Hi folks! We have two things for you today. First, bugfix build 0.22.89 is now live!
Here's what's changed:
Fixed several combat bugs when assuming manual control of characters and triggering combat abilities using keyboard hotkeys.
Fixed 'heal', 'protect', 'weaken', and 'slow' visual effects to better match the sizes of the affected characters. (they could get lost inside really large characters, before!)
Monsters now try to move to get into range for their shortest-range ability which is currently available to use, whether or not that ability is the next one in their combat schedule. This makes it much less likely for monsters to repeatedly skip over melee attacks because they were out of position, while still allowing them to back off to missile range while a slow-recharge melee attack recharges.
Fixed multi-stage dungeon boss health values for high-level bosses, as their health values were scaling more quickly than the configured level power scaling, making them much more difficult foes than they should have been!
Fixed an issue which could cause parties to get stuck in "forming" state.
Tweaked tutorial messaging around assigning developers to projects, which had been causing confusion for some new players.
Made a number of small fixes to using scenery painting tools inside dungeons.
Fixed a crash if you tried to force-quit the game while it was saving.
Fixed the New Game Summary page to show the correct statistics values.
Fixed dungeon monsters respawning if you had configured monsters respawns to happen instantly. (dungeon monsters aren't supposed to respawn at all, even if no delay is set on respawns!)
Fixed price sync on newly placed buildings.
Fixed parties sometimes not gathering properly.
That's live on the default branch on Steam right now!
And for those of you who'd like a preview of what's coming next, here we go:
A Sneak Preview of the Next Update:
Now it's time to talk about the upcoming update that I've been working on for the last month or so! It's something I never thought I'd be able to put into MMORPG Tycoon 2 without exploding our save sizes, but our main artist said something that inspired me to think about terrain in a different way, and.. I had to do it!
Terraforming
New in the next update, you'll be able to edit your game's terrain in far more detail than ever before. You can now draw directly on the terrain to change its height:
This same system will let you flatten areas of the terrain, lift areas up or down, recolor it, create regions of lake or water, and do all sorts of other new stuff!
As part of this, you can now label parts of your world!
And of course, with the new ability to place bodies of water anywhere you want, you'll be needing
Bridges
On launch, we'll have nine different bridge models available within the game, all of which can be made long or short, straight or curved, etc.
So.. the question people always ask at this point is about when the release of these new features will be, and the disappointing answer I always have to give them is that I'm not entirely certain! I'm hoping that it'll only be a week or two more; I'm fixing bugs pretty much as quickly as we find them, and once it all seems fully stable, we'll be rolling it out on the main default channel!
But if you're feeling a bit adventurous, this update is accessible right now on our public 'test' build ; please come join us and try it out! From the Steam library just right-click on the game and go to 'Properties', switch over to the 'test' beta branch, and let Steam download the update! And you can use our discord server or the in-game bug report/feedback tool to let us know what you think!
I'll be talking to you all again soon, when this gets rolled out to the main default build, and I begin work on one of our next big roadmap item: Factions.
Thanks so much to everyone who's sent us ideas, feedback, bug reports, and everything else!
-T