MMORPG Tycoon 2 News

Hi, folks! Today's update is a content update; new buildings, new scenery items, new walls, and more:

[h3]New stuff:[/h3]

• [h4]Adds a full new line of "Sturdy" buildings![/h4] Does one of your game's groups build its buildings out of particularly robust stone and metal? Try using the "Sturdy" building set! Guaranteed to look as if they're heavier and more robust than other, lesser buildings! Contains a full set of standard functional buildings, plus a teleporter, plus a robust modular building set!
  
• [h4]Adds more than a dozen new scenery models for decorating your worlds![/h4] From sarcophagi to spider webs, we've got you covered! (and there's even a very rickety new tower, for those who aren't fans of "sturdy" buildings)
  
• [h4]Adds six new types of wall![/h4] Perfect for railroading your players into going where you want them to go!
  

[h3]Changes:[/h3]

• [h4]Improved Drag&Drop support on Windows![/h4] Character prefab cards can now be dragged directly into the Character Prefab interface from most other applications, without needing to save them to disk first! (Discord, etc)
  
• [h4]Character prefab cards now get exported at screen scale[/h4] This makes character prefab cards much less likely to be re-encoded when shared on Twitter (as re-encoding the images destroys the embedded prefab data inside them)
  

[h3]Miscellaneous Fixes:[/h3]

• Fixed a crash bug when importing a character prefab if it was using custom icons for its abilities and you didn't have those icons on your computer.
  
• Fixed a crash bug if you opened the prefab list, alt-tabbed into Explorer and deleted one of your prefab files and then returned to the game and tried to import that deleted file before the game managed to refresh its file list. ("Doctor, it hurts when I do this")
  
• Fixed the character prefabs list showing ten lines each saying "unset" instead of filenames, if have no character prefab cards saved.
  
• Fixes random speeds being applied to the first five NPC Classes created in a new game.
  

Plus of course, fixes for a whole swathe of more minor bugs and glitches.

And finally, an update on the long-awaited upcoming Dungeons Update! I wrote last time about how we'd finally solved the worst of the technical challenges with making Dungeons function the way I want them to. This time, I'm here to tell you that we've started solving the visual challenges, and I'm *super* excited to show it all off in the near future. It's all been taking so much longer than I ever expected, but I hope you'll agree with me that the wait was worth it, once you see what we've built! :D

Once again, thanks so much to everyone for your enthusiasm and support and we'll talk again really soon!

-T

Hi everyone, it's Trevor - the main designer and programmer of MMORPG Tycoon 2. Last week I took a short break from my work developing Dungeons to look at ways to allow you to more easily share your creations with other players, or even just between your own MMOs.

We've already had a taste of that with ability prefabs, but I was never really satisfied with that approach, and we're looking to do a lot more support for sharing stuff you've created next year, but I wanted to get some better systems in place for it now, and this is what we've come up with for a first step toward improved sharing and reuse!



[h2]New in this build:[/h2]

• [h3]Character cards![/h3] In the Design interface, every player class, NPC class, and monster class now gets a "character card" where you can write any descriptions or notes or lore you like, and you can export an image of that character card.
  
  Those images can then be shared with other players via any image hosting service; drop one of those files into your prefabs folder and you'll be able to import those characters into your game, complete with their name, model, combat abilities, and lore. As long as the host doesn't resize the image or perform a lossy re-encoding, they should retain all the data needed to import the characters into a new game!
  
  We hope you enjoy this new sharing feature, and to encourage people to try it out we're holding a costume design contest in our Discord community. See below for more details on that!
  

[h2]Other Changes[/h2]

• Vastly improved the behaviour of wall placement tools, especially when
  connecting small walls to big walls (and especially ice walls).
  
  
• Redid the layout of the player info box, to make it smaller and easier to
  find stuff inside.
  

[h2]Fixes[/h2]

• ScenePanes now obey the UIScale option. (Previously, if you had a high UIScale value, you could wind up with very chunky low-resolution 3D scenes inside UI windows because they had guessed their on-screen size incorrectly)
  
  
• Fixed the pathing behaviour of players as they exit the default starting point.
  
  
• Fixed launcher images in the desktop interface sometimes being saved as flat black images instead of as game screenshots.
  
  
• Fixed cursor placement within vertically-centered (or bottom-justified) text edit boxes.
  
  
• Fixed the rendering of anti-aliased ScenePanes (technical details: they should have been set to composite using premultiplied alpha, but were actually using normal compositing, which often resulted in half-pixel-wide black outlines around objects)
  
  
• Fixed texture animations in combat abilities, which were playing frames in the wrong order (and have been for months and nobody --including me-- noticed and mentioned it, and I am
• *so cross** about that!)
  
  
• Fixes tint on newly joined subscribers. (Previously they rezzed into the world as pure white characters, as if they were ghosts. Now fixed!)
  
  
• Fixed a few very small memory leaks.
  

...plus the usual localisation updates and smaller bug fixes and improvements!

Our community manager Leanne wanted me to say some words here about the character contest that's starting today on our Discord server, so here those are:

Originally posted by Leanne

Hi folks! Today we're announcing our Spooky Monster contest! With the new character import/export features in the latest update, and the Halloween season right around the corner, we wanted to encourage your creativity!

Head over to our Discord for more details on how to participate and maybe be crowned Monster Maker Champion 2022!

And that's all from me, today! I'm now back onto Dungeons full-time and am looking forward to being able to show them off again, while the art team is spending time on an upcoming content drop which should happen mid next month.

Talk to you again soon --

-T

This is a quick patch for a few issues caused by the last update, most notably a crash in the 'loans' dialog. Thanks to everyone who reported the issue!

-T

Hi, folks!

We've got a small new feature (not dungeons) that's about to go into test on our public 'test' branch; it required a change to our save data format, so this commit is rolling out to 'default' so that we keep save file compatibility between our 'test' and default branches.

(old saves will get converted into the new format when they're loaded for the first time -- you absolutely can continue to use your existing saves!)

Watch this space for details on the update within a few days!

-T

Just a small update today, with a couple UI fixes!

Updated in this build:

• Fixed several UI bugs including a possible crash bug when editing non-printable text strings (this was most commonly strings of spaces; they're valid text but not technically
• renderable*, so earlier builds had trouble figuring out where to put an insertion caret because there were no glyphs being rendered to hint at where it should go; now fixed so that correct caret positioning works even around invisible text characters like spaces!)
  
• Unprintable unicode glyphs -- ones which don't exist in the game's font -- are now drawn as □ glyphs, to make them easier to spot and edit. (Previously, they had been drawn as spaces)
  
• Fixed non-breaking-spaces being treated as unprintable glyphs.
  
• Fixed a really subtle timing bug which could sometimes result in launcher screenshots (the game screenshots visible within the in-game desktop interface) being captured as pure black pixels instead of as a real game screenshot. Very glad to have finally found and fixed this one!
  

-T