Hi everybody! This update was originally supposed to just ("just") be a simple content update, but.. it's kind of expanded and morphed into something bigger, with a bunch of new features and AI fixes and improvements.
Let me tell you about them!
New stuff:
This was supposed to be the core of this new update; we've added a new "Ruins" theme, which includes a full new functional building set, plus a new modular building set, plus several new scenery pieces! This is all unlocked via a new 'Ruins' art pack you'll find in the list of available development projects.
This was also supposed to be part of this update; almost every building model in the game has been tweaked, bringing the path markup up to date to match the newer models, adding a little flair to many of the older buildings, that kind of thing. A little spruce and tidy, along with better player movements when interacting with older buildings.
And that was supposed to be it, apart from some small bug fixes. New models, fixes to old models, pretty standard for a content update between major new features.
But then..
I fully redesigned the AI logic that subscribers use to determine how much gold they're willing to spend, with an eye to making it more flexible for players who have tuned their in-game economies and rewards differently than what I'd originally expected! With this change, it should now be much more viable to charge higher gold prices for most in-game services (buying things, travel, etc) especially as your players gain levels and accumulate more gold to spend!
Based in part on discussions with players here on the steam discussion boards, buildings can now show and track multiple services, and AI players can distinguish between those services! As an example, graveyards now present two services; one service for spawning the ghosts of people who have been killed, and a different service for bringing those ghosts back to life. Previously, the first of those was just an automatic part of being a graveyard, but now it's been turned into another explicit service that's much more visible and has its usage tracked! Several other building types (inns, dungeon entrances, etc) also now have had their automatic "that's just something this building type does" functions turned into full, listed services, to make it all much more visible exactly what every building does, and how often people make use of those previously invisible functions. Of course, now being able to list an arbitrary number of services on each building and have the AI interact with any or all of them is just the first step toward several exciting new possibilities we've begun to cook up (and some of you can probably guess at a few of those future new features!)
...but the first of those new possibilities is that as of this update, any transport building (flight points, teleporters, etc) which has multiple travel paths now gets a separate service for each path they connect to, so you can now set separate prices to use each flight path, and have their individual usages tracked over time!
Changes/Bug fixes:
Fixed several major bugs in the game's pathfinding systems which were often resulting in players taking entirely non-optimal paths, ignoring roads, or even sometimes (and seemingly at random) just entirely ignoring individual transport buildings for a single pathfinding request, but then using them correctly the next time that same path was requested.
Fixed players attempting to migrate to other regions which they actually couldn't afford to migrate to (due to high prices on the travel options to get there).
Fixed players in party formation getting distracted and wandering off if they spotted a new quest giver.
Fixed players on moving ships falling off the back of the ship whenever they sent an IM.
Fixed players missing vehicle loading zones and instead standing in midair - often somewhat far away - while waiting for their vehicle to arrive, when they thought they weren't being observed.
Players no longer resist migrating to a new region just because it's a long way away.
Ghost players can now turn back human right where they are, while they are still inside the graveyard where their ghost appeared. (Previously, they would usually have to bounce around between different interaction pads within the graveyard, which looked a little weird)
"Most stable" and "Fewest cheaters" awards weren't awarding extra customer impressions as they were supposed to. Now they do! (the fix only affects newly received awards, sorry!)
Fixed several bugs which could each result in a player repeatedly "bumping" back and forth around a transit building, trying to use the building but then refusing to spend the money.
Fixed responsiveness of text entry when game FPS is low.
Fixed a region migration bug which caused migration to repeatedly fail for (rare) C-shaped regions whose geometric center point was outside the region.
Removed decorative and scenery buildings from the list of buildings in the region information window, to make it easier to see and find the functional buildings.
Fixed a bug which resulted in monsters being much weaker when not being watched.
Fixed a bug which resulted in both players and monsters being slower when not being watched and following a bent path.
Level up/down notification icons now remain visible for 1.5 seconds, down from 3 seconds.
Added a button to the "Developing tech" HUD element which will take you back to the development window, since this was a pain point for several new users who had closed the development window during the tutorial and then didn't know how to get back to it.
Moved building definition files into a new directory; this will probably break most building-adjustment mods, sorry! But because of the major changes to all the building definition files in this update, we needed to be certain to be loading the new-format building definitions, rather than files from old mods that maybe people had even forgotten they'd installed. Hopefully we won't ever have to do this again!
Related to the above, we now show a simple "Active Mods" window in the in-game desktop interface if you have any mods installed. This is really just there to remind folks that they do have mods installed (if they do), to make things easier when people are contacting us for support!
...plus a whole bunch of other bugfixes and minor improvements!
As exciting as I think tracking multiple services separately on each building is (and I think some of you can probably guess several other things I'm planning to do with that ability in the future!), I'm even more excited for the next update, where I'm planning to add some exciting new map editing functionality, some of which has been requested for a *long* time, but I've only recently figured out how to make it work in the game without exploding our save file sizes!
I'm very much looking forward to talking again soon when I have things to show for that!
-T