MMORPG Tycoon 2

• 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!
  

• 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 z̵͝a̷͊l̴͂g̸͒o̶̒ 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.
  

• 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.
  

• 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)
  

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)
  

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.
  

• 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.
  

• 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).
  

• 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!)
  

• 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.