Just a small update with hotfixes, today!

1. Fixes memory leaks while placing network WAN points and network servers.
   
2. Fixes incorrect "obstructed" complaints when trying to build walls connected to other walls.
   
3. Fixes pathfinding in highly congested falling back to using the older pathfinding system
   
   The older pathfinding system was slower and also produced worse paths; often ignoring one obstacle while routing around another. All paths should now be being generated by the newer, more robust system.

Hi everybody, I hope you've all had a lovely holiday period! We're back today with a somewhat larger than usual update!

Without too much ado, here's what's new:

• Sandbox Mode!
  We've finally added a proper sandbox mode to the game! Any game can be converted to or from sandbox mode at any time, from the "Settings" tab of the MMO's launcher. If you're in sandbox mode, you can buy stuff even if you have no money to pay for it. And that's all! Play whichever way you prefer; either in or out of sandbox mode. Sandbox mode is available for all games (including new and old games) once you've completed the initial tutorial in at least one game.
  
• Configurable Level Power Progression!
  Power progression has been completely rewritten. Previously, we used a linear power growth which caused players to gain too much power at low levels, and too little at high levels. Now power growth is exponential, with by default a 30% increase in power at each new level. And better, you can configure that growth amount yourself, from the Design interface!
  
• New Buildings!
  Adds a new suite of 'Sylvan'-themed functional buildings!
  
• New Old Buildings!
  A bunch of our older building models have been remodelled in this update! Same design and size, but now with stylish new triangles!

• NPCs Must Be Accessible!
  NPCs can now only be placed onto walkable ground; it's no longer allowed to place them inside walls or other places where players can't actually reach them.
  
• Monster Zones Must Be Accessible!
  Monster zones can no longer be placed on mountains, or other areas where players aren't allowed to walk.
  
• Hey Buddy, Do You Like to Type?
  Improved the typing experience by adding improved handling of arrow keys and adding support for control-A to select all text in a field (command-A on Mac).
  
• Blocked Building Notifications!
  There's now an on-screen notification if you've placed objects such that a building's entrance has been blocked and players can't figure out how to get inside. (the obstructions around some buildings are currently a bit larger than you'd expect, so it was easy to have this happen accidentally. Now there's at least a notification when that has happened! We're doing some more work toward making obstructions more closely match the shape of a building's footprint, but in the meantime this warning at least lets you know that things are placed too close together!)
  
• VIP Streamer Triggers Later
  Adjusted the trigger for the VIP streamer event to happen when your first subscriber joins, instead of when you reach version 1.0.0. This makes it less likely that an enthusiastic builder will miss their Streamer event because they didn't immediately place a starting point after reaching version 1.0.0.
  
• Or Are You Just Happy To See Me?
  A single run of network pipes (either cables or fibers) can now be placed across twice the distance, and may contain ten times as many curves as before.

• Notable CPU performance improvements to the general maintenance of character attributes (health, mana, etc) (big improvements to locality for the data cache)
  
• Variable "tick rate" for characters on the map lets the simulation spend less time simulating characters who are just travelling and more on characters who are in combat. This makes a reasonably large performance boost especially at high simulation speeds!
  
• Optimised the engine's handling of MSAA render targets, which provides a small GPU speed boost for anyone with any kind of anti-aliasing enabled (either MSAA or SMAA)

• Added a lot more number and money formatting options, and separated them from language selection! So if you want to play in English but using Euros as currency but with the Euro symbol printed to the left of the number, that's now an option!
  
• Vastly improved the text drawn inside UI meters, for languages with longer label strings.

• Spruced up various UI widgets, most notably combo boxes and tooltip windows.
  
• Tweaks to the window open/close visual effect.

• If a party drops to only one player remaining in it, the party now is correctly disbanded.
  
• When a party is disbanding for any reason, disband immediately; don't make everyone join up in formation first.
  
• In the "submit save to devs" interface, the "Upload" button is now disabled until you type something into the 'description' dialog. I have too many submitted saves and no clue what people wanted me to look at in them! :sadface:
  
• Fixed walls and turrets not visibly rezzing in during the initial load sequence.
  
• Fixed a terrain "overpainting" bug which could result in tiny slivers of a terrain type remaining in a region which couldn't be erased.
  
• Fixed a crash during game shutdown if at the moment of shutdown one of the game's subscribers happened to be considering travelling from their current region, through a second region, and then back into their current region again in order to reach a destination.
  
• Fixed a crash loading extremely old saves (from before March 2020) which were in the middle of the VIP Streamer event.
  
• Fixed player AI around dealing with quest-giving NPCs in multi-level regions, where they were deciding whether or not to pick up quests assuming that the quests would be of the multi-level region's lowest level, instead of looking at the actual levels of the quests.
  
• When the user destroys a road which AI are walking on, the AI now recalculate their path, instead of YOLOing their way straight over mountains and other obstacles to go to their intended destination.
  
• Fixed a crash which could sometimes happen after destroying a mountain pass or a flight path between regions if the game wasn't paused.
  
• Fixed a subtle bug which could very rarely teleport players dozens of kilometers across the map (often entirely *off* the map), when the game was running at a very fast simulation speed.
  
• Fixed a bug which could cause one duelist to think that the duel had begun a few seconds before the other duelist, and get a couple free hits in before their opponent would react.

Progress is still ongoing with the big Combat 2.0 update, but I'm going to be trying to push updates over here to the main default branch more frequently than I have over the past two months; we really had a big backlog of new stuff on the 'test' branch this time and I waited much too long to finally activate it for everybody! Thanks for your patience across the holiday period, everybody! We're going to have some exciting new stuff to show off in the coming weeks. :D

Hi folks!

New in this update:

• It's once again possible to have regions support multiple levels of player. How this works is that buildings will all support the whole range of players supported by the region itself, and monster zones and elite monsters can have a level set on them when they're placed. (They can also have their level modified after being placed by selecting the elite monster or the zone and using the controls in their Info window)
  
• Updated player AI so that they'll find a correct region for their level, even if there isn't a directly accessible region of the right level. So your newly level 3 player needs to travel out of their level 2 region, through a level 1 region, then through a level 8 region, in order to finally reach a level 3 region, they'll now find that and do that (they might not be happy about the long journey, though!)
  
• Quests now are assigned a level range based upon their destination. A quest which sends people to a level 1-3 weapon shop will be a level 1-3 quest, while one that sends you to fight a level 3 elite monster will be a level 3 quest. Players will not attempt to do quests which are higher level than them, but they *will* collect the quests and hold on to them until they've gained enough levels to do them.
  
• Monster zones now paint on with the left mouse button, and erase with the right mouse button, instead of having UI buttons to click to swap between "place" and "erase" modes.
  
• Adds 11 new achievements to the game. (yay!)
  
• ...plus a bunch of bug fixes!

And with this, I'm moving on to the combat system revamp that I've been talking about for a while, which should deliver improved combat editing, plus improved combat visuals and AI, as well as improved performance for games with a lot of logged in players. I'm really excited to get stuck into it!

Plus we have some new and revamped artwork coming within a few days, which I'm super excited to show off as well! :D

Hi everyone!

This is a small update with some new buildings and quality of life feature updates:

• Zoinks!
  Adds a suite of 'spooky'-themed buildings to the buildings list.
  
• Your party will not save you now!
  Fixed a bug which made it impossible to issue warnings to or ban players who were inside a party. Now you can ban people with impunity, again!
  
• Party Exploration
  Fixed a bug which caused most parties to usually prefer to fight monsters in the same monster zone; now when there is more than one monster zone available, not every party should go to the same one.
  
• Explanations of Cheating
  When inspecting players for cheats, cheating players now have a label drawn over their heads which actually explains what cheat they're using, and the effect it has, so you can decide whether or not you want to warn/ban them.
  
• Tier List Metagaming
  Fixed the character class ratings to no longer be thoroughly dominated by the class's "health" rating. This should fix the problem of tank-style classes always floating to the top of the tier lists. Note that tier lists are only regenerated at the start of each in-game day, so you won't immediately see this change if you load into an old saved game; instead, it'll update at the start of the next day.
  
• More employees!
  By popular demand, the cap on number of developers and GMs has been increased from 30 to 50, for all you folks with really big games.
  
• Moving the Buzz
  Moved the information about positive/negative buzz from the main header into the 'Rating' tab of the Overview report. This gives me a bunch more space to show useful information and explain what the values really mean, instead of jamming the values into a tiny meter and leaving folks to guess.

...and a whole bunch more localisation work, and other general bug fixes and improvements!

Next up is work on getting multi-level regions back in and working properly, and then onward to the Combat 2.0 update! Thanks so much for all your comments and feedback, everyone!

Hi, folks! Since we released the 'Party' update a couple weeks ago, we're starting another short period of smaller changes and "quality of life" features before we start work on Combat 2.0, the next major new feature update. Over the coming week or two, expect to see a bunch of quality of life improvements, plus we'll continue adding new models to the game.

New in this build:

• I don't always construct buildings, but when I do...
  Adds a suite of functional buildings in a new "Elegant" theme. Also adds three new types of landmark building.
  
  
• If you love something, set it free
  In edit modes, the camera is now allowed to move over unowned regions. This means that you can much more easily do fancy things like sending flight paths to travel across a water region and into a different island (which was difficult before because the camera wouldn't let you move over the water). We also now let the camera zoom out about 50% further than before, in edit modes.
  
  
• What is that other set of stairs for, anyway?
  Players can now exit a starting point via either the front or the back, instead of always exiting toward the front. (They'll use whichever exit they think is more convenient for wherever they're trying to go)
  
  
• If you love something, tie it up and never let it leave
  The camera is now constrained to the main map area; no more flying off infinitely over the empty oceans and then getting turned around and having no idea how to get back to the game.
  
  Sorry.
  
  
• At last I can hear myself think, again!
  Adds an 0.2 second delay to the "MegaTooltip" window opening and closing, so that it doesn't noisily pop up as your cursor brushes past a button on its way somewhere else, and similarly doesn't noisily close and re-open as your mouse is briefly in between two buttons while you're moving the cursor from one to the other. Did I mention that there are small quality of life features in this update? This update contains a lot of small quality of life features.
  
  
• Aah, this potion goes down smooth!
  I fixed potion shops so that their potions no longer look "chunky" when animating, which could get especially bad if the game had been running for a while. As part of this, I also made the potions brighter and more colorful, especially when the 'bloom' visual effect is disabled.

Thanks so much for your bug reports and suggestions, everyone! I'm really looking forward to getting started on all the new combat systems, but I want to knock over some of this little stuff first, since the combat system overhaul is going to be a big big change!

Hey everyone, the long-awaited Party Update is now here!

Here's what's new!

• Players now form parties!
  Your Subscribers can now form parties of up to four players to take on your MMO together! If you've developed the 'Parties' technology, you can enable this feature from the 'Design' window's "Features" tab, and then players will tend to gather around Taverns to form parties.
  
• New Artist, New Buildings!
  Adds a whole bunch of new building model variants. Almost every type of functional building now has two or three new versions of the standard model.
  
  We now have a new artist on the team, working on making heaps of new buildings and game assets, and this is just the first drop of those new assets; we're planning to continue with more regular art updates over the coming weeks!
  
• Unsubscription Report
  There’s now a new “Unsubscribe Reasons” Report, which can tell you what players have given as reasons for unsubscribing from the game (along with tracking the total number of unsubscribers over time).
  
• Subscription Savings Plans!
  Previously, a lot of subscribers would unsubscribe when their subscription fees came due because they didn't have enough money in their daily entertainment budgets to pay the whole fee. Now, they'll save up toward the subscription fee in advance, so this should be much less of a problem!
  
• Solid Walls
  Players should no longer walk through walls (or over mountains or etc), if you've completely walled off the place that they wanted to go to. (previously, if there was no legal way to reach their desired destination, they'd ignore obstacles in order to get there. Now they'll just fail to go there, instead)
  
• Littering is Bad, M'Kay?
  Fixes the infamous “dropped weapons” bug, which would sometimes result in dozens or even hundreds of pure-white weapons being randomly strewn about on the landscape. (This mostly happened on larger games, when players bought weapons while out of view of the camera; the weapons were appearing wherever the character had last been visible on-screen, and stayed there until the next time you looked at the player who owned each weapon)

I'm really happy to have this update out for everyone to play with! Getting our AI systems to work reliably in parties was surprisingly tricky; this one is literally the third full implementation I did of the Parties feature, and the first one that doesn't terrify me to think about trying to maintain or extend in the future!

Please let us know if you encounter any issues with the new Parties functionality or with the new game assets, or with anything else in this update!

Next stop, the Combat 2.0 update!

Hi, folks! This is mostly a small update, just dealing with a few critical issues in the most recent update, and one big change (which I couldn't really separate from the bug fixes; I felt like a few of the bug fixes were important enough to push this update out to Steam early!).

Big change:

• Subscribers no longer play every day. Subscribers now play a different number of days per month, and the number of days they play varies based upon their addiction level (as their addiction level goes up, they'll play on more days per month and for slightly longer per day)
  
  This change will result in about half as many subscribers being logged in at once (on average), which will reduce pressure on your region population limits as well as your login queues, without changing your total number of subscribers or your overall subscription fee income. Plus, it just makes more sense in terms of real-world MMORPG subscriber behaviour.

Issues fixed in this build:

• Fixed a number of player AI issues while doing quests or grinding for XP, where every player could end up trying to fight only one monster inside a monster zone, and where sometimes newly placed monsters would not aggro against players until after a save/load.
  
• Fixed a bunch of broken translation strings in the German language.
  
• Improved player questing/grinding AI to prefer to fight closer monsters, instead of picking entirely random monsters within a zone.
  
• Combat ability changes were being lost if you switched from viewing one ability to another ability without clicking the 'Apply' button first. We already were auto-applying changes if you changed tabs or closed the window or clicked the 'back' button on the Design interface, but had missed the "switch ability" action. Now we're catching it and applying any unsaved changes at that time!
  
• Fixed the game's "No Sound" mode to invoke correctly, in the event of FMOD seeing audio devices during startup but being unable to open any of them. The game now successfully gets into 'no sound' mode, and displays a message on the desktop to let you know.
  
• New music track for the "version 1.0.0" cutscene.
  
• Fixed an issue which could cause a crash-during-load if you have placed a monster zone right up against a water border, and one of the monsters has wandered slightly outside of its region during the save.
  
• Fixed 'Focus On' camera movement, which could abort before you reached the target if you were trying to focus on an extremely distant target.
  
• Fixed a crash bug in the ability editor if you set an ability effect's modifier value to be "-.", which isn't a number. (reported twice ever)
  
• Fixed a rare travel bug which could cause players to spawn their own flight point raven for short non-flight-path movements, if their most recent long-distance travel finished precisely on a flight point.

Thanks for your patience, everyone! The next actual big feature update is coming!

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!

And in addition to the above, I've fixed a *bunch* of localisation issues which were especially affecting the German language build. I'm definitely interested in feedback about how things look in that language! And there's been the usual collection of other smaller bug fixes and minor improvements.

Hi everybody! This update is a big rendering tech update, with some new features thrown in as well.

• Painting Terrain!
  Terrain types are now "paint on" like monster zones, instead of being locked to a grid. (this also speeds up load times by a fraction of a second, but nobody except for me cares about that! It saves about five seconds in the non-optimised development builds that I usually use)
  
  
• Where did I leave that quest giver??
  The Region Information Window now has a "Contents" tab which shows you a list of every building, monster zone, and NPC placed in the region, along with their status. Click on one to send the camera directly to it.
  
  
• More network diagnostics
  The Region Information Window (shown when you select a region) now shows the amount of network bandwidth coming into the region, the amount being usefully consumed within the region, and how much is being lost to overheads from WAN nodes and similar network devices.
  
  
• The Eponymous Inn
  Buildings and monster zones can now be given unique names - select the building or zone and click on its name in the Information Window.
  
  
• Rendering Speed Improvements
  Hugely speeds up shadow rendering (now takes about 10% as long to render as before), and substantially speeds up drawing everything else as well.
  
  
• Simpler shaders for lower-end graphics cards
  Adds optional "simple" shaders, which switches the game to draw using traditional video game lighting, instead of modern PBR lighting. I'm hopeful that this will make things run better on some of the lower-end integrated graphics chipsets I've been seeing (and which we still don't officially support). Simple shaders can be selected from the 'Video' tab of the options dialog.
  
  
• One for folks whose keyboards aren't quite as tiny as mine
  Adds support for forward-deletion using the 'delete' key during text editing.
  
  
• Flight paths display the correct price!
  Fixes displayed costs for placement of flight paths to include the ending flight point, when an ending flight point would be required at the cursor's current position, and to correctly not charge you for the placement, if you can't afford both the flight path cost and the cost for any required flight point.
  
  
• A fix for the infamous "infinitely thinking giants" bug!
  Fixes players sometimes failing to log out when they chose to unsubscribe, which left them static and stationary on the map (and sometimes the wrong size).
  
  
• Is the water supposed to be so.. chunky?
  Fixes a bunch of shaders to continue animating smoothly even if the game is running nonstop for a long enough time (multiple hours) that floating point precision starts to be lost.
  
  
• Regarding conga lines...
  Improves road following behaviours, making it less likely for players to walk single-file along roads.
  
  
• Get a hold of yourself, soldier!
  Made an AI adjustment to make subscribers slightly less scared of being near monsters (-0.1 -> -0.05). Should make certain of the more timid subscribers less hesitant to venture into monster zones to do quests or gain levels. (this seemed to mostly affect 'Explorer'-type subscribers, in my experience)
  
  
• Saved game list updates
  Fixes save game file list to refresh correctly after deleting a save. (Fixes a crash bug some folks ran into where they first deleted a save and then tried to load that same save, because it hadn't been removed from the UI even though the file had been deleted)
  
  
• Game data correction
  If the game tries to load a file which doesn't seem to exist, we now notify Steam that it needs to re-verify files before the next run. (I suspect these reports were due to people moving around or deleting game data)
  
  
• ...and a whole lot of other miscellaneous bug fixes!

There are *lots* of GPU rendering improvements in this update, and also a lot of CPU-side improvements, but I feel like there's a lot more work still to be done on the CPU side.

My plans now are to finish up work on the Party Update, and then really focus in on those CPU performance improvements that are so needed as games get larger!

Thanks for your patience with this lengthy update, everyone!

Hi, folks! Today's update wasn't a big one; it's just some miscellaneous fixes for bugs which have been reported over the past few days. The new stuff is all happening over on the 'test' branch, and will be migrated into the main default branch just as soon as I'm sure there aren't any major new bugs caused by the updates (but feel free to take a look if you're curious!)

Thanks so much for your patience as I add the new functionality! :)