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!