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!