MMORPG Tycoon 2

• Fixed an issue which caused some players to be unable to create new games (whilst still being able to load and play old ones).
  
• Fixed a pathfinding issue which could result in some vehicle depots sometimes being completely ignored for pathfinding requests.
  
• Fixed a possible softlock if you skipped a new release trailer while that trailer was showing the inside of a dungeon.
  
• Updated the "Unsubscribers Report" to show actual reasons for unsubscriptions. Previously we just showed the most recent negative thought of each unsubscriber, but that wasn't always (or even often) a full explanation. Now if somebody has unsubscribed because they were banned, we show that in the report. If it's because their character class got destroyed, or because they couldn't afford to pay the subscription fee, or because they thought they'd outleveled the game's current content, those will each show up in the report. Old historical "Unsubscribers Report" data from before this update will now show up as "Unknown Reason", but you'll still be able to see how many unsubscribers you had on past days from earlier builds of the game.
  
• Disabled the "dynamic batching" video option, since it was actually slowing down the game a lot when enabled, once a game got large. (I'll revisit this in future and try to find where the performance loss is happening! But until then I'm just disabling the option outright.)
  

Major Changes

• [p]When we rolled out the Accelerator update two weeks ago, some players (mostly AMD users) had rendering problems, and so I hastily rolled back all the rendering-related optimizations and fixes from that update in a hotfix build. But thanks to some heroic testers whom I'll never be able to thank enough, we found the bugs and now we're ready to roll those rendering optimizations back out to everyone again, and that's most of what's in this update!
  
  Rendering data is now smaller and draw calls are now faster (and under the hood, the engine's rendering code is nicer! But probably nobody cares about that last part but me.). It's a small improvement if you compare it to the scale of savings from the CPU-side optimizations that went into the last build, but every little bit helps, right?[/p]

Other Improvements

• [p]Fixed rare planning-related crashes immediately after destroying NPCs, Monster Zones, or after social circles disband. (we've seen about five of these reports in total over the last two weeks)[/p]
• [p]Added a game option to disable alerts about character types which don't have basic attacks. This should be considered an expert-level option, as it's basically removing the guard rails that prevent you from accidentally making character classes who can't fight at all (or who run out of juice partway through combat and then get completely stuck).[/p]
• [p]Fixed manually moving a player who is in a party which was traveling in formation so they actually get moved. (previously they ignored being moved and immediately teleported back to their party)[/p]
• [p]Fixed a visual bug in the network system which could cause some network cables to show themselves as carrying negative bandwidth.[/p]
• [p]Increased the amount of CPU time devoted to offscreen monsters, who sometimes weren't getting enough time in really *packed* regions to keep up their combat effectiveness.[/p]
• [p]Fixed parties getting stuck if the party unexpectedly got split up across multiple maps.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a bug which could result in a toon getting stuck at a dungeon door forever.[/p]
• [p]Vastly sped up drawing the new icons used for XP, death notifications, level-up, and etc.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a possible crash if you quit the game while viewing the "Release Announcement" view.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a critical bug in text formatting of certain floating point numbers, which could sometimes cause incorrect values to be displayed.[/p]
• [p]Fixed the tool "cost" string not being visible when the "System Cursor" option is set.[/p]

Headline features:

• [p]

  Much faster game simulation!

  With this update, even the largest saves we've received from players are now running at or near full speed on our test machines! This is a CPU-side optimisation, and I expect that the biggest improvements will be seen by players with large games, many players logged in at once, and at least three or four active world regions, with bigger savings the larger your world gets. There will likely be little or no difference for people who currently have just one or two regions active, and folks who are GPU-limited due to huge amounts of placed scenery will still be GPU-limited. (But hopefully running the simulation at max speed at least won't make their frame rate actively worse any more) [/p]
• [p]

  More use of background threads for AI!

  In this update, all player planning has been moved from the main thread to background threads. This means that (for example) five players all randomly happening to choose the same frame to rethink what they want to do will no longer cause frame rate microstutters! Those big choices about where to go and what to do are all now happening from background threads.[/p]
• [p]

  Compressed model data for all buildings and scenery models.

  Making models require less data in VRAM improves rendering performance! (this will matter more for folks on low-end hardware, though) [/p]
• [p]

  Icons as event indicators!

  In this update we replace the "+XP", "+LVL", "-LVL", "DEAD", and "IM" floating text indicators with localization-friendlier icons. There are still a few more of these text indicators to convert over to icons, and the specific icons being used in this build are not final, but I feel like this is already a big improvement! These new icons can still be turned off using the view options settings button near the top right of the HUD, the same way the text ones could.[/p]

Other notable changes:

• [p] Fixed a bug which caused GMs who are currently searching through game logs to find evidence to incorrectly show their status as "Failed to find evidence" while they're doing it. Oops![/p]
• [p] Fixed a bug during panic logout scenarios where players would not consider nearby potential inns as places to go to logout if the inn had a high price set. (the 'price' on an inn is the price to move into that inn as a permanent home; merely logging out there - especially in an emergency - is always free). This was causing spurious "Couldn't find an inn to log out" messages, even when plenty of inns were available![/p]
• [p] Fixed dungeon ambiance sounds continuing to play if you quit directly from a dungeon view to the in-game desktop.[/p]
• [p] Fixed a bug which caused buzz to stop giving any new-subscriber benefits at all if buzz grew past a total value of 1,000. (the intention was for the benefit-per-extra-buzz to reduce at that point, but what was actually happening was that the whole benefit was being removed once you were past that threshhold. Now fixed!)[/p]

• Weapon sizes for a character can now be adjusted in the costume editor. (use the 'Weapon Scale' slider while adjusting the character's right arm to change the weapon's scale). We also now do some better placement of weapons if you change the model used for the character's right arm!
  
• Fixed an issue which could cause the character type buttons in the class, NPC, and Monster design lists to occasionally flicker for a frame if you had more than 9 of one type of character and scrolled down in the window.
  
• Prevent the user from setting a buggy building as 'online' while a developer is trying to debug it (naughty naughty!) :D
  
• A few other miscellaneous fixes to the behavior of certain UI widgets inside grid widgets.
  

• Fixed already-placed monsters and NPCs not being given or updating their weapons when their character type's assigned weapon types are changed. (This was working in the initial release of the Weaponry Update, but was accidentally broken as part of a bugfix in Hotfix 1)
  
• The character model editor preview now shows the character with a randomly selected one of the weapon types assigned to the class. If you'd like to change it, you can set the preview weapon to be used over on the model editor's "Settings" tab, and also change the ilvl of the weapon being previewed.
  
• If you feel like a character's greatsword just isn't 'great' enough, or its dagger just isn't stealthy enough, you can now adjust the scaling of a character type's weapons, as an additional slider on the "Adjust" interface for the character type's right arm. (I need to find a better, easier-to-find place to put this, but it's functional over here for now!)
  

• Release trailers which include new player classes now show those new player classes using the weapons they're supposed to be using, instead of showing them all carrying swords. (oops!)
  
• Fixed a crash which could happen when you unpaused the game, if you had destroyed and then replaced a player character class while the game was both online and paused.
  
• Fixed single-frame animation glitches visible in the Ability preview window if you changed the character's model while viewing the ability preview.
  
• Set up an archery target in the ability preview window, replacing the Giant Ominous Sphere Of Darkness™ as the target of previewed attacks.
  
• Fixed an issue where pooled checkbox widgets were not being properly reset before being reused elsewhere in the UI. I *think* this was entirely benign, but it put some scary-looking messages in the game logs so I've fixed it!
  
• Fixed a few small (once per run only) memory leaks; about 10-15kb of RAM was being leaked in total, and was reclaimed when the game exited. Not a big deal for anyone, but it makes my dev tools happier!
  

New in this update:

• New weapon models! Our limited old weapon models have been removed, and are now replaced by literally 200 new weapon models, spread across 14 categories, and mapped to increasing quality levels so that higher item-level (ilvl) weapons look cooler and more dangerous than lower ilvl weapons!
  
  
• Selectable weapon types per player class! For each player class, you can set none, one, or multiple weapon types for that class to use, so there's no more mages carrying axes or barbarians with wands (unless that's what you want!)
  
  
• For the first time, you can now also specify weapon types for your monsters and NPC characters to use!
  
  
• Since we now have visual differences between high-quality and low-quality weapons, we no longer hide low-quality weapons when their wielder outlevels them! So if you have a level 20 paladin who is still carrying around that flimsy old broomstick that he bought as a practice weapon when he was level 1, you'll see him carrying it around while you're looking at him and mocking his life choices.
  
  
• New combat animations! We've boosted way up from 4 combat animations to 20, across our two stances ("humanoid" and "quadruped"). You can now specify for each combat ability which animation it should use, and whether it should use a bow/crossbow/gun animation when one of those weapons is equipped. So if you want a healer class who fires off their heals using a crossbow when one is available, that's now possible!
  
  

  The complete list of weapon categories is now "Axes", "Bone Weapons", "Bows", "Crossbows", "Curved Swords", "Daggers", "Greatswords", "Guns", "Hammers", "Maces", "Spears", "Staves", "Swords", and "Wands", each of which contain between 10 and 20 weapon models tied to different ranges of weapon item-level (ilvl).
  
  By default you'll start with the "swords", "axes", and "wands" weapon categories available, and the other categories are available via development projects. (Or if you just want everything all at once, there's a Custom Rule you can apply to your save for that!)
  
  Note that only humanoids who have a humanoid right arm/hand can be given visible weapons. (Sorry about that, we just never figured out a way to attach a sword to a chicken's wing without it looking silly!)
  
  Also note that there was a minor issue with the old 'golem' costume which caused bow/crossbow/gun animations to play a little weirdly on that specific costume. If you're in an old save and have issues with a golem and those weapons, you may wish to reapply the new 'golem' costume preset to get the fix!

  
  
  ....and of course, there's also a whole bunch of bug fixes and other minor improvements that come alongside this update.
  
  In terms of "what's next", I've actually got another under-the-hood performance patch in testing just behind this one, which reduces VRAM usage and should deliver notable CPU performance improvements for folks with really large games. Expect to see that one within a week or two!
  
  Until then, big thanks to everybody who's been sending in feedback and bug reports; they're always huge helps!
  
  -T