MMORPG Tycoon 2 News

Hi folks! About a week ago we put up build 0.18.82 in which we (amongst other things) updated our FMOD library to their latest release, version 2.2.05.

Pretty quickly after that we started receiving crash reports which our crash logs seemed to show happening deep inside FMOD. FMOD has now removed that version from their website while they investigate issues with it, and so in this build we've reverted to FMOD 2.2.04, which we hope will resolve the troubles that some players have been having.

If you had FMOD troubles in the previous build, I'd be really grateful if you could try again with this update, and let us know whether the troubles are still there! I'm contemplating pulling us all the way back to an FMOD 2.1-era build; that's probably my next step if this downgrade doesn't do the trick!

Also in this build, there are a couple of very small performance improvements, a fix for a tiny memory leak (7kb per time restoring from a saved game), and miscellaneous improvements for M1 Mac users.

Thanks so much for your patience with this one, folks! It took a long time to track down what could possibly be going wrong!

-T

Hi folks!

This is just a very small update which fixes a crash that some players were having when loading certain older saved games; it was a crash which could occur if a normal or elite monster had chased a subscriber all the way into a different region, and was then returning to their spawn point at the time of the save.

We now handle that situation properly and can successfully load those saves again; apologies for the inconvenience to everyone who ran into that bug, and many thanks for reporting it so that it could be tracked down and fixed!

-T

Hi folks! This is a very small update which is mostly dealing with under-the-hood technical debt, while I'm still working away on the upcoming Dungeons Update in the background.

New in this build:

• Updated all our various libraries. FMOD 2.2.5, SteamAPI 1.53a, Slug 6.1.
  
• On OSX we're now shipping a universal Intel/M1 app bundle (though Steam only seems to be launching the Intel side of it, which runs on M1 Macs using Rosetta for some reason? We need to do more investigating!)
  
• Vastly improved the appearance of terrain overlays when viewed from a high altitude.
  
• Rebuilt the 'heatmap' visuals for thought and unsubscribe reports. These are now both more useful and also much much faster to build, and also don't glitch out if there is too much data to be drawn, the way the old implementation did!
  
• During saved game load, watch out for dead Monsters who had moved into a different region before dying, to head off a possible crash bug which could sometimes occur later on when they respawned.
  
• Fixes a two-frame delay between scrolling a scroll bar by directly dragging the scroll thumb, and the scrolled contents learning about what the current visible part of the scrollable contents are currently visible. This fixes a lot of visual issues where lists appeared to be blank for a frame or two while rapidly scrolling. Note that this only affected scrolling by dragging the thumb up and down with the mouse; other scrolling methods (scroll wheel, autoscroll due to clicking on something partly out of frame, etc) were all unaffected.
  
• Small optimisation to how our visibility quadtree is updated, which should yield small performance improvements in large games.
  
• Fixed a geometry generation bug which could result in missing navigation meshes in shallow corners of some map regions (reported one time ever)
  
• Fixed a bug which sometimes caused air vehicles to teleport down to the ground when they began their docking procedure at the end of a path to a vehicle depot.
  
• Fixed a large performance stutter which occurred while entering the in-game desktop interface, especially if you have a lot of saved games.
  
• Fixed a shutdown freeze which only seemed to happen on Steam Decks for some reason.
  

Thanks so much for your patience and feedback, everyone! I'm really looking forward to getting the next content and feature update out for you all! :D

-T

Hi folks! It may still be the middle of summer down here in Australia, but it's winter in MMORPG Tycoon 2! So while we're still working away at the upcoming Dungeons feature update, we took a little time out to provide some new content themed around the colder months!

[h2]Here's what's new:[/h2]

• [h3]A new functional building theme[/h3] We've added a new "Fearless" building theme, for all your most energetic warrior factions!
  
• [h3]Two new modular building sets[/h3] We've added a modular building set matching the new functional building set, “Fearless”, as well as “Snowtown”, for towns blanketed in snow!
  
• [h3]Did somebody say 'snow'?[/h3] We've added 'Snow' as a new environmental particle effect, now available from the still-in-progress region information window!
  
• [h3]There must have been some magic in that[/h3] We've added a new character model preset, for all your frostiest classes and monsters!
  
• [h3]Winter Props![/h3] We've added 13 frosty new scenery objects to the scenery lists, including snow-topped structures and rocks, sleds, icicles, firepits, and more!
  
• [h3]Also walls![/h3] Added a new “Frozen Fortress” wall variant.
  
• [h3]But what about people who like ships[/h3] Ship your subscribers between islands in style using this new “Longship” vehicle! (available when vehicle paths are unlocked).
  
• [h3]But what about people who like fast travel[/h3] Adds a new woodland “Sylvan” teleporter variant (available when teleporters are unlocked).
  
• [h3]But what about people who like fast travel and also watched Stargate[/h3] We hear you! We've finally managed to get our lead artist @jarjarguy to watch Stargate, and got him to convert the old Arid Starting Point into an Arid Teleporter, the way that we've all said it should have been from the start, yay! Also, we've added a new Arid Starting Point model to replace the old one; it fits into the same footprint so the model swap shouldn't cause any trouble for old saves which were using it!.
  
• [h3]Dragging our castles kicking and screaming into the modern era[/h3]We've remodeled our old "Palace" modular building set into an exciting new, fully-featured "Palace2" set. During load, any “Palace” modular buildings will automatically be upgraded to “Palace2”.
  

...and of course a whole slew of other little bug fixes!

Additionally, we're running another little screenshot competition alongside this update, over on our Discord server. Check over there for more details!

As always, huge thanks to everyone for your enthusiasm, feedback, and ideas! I'm hoping to be back here soon with another fun changelog. -T

Hi folks! This is another little patch with bug fixes while we work on the upcoming major Dungeons update.

Fixed in this build:

• No longer kill a player immediately when they're dragged over an unowned map region; instead, only kill them if they actually get dropped inside an unowned region. This means you can now safely drag a player over water and into another region across the sea (previously the player automatically died once they were over the ocean without being on a boat or similar)
  
• Related to the above, fixed a whole bunch of bugs which occurred when someone died due to entering an unowned region for any reason. These bugs could have various effects, ranging from outright crashes to the character acting as though they were using a speed hack (without the game realising that they were using a speed hack)
  
• Fixed an extremely rare save file corruption problem which could occur if two or more saves were occurring simultaneously. (this could happen if a periodic autosave triggered at nearly the same moment as a manual save, for example)
  
• Fixes vehicle and teleporter path placement tools to work more reliably when placing paths that end at vehicle depots and teleporters that already existed on the map (rather than ending at new ones)
  
• Fixed a crash which could occur if you destroyed a vehicle depot just as a player was trying to enter it.
  
• Further work on triangulation code to make it even more robust for strangely shaped polygons containing complicated holes (these are used to draw monster zones and other draw-onto-the-terrain objects)
  
• Improved debuggability of std::bad_alloc exceptions (which we get reports of maybe once every few months, and which previously didn't tell us enough information to figure out what had gone wrong. Next time one gets reported, we should finally be able to figure out the cause, I hope!)
  
• Miscellaneous localisation updates.
  

Thanks so much for all the feedback and bug reporting, everyone!

-T