Hi folks!
It's been a long time since one of these periodic updates, in part because most of my energy has been going into the dungeons update, but also in part because we've made some pretty major system updates even for these regular builds and I wanted to give them a lot of time on the public 'test' branch to make sure we'd caught the worst of the misbehaviours!
New in this build:
- Vastly improved terrain flattening under buildings to better match the building's footprint on the ground, and also to result in fewer conflicts between multiple buildings trying to modify the shape of the same patch of ground.
- The "Prefabs" tab of the character model editor now shows visual previews of every available costume prefab, instead of giving a drop-down combat box list.
- Re-fixes voluntary PVP duels to
- not* generate "I'm dying too often!" complaints. (This has been fixed once before, but it was still happening occasionally)
- Stage One of a change to modular building limits. Previously, modular buildings were limited to having 64 faces visible (walls, ceilings, floors). This was
- totally* non-intuitive, and was a technical limitation. I've now removed the technical limitation, and in this build we instead limit how many individual blocks can be placed, regardless of how many 'faces' are exposed. In this build, the limit is 15 blocks per modular building (because with 15 blocks you
- can't* end up with more than 64 visible faces, so saves remain compatible with our older builds), but I'm going to boost that limit way upward as part of the next update! (that's probably already happened in our public 'test' build by the time you read this message; go try it out if you like!)
- Fixed a bug where a PVP duel could fail to start, even once both participants had arrived.
- Players who are in a duel or getting ready to get into a duel now display more, better 'status' messages explaining what they're doing; whether they're travelling to a duel or waiting or trying to find someone to fight, and when a duel is active, it tells you who they're fighting.
- AI adjustments for players who have outlevelled their current region: Players will no longer engage in PVP duels in regions that are below their level (we were finding that players would often just do PVP rather than ever spend the time to migrate to a better level). Similarly, overlevelled players will no longer start or join social circles in lower-level regions. (Exception: socialiser-type players will still both start new social circles and invite overlevelled players into their social circles, even in low-level regions)
- Fixes players delaying for several seconds when respawning as a ghost; now they become active immediately.
- Fixed a pathfinding bug involving chained flight paths.
- Fixed another pathfinding bug involving multiple flight points or multiple teleporters or multiple vehicle depots which were placed closely enough together that their entrances were inside the same navmesh triangle.
- Fixed gamepad inputs overriding keyboard/mouse inputs for camera zoom. This was causing it to be impossible for players to zoom in the camera if they had a gamepad plugged into their computer if that gamepad had input drift.
- "Unpowered" building visual effect no longer scales with the simulation speed. This both makes it look better and also makes it less of a photosensitive seizure hazard! (it's weird how often those two things go hand in hand)
- Fixes integration between the game and Steam in OSX builds, including the steam overlay.
- Fixed a bug which could cause player-controlled characters to go invisible if you took a really long hike with them.
- Untangled a whole bunch of code where we were loading textures upside down and then drawing the upside down textures upside down to kind of cancel it all out. Now we load textures right-side-up! (If you spot any remaining places in the game where textures are vertically flipped from what they should be, please let me know! But I
- think* I've now caught them all)
- Fixed an issue where players could fail to migrate into a heavily concave region, but then act as if they'd succeeded.
- Fixed a crash which could occur while editing a combat ability if you set a combat ability cost to 0 and then (without first clicking away from the text box) clicked the 'destroy' button.
- Fixed scenery being generated
- beneath* the terrain when lifting regions out of the sea. (this was fixed after a save/load cycle, but now that's no longer required!)
- Fixed a major bug in the game engine when loading non-square textures.
- Vastly improved our polygon simplification routines, which means we now generate substantially better navigation meshes, which saves both RAM and performance, while also yielding better AI behaviour around obstacles!
- Fixed a bug which could cause a crash if you entered particular characters into text edit fields. (I call this the "Little Bobby Tables" bug)
- Player-controlled characters are now restricted to the navigation mesh; they are no longer allowed to walk through walls or other solid structures.
- Fixed a potential crash if a player somehow left the entire game map and while there decided to try to go home.
- Plus a whole host of miscellaneous bug fixes!
...whew! That was actually quite a lot of bug fixes, along with the improvements! I should have brought those over to our main 'default' branch a whole bunch earlier; apologies for how long they've been exclusively on the 'test' branch!
In terms of future updates, we have a new art content drop coming really soon (likely later this week), and I've been making some exciting progress on Dungeons that I can't wait to show off to everyone, so that'll be coming a little later.
Thanks so much for all the feedback and ideas and bug reports, and especially with your patience as I've worked my way through everything! You're all the best.
Until next time,
-T