MMORPG Tycoon 2 News

Hi folks! This is another content update with even more new models for decorating and customising your game worlds!

We have a relatively short list of code changes and bug fixes this time, as nearly all my own time is going into the upcoming Progression Update, so you can think of this one as an "Oops, All Art!" update.

New in this update:

• A complete new set of functional buildings, and a new matching modular building set!
  
• A new wall style!
  
• Several new scenery items!
  

Bug fixes:

• Fixed an assertion which could be triggered if you unluckily quit the game during the exact moment when we were capturing a screenshot.
  
• If the game crashes while loading a save, the game will now submit the save file as part of the crash report. We've very rarely received reports of failures to load and upgrade particular extremely old saves, and this should help me to track that down and fix it!
  

And that's it! Next up is the Progression Update, which changes how version upgrades, character slot unlocks, and technology unlocks all happen. I'm really excited for that next update!

More details to follow.

As always, you're very welcome to join us at our official Discord server, where you can come hang out with us and other players, compare builds, and even test updates (like this one!) a few days in advance of them going live on Steam. We'd love to see you over there!

-T

Hi folks! This is a hotfix for yesterday's update which was resulting in crashes when people tried to save their game, if they (presumably accidentally) had the ancient "Slow saves" debugging option enabled.

In this hotfix build, I have both fixed the bug and also entirely removed that option; nobody should be using that old "slow saves" algorithm any more! It's old and slow and used a silly amount of RAM during saves; the new system (which has been in the game for well over a year at this point) is just categorically better in every way.

Otherwise, there is no difference between this build and the previous one. Apologies to anybody who was affected by that bug, but also, prepare to enjoy much zippier saves from now on in this new build!

-T

Hi folks! Every once in a while we release an update containing only "under-the-hood" changes, and this is one of those. A lot of people don't really care about the back-end technical stuff, and that's totally fine; please feel free to skip down to the 'Also in this build' bugfix section at the bottom of this post if that's you!

But for me, the most exciting parts of this update are up here at the top, and maybe you'll like them too!

New in this build:

• New save file format!
  
  Previously, when saving a game we saved out three separate files; the save itself, a tiny "meta" file which contained information
• about* the save, to be used in the desktop interface and elsewhere (this is how the desktop knows how many subscribers you have in every save file without actually loading them all), and a screenshot of the save to be used in the desktop launcher interface. Now we save all of those three things into a single file. A "monosave", if you will. This dramatically simplifies backing up saves and submitting them in bug reports and etc; there's only one file to copy and sync, now!
  
  The most exciting part of this is that the new "monosave" file format is forwards compatible with old versions of the game; saves from this build
• can* still be loaded in older builds! (I'm downright
• smug* over figuring out how to make that work!)
  
  

  Side-note: we are still saving out a separate 'meta' file when we save, just in case somebody does want to jump back to an old build of the game which would prefer to have those meta files, but starting from this version of the game we only read 'meta' files when loading really old saves which aren't in the new monosave format.

  
  
  
• Better handling of file system errors!
  
  If you run out of disk space while saving the game, we now tell you about it and let the game keep running, so you can alt-tab out and maybe clear up some room then try again!
  
  
• Better handling of file errors!
  
  Previously, if you tried to load a corrupted or truncated save file, the game would do its best to load as much data as it could from the file, but would then leave the rest of the data empty; in a worst-case scenario, it could act as if it had successfully loaded your save but leave you with a brand new and completely empty game! Now we'll instead pop up an error message to let you know that the file was corrupt or unreadable, and return you to the in-game desktop interface so you can try loading one of its periodic backups instead.
  
  
• Running low on disk space?
  
  We now check for low available disk space while you're in the in-game desktop interface, and we'll display a warning message if your disk is almost full, just as a gentle reminder that you might want to clear up some space before starting or loading into a game.
  
  
• Saved pathing
  
  Wait, what's this one doing way down here? This totally belongs right up at the top, certainly above the boring back-end technical stuff like "new save format"!
  
  In this build, we now save and restore the paths that players were following at the time of the save. This fixes an
• old* old bug which caused players who were on flight paths or on board vehicles when a save happened to fall off of them after a load. (which could often wind up with those players drowning in the sea or ending up in inactive or high-level regions and then re-spawning somewhere super inconvenient).
  
  Similarly, players who were waiting at a vehicle depot when the save happened will continue waiting there after the save is re-loaded, instead of changing their minds and wandering off to do something different!
  

Also in this build:

• Fixed a bug in the previous update which had the "alchemy_desk_a" scenery item displaying the "alchemy_desk_b" model. Oops!
  
• Fixed a bug which was causing gravity to not be applied to certain combat effect sub-particles (water droplets, little bits of gravel falling off of larger rocks, etc); this has actually been broken since the Dungeons update and nobody had mentioned it to me!
  
• Fixed tab colors for second-level tabbed window interfaces (for example, in the ability editor and in the character model editor); unselected tabs were being drawn in the same color as selected tabs, which could make it tricky to see which tab was selected! Now fixed.
  

Thanks so much to everybody who did early testing of this update!

Will talk again soon!

-T

Hi again, everyone! I'm excited to present our latest content update, containing our new "Sinister" theme of buildings and scenery items, and also incorporating some other new features!

New in this update:

• Sinister assets! Up first, in this update you'll find a new set of "sinister" functional buildings, a new dungeon entrance, a new wall style, and several new scenery items to use to decorate all your most ominous regions.
  
• Lighting on the world map! We've brought over tech from our dungeon rendering, and scenery items which look like they should be casting light into the world (lanterns, campfires, etc) now actually do so on the main world map, the same way they do inside dungeons! This means you can now make super thematic 'nighttime' regions and illuminate them using lanterns and other set dressing, instead of always requiring sunlight everywhere!
  
• General scenery cleanup! In this build we've also updated more than 80 of our old scenery items, fixing many minor issues (tables which were missing triangles when viewed from underneath, a cleaver which accidentally was embedded into a table by its handle instead of by its blade, etc). In general, we've worked quite hard to make sure these changes are subtle enough that you probably won't notice them and they shouldn't break any builds which had been using the old scenery items.
  

This update also has a whole bunch of other quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes:

• Fixed players on flight paths or on vehicles falling down to the ground after a save+load cycle. Additionally, players waiting for a vehicle at a dock at the time of a save will now continue waiting for the vehicle after the load occurs, instead of choosing to go do something else instead.
  
• Fixed a very rare crash bug which could occur if you started to change the destination of a quest but aborted out of doing so by clicking on a scenery placement tool that you had never used before.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused map generation to not be entirely repeatable when regenerated from the same seed. (this should make it possible for us to debug some extremely rare map generation bugs in future!)
  
• Fixed a bug which could result in a (non-functional) selection-box being drawn in the desktop interface.
  
• Mac and Linux builds no longer treat receiving a "SIGTERM" signal as if it was a crash (because it isn't one! It was just a polite way for one program or the OS itself to request another program close itself)
  

...as well as a bunch of other minor bug fixes, and updated localisation data!

As I mentioned with the last update, the next big thing I'm personally working on is a major revamp to game progression; how your game's version number goes up, how you unlock new technologies, and how you unlock character type slots; I'm very excited to write more about that in the next big feature update! And we have a couple more, smaller feature releases that will come out between now and then.

More details soon. And once again, huge thanks to everyone for your enthusiasm, support, feedback and bug reports throughout development! It all makes such a big difference to me and everyone else on the development team! :)

Talk again soon,

-T

Hi folks! This is just a quick hotfix build for bugs reported during the rollout of the scenery brush update.

In this update:

• Fixed a floating point imprecision issue which could very rarely cause a piece of scenery to treated as both
• inside* and also
• outside* of a brush stroke at the same time, which resulted in that single scenery item being placed and then removed again within a single editing action, which
• really* confused the game's undo system!
  
• Fixed a very rare placement issue with flight paths, teleporters, and vehicle depots, which could occur if you were playing in a window and clicked and dragged the mouse cursor out of the game window in the middle of placing the
• second* flight point, teleporter, or vehicle depot on a travel path.
  
• Fixed cursor briefly appearing to teleport across the screen when tapping the 'z' key during an object placement.
  

It's a really small hotfix this time! Big thanks to the folks who reported the issues above! Will talk again soon.

-T