesterday's update.

We'd brought in an engine change which had fixed a number of minor minor texture-related bugs, but accidentally created a few major texture-related bugs.

These were:

• Most notable was that text rendering was failing on many models of AMD graphic cards, as well as many (most?) models of Mac, and also on the Steam Deck.
  
  
• Road rendering was somewhat broken, with roads appearing extremely pixelated, when compared against earlier builds of the game.
  

Both of these bugs were caused by the same engine change, and should now be entirely fixed. Apologies to everyone who was affected, and huge thanks to the players who brought them to our attention and helped confirm that our fixes worked for them!

-T

Hi folks! This is just a small update with some utilities to help simplify some of our debugging efforts, along with some small bug fixes.

New in this build:

• Adds a "Bug Report" feature to the main game menu. Submitting a bug report automatically handles all of our standard data gathering when bugs are reported; it sends us (anonymous) information about your computer specs, your game log, the current game state, as well as a screenshot.
  
• Revised game menu to make its behaviour more intuitive.
  
• The major quality-of-life change: Made the game's "pause" border a soothing matte red instead of an eye-searing glowing electric orange. (I honestly don't know what I must have been thinking when I first set that up)
  
• Implemented double-click-dragging within text edit widgets, to drag and select by words.
  
• Fixed incorrect collisions vs. road intersections when placing scenery objects.
  
• Fixed the placement of player names for very large character models.
  

...plus a few other minor bug fixes!

As a general rule, we'd now prefer bug reports to be reported via the in-game bug reporter, when that's possible, because that gets us more information more easily, and should make it much easier for us to see the issues in action and get fixes more quickly! (though of course we'll continue monitoring the discussion boards and our Discord, for issues reported there!)

As always, thanks so much for your time and enthusiasm, everyone!

-T

Over the past hour, we've received some reports of modular buildings going missing from save files when loaded into the hotfix build from earlier today -- this update fixes that issue! If your modular buildings have vanished after loading a save, please try reloading from a slightly earlier save.

(MMORPG Tycoon 2 keeps periodic autosaves as well as separate saves at each new version release of your MMO -- you can access them from the 'Backups' tab in the in-game desktop interface.)

Apologies for the bother!
-T