MMORPG Tycoon 2 News

Hi folks! The update today is either really big or barely worth mentioning depending on your point of view.

This build is almost identical to the last one, except that we've addressed the "multiple steam accounts on one computer login account" issue that I was talking about earlier in the week. We do this by putting each steam account's save files into separate directories, so that Cloud Sync won't get confused about which saves belong to which account.

The first time you launch the game after getting this update, we now split your save files out into a separate subdirectory linked to your Steam account, and then launch the game normally. This should be entirely invisible to you; you likely wouldn't even notice if I hadn't told you about it in these patch notes. But doing it should make Steam Cloud Sync a lot happier in that "multiple-account" scenario.

Thanks so much for your patience with this update, everyone! Even though it's a relatively small change, it involved moving everybody's save data around and so we wanted to take a little extra time to put it through a lot (*a lot*) of extra internal testing before rolling it out to everyone!

Note for Mac users: Also in this build, we've raised our Mac minimum requirements from OSX 10.10 to OSX 10.15. OSX 10.15 is about five years old (and no longer supported by Apple), and it gave us access to the more modern C++ filesystem APIs which we've already been using on Windows and Linux, and which make moving the save files around easier and safer. We don't believe we actually have any players on OSX versions older than 10.15 anyway, so hopefully this doesn't cause issues for anyone, but it definitely simplified making this update!

I'll be back again soon to talk about Creativity Spike updates, now that I can turn my focus back to those!

-T

Hi folks!

This is a very small update which is getting us ready for a more important update that's coming later this week.

A player reported to us about an issue which can result in Steam deleting a game's saves when logging out of one Steam account and into a different one on a single computer account, if both accounts have access to MMORPG Tycoon 2. This issue isn't just us; this affects any game which saves into a single file path per computer login. (often this happens through Family Sharing, and similar features).

I mentioned this in the last update, but I've been working on a workaround to stop Steam from doing this when switching accounts, and that change is being tested by the team right now. But I wanted to put up a build with a warning message on the desktop interface, to encourage people make backups of their own saves in the meantime, just for extra safety and so that even folks who don't read patch notes will see it the next time they run the game!

As I said above, this really only affects people who are logging out of their steam account and into a different one on the same computer and same computer login account, and I *think* (but can't absolutely confirm) that it probably only affects people who turn *off* Cloud Sync for the game. I *have* reported the issue to Valve, and am hoping they'll fix it because I'm pretty sure it'll be affecting a lot more games than just us!

Also in this update:

• Updated the compilers being used for Windows builds. This fixes a number of minor bugs around file operations for players who have Unicode characters in their usernames on their computer (these were silently failing attempts at file renaming, and were instead going through the 'slow path' of explicitly copying files into their final location before deleting the originals, instead of just renaming them in-place)
  
• Added a workaround for the persistent "couldn't open 'shot.jpg'" launcher screenshot errors that seem to pop up every time we release a new update. Now, if we can't open the image file, we just continue to run without it and we'll try again the next time we enter the desktop interface.
  

And that's pretty much it for this very small update! I was hoping to have an initial revision of multiselect ready for people to play with by now, but this save file issue has kind of put everybody here on panic stations as we try to ready an update and a migration process that's going to work for *everybody*. Right now, I'm expecting to be back working on multiselect from *tomorrow*, while other folks on the team carry on testing of the save file change.

Thanks so much for your patience everyone, and I'm sorry for missing this issue until now, and big apologies to anybody who was affected by it! Also, thanks so much to the players who finally brought it to our attention a few days ago! :)

-T

[h3] Changes in this build:[/h3]

• The game will no longer load data from unpacked zipfiles. We've had way too many crash reports from folks who had extracted the zipfiles in earlier builds and are now trying to run the latest version of the game using data files from older builds! :D This should stop that from happening. (honestly, you want to load data from the zipfiles anyway; it makes loading into the game so much faster!)
  
• Fixed area-effect attacks used in PvP duels affecting players who weren't a part of the duel.
  
• Made party formation more attractive around taverns.
  
• Fixed 'stun' and 'root' status effects to work correctly. ('root' can't move but can still attack, 'stun' can do neither)
  

And of course a whole bunch of other miscellaneous bugfixes, fixing bugs reported to us both via crash reports and via in-game bug reports. Thanks so much to everybody who's been sending those through!

Also, while I'm here, here's
[h3]a general development update:[/h3]

We have another technical update coming very soon; we've had some reports of trouble with save files from folks using multiple steam accounts from a single Windows account, so I'm going to be moving game data into a different folder structure to try to make Steam Cloud Sync more robust in that situation.

This change will require us moving everybody's save data into a different location, which is frankly kind of a terrifying change for me, since it's touching literally everybody's save data all at once, but it'll put us into a much safer folder structure once everything has been moved, so it feels like an important change. We just need to test rigorously before rolling out the change!

We're into internal testing on this data migration process now; if the testing gives us the all-clear then I'm hoping to roll it out publicly maybe sometime next week!

In terms of new game functionality, I've begun making progress on multi-select, which I'm planning to have as the first new feature in the 'Creativity Spike' series of updates that we're working on now. The idea with multi-select is to make it possible to select a large group of objects and destroy them all with a single command, or (eventually) move them as a group, or maybe even create duplicates of whole groups of objects. The first release of multi-select will *probably* just do the "select multiple things and destroy them all at once" part, with other functionality to follow afterwards. But we'll see how I go with it!

As always, thanks so much for your support and feedback, everyone!

-T

Hi folks! This is another little bundle of bugfixes for the recent Dungeons Update.

Bugs fixed:

• Fixed a bug which was preventing NPCs from receiving their designed combat abilities.
  
• Fixed a crash that could happen after destroying a combat ability on a dungeon boss, if that ability was explicitly being used in a boss fight phase script.
  
• Fixed the "mmoEffectInstance::IsDone()" crash which could occur when a dungeon instance shut down while a player was being healed.
  
• Fixed several UI bugs.
  
• Fixed the visual selection effect after a game window resize or resolution change.
  

...and several other fixes and small improvements, all based upon bug reports and feedback from players over the past two days. Big thanks so much to everyone who has taken the time to submit reports about the issues they've experienced!

-T

Hi folks! This is just a quick hotfix addressing a couple of issues we've been seeing reported from the Dungeons Update.

Changes:

• Fixed a crash bug on OS X, when loading saves where subscribers were trying to pathfind to places where they couldn't actually reach.
  
• Fixed monsters always being given access to
• all* their combat abilities, instead of only the ones which are appropriate for their level.
  
• Fixed dungeon parties to - when given the option - prefer doing dungeons which are closer to themselves.

...and now I'm going to go to bed; it's well past 3am, here! :D

-T