Hi everybody! This is arguably the biggest update we've ever done. I know I said "no more huge updates" after the Dungeons Update, but.. here we are? So let's talk about what's new!

Major new features

Custom Rules

The Changelog

New Releases

Technology Development

Unlockable Art Packs

Character Type Slots

Down For Maintenance

Developer Policy

Game Master Policy

Logos

And that's just the start...

• Game map preview! When starting a new game, the game now lets you preview the new game's map before you start. It also now shows and lets you modify the map seed, so you can share the seed with other players if you'd like to each begin from an identical starting map.
• Advertising details! There is now information in the HUD about every advertising effect that's giving you extra subscribers right now, including details about how many people have seen the advertising and how many converted into subscribers.
• Integration with Steam Timeline! We now note certain events and clips for Steam's Timeline system, and also have some basic integration with their Game Phase system, to make it easier to find gameplay clips, if you're using it!
• AI running out of time! Your subscribers now consider how much play time they have left when choosing what they want to do; they're much less likely to start a long task if they don't have much time before they have to log out for the day!
• Improved distance culling! Better handling of very small objects when viewed from very far away! This probably isn't actually any faster, but it does make the map look much nicer when viewed from high up!
• Release celebration! My producer wanted me to say something here about the celebration sequence that happens when you release a regular or major update to your game. But honestly, I think that's better left as a surprise, so maybe I just won't say anything and you'll never see it coming!
• Configure view options! Do you hate those '+XP' notifications whenever a player kills a monster? We got you - at the top right corner of the screen there's now a little gearbox button that opens a window where you can make view configuration changes to show or hide whichever notifications you want!

Hi everyone! It's been a couple weeks, so it's time to update you all on where we're at with the Progression Update! Last time we talked, I'd decided that the way I'd implemented our "New Release" mechanics didn't feel true to the game, and I'd made the hard decision to delay releasing the Progression Update until I could figure out how to make that system feel good. It took me quite a while to figure out exactly why it felt wrong and how to fix it, but I'm now extremely happy with where we've landed, and there's an updated Preview build for anyone interested! So, some questions and answers:

"So when is the release date for this update?"

"How can I try it out?"

"Can you write some words about the new design?"

Summary

Hi folks! Last time we talked I was just about ready to roll the Progression Update out to everyone. I said that it just needed to go through a phase of player testing, expecting that there would just be a few bugs to fix and then it'd be ready to go. Welp. While overall tester feedback for the Progression Update was extremely positive, several testers felt that the new requirements specifically around making new game releases were too rigid and could even become difficult to satisfy at all, later in the game. And after giving it some thought and further testing, I had to agree with them. But worse, I realized that the system I had designed was running counter to what I wanted MMORPG Tycoon 2 to feel like to play; instead of empowering players to run their game as they like and to feel like they were engaging with and exciting (or enraging!) their subscriber base, I had set up what was effectively just a series of hoops for them to mechanically jump through every time. I didn't want to release the update with that small but important part of the game feeling like that. So instead, I've spent the last week cooking up a new - better! - design for how new game releases could be planned and deployed. I'm now most of the way through patching a first implementation of this new design into the Progression Update. Once this implementation is complete, we'll be putting it up for another round of public player testing and feedback. (It will show up as Preview 4 on our public "test" beta branch, once it's ready for testing) I'm hoping that I've nailed the design for the "New Game Release" portion of the update, and that the next time we talk I'll be announcing the full finished Progression Update release. But if not, I'll be back here in two weeks to give another development update to let you all know where we stand at that point! Talk more soon, -T

Hi folks! First, I want to apologise for the recent radio silence; work on the Progression Update has been going on for a lot longer than I expected, as I kept finding more adjustments I wanted to make to the basic game structure, and time just got away from me. This update has taken far longer and includes far more changes than I originally predicted, and I should have been posting updates here in the interim to let people know! Sorry I promise I'll be better about communicating what's going on with development from now on! So, with that said, I'm now working on the final few bits and pieces of the Progression Update, and I'm fully expecting it to land into the default Steam build within the next week or two; I have only two tasks left to finish up (both UI-related), and then it just needs to go through testing. So.. we're really close, now! Anyhow, those were the most important things I wanted to say in this announcement. But if you'd like to know more about what's coming in this update, I've prepared a little sneak peek below, so do read on! (On the other hand, if you'd rather be surprised, then it's safe to stop reading now and I hope you'll enjoy discovering everything I've been working on when the update drops in the near future!) -T

New stuff in the Progression Update

Introducing: The Changelog

Technology Development

Character Type Slots

And another thing

• More work for game masters! Game masters can now (optionally) respond to user reports of toxic game chat, or of cheaters, and you get to specify the policies they should follow for warning or banning players who get caught.
• New 'bug' system! The game's 'bug' system has been completely rewritten. There are now multiple types of bug which behave differently, ranging from causing full-on computer crashes for your subscribers to minor typos, and you can specify how and when your developers will deal with each of them, either as general policies or you can view the bug list itself and manually mark individual bugs to be fixed.
• Sometimes you just need to reboot the servers You can now take your whole game down for maintenance (which makes debugging easier and faster), or even schedule regular weekly maintenance periods so you don't even have to remember to do it manually.
• Game map preview! When starting a new game, the game now lets you preview the new game's map before you start. It also now shows and lets you modify the map seed, so you can share the seed with other players if you'd like to each begin from an identical starting map.
• Game logos! We now have the beginning of a system for generating custom logos for your game; you'll find this in the 'New Game' UI flow, or (for older saves) in the 'Game' status sheet. I'm looking forward to adding more editable logo prefabs to this system in the future, but I feel like it's already a big improvement toward giving your game its own unique visual identity!
• More sandbox options! I've added a whole bunch more Sandbox mode options, for folks who just want to get creative without needing to worry so much about the simulation aspects of the game!

Hi folks! Short one today with various bugfixes that I didn't want to delay until the upcoming "Progression" update:

• Fixed the 'undo' of destroying elite monsters or monster zones to correctly also restore any quests targeting them that were automatically destroyed.
• Fixed the crash reporter ignoring presses of the "Don't Report" button. (I'm facepalming *so* hard over this one! Big apologies, everyone!)
• Fixed scenery items not being placeable on dungeon walls.
• Fixed a possible crash if you used keyboard hotkeys to switch between editing tools while in the middle of using an editing tool with the mouse.
• Fixed some extremely rare issues which could very rarely occur during new map generation, resulting in invalid map layouts.
• Fixed a subtle bug which could result in structures inside a dungeon instance trying to modify pathfinding data when they shouldn't be doing that.
• Fixed several multithreading-related race conditions during the game loading process.
• Fixed a missing name string for the "Sinister Dungeon Entrance" model. Whoops!

Hi folks, this is a small hotfix for issues reported after the Feudal Update from a few days ago. New in this build:

• Fixed a bug which caused a crash when loading certain very old save files if a whole series of criteria all happened to line up in exactly the wrong way. If you had an old save that was failing to load, they should now work correctly again!
• Fixed a bug which could sometimes result in a crash if you paused the game and destroyed a player class while a player of that class was in combat and an enemy had a ranged attack projectile already in flight and which was *just about* to hit the player, AND you then created a new player class to replace the old one before unpausing the game. Now fixed!
• Fixed a crash bug that would happen if you were shown a crash report and chose not to submit it.

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!

• 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!

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!) [quote]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.[/quote]
• 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!

• 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.

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.

• 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)

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.

Hi everybody! Today we have a much-requested feature, a brush interface for placing down groups of scenery objects! New in this update:

• Scenery brushes! Each scenery placement tool can now be put into a "brush" mode, where you can scatter scenery items across an area with just the sweep of the mouse. There are several different patterns available, with customisable densities, brush sizes, scale and angle randomisations, and more! Individual placements are of course still available, and scenery items placed using a brush can be further adjusted the same as any other scenery items!

• All dropdown menus all now have a downward-pointing triangle on their right side, to indicate that they can be clicked upon
• Disabled 'undo' and 'redo' functionality during the initial game tutorial to prevent a possible soft-lock.
• Changed the MegaTooltip window so it won't place itself partially off the bottom of the screen.
• Added some missing description strings for the new vehicles from the last travel update.
• Fixed mouse movements affecting camera rotation if you were holding a keyboard "rotate camera" button (default-bound to 'q' and 'e')
• Moved the Wall/Path placement help messages to smaller, dark-background windows in the bottom right of the screen to match the appearance and positioning of other help text windows. (previously these had been larger blue windows in the top left)
• Vastly improved the handling of in-progress pathfinding queries when map edits happen, especially edits which touch multiple regions simultaneously (destroying mountain passes, multi-region flight paths, etc)
• Fixed issues with deleting a travel building while in a placement tool that had been trying to use that travel building as part of a new path placement.
• Fixed dungeon fog settings sometimes temporarily being applied to the main world map view, immediately after leaving a dungeon interior view.
• Fixed several issues caused by the use of keyboard hotkeys to switch between editing tools while in the middle of drag operations.

Hey folks, this is a very quick update with a critical fix that snuck past us during the Travel update! Each time you launched MT2, the first save you loaded would work normally, but if you then exited back to the ingame desktop interface and loaded into a second save (or the same one again), the map wouldn't build correctly and buildings would be unplaceable and subscribers would have many pathfinding issues -- especially when they're in a party. This build fixes that issue; you should now be able to load into saves as many times as you like and have them work every time -- apologies to everybody affected! The programmer responsible (me) has been scolded and sent to bed without dessert so that he can think about what he did. This update also contains the following unrelated fixes:

• If you try to place a building somewhere where players can't travel (on top of buildings, etc), the error message for that has changed from "Off map" to "Unwalkable terrain", which I feel is more understandable.
• Fixed the "Undo" hud element to adjust its positioning on screen if the game window is resized or the fullscreen resolution is changed.
• When sending a screenshot is enabled, bug reports now send us the screenshots at your window's native resolution, instead of always cropping/scaling to 1920x1080.

Hi folks! This is a hotfix build for the commonly reported issues for the Travel build. New in this build:

- Fixed an assertion which got thrown if a subscriber wanted to form a PVP Duel area, but the game couldn't find a legal place anywhere in the region which wasn't already covered by another PVP Duel, non-traversible terrain, or other obstructions. - Fixed an issue which caused certain UI buttons to not work correctly. These were buttons which caused transient windows to open; primarily pop-up color pickers, icon pickers, and the "Adjust" windows in the character model editor. Now fixed!

Hi everybody! Today we have a content update, adding more variation to a bunch of travel buildings which have had fairly limited options up until now. New in this update:

• Three new flight point variants! That brings us up to 2 to 5!
• Three new vehicle variants! Bringing us from 5 to 8!
• Three new teleporter variants! Bringing us from 6 to 9!

• Minor model fixes to a couple existing teleporter models (for example, one of them accidentally had visible interaction pads; that sort of thing)
• Lots of improvements to make terrain editing more responsive.
• Fixed an issue with the 'Icy' terrain type, which was causing its terrain shape to be randomised each time it was loaded. This could result in carefully arranged scenery objects in these areas being jostled vertically after each load, and monsters being briefly floating or sunken under the ground (they'd fix themselves within a minute or so, though). These things shouldn't happen any more after this build!

Bugfixes for v0.20.57:

• Fixed "icy" terrain types to generate reliable ground shapes each time; previously they generated a different shape each time you loaded a save, which could cause complex scenery placements to become vertically unaligned. That should no longer happen after this build!
• Fixed an issue where the monster zone placement tool could become confused about its state if you started using it in an illegal location (such as inside an unowned region). It's now much better-behaved in those situations!

Another quick hotfix with a couple fixes for issues raised overnight! Changes in this build:

• Fixed an issue with buildings not following the terrain as they should have.
• Fixed an issue with destroying dungeons.

Hi folks! Over the last couple hours since releasing the Undo update, we've had a couple of issue reports mostly around the monster zone tool; I think I've fixed up the worst of the issues there! This patch fixes the following bugs from the original Undo update:

• If you completely destroyed a zone using a painting tool (instead of using a 'destroy' tool), then "undo" would fail to bring that zone back.
• If you resized an existing monster zone using a painting tool, any monsters added or removed would not be correctly updated during an undo/redo.
• If you aborted out of painting a zone by pressing 'escape' while the mouse button was still down, or if you dragged the painting tool outside of the game window and released the mouse button out over the desktop or another program, then the tool could get confused. In bad situations, this could eventually lead to a crash.
• If you destroyed a dungeon, this could eventually (much later) lead to a crash.

Hi folks! It's another big update, closing out our Creativity Spike #2. This one went a little longer than expected as it ran into some unexpected roadblocks, but we got there in the end! This time, there's just one feature in the update, but it's a huge one, once again touching most of the game.

What's new:

• Undo!

  
  Editing actions in the game are now nearly all undoable. Placing objects, destroying them, moving them around, painting terrain, splitting roads, etc; nearly every placement-related action can now be undone and then redone, using the "Undo" and "Redo" buttons (or control-Z and control-Y, respectively). There's now a small window in the top right corner of the screen which shows the next items in the undo and redo stack, so you can always be sure what will happen when you hit 'undo'.

This is just a small update to maintain forwards-compatibility with the new feature builds that are about to start rolling out to our public 'test' branch on Steam, but there are also a few notable changes and bugfixes too. These are:

• Changed the default "move" hotkey to "z" from "m". This moves it close to all our other placement hotkeys. Note that this only changes the default; if you've already played MT2, your hotkey will remain the same ("m") until/unless you reset your keybindings to default from the options window, but new players will have "z" as their move hotkey. And you can always change the hotkey to whatever else you'd like it to be, also in the 'options' window, if you'd prefer it was something else!
• Fixed large characters often getting stuck around corners inside dungeons.
• Fixed a pathfinding bug which could cause incorrect pathfinding failures in dungeons containing a lot of doors. (in bad cases this could also result in parties appearing to become stuck, often with glitchy animations as they'd start to move and then fail)
• Fixed the "Boss Rewards" tab in the monster information window to only show up when a dungeon boss is selected. Previously it was incorrectly showing up for all monsters, which understandably caused a lot of player confusion since its buttons and settings didn't actually do anything for anything but dungeon bosses.
• Fixed UI refresh issues around changing the sync of building prices.

Hi, folks! I didn't *quite* get the next feature build ready to go through testing before the weekend (next week for sure!), so I'm consoling myself by putting up this bugfix build instead, which contains fixes for various issues reported over the last week. The biggest fix is that there was a rendering bug in the last build which caused certain dungeon models to be drawn facing backwards; this affected pretty much every animated object that can be placed inside a dungeon, but was most noticeable with chests, where parties would walk to the *back* of them to open them (because that was actually supposed to be the front!). Now fixed! There are also a number of smaller bug fixes for things that we've had reported over the past week; it's mostly odds and ends around weird edge cases, but we've got a couple of shutdown crash fixes and things like that in here. Thanks so much to folks sending in crash reports and in-game bug reports! They really do help us to track down weird cases where things go wrong! -T

Hi folks, another quick update with bugfixes for issues reported in the last couple days. The biggest fixes are these:

• Fixed some animated objects being drawn at the wrong scale (or not at all!) inside dungeons, dungeon instances, and dungeon UI elements. (this was mostly things like chests and doors).
• Fixed a small handful of specific scenery items which were getting bigger every time you performed a "move" action on them. There were 26 of these; all other scenery items were unaffected and worked properly.
• Fixed ungrouping scenery items to correctly reinitialise all their placement data. Previously, a scenery item which was grouped, moved with the group, and then ungrouped could wind up moving vertically in surprising ways the next time the terrain changed or during save/loads. Now fixed!

Hi folks! Quick hotfix here for the "Editing 2.0" build from two days ago. New in this build:

• Monsters, NPCs, and players can once again be manually moved around, this time using the same "Move" and "Precise Move" functions we use for everything else, including now being able to select a group of them and moving them all at once. Note that if you move an elite monster or a boss monster, the 'move' will also update their respawn position (whereas regular monsters from a monster zone will keep their respawn point inside their home monster zone even if you move them)
• The hotkeys for 'move' and 'precise move' can now be changed in the Options window.
• Fixed the character names of new subscribers not being displayed until after a save/load cycle, which was a bug introduced in the last build.

Hi folks! This update took up a lot more of our "Creativity Spike" time than I'd expected, but I really think it's been worth it! New in this build:

Multiselect


Don't waste your time editing each blade of grass separately; grab a whole forest and manipulate it all at once! Want to grab a bunch of scenery along with the nearby buildings and move or destroy them all at once? Now you can! This works for scenery, for buildings, for loot items inside dungeons, and more!

Scenery groups


If you select multiple scenery items, you can now group them together! Grouped scenery items act as if they were a single scenery item. So if you've carefully built a whole stack of scenery objects, you can now group them together and move them as if they were a single object!

Duplicate


You can now make duplicates of most types of object, including all those mentioned above. Multiselect a building and the scenery around it and just duplicate the whole lot in a single go, to make it easier to set up new areas! Unlike regular 'move' commands, 'Duplicate' lets you place the duplicated objects into new regions!

Selection filtering


Accidentally grabbed more things than you intended? Use the toggle buttons in the multi info window to quickly trim your selection down to just the types of objects you'd intended to select.

Magic select


Okay, this one is kind of a secret, but since we're all friends here I'll tell you about it if you promise not to tell anybody else -- if you hold 'control' while clicking on a scenery object, magic select will automatically select all other scenery objects of the same type that are currently on-screen. Often very useful when you really just want to move the trees without moving the rocks!

Did somebody say 'performance'?


This build also contains some notable performance boosts for larger games! (which is *awfully* convenient, considering how much easier it is to place thousands upon thousands of scenery objects now!)

Hi folks! This is the first build in our "Creativity Spike #2" series of patches. It contains both some new features as well as a lot of bug fixes. New feature up-front:

New region environmental/weather effects!

• Fixed window dropshadow rendering when UI scale is set to any value other than 100%.
• Fixed a crash if you changed UI scaling while an object was selected.
• Fixed a small memory leak that could happen during game shutdown. (this showed up as a "Not all instances returned to the pool" error message while quitting the game)
• Fixed a crash if you destroyed popular player classes and then created new ones all while the game was paused.
• Fixed a crash which could occur when a party entered a dungeon if that dungeon was the smallest dungeon possible and was oriented precisely in an east-west or north-south direction.

Hi folks! Apologies for the delay on this update; we've been in the midst of a big office move over the last week, and I'm only just now finally coming up for air! Here's what's new in this update:

• Fixed the "Party wasn't in the expected party manager?" error. This was occurring if a party was trying to travel from one part of a region to another, but the fastest path it could find involved traveling through another region using a teleporter, and if that other region was outside the party's normal level range. When the party teleported into that other region, it was disbanding because the region was the wrong level for the party, and the game was getting confused about where the party was being stored since it was changing region and disbanding at exactly the same moment. This whole thing is all now fixed; parties no longer disband due to traveling through wrong-level regions on their way to a right-level region, and even if they do disband instantly for some other reason, the game doesn't get confused and generate this error any more! Huge huge thanks to everyone who submitted saves demonstrating this issue; it would have been an absolute nightmare to track down this bug without them!
• Fixed a rendering bug which caused dynamic point lights to not draw correctly until after you had viewed the inside of a dungeon at least once, each time you loaded into the game.
• Fixed a rendering bug which caused a player's weapons to stop being rendered once a player died. This was only a visual bug; the game knew they still had their weapons, they just weren't being drawn until the next time you loaded into a save.

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.

Changes in this build:

• 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)

a general development update:

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.

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.

Wow, it's been a long time coming, but we're finally here! This is by far the largest update we've ever done, with major rewrites to the entire game engine to support the new features and nearly tacking a whole extra game onto the game, but we made it! I'm going to talk more about the process that brought us to this point and the development plan ahead, but first let's do the changelog, along with some screenshots taken by our intrepid testers!

Major new stuff in this build:

• Dungeons!

  
  Did I really need to say that Dungeons are a part of the Dungeons Update? Of course I did! Dungeons are customisable instanced maps that branch off from the main world map. You build the entrance to them like a building on the main map, but then you can go inside and lay out and decorate the interior! For each dungeon, you can select how many instances you want to run, and parties of players will assemble to explore them. Do bear in mind that these dungeon instances do have a daily upkeep cost whether or not they're active, and each instance will be demanding bandwidth from your network connection, so try not to run more of them than you really need! In order to access dungeon placement, you'd normally need to research and unlock both "Parties" and then "Dungeons", but in this build, we're also giving you "Dungeons" as a bonus technology whenever you unlock "Parties", so that you can see the new game systems immediately. (The bonus "dungeons" technology is temporary; it'll likely require a separate unlock in future versions of the game)

• Dungeon customisation!

  
  This build contains eight different dungeon themes, each of which can themselves be edited and recolored, with new scenery items, doors, paintable floors, and more!

• Design boss fights!

  
  Design giant dungeon bosses, complete with multi-phase boss fights! Each phase can be customised separately, with their own attack patterns, health bar, and visual effects.

• Four new character models!

  
  New character models specifically designed for use as bosses have been added in this build, but of course you can use them for anything you like; regular monsters, NPCs, even playable characters, and they're all compatible with all our other character models so can be mix&matched at will!

• Custom dungeon monster type storage!

  
  Each of your dungeons now gets two additional monster type slots and one boss monster slot, which you can use to make custom monsters that can only be placed inside that dungeon. (Dungeons can also contain any monsters from your game's main map). Right now each dungeon is limited to just these three custom character slots, but we have plans to expand how many custom slots you can have inside dungeons; that'll be coming in a near-future update!

• Hate unlocking things? Access dungeons from the very start of the game!

  
  The "Role-Playing" MMORPG type now starts with the "Parties" technology already unlocked from the start, which means that in this build they also have "Dungeons" unlocked! So if you want to jump straight into laying out dungeons in a fresh MMO, that's the MMO type to choose during New Game creation!

Combat changes in this build:

• Area effect combat abilities!

  
  This build adds support for making combat abilities affect a large area; very useful for when you just want your boss monster to wipe a whole party all at once!

• Full monster aggro system!

  
  Monster aggro is now modeled much more accurately, including non-combatants gaining aggro due to healing or buffing players who are directly fighting the monster.

• Taunt mechanics!

  
  Players can now be given "taunt" abilities to pull and hold monster aggro, to make true tanks.

• Status effects now stack!

  
  When someone is affected by multiple Damage over Time effects from different sources, they now stack with each other, instead of replacing each other.
  

• Party roles!

  
  When in parties, players can now select 'roles' they want to play on the team. A player who has healing skills may choose to take the "healer" role, in which they'll tend to hang back and focus on healing their party members, or a player who has at least one taunt may choose to take the "tank" role, focusing on trying to keep the monsters focused on them! Note that each party may only have one healer and only one tank because I still have the emotional scars from all-healer and all-tank parties I've been a part of in various MMOs and I want to spare you from ever having to experience that pain. <3

• Parties take rests!

  
  Individual players were already doing this when adventuring solo, but parties now also take time to heal up after a fight, instead of immediately charging off to fight more monsters. This should result in substantially fewer silly party wipes! Additionally, players (both solo and in parties) now consider damage-over-time effects while resting, and will continue to rest and heal themselves up until the damage-over-time effects expire.

Regular new stuff in this build:

• [h4]New UI![/h4] Much of the game's UI has been spruced up and updated, including moving the game's various "reports" into a new menu system, and starting to break up individual design pages into separate windows instead of mashing them all together into giant monolithic windows. This also includes a new way of showing what object is selected, which is both much clearer (IMHO) and also is going to open up some exciting new possibilities for future updates!
• [h4]Building activation[/h4] Buildings now have a different appearance when they've not yet been activated. You can now activate buildings manually if you wish (instead of waiting for one of your developers to do it), and buildings automatically get switched into 'maintenance' mode when a developer is fixing bugs on them. Your subscribers cannot interact with buildings which are deactivated.
• There's a new visual effect for when a healing ability is used on a player, to make it more obvious when somebody's been healed!
• Designed character types can now be destroyed. Got a player class that's only being played by jerks? Destroy it, and everybody using it will be unsubscribed all at once!

The road ahead

Hi, folks, I'm back from my long-overdue break and eager to get back to work on MT2! While I was gone, our artist Liam's been hard at work adding new content, and that's what this update contains! New in this build:

• A new "mechanical" functional building theme! If you always wanted one of your game's races to be fanatical tinkers or magi-tek wielders, then this is the set for you!
• A matching "mechanical" modular building set!
• About a dozen new scenery items which also match this theme!
• Two new character models!

Hi, folks! Gosh it's been a while since we've posted an update; apologies for that, but we've been super busy behind the scenes and I think you'll be excited for what we've got coming! First, we've added a new set of "magical city" buildings and scenery items for sprucing up wherever your civilisation of magic-users call home! Second, we've got a big new set of fifteen new character costumes usable for player characters, monsters, or whatever else you have in mind! So that's the first thing. The second thing is that as some of you clever folks may have already noticed, we've quietly put up a preview of the Dungeons feature that I've been working on for geez at least the last year! This has required a major restructuring of most of the game engine in order to support instanced dungeon spaces, realistic monster aggro, taunts, party combat roles, AoE combat effects, and all the other new features that are in the dungeons preview build! That dungeons preview branch is accessible from the eponymous dungeons_preview beta branch, which you can find by right-clicking on the game in your steam library, choosing 'Game Properties' from the context menu, and then selecting the dungeons_preview branch on the 'Betas' tab. Doing that and letting Steam apply the patch will give you access to try out the upcoming features around placing and designing dungeons, boss encounters, and watching your subscribers play them! All of the above new assets (the "magical city" buildings and new character models) have also been added to the dungeons_preview build, so you can play with those in whichever branch you prefer! I suspect that we're still at least a month or two away from integrating the Dungeons feature back into the main game branch, but I feel like it's now more than ready to have an even larger group of people's eyes on it providing feedback and bug reports as we put together the finishing touches! You can use an existing save with the dungeons preview build if you wish, or can start a new one. I've been working super hard to keep saved games compatible between our default build and dungeon preview builds, but obviously it'll be safest if you use a dedicated save for the dungeons preview build and don't try to reload it in the default build after it's had dungeons added to it! And I should also note that if you're checking out the dungeon preview, you'll find a comprehensive set of FAQS about the dungeon preview build over on our Discord server (at https://discord.mmorpgtycoon.com/), as well as plenty of knowledgeable players sharing tips and ideas over there! So that's all from me today. Once again thank you to everyone for your patience and support, and we'll talk again soon! -T [EDIT]: Whoops! I originally put the wrong version number in this announcement -- this update is actually version 0.19.125. So if steam has updated your build to 0.19.125 then you've got the new buildings and assets discussed in this changelog! (and the version number for the dungeons_preview build is 0.1.15-dungeons) Big thanks to everybody who pointed out that mistake!

Hi folks! This is a very small patch that fixes a few save file compatibility issues with our next big feature update. There should be no visible changes at all in this build, but I do hope to be posting a much more lengthy and exciting set of patch notes in the next few weeks. It's all finally coming together! :) -T

This is a very small hotfix which fixes a crash bug which occurred in the previous build if you loaded a save, quit back to the title screen, loaded into a save again, and then a new subscriber joined that game. Apologies for missing that one, and big thanks to everyone who reported it! Best, -T

Hi folks! This is a small general update with some performance improvements and some placement tool improvements. These include:

• Improved the wall placement tool to make it easier to join walls together.
• Walls now do a much better job at reliably building obstructions into the navigation mesh. (previously they would sometimes be truncated or have small gaps in tight corners)
• Vast speedups to navmesh generation, especially in regions containing a lot of walls.
• Fixes an issue with pasting multi-line text into a single-line text edit box.
• Fixed a lot of activities which weren't testing the 'island' system to validate themselves, which could result in subscribers getting stuck in a pathfinding loop, which would then hog pathfinding threads and cause other subscribers to spend a lot of time standing around and waiting for legitimate paths to generate.

This is a very small update which contains bugfixes to address issues reported by the community, mostly to do with destroying cross-region teleporters and vehicle paths.

We've had a few reports of crashes-on-load in the update from a couple hours ago; they pointed to trouble in one of our debug visualisations (which are all disabled by default, but were being generated whether or not they were visible). In this build I've temporarily disabled those visuals while I figure out and fix the issue. Sorry for the inconvenience! This change has no effect on the game except for temporarily removing one of the debug visualisation options while I figure out the underlying issue. -T

Small update this time, mostly focused around character movement. It gives us better behaviour in general, improves our "worst case" scenarios, and even slightly improves performance, too! There's actually a *big* new system under the hood powering these changes; it was developed for use in the upcoming Dungeons update, but it gives us enough benefits on the main map that I thought I should backport it into our live build so you can see the benefits now! New in this build:

• While idle, monsters now remain strictly inside their monster zones (previously they could wander up to 20 meters outside of their monster zones). Additionally, they should no longer walk through obstructions (walls/fences/etc) at any time.
• While kiting enemies, players would sometimes accidentally travel through obstructions or over mountains or into the sea -- this shouldn't happen any more!
• When considering what to do, players no longer consider activities which are unreachable from their current position. This fixes the old (old!) problem of players sometimes getting stuck repeatedly trying to figure out how to reach a building which was fully walled-off and inaccessible.
• Various pathfinding bugfixes and performance improvements, especially related to detecting impossible paths.
• Buffed "consult online guide" action to give a much wider knowledge of the subscriber's surroundings and made it last longer (33% chance to expire at the end of each play session, instead of a 100% chance).
• Guards on patrol no longer accidentally teach nearby subscribers to fight better; they now only provide directions, as intended. Guard directions now give region knowledge similar to that acquired from online guides (but are much faster and don't require the subscriber alt-tab out of the game).
• Fixed a rare bug which could result in a player's combat abilities getting stuck in a 'charging' state such that the player thought they were using the ability but no attack ever happened. (this would usually end up looking like the player repeatedly approaching and then running away from monsters, when they actually thought they were kiting the monsters)
• This build also contains an experimental fix to our data file format, to theoretically make them work much better with Steam's delta patching system, which should result in smaller patch sizes for future patches.

Hi everyone! We wanted to post a small news update for you today to give everyone a first look at the progress we've made on dungeons so far. If you're already hanging out with us on Discord, you've seen the odd sneak peek here and there, but as we get closer to putting the first part of this feature on the Test build, we thought we'd show a little of where we're at right now. First up, a couple of disclaimers! These definitely aren't done yet. What you'll see in the below screenshots are mostly representative of what we're aiming for, but they are not the final product and are very much subject to change. It also doesn't represent everything we have planned! But we also don't want to over-promise. Let's start by taking a look at your experience with creating dungeons!


We want this to feel like the same robust and familiar building toolsets you have in the open world, but working to the confines that are required in creating a dungeon-type space, and we're feeling pretty good about where it's at! Now, on to what your players will see.




So, that's where we're at with dungeons right now! It's coming along nicely, and we're still confident it'll be done and with you the first half of this year (with the test build getting it a bit sooner!) If you have thoughts & feedback for us, head over to our Discord and let us know! The whole team is active on there and we try to be as available as we can! --Leanne

This is a hotfix for a couple major issues in yesterday's update. We'd brought in an engine change which had fixed a number of minor minor texture-related bugs, but accidentally created a few major texture-related bugs. These were:

• Most notable was that text rendering was failing on many models of AMD graphic cards, as well as many (most?) models of Mac, and also on the Steam Deck.
• Road rendering was somewhat broken, with roads appearing extremely pixelated, when compared against earlier builds of the game.

Hi folks! This is just a small update with some utilities to help simplify some of our debugging efforts, along with some small bug fixes. New in this build:

• Adds a "Bug Report" feature to the main game menu. Submitting a bug report automatically handles all of our standard data gathering when bugs are reported; it sends us (anonymous) information about your computer specs, your game log, the current game state, as well as a screenshot.
• Revised game menu to make its behaviour more intuitive.
• The major quality-of-life change: Made the game's "pause" border a soothing matte red instead of an eye-searing glowing electric orange. (I honestly don't know what I must have been thinking when I first set that up)
• Implemented double-click-dragging within text edit widgets, to drag and select by words.
• Fixed incorrect collisions vs. road intersections when placing scenery objects.
• Fixed the placement of player names for very large character models.

Over the past hour, we've received some reports of modular buildings going missing from save files when loaded into the hotfix build from earlier today -- this update fixes that issue! If your modular buildings have vanished after loading a save, please try reloading from a slightly earlier save. (MMORPG Tycoon 2 keeps periodic autosaves as well as separate saves at each new version release of your MMO -- you can access them from the 'Backups' tab in the in-game desktop interface.) Apologies for the bother! -T

Hi folks! This update is a hotfix for a bug that slipped through in v0.19.89, to do with using modular building edit controls around the newly added 'Festival' buildings; sorry we missed this one, and biggest of thanks to the folks who reported it! -T

```Hi, everyone! We're back from the holidays and right back into development! Today's update is a content update; more than two dozen new buildings and scenery items, a new type of shop, and more!

New stuff:

• [h4]New "Festival" buildings and scenery![/h4] This adds a new category of "scenery buildings", which don't actually sell anything, but can help boost an area's "Beauty" statistic in the same way that regular scenery does.
• [h4]Sell trinkets to your subscribers, using the new Trinket Shop building![/h4] Subscribers love buying trinkets (for some reason?) They don't actually do anything, but they help fulfill your subscribers' psychological need to "get loot" in a safe way, and they give them something to talk about in social circles, too! Subscribers may purchase up to one trinket per day. You can see how many trinkets a player has on the 'Inventory' tab of their information window.
• [h4]Vendor trash?[/h4] In addition to normal loot and gold, dead monsters now also drop "vendor trash" - basically worthless items that clog up a player's inventory. Players can sell vendor trash to shops for 1/10 a gold each (rounding down). You can see how much vendor trash a player is carrying also on the 'Inventory' tab of their information window.
• [h4]Jester?[/h4] How have we gone so long in early access without ever making a jester model available? This was a terrible oversight on my behalf but we're fixing that problem now!

Changes:

• [h4]Weapon Item Levels[/h4] Previously, player weapons were categorized as either "not good" or "acceptable", and when a player out-leveled their weapon, they would have to buy a new one. Now, weapons have levels the same way that players do. As a general rule, weapon levels are about ten times the matching character level. So a level 1 character would generally use an item level 10 weapon, but may buy a slightly better one so they don't have to upgrade it as often. Item level shows up as "ilvl" in the player information window.
• [h4]How much have I earned from that subscriber?[/h4] We now track how much real-world money you have earned from each subscriber, and you can see that information on the new "Money" tab in the subscriber information window. (caveat: we weren't tracking this data before this build, so your older subscribers will be starting from '0'; sorry about that!)

Miscellaneous Fixes:

• Fixed "focus" behaviour when invoked on a monster zone.
• Fixed a crash bug during load if you had saved a string longer than 1kb in length (typically these were lore descriptions of things, or else ability tooltip messages)
• Big improvements to the UI for dragging the "precise" movement mode axis widgets, especially for objects which are above the camera.
• Vastly improved "precise" rotation mode when rotating objects which are close to the camera.
• Fixed cursor collision tests vs. vehicle routes; makes it much easier to use the 'destroy' tool on vehicle routes, rather than having to destroy the depots!
• Big big fixes to wall placement, especially for short walls.
• Fixed various text editing issues, particularly the widget getting confused if you inserted a carriage return after a word wrap had happened.
• Fixed absurd extra CPU usage while the mouse hovered over an editable text box on a sharable character prefab card.

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

New stuff:

• [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!

Changes:

• [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)

Miscellaneous Fixes:

• 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.

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!

New in this build:

• Character cards!

  
  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!

Other Changes

• 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.

Fixes

• 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.

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!

Hi folks! This small update is a collection of patches for issues reported over the past few days. These fixes include:

• Worked around an odd crash when loading certain older saved games into the new game architecture.
• Fixed a crash-during-save bug which could rarely occur if you moved the camera around to look at characters who hadn't been in view when the save began.
• Fixed movement prediction code for players around vehicles and vehicle depots.
• Miscellaneous minor UI widget fixes and improvements, especially in text edit boxes.

Whoops! A bug which made it difficult to place network gear was introduced in the previous hotfix; this tiny update fixes that bug! -T

Hi folks! This is a quick hotfix build for a performance regression which slipped through in the recent v0.19.55 build. The performance regression mostly affected players with really large games or low-spec GPUs, and who had the Dynamic Batching video option enabled. This fix should bring performance back under control for the folks affected! Best, -T

Hi folks! So, it's time for another big tech update! New in this build:

• Vastly reduced memory usage during loads/saves

  
  Skippable technical details: Previously, saving was a two-step process, where first we converted the current game state into an intermediate format and then saved that intermediate format to disk. Loading worked the same way, in reverse; load into the intermediate format, then convert the intermediate format into a real game state. So it turned out that the intermediate format could be extremely large for large games; for our largest player-submitted saves I've seen it consume more than ten extra gigabytes of RAM; we have one user-submitted save file which I couldn't even load on my main development PC because I simply don't have enough virtual memory to hold the intermediate format! This change entirely eliminates the intermediate format, and we instead load and save directly, saving *all* of that extraneous RAM usage during saves and loads!

• Integrated the new game architecture which will support the Dungeons feature

  
  The Dungeons feature itself isn't in this build, but all the underlying technology changes which were required for Dungeons is here for early testing. This game architecture change should be invisible to everyone, but it's helpful for us to have more people running on the new architecture, so we can be sure it's really solid and have people testing that the savefile upgrade process from the old architecture to the new one is absolutely seamless!

• Multi-line text editing

  
  This commit adds new, multi-line text editing, which we'll eventually be rolling out to a bunch of different places in the UI, but the one in this build is in the updated building information window, where there is now a small freeform text box where you can take notes, write flavor text, etc. This update also improves cursor handling over unicode text, and adds word-select on a double-click. (select-all has been moved to triple-click)

Here's a further hotfix for a couple issues reported in the recent performance update. This fixes a couple of AI issues which could result in two problems: 1. Monsters sometimes clustering around players and getting stuck while not in-view (this typically occurred only when players and monsters had only melee-ranged attacks). 2. When the above didn't happen, monsters could become overpowered and players become underpowered when not being watched, which meant that monsters won most of the off-screen combats. (again, this only happened while not being watched). Both these issues should now be resolved in this update! Thanks so much for the reports of the issue! -T

Hi folks! This is a small hotfox update for the recent "Go-Faster Stripes" update with the following fixes: [olist]

Hi everyone! It's been a little while since our last update as I've mostly been soldiering away on the big upcoming Dungeons feature, but I wanted to roll out the various bug fixes and improvements which have been accumulating over in our public 'test' build, because there have been some pretty good 'quality of life' ones!

New in this build:

• SPEED!

  
  I've found some huge CPU-side performance boosts to the simulation calculations! Since the last 'default' build, my most demanding save file has dropped from taking 22ms to calculate each frame down to just 5ms. (I'm super proud of these optimisations; they're quite possibly the cleverest thing I've ever coded)

• Video Memory Savings!

  
  Implemented render target sharing within model list GUIs, which reduces quite a lot of video RAM usage.

• Costume Editor Improvements

  
  Made usability improvements all across the costume model editor, including fixing the long-broken "Stance" and "Preview Animation" options.

• Combat? Combat!

  
  Fixed an old bug which would cause a combat ability to become stuck and never recharge if a player/NPC/monster was killed while in the middle of triggering it. (this fixed itself after a save/load cycle, but now it doesn't happen at all)

• Good Clear Roads

  
  Fixed the grass suppression zone around paths, which had been offset by about 7m to the northeast of the path.

Hi everyone! This is a content drop of new character art, plus various bugfixes and other minor enhancements. New in this build:

• Twenty new prefab character costumes -- this expands our built-in costume library by over 50%!
• Exposed the previously-hidden "model scale" costume editing parameter, which gives you even more control over your edited costumes! Similarly, exposed a "down" slider for the 'torso' piece so that you can correct issues with character legs poking through the ground.
• Fixed issues with player migrations. Previously, when players out-leveled their current region they would only consider migrating to immediately adjoining regions; now players will consider migrating through intermediate regions to try to find a correct-level region for themselves. (So if a newly level 3 player needs to travel from their current level 2 region through a level 1 region in order to reach a level 3 region, they'll now do that which they wouldn't have done before)
• Fixed a number of single-frame visual glitches when switching between tabs in various UI windows.
• Fixed a number of bugs involving vehicles which traveled through inactive regions.
• Fixed the "level two tutorial" failing to set the "completed the level two tutorial" flag, and therefore the tutorial being re-shown during every new game. Big apologies for missing this annoyance for so long, everyone!
• Several big optimizations around UI elements showing 3D scenes, saving CPU time, GPU time, as well as lowering VRAM usage.
• ...oh, and one more thing -- after many requests, you can now (finally!) unlock extra NPC slots as your game grows!

Hi folks! The update that went up yesterday had a bug in it which had gone completely undetected in our public 'test' branch for a full month; it had quite a lot of terrain details flipped between north and south, which could cause many sorts of intricate scenery builds to break. This build fixes that bug; apologies for missing it during 'test'! New in this build:

• Fixes north/south flip of terrain type heights introduced in 0.19.17.
• Modular buildings now allow up to 40 blocks per building (up from 16)
• Updated localisation data.

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!

Hi folks! This is a small update which is mostly for the Mac side; someone noticed that although our store page said that we require OS X 10.9 in our Mac build, our game actually required OS X 11.0 (which is a much bigger difference than it sounds like; the equivalent on Windows would be like us saying on the store page that we require Windows 98 but actually requiring Windows 10). That's now been fixed! On Mac we now require OS X 10.10 (which is what's required by Steam); store page update is incoming! Other updates: New in this update:

• While editing combat abilities, we now simplify the combat ability after every edit. If you reduce a damage effect amount to '0', we remove that damage effect entirely. (You can add it back if you wish, though!) This fixes some issues we had with ability classification, where an ability with a 'damage' effect set to zero would still be classified as an 'attack' and by used and evaluated that way by the AI.
• When adding an ability effect to a character, healing ability effects now default to a heal amount of '1' (previous default was '0', which caused problems for the change above)
• Fixed a single-frame visual flicker in the game's "grid view" UI widget, which was most notable in the ability editor UI whenever you edited an ability.
• Fixed an important data initialisation error which could sometimes cause problems during a load, for some folks with computers of a very specific speed and whose computers were under a very specific amount of load. (multithreaded timing bugs are the *best*!)
• Fixed zalgo text in the crash reporter.
• New log file format, and the logging starts earlier during game startup so that we don't lose some critical log lines that were being lost before.
• Adds a simple profanity filter, which screens the procedurally-generated names used by newly created players. Note that this filter only runs at the time that a new character is created; any already-generated names in saves or names manually edited by the player are *not* currently being checked against it.

Hi folks, it's another relatively small patch dealing with miscellaneous small issues reported over the past few days, plus a couple small bits of new content! New in this build:

• Owl flight points have been added! For when you'd rather swoop on silent wings rather than ride on the back of a giant crow! (requires 'Flight Paths' tech to be unlocked)
• Fixed the crediting of hunt quest kills. Previously, players only received credit for quest kills if they were standing inside the appropriate monster zone at the time they killed the monster. This meant that long-range players sniping into the monster zone from outside weren't getting quest credit for their kills! Now fixed; killing a monster which is from a particular monster zone now always awards quest credit, regardless of where the monster or the player are currently located.
• Some moderate speed and memory improvements during the load of large saved games.
• Fixed the visible title of the "Design" window when it's opened again after last having been closed while in a character-edit mode.
• Improved the data sent to us in crash reports on Windows.

Hi everyone! This is another small set of hotfixes for recent updates, while most of my effort is still going into dungeons. New in this update:

• Fixes crash reporting on Windows (one of two crash reporting mechanisms was failing!)
• Fixes fallback code for moving files. (in the event of errors while saving files, we have multiple fallbacks, and the *third* fallback case had a bug in it which caused it to always fail. I've heard from just *one* player who I think was hitting this situation!)
• Adds an "enable gamepads" checkbox to the game options, defaults to enabled. If you're having trouble with a drifting gamepad causing the game's camera to move around, you can turn this checkbox off and the game will disable all gamepad functionality. (previously, we always recommended people to unplug those gamepads, but now you can just make the game ignore them instead)

Hi folks! This is a very small patch with a couple hotfixes for the content update which went up a couple days ago.

New in this build:

• Fixes a bug which caused some scenery items placed during builds 0.18.99 or earlier (basalt columns being one major instance) to convert into a different scenery item during load. Loading save files from 0.18.99 and earlier now correctly preserves those scenery items! (note that if you load a save which had already converted the scenery items into different types, that conversion will remain. To fix, you either need to re-place the intended scenery types or load an older save from before the conversion happened. Apologies for this trouble!)
• Players can now survive moving entirely off the map if they're on a flight path or on board a vehicle. (this still isn't great; there are problems calculating whether they're visible while they're over there, so they may unpredictably pop in and out of being drawn, but at least it's sort-of working now!)
• Fixed a crash bug which would happen while loading a saved game containing a dead player who was off the edge of the map.
• Players who die off the edge of the map no longer get stuck there; now, they respawn at the nearest owned region containing a functional respawn point.
• Fixed displayed version number in-game (which was showing the back-end build identifier instead of the public-facing one)

Hi folks! It's been a while since our last big content update, and we're making up for lost time by adding this drop of more than sixty new scenery objects for decorating your worlds, plus miscellaneous bugfixes and other game improvements!

Here's what's new:

• All the plants!

  
  Did you want mangrove trees? Savannah trees? Mighty redwoods? Flowering vines? Venus flytraps? We've got something for everyone in this update with more than sixty new scenery objects added to the roster!

• New costumes!

  
  We've added a new "Fungoid" costume prefab and a new "Mantis" costume prefab, each of which works great either as player models or as monsters on their own, or (even better) mixing and matching them with other costume pieces to make your own unique chimeras.

• Better speed hacks!

  
  Speed hackers were inconsistent in the game before; now their speed hacks are always active, whether they're new players or old players, and whether they're on ground or on a flight path. This make speed hackers a lot easier to see without using any special tools!

And here's what's changed:

• Players now complain about dying less frequently. Previously, they would lodge a "I'm dying too often" complaint if they died even once ever for any reason. Now, they only complain if they're killed in PvE multiple times in a row, and never complain about deaths within PvP duels.
• I've made under the hood modifications to our 'addiction' system which I'm going to be all coy about and not explain except to say that I'm happy with the adjustment and it should make it a little easier to wind up with players who are both happy with the game and also addicted to it at the same time.
• Finally found and fixed the longstanding bug which could result in repeat streamers sometimes logging out of the game immediately after logging in at the start of their stream. (this would only happen for streamers who were streaming the game for their second time, and mostly only happened for streamers with a negative addiction level)
• Fixed some audio issues with the terrain editing and monster zone editing tools.
• Made some small improvements to our save process which should make saving slightly faster and use slightly less memory during the save. (there's still a lot more work to be done here, but this was a good first step!)
• Fixed crash reporting on the OSX build.

New in this build:

• Fixed parties sometimes getting stuck in 'Forming up' state (which was more common on fast time speeds).
• Fixed monsters sometimes becoming unkillably undead. (I'm not sure how this happened and nobody's ever reported it to me, but I once saw a monster that had zero health remaining but was still alive and killing one player after another.. so I put in some fixes to prevent monsters from getting into that 'undead' state!)
• Added the concept of "basic attacks" to the game, where a basic attack is any attack which has no cost. The game will now generate a warning if a player/npc/monster class has no level 1 basic attacks (since that class may not be able to engage in combat at all)
• Fixed user-provided music tracks always playing at 100% volume when automatically triggered by the game.
• Fixed text layout of the intro sequence's "login" window for certain localisations.
• Fixed several bugs in the 'Features' tab of the Design window, so that Parties and PvP can correctly be enabled when you own the techs, even if you haven't unlocked both of them.
• Fixed a whole bunch of issues around dragging ability prefabs into and out of the prefabs window.

Hi folks! This is just a small hotfix patch for a few issues present in the recent sound update. Most notably:

• Fixes a crash bug if more than just a few custom music tracks were added to the game.
• Fixes the ambient music player completely ignoring which tracks had been enabled and disabled within the UI, when picking a music track to play.
• Fixed a potential lockup if every music track but one was disabled, and that one remaining track could not be played for some reason (for example, for being an invalid file).

Hi folks! We discussed for a long time whether this should be consider a full update or a small update and in the end I decided to call it a small update because I honestly have no idea how you'd make branding images for an update that's all about sound! New in this build:

• Lots of sound updates! We've added an initial pass of tool sounds to almost every interactive tool in the game, and have categorised sounds into several different groups which can now all have their volumes set separately, in the 'options' window.
• Ambient music tracks; every so often, the game will now sometimes play an ambient music track when the camera is brought down into a populated region. If you wish, you can add your own music tracks to this system by dropping audio files into a particular directory (the game will tell you where, in the "Ambient Music Tracks" interface in the audio options). We're expecting to add more tracks to the built-in list in the future!
• Adjusted sound volume slider ranges, to make the full range of the volume sliders more useful.
• Fixes a couple of situations which could result in players getting stuck forever while waiting for a PvP opponent to arrive, if that opponent changed their mind and decided to go do something else before arriving. (this would most commonly happen if they got attacked on the way to the PvP duel)
• Improves the layout of the "Features" page of the Design window to make it much more obvious when features aren't available, and to explain what must be done to unlock them.
• The game now notices if Steam tells us to quit, and acts as if the player had requested to quit. This performs an autosave and then quits.
• Disabled some spammy log messages which accidentally got included in the last update.
• In the 'intro' animation, the game now uses your Steam display name as the pretend 'login' name, instead of the hardcoded string 'admin'. (this is the first step toward some future plans)
• Fixed save file submission to be more robust and handle large save files much more reliably! (previously, large save files were often being silently discarded by the server; that shouldn't happen any more!)

New in this build:

• Fixes weapon models not being drawn (this bug was introduced in 0.18.85); the simulation was still working as intended; it was just that players who were carrying weapons didn't have those weapons actually visible in their hands.
• Fixes a possible crash bug when placing teleporters very close to each other.
• Migrated all of our image saving/loading from using SDL_Image to using stb_image (and stb_image_write). This turns out to be simpler, faster, and easier, and also removes one of our more troublesome dependencies. Also fixes a Mac bug where game thumbnails weren't successfully being saved by SDL_Image!
• Worked around a "freeze on exit" issue which (to my knowledge) only affected the Steam Deck.

Hi everyone! This is a hotfix for an important bug that accidentally got introduced yesterday in 0.18.86, which resulted in NPC badges not being displayed, which made it harder to visually identify NPCs such as guards and quest-givers. That's now fixed! Apologies for the inconvenience! Will talk again soon with a proper content update! -T

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.

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!

Here's what's new:

• A new functional building theme

  
  We've added a new "Fearless" building theme, for all your most energetic warrior factions!

• Two new modular building sets

  
  We've added a modular building set matching the new functional building set, Fearless, as well as Snowtown, for towns blanketed in snow!

• Did somebody say 'snow'?

  
  We've added 'Snow' as a new environmental particle effect, now available from the still-in-progress region information window!

• There must have been some magic in that

  
  We've added a new character model preset, for all your frostiest classes and monsters!

• Winter Props!

  
  We've added 13 frosty new scenery objects to the scenery lists, including snow-topped structures and rocks, sleds, icicles, firepits, and more!

• Also walls!

  
  Added a new Frozen Fortress wall variant.

• But what about people who like ships

  
  Ship your subscribers between islands in style using this new Longship vehicle! (available when vehicle paths are unlocked).

• But what about people who like fast travel

  
  Adds a new woodland Sylvan teleporter variant (available when teleporters are unlocked).

• But what about people who like fast travel and also watched Stargate

  
  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!.

• Dragging our castles kicking and screaming into the modern era

  
  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.

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.

Hi everyone! This is a small bugfix/quality of life patch. Here's what's changed:

• Global settings for monster respawning can now be set in the "Design" window's "Combat" tab. By default, monsters respawn 60 seconds after being killed, and do not check whether there are any players close to the spawn point before respawning, but either of these can be changed. The eventual goal is to make these settings customisable per monster zone, but making the global values editable is the first step toward that.
• Fixed a weird edge-case which allowed you to add a block to a modular building in an illegal spot. This could result in the modular building getting into an invalid state which would prevent you from further editing of the building.
• Adds the ability for players to explicitly try to pathfind to another region, rather than two a specific point in the other region. This fixes bugs which sometimes occurred when two regions were connected in more than one way where the player tried to enter the region via one entrance, but the pathfinder would return a path using the other entrance and then walk over to the entrance that the player had been expecting to use. Wow this is becoming a long explanation. I guess what I'm trying to say is that migration between regions is better now, yay!
• Adds a status message which appears in the 'Info' window for a player when you select them, if they're migrating to a different region. This replaces the embarrassing "Traveling (Traveling)" message they used to have. (seriously, how has it been years of development and testing and I never noticed that until now?)
• Removed some leftover old AI code which was making players believe that every other region was far more exciting and more beautifully decorated than the region they're currently inside, and so they could end up running back and forth between two adjacent regions instead of ever really playing the game. Just run back and forth forever!
• Fixed another cause of AI appearing to "bounce" back and forth between regions, which happened while traveling from one region to another along a mountain pass, only when the player was traveling to the other region in order to grind for another level or to do a hunt quest; if a player was halfway between regions and somebody else killed the monster that the player had been planning to kill, then the player would select a *different* monster to attack, and back up to the start of the mountain pass, before turning around and resuming their path toward the new monster they'd selected. This could happen dozens of times, if the selected monsters kept being killed before the player managed to get all the way through the mountain pass! (this one was a surprisingly challenging bug to figure out!)
• Fixed the rendering of point lighting, which had been inconsistent before.
• Fixed the highlighting of widgets in "precise" placement mode for buildings and scenery objects. (they're supposed to highlight on mouse over and on click/drag, but sometimes it would take a second or more before the highlight was applied; now fixed!)
• Vehicle, Flight Path, and Teleporter placements now use the same building placement system as regular building placement. This means that you can now use the 'Z' key to rotate the buildings, or can even use 'Precise' placement mode to put them exactly where you want.
• Extra safety code to make sure that players won't remain in "resting" state if a monster is attacking them. (this shouldn't have been happening anyway, but there seems to be an edge case which is allowing it to happen sometimes; going to be keeping my eye on this one!)
• Fixed an AI bug which caused players with long-range attacks to not kite their enemies during combat, which meant that missile attacks weren't as much of a tactical combat benefit as they ought to have been. Now fixed!
• Improved the game's error messaging when trying to load corrupt/damaged save files.

Happy spooky season, everyone; we're back with another big Spooky content update!

New stuff in this build:

• Two new modular building themes!

  
  We've added new "Gothic" and "Pillaged" modular building themes, for all your spooky village needs!

• A new functional building set!

  
  We now have a new "Corrupted" functional building set, which contains corrupted variants of some of our favourite building models!

• Set sail with sinister seagoing spectres!

  
  Adds a new 'ghost ship' vehicle to the unlockable Vehicles system!

• Spooky scary scenery!

  
  Adds lucky number 13 spooky new scenery items, including candles, cauldrons, summoning circles, and more pieces of thematic set dressing!

Other Changes:

• Remodeled the "Civilised Tavern" model to better match the visual style of other "Civilised" buildings.
• Fixed subscribers occasionally falling off depot platforms when they noticed a new quest giver nearby.
• Fixed several bad edge cases while triangulating polygons, which occasionally was causing problems for terrain generation or navigation mesh generation.
• Renamed "Shops" to "Market Stalls" and updated the tutorial messaging, to make that step of the tutorial less likely to cause confusion for new players.
• Fixed "Bard" and "Knight" character model prefabs, which were missing data for where tails should go.
• Fixed "Chicken" and "Tortoise" character model prefabs, which were missing data for where hats should go.

Hi folks! This is a very small patch with a couple hotfixes for the Travel Update which went up yesterday. These are:

• Fixed subscribers falling off vehicle depot platforms if they noticed a new quest giver NPC nearby.
• Added some extra safety checks in pathfinding, to cope with the destruction of buildings while a pathfinding operation was ongoing in a background thread.
• Converted a few minor errors from being treated as fatal to merely outputting a message to the game's log.
• Updated the German localisation data.

Hi everybody! Thanks for your patience with this build that took a bit longer than I'd really intended! But we got here in the end! :D

New features in this build:

• Vehicles!

  
  A selection of large vehicles have been added, which can provide fixed transport over long distances; ideal for transporting your subscribers between far-distant islands or over hazardous terrain! Vehicles are unlockable in the tech tree after you've unlocked flight paths.

• Teleporters!

  
  Vehicles not fast enough for you? Teleport there directly! Teleporters are unlockable in the tech tree after you've unlocked Vehicles.

• Scenery!

  
  Adds about 20 new scenery items to the game. Have you always wanted to place shipwrecks off your town's coasts? Now you can!

• Autosaving is absolutely a new feature now which totally deserves to be up in this top section wait where are you going

  
  The game now displays a warning about 20 seconds before performing a periodic autosave, and offers to let you skip the autosave entirely, or even to trigger it immediately. Additionally, it now performs the preparatory autosave work (which requires the simulation to be paused) from a background thread, which keeps the game from feeling like it has locked up for a second, the way that it sometimes did for really large saves in the past.

Other Changes:

• "Show All Tutorials" is now a setting you can set separately for each game, or change in between play sessions. When enabled, it will cause tutorials to play again even if you have already completed them. Find it on the 'Settings' tab of the game launcher, in the in-game desktop interface.
• Monsters no longer wait for space to clear around them before respawning. Previously they waited until there were no subscribers within 20 meters, to ensure that they wouldn't immediately aggro on unsuspecting players, but this could cause heavily farmed monster zones to simply run out of monsters because there were just too many players hanging around for monsters to have that much empty space around them. I feel like this change generally makes monster zones work better overall!
• Adds a "respawn now" button to the monster zone information window, so you can manually respawn all of the monsters in the zone without needing to use the old "change density back and forth" trick to trick the game into doing it! Caution: respawning monsters has always required bandwidth use, so respawning all of the monsters in a large monster zone can put severe pressure on your network layout!
• Adds a 'Quests' tab to the subscriber information window, which displays what quests the subscriber currently has in their list and their progression within each.
• Made terrain editing free! (yay!)
• MegaTooltips for building placement tools now select random building variants to display in the megatooltip each time they open, instead of always showing the "base" one.
• Improves complaints about buildings. Previously, any time a subscriber tried to use a building and failed, it generated a "too expensive!" complaint. But there are actually several other reasons why a building interaction might fail, entirely unrelated to cost! Now subscribers have a lot more types of thought which should give far more information about what's actually gone wrong.
• Time scales adjusted, since the vast majority of players began to have trouble running the game simulation at extremely high speeds. "Fastest" time scale has been dropped from 20x speed to 9x speed, as an experimental change to see how people like it. (I'd love feedback on this change!)

Performance improvements:

• Dramatically improved the speed of pathfinding, which should fix the "players walking in place" problem which occasionally happened if every available background thread had become stuck in a long-running pathfinding request simultaneously.
• Improved the time taken to decide what regions could be travelled to when a subscriber was feeling crowded or outlevelled their current region.
• Fixed an issue where subscribers travelling to another region were discarding their planned path and rebuilding it every few seconds. This fix also reduces pressure on the pathfinding system!

Bug fixes in this build:

• When taking direct control of a character, use that character's speed for movement. (Previously, a custom speed set on a character was ignored, when you took manual control over it, and a default speed was used instead)
• Fixes long, thin, meandering walls (fences, most commonly) sometimes accidentally generating small holes along their length that subscribers can pathfind through.
• Improved messaging if a file write operation fails for any reason.
• Fixes extra AI ticks being fed to both players and monsters during combat, which allowed them to spam attacks far faster than intended.
• Fixes the "kill", "heal", and "control" interaction tools to work correctly when targetting elite monsters.
• Fixes the displayed error messages for the lift and lower region tools, on the "Grid" tab of the action bar.
• Fixes class "Optimal DPS" calculation to not include damage inflicted upon oneself as part of the "Optimal DPS" value.
• Fixes adding blocks to modular buildings. Previously, with precise mouse positioning you could add blocks diagonally off of a building, which broke some of the building logic. Now we actually constrain block adding to only be directly adjacent from existing building blocks.
• Fixes parties to be less of an absolute jerk to their members. Previously, parties in "forming up" or "reforming" states would periodically check all of their members and demand they travel to the party. Now there are some exceptions; they no longer do this if the member is dead (they're allowed to respawn first before the party forces them to travel to the party), or if they're in combat (wait until they finish killing the monster before travelling to the party), or if they're on a vehicle or a flight raven (wait until they're off the travel path first)
• The game now closes cleanly and immediately if you try to close it in the middle of a load. (Previously, the game waited until the load completed before exiting)
• ...and a bunch of other minor fixes!

Hi folks! This is just a hotfix update. Updates in this build:

• Fixes a crash which could happen if you selected a scenery item on the very same frame as pressing backspace.
• Fixes some spurious error messages which sometimes got displayed while placing NPCs.
• Fixes a handful of missing triangles on the south face of the 'arid landmark' building.

Hi folks! This is the final update in our current Creativity Spike series of updates; there will be more Creativity Spikes in the future, but after this update we're moving our attention back entirely onto core game features and mechanics! Here's what's new in this build:

• Adds more than 60 new placeable scenery items!
• In simple placement mode, you can now place scenery items on top of or against other objects in the game world, and can optionally orient them to match the surface they're placed against.
• In "precise" placement mode you can now freely rotate scenery items along any axis, and can lift them up into the air or sink them down into the ground.
• Scenery items can now be drastically scaled up and down.
• Fixed the default scales of several older human-scale scenery items to actually be closer to human scale. (Note: This only affects newly placed instances of those items; already-placed ones will retain their previous size, so that folks who have been making sculptures from scenery items won't have those sculptures broken when loading the save into this new update!)
• Modular building themes now support special wall models at ground level. For themes which use them (right now these are the arid, fortress, elegant, and village themes), existing modular buildings placed in a save will be converted to use these new ground-level walls during the load.

• Fixes a bug with modular buildings which resulted in underhangs never being removed even when they were no longer needed.
• Fixes the centering of modular buildings. (The calculated center point was previously being offset by about 6 meters)
• Fixes a tutorial non-progression bug which allowed the instantaneous destruction of the last respawn point in a region, even though the UI was indicating that it couldn't be done at all.

Arid Update: v0.18.25 Hi folks! This quick update isn't canonically part of the Creativity Spike, but is just adding a new theme of buildings to the game, the 'arid' set. Major changes in this build:

• Adds new 'Arid' model variants for the inn, tavern, shop, potionshop, blacksmith, landmark, graveyard, and starting point functional buildings.

• Improvements and fixes to wall placement, especially around the 'wall snap' feature..
• Pressing 'escape' can now cancel an in-progress drag-rotate without actually leaving placement mode.
• Fixes a crash loading a saved game in which there's no land at all.
• Fixes an AI logic bug which could make players in a multi-level region get stuck trying to pick up a quest from an NPC who doesn't offer any quests for their level range.
• Further refinements to navigation mesh generation to better handle a few more esoteric edge cases.

Hi folks, just a very small one today! New in this build: - Fixes bad behaviour of the wall placement tool, if you deactivated the tool in the middle of placing a wall which was snapped to another wall. - Added some more logging to try to track down the cause of a few rare bugs. That's all! And with that, I'm back to work on feature updates again. :D

Hi folks! This is our traditional post-update 'hotfix' build after a regular update to catch stuff that wasn't caught during testing. This time we have:

• Tweaking navmesh generation just slightly. We're seeing a lot fewer navigation mesh problems than in previous builds, but it hasn't gone entirely to zero yet, so this is just tweaking the procedure a little to see whether we can't minimise those issues.
• Fixed the "click and drag mouse to rotate" building placement interface when angle snap is disabled; it was feeling very weird and unresponsive in the last build. Now fixed to be like in previous builds!
• Fixed an string in one of the help messages which was using the wrong localisation key.

Hi folks! This is part two of our "Creativity Spike" updates, this time focused on the long-neglected "Set Dressing Buildings", now renamed to "Modular Buildings". Major updates:

• "Set Dressing Buildings" renamed to "Modular Buildings".
• Tools for editing Modular Buildings have been consolidated into a single action bar button with its own tool palette, and have been moved to the Building tab of the action bar.
• Modular Building tools have been updated to the newer UI styling used by most other tools, and a whole raft of bugs were fixed in them.
• Quality of life improvements to the Modular Building tools, including a visible brush showing exactly where a block would be added or removed, and where an entrance would be added or removed, when using those tools, plus explanatory text when a block cannot be removed or added somewhere.
• Adds 'grid snap' and 'angle snap' options to the game's general placement logic (currently only accessible for modular buildings, but this will be added to other tools in near future Creativity Spike updates!)
• Separated "Scenery" objects out into five separate categories of scenery items, with separate icons on the 'Scenery' action bar, to make it much easier to find the particular objects you're looking for.
• Big performance improvements to pathfinding cancellations. When pathfinding requests needed to be cancelled (either due to somebody being attacked by a monster and switching into a combat mode, or due to the player changing the contents of a region in a way that would invalidate pathfinding results), it was possible for the game to get stuck for a little while trying to cancel those pathfinding requests safely. This is now handled in a much faster, and even safer way!

• Modified how subscribers value gold when choosing whether to spend their money on for-pay flight paths, so that players with lots of gold should now be willing to spend more of it on flight paths than they were before. This makes valuations for gold prices work more like how valuations for real-money prices work, where people with more are usually willing to spend more.
• Fixed a crash which could occur during a load, when the saved game somehow had alive subscribers located inside an inactive region.
• Elite monsters now award double XP when killed.
• Misc UI fixes around wall and building placements.
• Adds a subscriber thought if they decide that a flight path is too expensive.
• Stopped AI from even considering taking a flight path to another region (for the purpose of reaching a correct-level region, or for avoiding crowds, or similar) if that flight path is too expensive for them to be able to afford to take it.
• Updated FMOD library from version 2.00.07 to 2.01.10.

Hi folks! This is a further patch for a series of relatively rare crash bugs that have been reported over the past few days, involving the placement of walls. There should be no big obvious changes in this build! We've also tweaked some error messaging, as we've seen a surprising number of people getting errors when the game tries to access their saved games, due to permission errors; as though the OS had set their saved games so that they didn't have read access to them. (I honestly don't know how that could happen; maybe 'Run as Administrator', and then trying to load the saves from a non-Administrator account?) Thanks for your patience with these teething issues, everyone! -T

Hi folks! This is a hotfix patch for the 'walls' update, containing these fixes:

• Fixes erroneous claims of walls being 'obstructed' when they're precisely parallel to other walls (most easily caused when the "angle snap" placement option was enabled)
• Various fixes to wall placement, particularly re: placing multiple separate walls without deselecting the tool in between, walls snapping to other walls and enforcing minimum wall lengths.
• Fixes cursor collisions vs. walls to more closely match their visible model.
• Improvements to navigation mesh generation (especially in the corners of tightly bending walls)
• Fixes display of addiction status in the player information windows, which was actually displaying completely the wrong message (claiming that players were addicted when they weren't, and that they weren't addicted when they were) because I was being too clever by half and confused myself when setting up those messages for localisation! All fixed now!

Hi folks! With this build we're starting our "Creativity Spike" series of small updates which update the game's placement and creation tools. First, up, walls! Headline features in this build:

• Walls now use real models! When selecting the wall placement tool, you're now given a palette of wall styles to select from, ranging from the old castle walls (now with battlements!) to fences and even giant walls of ice.
• When placing walls, you can now optionally lock them to specific angles, and choose whether they should snap together.
• Big improvements to the model palettes used for most model pickers, so far less scrolling is required to find things. (Exception is the Set Dressing buildings, which will receive the same fixups in the next update)

• Nerfed the 'Social' MMO type's starting stats to bring it in line with other types: - Hugs 15->14 - Gibs 2->1.
• Quality of life improvements to the UI for changing quest destinations.
• Fixed a bug where AI were repeatedly failing to do quests to kill elite monsters.
• Dramatically reduced RAM usage while loading really large saved games.
• Fixed a bug which was generating "These monsters are too easy" thoughts when players completed a quest which had been given a 0 XP reward.
• In the "Player Info" window, we now show total logged in time using simulation time, not real-world clock time.
• Adds a slider to the ability editor, which lets you display the ability's effects at different player/monster levels.
• Improved comically bad "Optimal DPS" calculation for classes. (It's still not doing quite the right thing to estimate DoT attacks, but it's a whole bunch closer than before!)

Hi everyone! I'm now well and truly working on our next major update (the "Creativity Update", which will be followed by the Dungeon update); this one is a smaller update with various fixes and quality of life improvements in the meantime! New in this build:

• Streamers now revisit your game each time you release a new major version update.
• Giant speedups to how long it takes to load big, complicated games.
• Vastly improve the navigation mesh that's generated around buildings, so that players can actually walk much much closer to the visible walls of buildings! This fixes all sorts of annoyances like buildings placed close against one side of a path blocking the entrances of buildings placed close against the opposite side of the path, and similar. Old saves will have their navigation meshes automatically rebuilt during the load to get this benefit.
• Fixes a broken title string on the save overwrite window.
• Fixes a crash bug when you select a character class which has quotes in its name. And unrelated to that, you can no longer put quotes into character class names (because we're going to start using them as filenames within the Creativity Update, so no more non-filename-legal characters allowed!)
• In preparation for the Creativity Update, hardened loading of scenery from saves so that we can better cope with save files that contain scenery models that aren't actually currently installed (perhaps due to having been saved in a version of the game which had different scenery models available).
• Fixes another situation where a character could accidentally use abilities on themselves when they meant to use them on another character. (This time, it was if you converted an ability which used to be a self-only heal into an attack which was supposed to affect enemies. Fixed!)

One of the crash fixes in the patch earlier today accidentally made it impossible to change the rewards on individual quests. This hotfix restores that ability! Sorry for the inconvenience!

Fixes in this build:

• Fixes a crash that was extremely rare on Windows and common on Linux, during or shortly after creating a new combat ability.
• Fixes a crash if you're looking at an NPC's quest list while destroying the places that those quests were sending players to.
• Fixes a crash if you select the last thing in a region's "Contents" list and then destroy it and then click on something else in the "Contents" list quickly enough.
• Fixes a crash if you start editing an ability prefab and then delete the ability prefab with the editor still open and then try to save your changes to the ability prefab.
• Improvements to animation logic.
• Adds an explanatory note to the level selector widget when setting region levels, to explain how to select multiple levels.
• Vastly improves the "Optimal DPS" calculation for classes to match the combat mechanics of Combat 2.0.

• Fixes a potential game lockup if subscribers try to form a social circle somewhere where there isn't enough free space to form a social circle. (This was most common in tightly compressed towns with tight walls around them built right in a corner of a region. Many thanks to several folks who submitted save files demonstrating this problem!)
• Removes two errant 'giant mushroom' models which were sitting on their side. They were accidentally added to the game during our recent rebuild of the scenery systems in preparation for Workshop support). If you've actually used either of those models, it'll be automatically replaced with a correct giant mushroom model the next time you load your save.
• Fixed some misbehaviour that could happen if you tried to save a "Fireball" ability prefab and then also save a "fireball" ability prefab on a computer which uses a case-insensitive filenames.

New in v0.17.233:

• Replaces the old "Castle" set dressing building theme with a new "Castle2" theme. Any "Castle" buildings in your save will be upgraded to "Castle2" the first time they're loaded.
• Fixed an AI bug which caused subscribers to occasionally accidentally attack themselves when they meant to attack an enemy.
• Limit frame rate to the monitor's supported FPS, even if vsync is disabled. (Stops the game from rendering at thousands of frames per second in light scenes, like the main UI, needlessly stressing out the CPU preparing frames that will never be seen)
• Fixes a crash which could happen when deleting the percentage from a Protect/Weaken ability effect and then dropping focus on the text box.
• Fixes a rare crash which could happen if players somehow decided that they wanted to travel to a spot outside of a building which is located in an unowned, inactive region.
• Fixes the blinking text cursor to appear at the correct height in text edit boxes when they're empty (previously it was drawn as much as half a line below where it ought to have been drawn)
• Fixes a rare crash which could occur when creating a very, very tiny monster zone.

This update fixes a loading screen crash experienced by a couple of users when loading older saved games.

Hi folks! This is a quick update which addresses a few bugs folks found in the Combat 2.0 update. New in this build:

• Fixes players sometimes applying buffs to the enemy they're fighting, when they meant to apply them to themselves.
• Fixes monsters and NPCs using "self only" abilities on their targets. Note that apart from "self only" abilities, monsters and NPCs will use all of their combat abilities on their opponent. So if you don't want them to heal/buff their opponent, make sure to set any heal or buff abilities as "self only"!
• Fixes a bunch of pathfinding issues if players manage to get themselves outside of walkable areas (too close to buildings, in the middle of mountains, etc). Players now correctly return to the nearest walkable area. NPCs also now stay in walkable areas, so that they won't tempt players to step out into places where they can't pathfind.
• Melee attacks now apply their effects instantly when they're activated. Previously, there was a 0.5 second delay between the visuals and the attack applying its effects to the target, which made it often feel like the attacks weren't doing any damage.
• Fixes players to actually face quest-givers when picking up quests (instead of turning to face them after picking up the quest)

Hi folks! This update was a lot bigger than I'd expected it to be, but it's finally ready for prime time! Thanks heaps to all the testers sending feedback and bug reports over on the Discord server! Here's what's new:

• No more negative damage!

  
  We've entirely rebuilt the interface for editing combat abilities to make it simpler, easier, and more intuitive! In particular, it's now possible to just say that an ability does 5 damage, instead of needing to specify that an ability "adds -5 health".

• Damage Over Time

  
  Oft-requested support for damage over time effects has been implemented! A single ability may do both static, instantaneous damage, and also additionally inflict damage over time. In this build, each character may only be affected by a single Damage Over Time effect at once; further DoT effects will refresh or replace earlier ones.

• Heals!

  
  Heals have been added to the above, and like damage, are available both as static heals and also as Heal-over-Time effects.

• "Greed is good"

  
  Adds a "Self Only" option for combat abilities. Useful if you want to give someone a powerful self-heal but don't want them to be able to use it on party members!

• I never drink... wine

  
  A new "siphon" ability effect type has been added, which lets characters drain health, mana, or rage from their opponent, and add it to their own health, mana, or rage supplies!

• Buffs? Buffs!

  
  A selection of buffs and debuffs have been added, including "Protect", "Stun", "Root", and others.

• Ability icons!

  
  Adds about 300 ability icons to select from, to represent your characters' combat abilities.

• Auto-Rage

  
  The "Rage" attribute has been reworked, and now works entirely automatically. Previously you had to manually create abilities which would increase its value; now it automatically goes up due to participating in combat without you needing to specially craft abilities to do that.

• Why does my fighter have mana?

  
  You can now set a class's maximum Mana or Rage value to zero, which will remove its mana or rage bar entirely.

• Combat visuals!

  
  Brand new visual effects have been created for combat effects; these can be selected and configured from the new ability editing interface. There are seven effects and four movement options for their projectiles, plus configurable colors!

• His power level is over 9000!

  
  Combat abilities can now be given a casting time, during which the user must "charge up" to prepare to use the ability.

• For the writers out there (you know who you are)

  
  The game now automatically writes a tooltip for your combat abilities, but if you really want to, you can write your own blurb to describe your new combat ability.

• Combat ability prefabs

  
  The game now provides an "Ability Prefabs" space where you can copy abilities you've created. Those abilities can then be imported into other saves! (I'm looking forward to doing this with other stuff in the near future too, but combat abilities is where we're testing the idea first!)

• Combat AI Improvements!

  
  Players are now much better about using their best combat abilities, and also applying heals and buffs to party members, and debuffs to their foes!

• Character Customisation

  
  Adds another 13 character models to the game, bringing our set of customisable character models from 22 to 35!

Other fixes:

• Updated 14 building models with color improvements and lighting fixes.
• Fixed the game sometimes overwriting quest names while you were in the middle of editing them.
• Fixed players getting stuck at offline flight points.
• Fixed players entering the "coastal inn" inn by charging straight through its wall instead of going through the door.
• Action bar buttons now show the hotkey to activate them.
• Vastly improved the camera and UI interface when controlling an in-game character.
• Fixes elite monsters losing their size after a costume change.
• Subscribers now sit down to heal faster, after combat.
• Monsters now react much faster to being attacked.
• Fixed a bug which could cause elite monsters to not be considered ready for combat immediately after loading a save.
• Destroying a wall or road now refunds its purchase price, the same as happens with destroying other in-game objects.
• Slightly nerfed the time until mana regeneration begins (3 seconds of no mana usage -> 5 seconds of no mana usage)
• Changed automatic health regeneration to never occur while someone is in combat. (previously it would begin after 3 seconds of taking no damage, and this could allow someone to begin to heal when their opponent was stuck in a lengthy ability cast)
• Added an error message to display in the ability editor if an ability is configured to require too much health/mana/rage for the class to ever actually be able to use it.

Hi folks! This is a compatibility update with a bunch of small bug fixes, but mostly containing just compatibility fixes so that Combat 2.0 saves can be loaded and played in this version. Early testing of Combat 2.0 is now rolling out to our 'test' branch; feel free to switch over to the 'test' branch if you'd like an early peek at the new ability editing systems! (Right-click on the game in Steam and choose 'Preferences...' from the context menu, then switch to the 'Betas' page and choose to take part in the 'test' beta build, then let Steam update your game!) But in terms of what's changed in build 0.17.199:

• Fixes a black screen rendering bug on OSX, when the "bloom" visual effect was disabled.
• Fixes an uncaught exception which could occur if you typed a number too big to be stored in a 32-bit integer into a text entry widget.
• Fixes floating point number formatting to round numbers correctly. (When rounding to one decimal place, previously the value 1.79 was just truncated and displayed as 1.7, where now we round it correctly and display it as 1.8.)
• Fixes a crash which could happen if a party was near the border of a concave region, next to an unowned region and one of the party members died in such a way that the midpoint in between every party member was inside that unowned neighboring region.
• Fixes players ignoring obstructions while on their way to do a quest.
• Fixes player respawn behaviour when in a region where there are no operational respawn points. (this is now treated as a 'bug', and affected players file trouble tickets so that gamemasters will come and respawn them)
• Fixed a crash which could occur if you received and clicked on a "this class has no usable attacks" alert before you had ever clicked on the Design window (I believe this was only possible after loading a saved game)
• Fixed a flight path corruption problem which could sometimes occur when undoing a path placement point by clicking the right mouse button.

Hi folks! This is another bugfix update, while most of my development effort is going into the upcoming "Combat 2.0" update. Newly fixed in this build:

• Improves the appearance of selection rings around parties and party members.
• Fixes display of party members in the "Party Info" window (which sometimes could be displaying outdated information or no information at all).
• Fixes an AI bug which could result in players in parties appearing to float or sink into the ground, after dying and respawning.
• Fixes parties to regroup after a party wipe, instead of continuing to charge one by one straight into the same monsters that killed them before.
• Fixes a crash which could occur after destroying an elite monster which was the target of a quest.
• Fixes a crash which could occur while quitting to the title screen after changing video mode from Multisampled antialiasing to SMAA or no antialiasing. (Or the other way around)

This is another little hotfix, mostly just addressing issues reported from the last build. New in this build:

• Adds a first pass at Steam Rich Presence, which will show your current subscriber and active player count in your friends list, while you're playing. Currently, this count updates once per minute.
• Fixes a crash bug which could occur during game shutdown if you quit the game using Alt-F4 (or equivalent OS force-quits of the game; this crash would happen *after* autosaving, so no actual game progress would be lost)
• Adds a Next feature at: line to the main header window at the top left corner of the screen, showing what version number you need to reach to unlock your next new technology. (suggested by @cow over on our Discord server)
• Fixes the visibility of region level numbers when the bloom visual effect is disabled. (previously, these were very hard to see without the 'glow' shader!)
• Fixes minor rendering issues on the level selection widgets used for assigning level ranges to regions, and for assigning levels to monster zones.

Hi folks! This is a quick hotfix to address a common issue reported in yesterday's update. New in this build:

• Fixes a crash bug introduced in yesterday's build which could occur while placing a mountain pass.
• Fixes some confusing error messages while placing mountain passes.
• Updates localisation data

New in this build:

• Memory improvements! Dropped memory usage in really large games to about half previous memory usage. Also makes saved game files about half their previous size, leading to faster cloud sync!
• Improvements to Developer and GameMaster AI to make them more effective at accomplishing tasks. If folks have lots and lots of developers or GMs, you may want to check to see whether you can make do with fewer of them now, now that they're being more effective!
• Fixes ravens being left behind if players log out while riding them.
• Fixes cheater notifications from being left behind if players log out while they're being displayed.
• Stops the user from placing mountain passes such that they overlap each other or other paths.
• Fixes the cursor from "clicking through" certain visibly-solid portions of the action bar and instead accidentally selecting something from the world underneath the action bar.
• Fixes the sorting of draws of action bar buttons, which could cause some icons to be invisible, if multiple buttons in an action bar had the same icon.
• Fixes some text not rezzing out along with its window, when the window is closed.

Just a small update with hotfixes, today!

Updates since the last build:

Hi everybody, I hope you've all had a lovely holiday period! We're back today with a somewhat larger than usual update! Without too much ado, here's what's new:

Features

• Sandbox Mode!

  
  We've finally added a proper sandbox mode to the game! Any game can be converted to or from sandbox mode at any time, from the "Settings" tab of the MMO's launcher. If you're in sandbox mode, you can buy stuff even if you have no money to pay for it. And that's all! Play whichever way you prefer; either in or out of sandbox mode. Sandbox mode is available for all games (including new and old games) once you've completed the initial tutorial in at least one game.

• Configurable Level Power Progression!

  
  Power progression has been completely rewritten. Previously, we used a linear power growth which caused players to gain too much power at low levels, and too little at high levels. Now power growth is exponential, with by default a 30% increase in power at each new level. And better, you can configure that growth amount yourself, from the Design interface!

• New Buildings!

  
  Adds a new suite of 'Sylvan'-themed functional buildings!

• New Old Buildings!

  
  A bunch of our older building models have been remodelled in this update! Same design and size, but now with stylish new triangles!

Changes

• NPCs Must Be Accessible!

  
  NPCs can now only be placed onto walkable ground; it's no longer allowed to place them inside walls or other places where players can't actually reach them.

• Monster Zones Must Be Accessible!

  
  Monster zones can no longer be placed on mountains, or other areas where players aren't allowed to walk.

• Hey Buddy, Do You Like to Type?

  
  Improved the typing experience by adding improved handling of arrow keys and adding support for control-A to select all text in a field (command-A on Mac).

• Blocked Building Notifications!

  
  There's now an on-screen notification if you've placed objects such that a building's entrance has been blocked and players can't figure out how to get inside. (the obstructions around some buildings are currently a bit larger than you'd expect, so it was easy to have this happen accidentally. Now there's at least a notification when that has happened! We're doing some more work toward making obstructions more closely match the shape of a building's footprint, but in the meantime this warning at least lets you know that things are placed too close together!)

• VIP Streamer Triggers Later

  
  Adjusted the trigger for the VIP streamer event to happen when your first subscriber joins, instead of when you reach version 1.0.0. This makes it less likely that an enthusiastic builder will miss their Streamer event because they didn't immediately place a starting point after reaching version 1.0.0.

• Or Are You Just Happy To See Me?

  
  A single run of network pipes (either cables or fibers) can now be placed across twice the distance, and may contain ten times as many curves as before.

Performance

• Notable CPU performance improvements to the general maintenance of character attributes (health, mana, etc) (big improvements to locality for the data cache)
• Variable "tick rate" for characters on the map lets the simulation spend less time simulating characters who are just travelling and more on characters who are in combat. This makes a reasonably large performance boost especially at high simulation speeds!
• Optimised the engine's handling of MSAA render targets, which provides a small GPU speed boost for anyone with any kind of anti-aliasing enabled (either MSAA or SMAA)

Localisation

• Added a lot more number and money formatting options, and separated them from language selection! So if you want to play in English but using Euros as currency but with the Euro symbol printed to the left of the number, that's now an option!
• Vastly improved the text drawn inside UI meters, for languages with longer label strings.

Smaller Changes

• Spruced up various UI widgets, most notably combo boxes and tooltip windows.
• Tweaks to the window open/close visual effect.

Bug Fixes

• If a party drops to only one player remaining in it, the party now is correctly disbanded.
• When a party is disbanding for any reason, disband immediately; don't make everyone join up in formation first.
• In the "submit save to devs" interface, the "Upload" button is now disabled until you type something into the 'description' dialog. I have too many submitted saves and no clue what people wanted me to look at in them! :sadface:
• Fixed walls and turrets not visibly rezzing in during the initial load sequence.
• Fixed a terrain "overpainting" bug which could result in tiny slivers of a terrain type remaining in a region which couldn't be erased.
• Fixed a crash during game shutdown if at the moment of shutdown one of the game's subscribers happened to be considering travelling from their current region, through a second region, and then back into their current region again in order to reach a destination.
• Fixed a crash loading extremely old saves (from before March 2020) which were in the middle of the VIP Streamer event.
• Fixed player AI around dealing with quest-giving NPCs in multi-level regions, where they were deciding whether or not to pick up quests assuming that the quests would be of the multi-level region's lowest level, instead of looking at the actual levels of the quests.
• When the user destroys a road which AI are walking on, the AI now recalculate their path, instead of YOLOing their way straight over mountains and other obstacles to go to their intended destination.
• Fixed a crash which could sometimes happen after destroying a mountain pass or a flight path between regions if the game wasn't paused.
• Fixed a subtle bug which could very rarely teleport players dozens of kilometers across the map (often entirely *off* the map), when the game was running at a very fast simulation speed.
• Fixed a bug which could cause one duelist to think that the duel had begun a few seconds before the other duelist, and get a couple free hits in before their opponent would react.

Hi folks! New in this update:

• It's once again possible to have regions support multiple levels of player. How this works is that buildings will all support the whole range of players supported by the region itself, and monster zones and elite monsters can have a level set on them when they're placed. (They can also have their level modified after being placed by selecting the elite monster or the zone and using the controls in their Info window)
• Updated player AI so that they'll find a correct region for their level, even if there isn't a directly accessible region of the right level. So your newly level 3 player needs to travel out of their level 2 region, through a level 1 region, then through a level 8 region, in order to finally reach a level 3 region, they'll now find that and do that (they might not be happy about the long journey, though!)
• Quests now are assigned a level range based upon their destination. A quest which sends people to a level 1-3 weapon shop will be a level 1-3 quest, while one that sends you to fight a level 3 elite monster will be a level 3 quest. Players will not attempt to do quests which are higher level than them, but they *will* collect the quests and hold on to them until they've gained enough levels to do them.
• Monster zones now paint on with the left mouse button, and erase with the right mouse button, instead of having UI buttons to click to swap between "place" and "erase" modes.
• Adds 11 new achievements to the game. (yay!)
• ...plus a bunch of bug fixes!

Hi everyone! This is a small update with some new buildings and quality of life feature updates:

• Zoinks!

  
  Adds a suite of 'spooky'-themed buildings to the buildings list.

• Your party will not save you now!

  
  Fixed a bug which made it impossible to issue warnings to or ban players who were inside a party. Now you can ban people with impunity, again!

• Party Exploration

  
  Fixed a bug which caused most parties to usually prefer to fight monsters in the same monster zone; now when there is more than one monster zone available, not every party should go to the same one.

• Explanations of Cheating

  
  When inspecting players for cheats, cheating players now have a label drawn over their heads which actually explains what cheat they're using, and the effect it has, so you can decide whether or not you want to warn/ban them.

• Tier List Metagaming

  
  Fixed the character class ratings to no longer be thoroughly dominated by the class's "health" rating. This should fix the problem of tank-style classes always floating to the top of the tier lists. Note that tier lists are only regenerated at the start of each in-game day, so you won't immediately see this change if you load into an old saved game; instead, it'll update at the start of the next day.

• More employees!

  
  By popular demand, the cap on number of developers and GMs has been increased from 30 to 50, for all you folks with really big games.

• Moving the Buzz

  
  Moved the information about positive/negative buzz from the main header into the 'Rating' tab of the Overview report. This gives me a bunch more space to show useful information and explain what the values really mean, instead of jamming the values into a tiny meter and leaving folks to guess.

Hi, folks! Since we released the 'Party' update a couple weeks ago, we're starting another short period of smaller changes and "quality of life" features before we start work on Combat 2.0, the next major new feature update. Over the coming week or two, expect to see a bunch of quality of life improvements, plus we'll continue adding new models to the game. New in this build:

• I don't always construct buildings, but when I do...

  
  Adds a suite of functional buildings in a new "Elegant" theme. Also adds three new types of landmark building.

• If you love something, set it free

  
  In edit modes, the camera is now allowed to move over unowned regions. This means that you can much more easily do fancy things like sending flight paths to travel across a water region and into a different island (which was difficult before because the camera wouldn't let you move over the water). We also now let the camera zoom out about 50% further than before, in edit modes.

• What is that other set of stairs for, anyway?

  
  Players can now exit a starting point via either the front or the back, instead of always exiting toward the front. (They'll use whichever exit they think is more convenient for wherever they're trying to go)

• If you love something, tie it up and never let it leave

  
  The camera is now constrained to the main map area; no more flying off infinitely over the empty oceans and then getting turned around and having no idea how to get back to the game. Sorry.

• At last I can hear myself think, again!

  
  Adds an 0.2 second delay to the "MegaTooltip" window opening and closing, so that it doesn't noisily pop up as your cursor brushes past a button on its way somewhere else, and similarly doesn't noisily close and re-open as your mouse is briefly in between two buttons while you're moving the cursor from one to the other. Did I mention that there are small quality of life features in this update? This update contains a lot of small quality of life features.

• Aah, this potion goes down smooth!

  
  I fixed potion shops so that their potions no longer look "chunky" when animating, which could get especially bad if the game had been running for a while. As part of this, I also made the potions brighter and more colorful, especially when the 'bloom' visual effect is disabled.

Hey everyone, the long-awaited Party Update is now here! Here's what's new!

• Players now form parties!

  
  Your Subscribers can now form parties of up to four players to take on your MMO together! If you've developed the 'Parties' technology, you can enable this feature from the 'Design' window's "Features" tab, and then players will tend to gather around Taverns to form parties.

• New Artist, New Buildings!

  
  Adds a whole bunch of new building model variants. Almost every type of functional building now has two or three new versions of the standard model. We now have a new artist on the team, working on making heaps of new buildings and game assets, and this is just the first drop of those new assets; we're planning to continue with more regular art updates over the coming weeks!

• Unsubscription Report

  
  Theres now a new Unsubscribe Reasons Report, which can tell you what players have given as reasons for unsubscribing from the game (along with tracking the total number of unsubscribers over time).

• Subscription Savings Plans!

  
  Previously, a lot of subscribers would unsubscribe when their subscription fees came due because they didn't have enough money in their daily entertainment budgets to pay the whole fee. Now, they'll save up toward the subscription fee in advance, so this should be much less of a problem!

• Solid Walls

  
  Players should no longer walk through walls (or over mountains or etc), if you've completely walled off the place that they wanted to go to. (previously, if there was no legal way to reach their desired destination, they'd ignore obstacles in order to get there. Now they'll just fail to go there, instead)

• Littering is Bad, M'Kay?

  
  Fixes the infamous dropped weapons bug, which would sometimes result in dozens or even hundreds of pure-white weapons being randomly strewn about on the landscape. (This mostly happened on larger games, when players bought weapons while out of view of the camera; the weapons were appearing wherever the character had last been visible on-screen, and stayed there until the next time you looked at the player who owned each weapon)

Hi, folks! This is mostly a small update, just dealing with a few critical issues in the most recent update, and one big change (which I couldn't really separate from the bug fixes; I felt like a few of the bug fixes were important enough to push this update out to Steam early!). Big change:

• Subscribers no longer play every day. Subscribers now play a different number of days per month, and the number of days they play varies based upon their addiction level (as their addiction level goes up, they'll play on more days per month and for slightly longer per day) This change will result in about half as many subscribers being logged in at once (on average), which will reduce pressure on your region population limits as well as your login queues, without changing your total number of subscribers or your overall subscription fee income. Plus, it just makes more sense in terms of real-world MMORPG subscriber behaviour.

• Fixed a number of player AI issues while doing quests or grinding for XP, where every player could end up trying to fight only one monster inside a monster zone, and where sometimes newly placed monsters would not aggro against players until after a save/load.
• Fixed a bunch of broken translation strings in the German language.
• Improved player questing/grinding AI to prefer to fight closer monsters, instead of picking entirely random monsters within a zone.
• Combat ability changes were being lost if you switched from viewing one ability to another ability without clicking the 'Apply' button first. We already were auto-applying changes if you changed tabs or closed the window or clicked the 'back' button on the Design interface, but had missed the "switch ability" action. Now we're catching it and applying any unsaved changes at that time!
• Fixed the game's "No Sound" mode to invoke correctly, in the event of FMOD seeing audio devices during startup but being unable to open any of them. The game now successfully gets into 'no sound' mode, and displays a message on the desktop to let you know.
• New music track for the "version 1.0.0" cutscene.
• Fixed an issue which could cause a crash-during-load if you have placed a monster zone right up against a water border, and one of the monsters has wandered slightly outside of its region during the save.
• Fixed 'Focus On' camera movement, which could abort before you reached the target if you were trying to focus on an extremely distant target.
• Fixed a crash bug in the ability editor if you set an ability effect's modifier value to be "-.", which isn't a number. (reported twice ever)
• Fixed a rare travel bug which could cause players to spawn their own flight point raven for short non-flight-path movements, if their most recent long-distance travel finished precisely on a flight point.

Hi, folks! This is a fairly small update as most of my time is still going into the Party Update. Here's what's new!

• Improved game simulation speed!

  
  Vastly improved the speed at which the game simulation runs; this should make a *big* improvement for anyone with a medium-to-large-sized game world. There's still more work to be done here, but it's kind of a night and day difference for the bigger game worlds I've seen! Notable improvements came from optimising logic around when characters need to be animated, about finding monsters in range to aggro, and around calculating 'convenience' and 'beauty' ratings for paths and quests.

• Rendering speed improvements!

  
  There have also been more rendering improvements, using cheaper shaders when we don't need the complicated ones and faster ways to pass data into the shaders.

• No more lazy Guards!

  
  Previously, each Guard felt that killing a monster once was really all that they needed to do; they'd ignore it if it respawned and aggroed again! This fix also fixed a problem which could cause NPCs to rarely use attacks during combat, on computers running the game at higher than 100fps. Also, if you take control of a player and make them attack a guard, the guards will now attack back (previously, they would only ever attack monsters, no matter what the players did).

• Fix startup audio crashes!

  
  There was an issue before where if your computer had only one audio device, and that audio device was locked by another process such we couldn't open it (this was very rare, but seemed to most often happen with USB headphones), then the game would crash while trying to find another audio device to use. Now we instead start the game up in "no sound" mode in that situation.

• Path placement fixes!

  
  Fixed a bunch of issues around path and wall placement, most notably fixes for the rendering of walls that extend out into the water, and detecting where walls and paths intersect with other walls and paths. This also fixes a UI bug which would allow you to place a wall turret *on top* of another wall turret. And also fixes a bug which would sometimes result in paths not being able to be deleted.

• Scenery moves with the terrain!

  
  At some point I seem to have broken scenery tracking the ground as it's edited. This is now fixed! And especially for the case where you sink a region into the sea and then lift it up again; the scenery now correctly moves into place, as intended.

• The world turned upside down

  
  Fixed a camera bug which could result in the game camera turning upside down if you moved the camera right down to the ground and looked straight down, then moved the camera a short distance back up. Now fixed!

Hi everybody! This update is a big rendering tech update, with some new features thrown in as well.

New in this build:

• Painting Terrain!

  
  Terrain types are now "paint on" like monster zones, instead of being locked to a grid. (this also speeds up load times by a fraction of a second, but nobody except for me cares about that! It saves about five seconds in the non-optimised development builds that I usually use)

• Where did I leave that quest giver??

  
  The Region Information Window now has a "Contents" tab which shows you a list of every building, monster zone, and NPC placed in the region, along with their status. Click on one to send the camera directly to it.

• More network diagnostics

  
  The Region Information Window (shown when you select a region) now shows the amount of network bandwidth coming into the region, the amount being usefully consumed within the region, and how much is being lost to overheads from WAN nodes and similar network devices.

• The Eponymous Inn

  
  Buildings and monster zones can now be given unique names - select the building or zone and click on its name in the Information Window.

• Rendering Speed Improvements

  
  Hugely speeds up shadow rendering (now takes about 10% as long to render as before), and substantially speeds up drawing everything else as well.

• Simpler shaders for lower-end graphics cards

  
  Adds optional "simple" shaders, which switches the game to draw using traditional video game lighting, instead of modern PBR lighting. I'm hopeful that this will make things run better on some of the lower-end integrated graphics chipsets I've been seeing (and which we still don't officially support). Simple shaders can be selected from the 'Video' tab of the options dialog.

• One for folks whose keyboards aren't quite as tiny as mine

  
  Adds support for forward-deletion using the 'delete' key during text editing.

• Flight paths display the correct price!

  
  Fixes displayed costs for placement of flight paths to include the ending flight point, when an ending flight point would be required at the cursor's current position, and to correctly not charge you for the placement, if you can't afford both the flight path cost and the cost for any required flight point.

• A fix for the infamous "infinitely thinking giants" bug!

  
  Fixes players sometimes failing to log out when they chose to unsubscribe, which left them static and stationary on the map (and sometimes the wrong size).

• Is the water supposed to be so.. chunky?

  
  Fixes a bunch of shaders to continue animating smoothly even if the game is running nonstop for a long enough time (multiple hours) that floating point precision starts to be lost.

• Regarding conga lines...

  
  Improves road following behaviours, making it less likely for players to walk single-file along roads.

• Get a hold of yourself, soldier!

  
  Made an AI adjustment to make subscribers slightly less scared of being near monsters (-0.1 -> -0.05). Should make certain of the more timid subscribers less hesitant to venture into monster zones to do quests or gain levels. (this seemed to mostly affect 'Explorer'-type subscribers, in my experience)

• Saved game list updates

  
  Fixes save game file list to refresh correctly after deleting a save. (Fixes a crash bug some folks ran into where they first deleted a save and then tried to load that same save, because it hadn't been removed from the UI even though the file had been deleted)

• Game data correction

  
  If the game tries to load a file which doesn't seem to exist, we now notify Steam that it needs to re-verify files before the next run. (I suspect these reports were due to people moving around or deleting game data)
• ...and a whole lot of other miscellaneous bug fixes!

Hi, folks! Today's update wasn't a big one; it's just some miscellaneous fixes for bugs which have been reported over the past few days. The new stuff is all happening over on the 'test' branch, and will be migrated into the main default branch just as soon as I'm sure there aren't any major new bugs caused by the updates (but feel free to take a look if you're curious!) Thanks so much for your patience as I add the new functionality! :)

Hi, everyone! This is a small update that's coming in now just to address a bug I've finally tracked down. Some changes made recently had resulted in combat abilities having their level changed unexpectedly. And.. this was causing a bunch of problems; subscribers who couldn't attack and so were becoming frustrated in combat, things of that sort. Worse, if a frustrated player was trying to grief other players by kiting a dangerous monster into a low-level area, the game wasn't checking whether that player actually had any combat abilities, and the whole game crashed when they tried to attack the monster with a non-existing ability. Oops! So here are the things that I've changed to fix that whole AI bug: [olist]

Hi, everyone! This update is really big to me and possibly small to you, unless you're excited for one of the (spoiler) newly supported languages!

• A brand new text drawing method!

  
  I'm *super* excited about this; It's an exciting new approach which makes our text drawing require less data and less memory and also makes the text draw far more sharply, especially when I need to squeeze the text to fit somewhere or when UI Scale is set to a non-default value. Text just looks *better* now, pretty much everywhere and all the time.

• New languages!

  
  This new text drawing system makes it possible for us to support languages with different alphabets or with additional accent marks, so we've added support for playing the game with text in simplified Chinese, Czech, Russian, and Polish! These can each now be selected from the language menu in the options screen.

• Why isn't this building activating?!?

  
  Added a big new on-screen "Paused" indicator, to make it a lot more visible when you've forgotten to un-pause your game! (This can be disabled in the game options, if you dislike it)

• Fixed display of error messages when placing NPCs.
• Fixed NPCs being too low-level to properly defend their area. (NPCs are supposed to be ten levels above the level of the region they're placed into; in the last build they were being set to be of equal level, which meant that they could sometimes be killed by an errant monster that wandered too close!)
• Fixed the "Object deleted itself" error message that some folks were encountering while editing monster zones.
• ...and a bunch of other little tweaks and fixes!

Hi, everyone! It's been a long time coming, but we're finally rolling out proper support for game localisation, with our first drop of language support covering German, French, and Brazilian Portuguese. Also in the build are work-in-progress translations for Italian and Spanish, but we're not yet confident enough in the translations for me to feel comfortable ticking the boxes on Steam saying that they're officially supported, yet. If you're fluent in Italian or Spanish (or other languages!), you can contribute to the translation effort by visiting our site on Localizor!. Those languages can be selected from the 'Language' tab in the Options window. I'm also working on integrating some new font rendering tech which will allow us to localise into languages which aren't using Latin scripts; Chinese, Russian, etc. (Additionally, it'll make our text sharper even for English text!) Expect to see those new translations being added really soon! But for the moment, let's talk about what's new in this build that went up maybe twelve hours ago (as of the time I'm writing this)!

Changes:

• Translations!

  
  Okay, I already talked about translations above. But it really is the headline feature of this update, and more languages are coming; most notably I'm expecting to see Czech, Russian, and Chinese in the very near future! For French, German, and Brazilian Portuguese you can now select a language in the Settings for the game within Steam. For other not-yet-officially-supported languages, you can select them within the options screen inside the game.

• Number formatting!

  
  Also on the 'Language' tab of the options screen, you can now choose how you want numbers to be shown; either US-style "1,000.50" or European-style "1.000,50". Similarly, you can choose what currency symbol you'd like to see for money amounts!

• Charging for flight paths

  
  Flight path prices are now being enforced, and their usage is being tracked! Note: Players currently will not ever pay real-money to take a flight path; I just couldn't figure out a way to convince the AI that a flight path could ever provide enough value to be worth actual dollars. I'm definitely going to be returning to this in future updates! But at least the flight points correctly graph how many people have used them, now!

• UI Descaling

  
  It's now possible to lower UI scaling below 100%. I'm not sure why someone would want to do this, but.. it's there now, since a few folks asked for it? :D

• More complaining about bugs!

  
  Buildings which are suffering from more than one bug now contribute extra toward an MMORPG's "bugginess" rating.

• No more losing changes!

  
  Changes to anything in the 'Design' interface now automatically 'Apply' when you close the window, instead of being cancelled! This means you'll no longer lose that perfect character model design because you forgot to click 'Apply'!

• Empty Intros!

  
  If you very methodically removed every single scenery item in your first region and then opened it up to the public, it was possible to make the game lock up as it was trying to find something for the introductory cutscene to look at. This is now fixed!

• No more playing forever

  
  Previously, if a player wanted to log out but couldn't afford to set their home at an inn, they would keep playing forever. Now they just log out wherever they are, instead.

• No more long ad campaigns

  
  Previously, due to calendar changes in an earlier build, it was possible for an ad campaign to be lengthened dramatically when loaded in a newer build of MT2 than it was saved from. Now we fix that problem during load!

• Auto-adjust quests

  
  If you change the level of a region which has already been set up, the quest-givers within the region now automatically adjust their quests to match the level's new region. Similarly, monsters now correctly adjust their levels to match the region!

• YOLO LOL

  
  Fixes a game crash if you ban the VIP streamer during a streamer event. You monster.

• Looks Buggy!

  
  Replaces the infamous old "red cube" indicator that a player was being affected by a bug with an actual, comprehensible bug icon.

• ...and a Screensaver?

  
  The in-game desktop interface now has a screensaver, if you leave it alone for ten minutes or so. Folks who are keen can launch the game straight into the Screensaver by starting MT2 with the command line parameter `Screensaver`. (Press escape to exit, in that mode)

Hi everybody! It's been a little longer than usual between updates to the main Steam build; I've been working on localisation support and it's taken longer than expected! the base systems are now *mostly* in place (I'm aware of a couple things which still won't get translated, but the vast majority of the game is now ready for translations). Ordinarily I'd wait for the feature to be fully complete, but there were a couple important new features and bug fixes I wanted to push to the default branch, so.. as a bonus, you're also getting a preview taste of translations!

New stuff in this build:

• Fixed an important bug about destroying a network fiber which extends across a region boundary.
• Fixes an important bug which caused things keyed to the current date to read the wrong date. This fixes the daily finance report, the finance graph, and advertisements ending earlier than they ought.
• Fixes a few important bugs around orphaned roads/flight points.
• Fixes a few navigation mesh generation issues.
• Re-enables save file deletion within the game, from the 'load' or 'save' dialogs.
• Monsters will no longer attack players who are traveling on flight paths (oops)
• Adds an in-game "Submit file to devs" button, which automates the process of sending me a save file to investigate. (If I've ever asked you to provide me with a save file, this will make that process a *lot* easier!)

Apologies for the lack of new features over the past week! I've been working really hard toward localisation support and I'll have another announcement about that probably later today! But I've just updated the default steam build to 0.17.78 with some bug fixes, and wanted to talk about those a little! New in this build:

• Fixed a number of (thankfully, rare!) stability issues around the new navigation mesh generation.
• Player badges now vanish correctly when they log out.
• Show a visible error message if OpenGL initialisation fails (due to OpenGL not being supported on the device)
• Fixes a crash if the user attempts to close the game in the middle of a loading screen.
• Improvements to region styling algorithm during map generation for a new game.
• Extra safety around deactivating regions which players might be pathfinding inside.
• Extra safety around attempts to print non-printable strings

Hi, everyone! I argued with myself for a long time about whether to categorise this update as a "regular update" or as a "small patch". From a programmer point of view, this is a pretty big change! But.. from a player's point of view, maybe less so? Here's what's changed:

• I've done an almost complete rewrite of the core pathfinding system, switching us from our old "dynamic-node A*" system to a more traditional Navigation Mesh ("navmesh") system. It's really just a different way to figure out the best path to travel from one place to another. But it's heaps faster and more reliable, and fixes all sorts of issues like players barging straight through walls and similar issues when they were travelling to a new region. (caveat: subscribers still don't understand the idea that there might be somewhere where they simply can't go; if the pathfinding system can't find any legal way to reach the place where the subscriber wants to go (because you've built a solid wall all the way around that landmark, for example) then the subscribers will continue to just barrel through every obstacle in their way to get there. That's a fix for a future update!)
• Impassable terrain now blocks traversal in a much more reasonable way. Previously, whole square terrain blocks were being blocked off; now we only block the actual parts of the terrain which *look* like they ought to be blocked; this means more rounded edges, etc.
• Fixed the "out of space writing in vsStore" crash, by far the most reported crash bug over the past few weeks. Apologies for how long it took me to locate and squash this bug!
• Fixed some stability issues around alert popups which referred to players who unsubscribed shortly after the alert popped up.

This is just a few small fixes and updates. Nothing tremendously exciting, but I'll tell you all about it anyway! :D New in this build:

• Fixed an AI bug where if a subscriber decided themselves to discard a quest from their list (often due to gaining a level), they could become annoyed as if you had destroyed the quest while they were trying to complete it.
• Fixed another way that saved business records could get jumbled, breaking a few of the daily financial reports. Saves with that problem will automatically be fixed during load.
• Fixed roads (and maybe other things?) being indestructible when placed too close to the ocean.
• Fixed road intersections sometimes being left behind when a road is destroyed.
• Fixed a bug which could cause subscribers to be charged an extra monthly subscription fee during a load.
• Fixed rendering of the network layer if the game window is resized to a different aspect ratio.
• Fixed setting custom quest XP and gold amounts greater than 1000.
• Fixed wall turrets sometimes not being visible immediately after being placed.

Hi everyone! It's been a couple weeks since the last feature update, and I've been hard at work! Here's what's new in this new build:

Big New Stuff

• Quest Rewards Nerfed!

  
  By default, low-level quests now give far less experience on completion than they did before. Previously, a low level quest might give anything up to 1000xp or more when a player turned it in; that's enough to often catapult a level 1 player straight up midway through level 3! Now a default level 1 quest will give only 40xp. This means that your players will level up more slowly and more controllably, and will give you more time to build new areas ahead of them! But also, high-level quests now scale up their rewards to help them keep up with the increasing XP requirements!

• Quest editing!

  
  I've completely re-implemented the UI for quest editing! Now quests can be renamed, their rewards can be seen and edited, and (for combat quests) you can set precisely how many monsters must be killed, instead of having only a limited number of choices.

• Are you tired of quest editing? Because there's more quest editing!

  
  In addition to all of the above, you can now change the way the game automatically sets XP and Gold rewards for quests; set an approximate number of quests it should take to gain a level, and the game will set XP values for everything across your whole game appropriately! (and you can still override the defaults for specific quests whenever you like!)

• Editable leveling curve!

  
  Are your players leveling up too quickly or too slowly? The 'Design' window now has a new "XP & Leveling" tab where you can change how much XP monster kills are worth, as well as how many monster kills are required in order to gain levels! These settings interact with the default quest settings to let you specify how quickly you want your players to gain levels, and also how much of their experience should be coming from quests vs. how much from combat.

• Let's do the time warp!

  
  Slowed down the game's wall clock speed, but sped up its calendar! On 1x speed, it now takes 2 hours for a full in-game day to finish (previously was 1 hour); this gives your subscribers a lot more time to play before their playtime per simulated day is over! But at the same time, I've reduced the duration of a simulated month from 30 in-game days to just 5 in-game days. These two changes, taken together, mean that you'll get your first 'monthly' subscription payments after just 10 hours of play on 1x speed, instead of after 30 hours of play (and of course, much less than that if you turn the speed up!). Capitalism is easy, when you control all the clocks!

• I want to be big!

  
  Player, Monster, and NPC character types can now be scaled. This ability is available from the 'Adjust' interface on the character model's "torso" piece.

• Reduced-Bandwidth Monster Zones!

  
  Monster zones now have approximately half the network bandwidth upkeep requirements they used to have, which means you can have a lot more and larger monster zones using fewer network uplinks!

• Player/Monster Unlocks!

  
  You now start a game with three player classes unlocked (previously was two), and four monster types unlocked (previously was three). More player classes and monster types are now unlocked as you gain more subscribers! (Previously, unlocks happened based on maximum player level)

Bug Fixes

• Vastly improved CPU load when viewing the Network layer, when many regions were active!
• Miscellaneous improvements in our interactions with FMOD which hopefully should sort out launch issues for a few players who had unsupported audio devices connected to their computers.
• Stopped monsters from attacking players while the game is paused.
• Moved "Game Features" tab from the Overview report to the Design window. Same features, different window!
• Much better support for window resizing and window minimise/restore, especially during the loading screen!
• Much better support for UI scaling, for folks with much higher resolution screens than me! (I'm so jealous right now)
• In "Fullscreen Window" mode, we no longer grab the cursor, so you can now move the cursor to other monitors.
• Fixed "Optimal DPS" calculations to correctly handle attacks which use floating point numbers (previously Optimal DPS rounded everything down to whole numbers, which meant that an attack which did 0.9 health damage was treated s if it did no health damage at all)
• High level monsters now respawn with full attribute values! (Previously, they spawned with the health and mana values of a level 1 monster, and then healed up over a short time, which could make them easy kills if someone attacked them immediately after they spawned!)
• When leveling up, players now instantly heal up to their new maximum health and mana values!
• We now stop the player from giving two types of monster/player classes/npcs the same name, which could make the game confused.
• Fixes a crash if you take over control of a character with more than four attacks available.
• ...and a bunch of other miscellaneous fixes!

This build is mostly minor bug fixes, and trying to improve stability for folks who were having trouble! New in this build:

• A fix for a few rendering issues very early during the loading screen. These *ought* to have been harmless, but I've seen a number crash reports -- mostly from very old Intel graphics chipsets -- which seem like they might be related, so.. I cleaned it all up, in hopes that it'd solve issues on those Intel graphics chipsets!
• Upgraded our FMOD library from version 1.07.04 to 2.00.07. (It was almost four years old!) This seems to have worked around problems for at least one tester!
• Fixed the elite monster placement tool to only offer to place monster types, not player classes or NPCs. (oops!)
• Fixed monsters to immediately update their name and other information if you changed the name of their monster type.
• Fixed GUI 'meter' widgets to display values above their configured maximum. This can make a big difference for a region's capacity, or for a 'buzz' amount, or for the number of people waiting in a login queue, all of which would commonly exceed their default "maximum values". Now fixed!
• AI Change: Previously, new subscribers usually would not play as newly created classes until they had been awarded a FotM tier. Now, new subscribers will instead flock to new classes before they're rated, as they're new and exciting and *might* be amazingly awesome!
• Fixed an only-reported-once crash if your desktop.vrt desktop file has somehow become highly corrupt (say, by someone going into it and deleting all of its contents but not removing the file itself)
• Fixed an only-reported-once crash if the user has deleted some (but not all) of the crash data from a previous run which hasnt yet been reported.

Hi, everyone! It's been a little over a week to get here, but the long-awaited 'Abilities' update has finally landed!

Let's talk about what's new:

• Add new abilities to your player and monster classes!

  
  You can now add or delete combat abilities from Player, Monster, and NPC character types; do it from the character editor's "Abilities" tab in the Design dialog.

• Players can now gain abilities as they level!

  
  Each ability can now specify the level at which it becomes available. Monsters and NPCs learn these new abilities automatically, but Players need to be taught by a class trainer. Learning a new ability is very rewarding for players, and makes them happier!

• Did I say 'class trainer'?

  
  Yes I did! You can now place class trainers to train your players to use their new abilities, when they go up a level. Note that class trainers will only train players of the same class as they are, so be sure to place one for each class somewhere near wherever youre expecting players to level up!

• Did I just say that class trainer NPCs can use the same classes as players?

  
  Yes I did! All NPC types can now use any of the available character types, whether player, NPC, or even monster. Want to have a friendly bear who gives your players quests? You can do that now! (note: "Class Trainer" NPCs can only use Player model types; NPCs and monsters don't require training!)

• Did I say 'performance improvement'?

  
  Er.. well, actually, no I didn't! But there's another big performance improvement in this build, as all our pathfinding calculations have now been moved into a background thread, and a few other expensive calculations have been smoothed out. This should give a nice frame rate boost to those really big games, and iron out the responsiveness troubles some folks had when setting the game to its highest speed in those games!

• Literally half the RAM usage! (for large games)

  
  I fixed an issue which was causing players to store their complete play history in memory, instead of keeping only the history of their most recent play session. Purging this unused historical data, on extremely large games, tends to drop our overall RAM usage in half!

• Fly over the water!

  
  Players no longer die when taking a flight path over an inactive region; as long as they remain on the raven, they'll continue safely to their destination! There are still a few bits of UI awkwardness around placing such a long flight path, but it's now at least possible to use a flight path to travel to or from an island to a nearby bit of shoreline!

• Super-mega-ultra widescreen support!

  
  Fixed a bunch of rendering bugs which had been affecting players with extremely widescreen monitors! I am jealous of your monitors!

• UIScale improvements!

  
  For those on 4k monitors, our UIScale system is now much more reliable and should now 'just work'! I am jealous of your monitors, too!

• Want screenshots?

  
  I've added a "HUD Toggle" function that you can bind a key to, in the 'options' screen, to clear the screen to make screenshot capturing easier.

• The Most Recent Save Problem

  
  We've stopped trusting the OS to tell us what save file is most recent, and now track this ourselves, which means the game should no longer (for new saves after this build) ever pick the wrong save file, when you use the 'Connect' button!

• The "Level Two" tutorial!

  
  Added a new tutorial, triggered when your first player reaches level two, to explain character unlocks, point toward ability editing and class trainers, and give some basic advice about setting up a level 2 region. Just like the game's starting tutorial, this won't appear again after you've completed it once in any save (unless you start a new game with the "Play Tutorial" option enabled)

Hi, everyone! I've just rolled out one more set of hotfixes for various bug reports ("bugs report"?) since the last build! New features in this build:

• Adds 'sideways' model part adjustments for costume editing.
• Adds a 'destroy' tool to the 'NPCs' action bar tab. For all your NPC-destroying needs!
• Players can now travel from one region to another purely by flight paths; it's no longer required to open a mountain pass in addition to the flight path. If they'll reach, flight paths can even cross over empty sea regions to islands, and players will now consider using them to spread out or to move to a more level-appropriate region, the same way they use mountain passes.

• Fixed players getting stuck if they accidentally stray over a region boundary into an inactive region (typically this would only happen at sea boundaries). Now those players are immediately killed for their trespass, and are respawned at the nearest available respawn point in the region they came from.
• Fixes players becoming stuck in too-high-level regions and being unwilling to move back into lower-level regions.
• Players no longer attempt to use buildings if they would be unsuccessful at doing so. For example, if a player can't afford to buy a weapon, they won't try to buy one and fail. If a hotel is full, players won't attempt to move into it and fail.
• Much improves the discrepancy between number of users who log in when the game is set to normal speed and when the game is set to fastest speed.
• Potential new subscribers now think about the value of your game's purchase price when deciding whether or not to buy. If your price is set much over the default price, then these customers may now decide not to purchase your game, *even if* they could afford it! This resolves the mild exploit of setting an absurdly high purchase price, which new subscribers would pay out of their savings without even noticing that it was a surprisingly high price. (Apologies! This exploit was fun while it lasted!)
• Elite monsters placed inside a monster zone are no longer "owned" by that monster zone, so modifying or removing the monster zone no longer automatically destroys those elite monsters. (NOTE: This only affects newly placed elite monsters in this version or later; eilte monsters placed using earlier builds still belong to the zones they were placed inside)
• "Common Thought" heatmaps are now much more visible when "bloom" is disabled in the Video options.
• Fixed a bug which caused a subscriber to not discard the quest chain they were working on, if they gained a level from the quest XP reward while in the process of turning in a quest from that chain. They would discard all *other* out-levelled quest chains they'd been working on, but not that one, which could result in high-level players continuing to do one low-level quest chain before deciding to move to a new region which better suited their level.
• Fixed a very subtle bug which could result in a single subscriber being logged in *twice* with the same character, when a region's login queue is active. This would result in that character moving quickly, as if they were using a speedhack, and then continuing to move around in the world even after "logging out" (and could even result in a crash if they unsubscribed!) This bug fixed itself every time you saved or loaded, which made diagnosing this bug tricky!
• Fixed building placement/movement logic to actually only place/move buildings in regions where it thinks it's legal to do so, instead of only telling you that it couldn't place a building there but doing it anyway if you told it to.
• Vastly improved the generated meshes for bandwidth-covered areas on the network view (vertex counts are down about 90% compared against what they were in the last build!).
• Fixes "Negative buzz" HUD meter vanishing, after you've taken and released control of a monster.
• Fixes a lot of "daily" reports and graphs incorrectly "wrapping around" as we move from month 1 day 30 to month 2 day 1.
• Fixes flickering of network objects during placement.

This is just a little update which fixes a persistent problem experienced mostly by players using Macs with AMD graphics cards. This update fixes terrain rendering for those players! Changes in this build:

• Fix for Mac/AMD terrain rendering glitches! (I've had a report that this same fix also fixed a persistent rendering bug for one PC user with an NVidia GPU, which surprises me, but I'll totally take credit for that fix too!)
• Disables gamepad input, which previously was wired up to camera movement. This change means that folks who happen to have a badly calibrated gamepad connected to their computer no longer have to cope with a drifting camera!
• ...and a whole bunch of little bug fixes, based upon feedback and bug reports!

Hi everyone! This is another maintenance update, just generally working toward full stability! In previous builds, we were accidentally not submitting some crash reports. We now catch those! As a result, if you've ever had the game spontaneously close without a message, it'll probably try to upload that report the next time you launch the game. Thanks for your patience! The other big thing in this build is that I believe I've identified the cause of brief stuttering (and occasionally even hard lockups) some people were reporting in medium/large games, when playing at the fastest speed setting, in Windows build. It seems the issue was coming from the audio middleware we're using. We'd been sending every audio event in the game to FMOD, and at our fastest speed setting that often seemed to be overloading FMOD. Now we're no longer sending every event to FMOD; only the ones we think might actually be audible. Net result: no more lockups on fastest speed settings! Also, there were a few more pathfinding performance boosts in this build, particularly for games which include a lot of walls! That's pretty much all that's new in this update; next plan is to arrange a publicly viewable development roadmap, and then I'll be onto adding more combat abilities and making them more configurable! Thanks to everyone for all your feedback and patience!

Hi everybody! This update contains basically zero new features, but I still find it extremely exciting! The biggest thing in this new update is actually quite small indeed; the game now uses about 80% less RAM than it used to, especially on big games with lots of subscribers! This means that folks should have a *lot* fewer problems with autosaves and general memory swapping than in previous builds! The biggest saved game I've seen so far was about 60 megabytes in size, and with this change it came down to about 18 megabytes. When loaded into memory, it was taking nearly 10 gigabytes of RAM, and now it's down to 1.5 gigabytes. This is a *huge* improvement, especially for folks (like me!) who don't have 32 gigabytes of RAM in their computers! Here's the full changelog:

• Switched from a precise subscriber knowledge model to an abstract one, which reduced our memory load substantially! Also, we now only store one day's worth of memory and thoughts for each subscriber.
• Dramatically sped up pathfindinding 'obstacle' checks; pathfinding in complicated regions should now be substantially faster than before.
• Fixed a pathfinding bug which caused players to sometimes travel diagonally through the middle of buildings which had been rotated during placement.
• Combat abilities now actually require their specified costs. (no more casting fireballs when you're out of mana!)

Hi everyone! v0.17.21 combines a bunch of different unrelated bugfixes into one new update. Here's the combined changelog: New in this build:

• Worked around a Windows-only issue which caused the game to be unable to tell which save file was the most recent, resulting in a game's "Connect" button sometimes loading an old save file by accident. Note: this fix only affects new saves within a game; saves from before this fix may still be sorted incorrectly.
• If you somehow managed to get an NPC killed, they now respawn correctly after a minute! Also, they now play a death animation if killed.
• Players now behave better around dead NPCs; they no longer repeatedly try to pick up or turn in quests to them; now if they can already see that the NPC is dead, they won't attempt to interact with them at all, and won't be as upset by the NPC's unavailability.
• Fixed a bug which caused players to think that non-combat quests would take much longer to complete than they actually do, which made them highly reluctant to do them.
• Fixed a bug which caused players to get stuck inside Inn and Landmark buildings, when they were the target of a quest, and also fixed Landmark buildings to tell players to enjoy the scenery outside of them rather than inside of them.
• Fixed the text description of the Network Server to correctly specify how much extra capacity it provides to a region. (The text description previously said 100, while it actually provides 400)
• When a subscriber gains a level, they now emit a cheery DING! instead of a boring, outdated +LVL.
• Worked around an extremely rare map generation bug. (If you ever saw an error which complained about a "Complex clip", then you're one of the lucky winners of this bugfix!)
• Fixes drawing of playback speed icons so they always draw on top of the main button body, instead of sometimes being sorted beneath it.
• Fixes an issue which could result in the dev job queue to get stuck if you placed a building, the building developed a bug, you moved the building to a new region, and then destroyed the building. In that instance, devs could stop work and do nothing forever. Now fixed!

By far the most common piece of feedback we received on our original Early Access release was this; people wanted to be able to create more monster types! Just five monster types to populate a whole MMORPG world was, of course, far, far too few types of monsters. So in this build, we've shaken things up! Now, you only get two player classes and three monster types to start. But! As soon as one of your subscribers reaches level two, you unlock another player class and two more monster types. This continues, with another new player class unlocking for every two subscriber levels (maximum 8), and two more monster types unlocking for every subscriber level (maximum 30). If you're loading an older save file, you'll keep everything you had already unlocked, and further unlocks will happen once any of your subscribers reach the required subscriber levels. Check the 'Design' window in-game for unlock details. I'm very interested in people's reactions to this design change! Is it too few player classes to start with? Are things unlocking too quickly or too slowly? Drop us feedback in the discussion forums! Also in this build: We now send alerts when someone reaches a new level that no subscriber had reached before in your game, so you know it's time to look for new class unlocks! And of course, the usual potpourri of general stability bug fixes!

Hi, everyone! This is another patch mostly containing bug fixes, but also fixes the performance degradation that came in as part of 0.17.6's changes to pathfinding. Here's the complete Changelog:

• Recovers the game performance lost by the pathfinding fixes introduced in 0.17.6. Games with lots of logged in subscribers should have much improved performance over the last few versions! (Theres still a lot more for me to do to further improve on this, but I wanted to get this improvement out quickly!)
• Stopped subscribers from attacking elite monsters which were already dead. (This would only happen when they were on an explicit quest to kill that elite monster)
• Drops default region capacity from 2000 to 800 simultaneously logged-in players, but fixed the 'server' network object to actually increase the region capacity, as it was supposed to be doing all along. Additionally, increases the effectiveness of an active server from +100 logged-in players to +400 logged-in players. [quote] Note: A region which has hit its player cap will begin using a login queue to slow down the rate of players entering the region; you can see the details of how many people are currently waiting in the queue in the regions information window. Regions which are capped out draw in red, when in edit mode, to make it easier to spot that it's happening. The game also generates alerts to point you at the problem.[/quote]
• Adjusting a monster types base statistics now also adjusts the statistics of elite variants of that monster type.
• Fixed a crash bug which could occur if you changed a regions assigned level, and then destroyed a monster zone inside that region before all the monsters could have their levels adjusted to match the new region level.
• Fixed a bug in auto-buff and auto-nerf which incorrectly applied every change to the abilitys effects, even if the proposed change was supposed to be a change to the costs. (this could turn what was supposed to be a buff into a nerf, or vice-versa!)

Another very small update, but I wanted to push this one up to Steam absolutely as quickly as possible, once I found it! New in this build:

• Fixed problem where some random tooltips were missing for some players; often different ones each time they ran the game.

Hi, everyone! v0.17.11 has just reached the default branch on Steam. This is a very minor patch but with one very important fix in it.

• When the user sets their games subscription pricing, maybe we should actually set that pricing and not just ignore it and keep using the default value. (Im so embarrassed by this bug!)
• Also fixes a few very rare stumbling blocks; one involving a map object composed of a surprisingly large number of pieces (Im guessing someone got very enthusiastic with adding blocks to a scenery building!), and one involving someone trying to go up to a major version number without having first selected a new technology to learn. The game should now cope with both of these situations much better!

Hi everybody! Apologies for how long it's taken me to figure out how to post these news updates, so this one is going to be pretty long while I clear out the backlog; here's what changed in each of the ten updates we've had since launching into Early Access three days ago! Our Early Access build was our "Milestone 17" build, version number 0.17.0. I've been organising development into "milestones", where the milestones are anything from a month apart to sometimes six months or more. But all of them are major milestones along the path to full release! Most of the patches that have been applied so far during Early Access have just been addressing bug reports that have come in from folks in the discussion boards here, or from our discord (link available inside the game itself), or via the game's built-in bug reporter, and most of them were relatively small. So with that said, let's talk about all of the patches so far! Note that you can see the version number of the build you're running in the bottom right corner of the screen for the first few seconds after you launch the game, and it's also visible inside the "About" application on the game desktop. So if you're curious whether you actually have the most recent build version, that's how to tell!

Version 0.17.1

• Subscribers are no longer confused by concave polygons! In 0.17.0, subscribers wouldnt recognise mountain passes which crossed over a concave border of a region. Now they do!
• Having the PVP Duel Tech now actually allows you to enable PVP Duels!

Version 0.17.2

• Fixes an assertion if a GM tried to leave a region but the last respawn point in that region had been destroyed, so that they couldn't find a legal way out
• Fixes the games crash reporter to work again. Id accidentally broken it in the last days before Early Access!
• Adjusts fast-forward speeds downwards, to avoid buggy behaviour on 100x speed. Top speed is now 20x speed, instead of 100x speed.

Version 0.17.3

• Adjusted a lighting shader to fix a compile error on extremely picky Intel graphics drivers (lol)

Version 0.17.4

• Fixes an assertion failure if you make a quest to kill an elite monster, then destroy the elite monster, and then reorder the quest givers quests (without saving/loading in between)
• Handled an issue which was causing the Place/Erase monster zone placement mode selectors to not work for some players.

Version 0.17.5

• Fixed a crash bug if you connected both sides of a network cable to the same network fiber.

Version 0.17.6

• Fixed players not using roads or flight paths in several circumstances.
• Fixed players sometimes walking along the ground under a flight path instead of soaring majestically on an avian steed!
• Fixed players not immediately getting off their bird if you demolished a flight path out from under them. (Instead, theyd travel straight to the next point on their path past where the flight path used to take them, getting the flight speed boost the whole way!)
• Fixed flight paths not updating correctly if you moved the flight points after their initial placement.

Version 0.17.7

• Fixed an assertion failure which could occur if you tried to quit out of a game while a logged in subscriber was upset enough that they wanted to unsubscribe when they were automatically logged as part of the world destruction process. (oops!)
• Fixed pathfinding for flight paths to only ever step onto a flight path at the front or at the back, no matter how curvy the flight path is around the starting or ending point! This was causing some troubles for some people.
• If a player was a resident of an inn in one region, moved into a new, higher-level region, and then decided to visit a new inn in that new region, it was possible that the player wouldnt actually move out of their old home before moving into their new one, which could result in them using up a room at both inns simultaneously! This would have been fixed after a reload, but now doesn't happen at all any more.

Version 0.17.8

• Fixes a few more game shutdown issues, where players who were forced to logout during the game shutdown process were trying to register thoughts and alerts. Now fixed; we let them have their say and then promptly ignore them because we'd already taken the last autosave before blowing up the game world. ;D
• Adds some extra debugging messages to cases where illegal array accesses were happening, to hopefully help me debug exactly whats going on in those cases!
• Adds sanity checking for handling the situation of a quest being destroyed while were in the middle of editing it. I have no idea how that could happen, but we had a couple automatic bug reports filed which showed it had happened! Now we should roll with the punches if that happens, and everything should be okay again!

Version 0.17.9

• Fixes to make the game visuals behave nicely on Windows, when display scaling is enabled! (we don't properly support high density displays on Windows, we just treat pixels as pixels. You can use the UI scaling control to make the UI larger, though, if you need to!)
• Stopped new subscribers from trying to join when there's no starting area for them to join from.

Version 0.17.10

• Adds | to the list of glyphs not allowed in MMORPG names, as its not allowed in filenames!
• Stopped new subscribers from trying to join when there's no starting area for them to join from.
• Move the "joy" emoji from the sad category to the happy category. I am apparently old and fail at millennial. Get off my lawn, you kids!
• Fixed some minor issues in auto-destruction of quests, when their targets are destroyed.
• Fixes monster zones going wandering during save/load cycles. Under some rare circumstances, a monster zone could move during a load. When this happened, it would generally move a very long distance away, often into the water! It wouldnt take its monsters with it, though. This led to all sorts of bad behaviours! Now during load we detect whether that had previously happened in the save game, and do our best to fix it if so! (we move the zone back to its monsters, as close as we can get)
• Adds a combo box to the character model editor (on the stance tab), where you can set what animation you want to play on the character model preview. Pick from run, idle, ghost, or socialise!
• Adds sliders to the character editor (on the general tab) to set the characters base health, mana, and rage attributes, and also to adjust their speed!