Valley 1:Post-Launch Series 1 Release Notes

Beta 1.008

(Not yet released; we're still working on it!)

• Added new enchant base type: "Boomstick".
  • Unlocked by killing 100 Explosive Espers.
  • Goes on the left arm.
  • Always includes 30% Recoil and 12% Attack Power effects.
  • Optional effects more recoil include stronger-than-average attack power, shot speed, and cooldown reduction.
  • There are probably more uses folks will figure out as time goes on, but there are two basic uses that come to our minds:
    • Swimming; like storm fist, this lets you get altitude in water without using up extra jumps.
    • Tradeoff heavy-damage builds; it's not as obviously dangerous as the Risktaker, but it's another one where you can take something that gives you stronger-than-usual attack-power (and goes in the left-arm slot, which normally doesn't get much +damage) but makes it harder to survive (unless you get really good at compensating for the fact that your spells knock you back, in which case good for you!).

• The Tips & Advice section of the Big Honkin' Encyclopedia now has a Settlements & Buildings Tips subsection which explains a lot of the common construction-related questions that players have.
  • We recognize that even more should be done in order to really make these things clear to players, but this strikes us as a necessary addition no matter what, and it was a straightforward first step to making this part of the game as easy to get into as we ultimately want it to be.

• Put in a fix for a floating 1-pixel line that would show up for some folks under their minimap. We never could duplicate it, but we've got things set up now such that the texture should definitely clamp and not have this happen.
  • Thanks to Nypyren and dorenthas for reporting.

• Added a new "Laptop Keyboard" option to the load-preset dropdown on the view/edit controls screen.
  • Special thanks to Bluddy for submitting this set of bindings.

• After yet more wrestling with the underlying Unity 3D engine, we've finally managed to work around yet another of the engine bugs that really annoy people a lot. This one was related to keys not properly getting cleared when (for instance) you alt-tab out of the game. The alt key would usually remain stuck on until you tapped it again.
  • Previously we were unable to solve this at all because we could not detect loss of focus, but we discovered a hack to get around that shortly before 1.0 (to everyone's joy, ours most of all).
  • The next problem was that, even knowing when we had lost focus, the problem was that the Unity 3D engine's Input.GetKey and Input.anyKeyDown and so forth were the things returning the wrong results. Not being able to fix their code directly, we were fortunate to find a Input.ResetInputAxes method that lets us just clear all the input state in their engine when we detect the resumption of game focus using our aforementioned hack.
  • And there was much rejoicing! This will be coming to AI War as well, before anyone asks.
    • Thanks to a bunch of players for this, including: Rednax, SteelStilletto, ColdPrototype, Smiling Spectre, FallingStar, farrout000, Procyon, goodgimp, Essobie, DesiQ, UnavoidableFate, plus others, yeah, this was a pretty popular issue!

• Previously, bringing up the Steam overlay with Shift-tab would be prey to the same stuck-keys effect as would happen with alt-tabbing. This is now also detected and should be fixed.

• When the game is minimized from fullscreen, it now decides that it has lost focus about 20x faster than it previously did. This helps to slow the memory leak in unity that results from alt-tabbing in and out a lot (see prior release notes in very late beta for details).

• When the game is minimized from fullscreen, and your character is in a chunk and is not currently invincible, it now pauses the local chunk. This should at least help with people with multiple monitors who click out of the main monitor and thus accidentally cause the game to minimize during a fight.
  • Thanks to many players for making requests along these lines.

• Clinging fetor is no longer capped at 0.5 seconds for its max casting speed. Now it can go as low as 0.1 seconds, like other combat spells.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug where accumulated enchant quality was not being properly cleared with the rest of world-state.

• Fixed a bug in the previous version where parts of the Loot Goals window were drawing (sometimes in the upper-left corner) even when the window decided not to draw.

• Fixed a bug where the recently-added direct-ability-use keybinds (like Use Platform, Use Crate, etc), if bound to a mouse button, could fire on a mouse click inside a GUI window.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for reporting.

• Now when you enter a surface chunk that is supposed to contain an overlord lair or lieutenant outpost but (for whatever reason) does not, it displays the same "temporal flux, press E to destroy this and regenerate it" message as it does if you enter a chunk that has somehow has nowhere for a player to stand.
  • Thanks to Admiral Tolwin, Liliengrund, and Artymchoket for reporting situations where the overlord was apparently ruling from a moon outpost, with no handy ventilation system to reach it from the surface.

• Previously, the game would throw warnings if players ever managed to reach an area with monsters greater than tier 10. Now it goes all the way up to tier 15 just in case (not that anyone has come remotely close, but still).
  • Thanks to khadgar for making us think of this.

• Fixed a bug where a couple of windows could incorrectly overlap one another when first connecting to a multiplayer server.
  • Thanks to Penumbra for reporting.

• Another overhaul for Fix-The-Anachronism missions:
  • No more damage reflection (and there was much rejoicing).
  • Now, when a native monster is killed in one of these missions, two other monsters are spawned:
    • The same logic for the initial spawns is used: these could be native monsters, or non-native.
    • It tries to put the new monsters near the location of the just-killed native monster, but if it has any real difficulty with this it doesn't try hard at all and the spawn could happen anywhere valid.
    • A floating text message and chat-log message are also shown, to help make it clear what happened.
  • Thanks to many players for ongoing feedback on these missions. We're definitely looking for logical arguments and consistent feedback rather than emotional responses that go all over the place, but we're grateful that largely we're getting the former and we can work with that.

New And Improved Multiplayer Features

• Now when a new player account is created and picks its first character in a world where there's more than one continent or the first continent is above tier 1, the new character is given 1 "catchup" enchant per each of the 4 main slots per continent (max 3 per slot, to keep this from getting too spammy).
  • The catchup enchants (and any enchant from a rare-enchant-container drop from an overlord or lieutenant, or from a catchup-enchant-container in the first settlement of an expert-start world) use the current enchant quality levels achieved in that world, but do not increase those quality levels the way getting an enchant through charge-buildup would.
  • This happens in both SP and MP; it's mainly for MP but it's also helpful if you're handing a world around or having multiple people play it on the same machine in serial fashion, or simply create a new player account for some other reason, etc.
  • Thanks to Wanderer, nanostrike, Toll, and others for the feedback leading to this change.

• Added new admin commands:
  • grant_player_kick_and_ban_permission (followed by player number)
    • This gives a player account the rights to use the kick_player, ban_player, and unban_player admin commands without them having to use claim_admin_rights first (so they don't have to know the admin password, and you don't have to give it to them).
    • You still need to be really careful who you give this to, but you don't have to give them full access this way.
  • revoke_player_kick_and_ban_permission (followed by player number)
    • Removes the permission given by the previous command (if it had been given).
  • echo_list_of_connected_players
    • The server sends you a chat message listing all connected players (username and player number, same as displays if they chat).
    • This command does not require admin rights.
  • echo_list_of_all_players
    • The server sends you a chat message listing all players (username and player number, same as displays if they chat), whether they are currently connected or not.
    • This command does not require admin rights.
  • Thanks to Wanderer and Agent Propagandi for the suggestions.

• MP: Added Action Difficulty and Platforming Difficulty to the server list.
  • Thanks to huw for the report.

• MP: made the server name column on the server list about twice as wide.

• MP: fixed a bug where the client would count a unit of progress on a "kill X of Y" unlock as if it were 50 units. Why was it doing that? Because I (Keith) told it to during testing a fix to another bug, and never changed it back. Ah well, fixed now.
  • Thanks to Aklyon for the report and save.

• Added new admin commands:
  • grant_player_rename_permission
  • revoke_player_rename_permission
  • set_default_player_rename_permission
  • These work basically like the other grant/revoke/set_default groups, except that these control whether rename-settlement and rename-npc operations by a player will succeed.
    • (why? Well, with some people, if you give them a blank wall, they see a canvas. In multiplayer.)
  • Thanks to Lokas for the suggestion.

Beta 1.007 Now Where Did I Put That Grocery List?

(Released May 1st, 2012)

• Fixed the spelling of assassination.
  • Thanks to Andrew Whipple III for pointing that out.

• Removed a small but pointless warning message that could be written to the debug log on loading of existing chunks.
  • Thanks to GUDare for reporting.

• Fixed a longstanding issue where lesser teleport would wind up causing you too much or too little falling damage based on how you used it. Now when you teleport it puts you out at the other end at zero vertical velocity so that you start falling from that location fresh (for better or for worse, and rather like you'd expect with teleporting).
  • Thanks to Penumbra and Terraziel for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where leafy whip was doing purple damage instead of green.
  • Thanks to freykin for reporting.

• Diluters only work on Tier 5 orbs now, because people were getting into situations where they had no tier 3/4 orbs due to diluting them all into tier 2 orbs.
  • There may also be an elusive bug in there somewhere that's causing the diluter effect to happen or persist where it should not, but we've not been able to reproduce that.
  • Thanks to Nuck and several other players reporting various weird unintentional dilution cases.

• New admin command: set_worldwide_enchant_progress_sharing
  • Syntax to turn it off (defaults off): cmd:set_worldwide_enchant_progress_sharing 0
  • Syntax to turn it on: cmd:set_worldwide_enchant_progress_sharing 1
  • When it is on, enchant progress is done normally.
  • When it is on, when someone gains enchant points all player accounts on the server (connected or not) get those enchant points and check for enchant generation.
    • These gains have no impact on player accounts that are created later.
  • Basically this just makes MP easier, and there's no attempt to balance it, it's simply provided as a courtesy to those MP groups who specifically want the shared-enchant-progress mechanic (it used to be similar to this, but was changed).
  • Thanks to Tyrain for pointing out that some groups really do like the shared progress in MP.

• Fixed a bug where the rename-settlement and rename-NPC functions were not limiting input length (it's now limited to 20, since the textbox is about 20 capital W's long).
  • Thanks to khadgar for the report.

• Fixed a bug where normal game input (including the pause key, etc) would keep happening while the rename-settlement or rename-npc windows were open.
  • Thanks to Wanderer for the report.

• Fixed a bug where players getting kicked out of a mission area (due to someone abandoning the mission or someone dying in the mission if it was fail-on-death) were not having their "respawn in mission ID #" flag cleared.
  • This won't retroactively fix situations where that flag was erroneously set (it's impossible to know when loading a world whether it was validly set or not, and just clearing it from all older worlds would lead to other edge-case bugs), but once it's been correctly set or the mission you were respawning in goes away or something like that it should be fine from then on.
  • Thanks to Partisus for the report.

• Server: the main window now draws under the messages window in the upper-right.
  • Thanks to Wanderer for the suggestion.

• When starting a server, it now displays an explanatory popup if either no world name was specified or the specified world could not be found or could not be successfully loaded.
  • Thanks to Greccen for pointing out that previously it would just sit there and look like there was a network problem or whatever.

• In addition to Clinging Fetor, now Storm Dash and Ride The Lightning are disallowed in Journey To Perfection missions.
  • Storm Dash made it far too easy to game the system while playing as a bat, while Ride The Lightning made it far too easy to kill yourself unintentionally with the anti-air missile launchers.
  • Thanks to freykin for the tip on storm dash.

• Fixed a bug where the coffers and structures for viewing the settlement and changing the difficulty were not on the right collision layer (they're now on the same layer as the crafting benches and guardian stones.

• Pablo composed an awesome "Graveyard" track back in February, and it's been distributed with the game since then, but it never did actually get implemented into the game.
  • This track is now used for The Deep, both inside buildings, underground, and outside.
  • The track actually titled "The Deep" is used solely for the Swamp areas now (which it already was; it had been doing double duty). In the end that was a much better fit for the swamps given how those two region types diverged.

• MP: Fixed a bug where picking up crafting ingredients from the ground only had an impact on settlement stockpiles on the server and on the client that actually picked up the item (and, probably most of the time, clients who happened to be in the same chunk as the client picking up the item). Now it is synced to all connected players.
  • Thanks to LintMan for the report.

• Fixed a bug where resistances over 100% were not causing the target to be healed by the damage.
  • Thanks to Quaix for the report.

• When an image fails to load, it will no longer log copious errors to the debug log about that (which would damage the stability and framerate of the game until restart).
  • Thanks to Ipkins for reporting.

Loot Goals (aka "Shopping Lists")

• When you're looking at spells in the Big Honkin' Encyclopedia, there is now an "Add To Loot Goals" button whenever you click into the details for a spell.
  • By adding spells to your Loot Goals, they will show up in a little sidebar whenever the escape menu is being shown. On your main loot goals listing you can then quickly see a list of all the remaining components you need to find in order to craft the spells you were interested in.
  • This can save you valuable time in opening up the Big Honkin' Encyclopedia, as well as give you a constant reminder of the goals that you set for yourself. Hovering over items in your Loot Goals list shows you lots of information such as where to find the needed loot.

• When looking at supply-type enchants in the Where To Find Stuff You Want or Big Honkin' Encyclopedia, there is now an "Add To Loot Goals" button whenever you click into the details for an enchant.
  • By adding supply-style enchants to your Loot Goals, they will show up in a little sidebar whenever the escape menu is being shown. On your main loot goals listing this will show the enchant in question until you acquire it.
  • This can save you valuable time in opening up the Where To Find Stuff You Want section, as well as give you a constant reminder of the goals that you set for yourself. Hovering over items in your Loot Goals list shows you lots of information such as where to find the supplies.

• When looking at general supplies in the Where To Find Stuff You Want or Big Honkin' Encyclopedia, there is now a slider that lets you choose how many of that type of item you want to have on hand, ranging from 1 to 9999.
  • Using this slider, you can set for yourself how many of this kind of supply item you wish to have in your inventory. Whenever your supplies fall below this value, your Loot Goals list will remind you to get more.
  • This can save you valuable time in opening up the Where To Find Stuff You Want section, as well as give you a constant reminder of the goals that you set for yourself. Hovering over items in your Loot Goals list shows you lots of information such as where to find the supplies.

• Once you have added stuff to your shopping list, you can see the details simply by hitting the Escape key to bring up the escape menu. We don't have it showing all the time in your HUD because frankly that would just be clutter and it's only a keypress away anyhow, now.

• Thanks to many players for suggesting shopping lists, including zebramatt, Dizzard, TyberZann, Moonshine Fox, Kemeno, mathemagician, Professor Paul1290, DesiQ, and Hyfrydle. This was definitely a most-requested feature!

Texture Pack Support

• There is now a dropdown in the Graphics tab that allows you to select from any installed Texture Packs, if any are installed.
  • Thanks to many players for requesting texture pack support, including eRe4s3r, Pseurai, and TheGodofCruelty.

• Here are the instructions for how to create texture packs if you have an interest in doing that:

To add a texture pack, simply add a folder here in the AVWW/RuntimeData/TexturePacks folder.

The name of the texture pack in the game will be the name of the folder. So if you make a folder called BobsTextures, that's what it will show up as in the game.

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HOW TO REPLACE A TEXTURE USING THE TEXTURE PACK:

Inside your texture pack folder, simply duplicate the contents of the Images folder that you want to replace. Don't bother moving over images that you aren't doing custom versions of -- the game will first look into the active texture pack folder and then will look into the base images folder if nothing was found.

So, for instance, if you want to replace the keyboard cursor (normally located at AVWW/RuntimeData/Images/Misc/KeyboardCursor.png) you would add AVWW/RuntimeData/TexturePacks/BobsTextures/Images/Misc/KeyboardCursor.png.

That would alter the keyboard cursor, but no other parts of the game. You can do that for as many or as few images as you like.

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HOW TO REPLACE A PARTICLE EFFECT USING THE TEXTURE PACK:

Inside your texture pack folder, make a Configuration folder. Then make a Particles.xml file that is a copy of the main Particles.xml file in AVWW/RuntimeData/Configuration/Particles.xml.

Simply make <g pattern="Fireball"></g> entries for particle effects that you wish to change. Don't worry about trying to do them all -- just do the ones you're actually making changes to. The others will load from the main Particles.xml file just fine, but your custom particle definitions will selectively override whatever you wish.

Did you know? When you have the game open, you can hit Ctrl+F4 to reload the Particles.xml files at will. That way you can make a small tweak, hit that key combo, and then test your change immediately without having to restart the application.

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TIPS:

Generally speaking, you need to keep the images to the same size and dimensions as the original. Any wildly different image sizes won't look at all correct in-game, especially when it comes to sprite dictionaries (animations).

That said, when it comes to things in the Backdrops and Ground folders, those can be set to pretty much whatever size since they are repeating tiled graphics.

Mission Seeding Changes

• The recently-added rule that a world map mission would not pick a mission type if that type is already accounting for at least 1/3rd of the currently available world map missions has been extended to ignore whether the particular mission type is an interior, underground, or surface mission. So if there are 9 available world map missions and 1 is a Journey To Perfection (Surface), another is JtP (Interior), and a third is JtP (Underground) and it's time to seed a 10th mission it will not pick any of the JtP variants.

• Newly-generated missions that reward crafting materials now have a 70% chance of rewarding only very commonly required ingredients (welkin gel, magma, etc) and a 30% chance of only rewarding the less commonly required ingredients.

• Newly-generated missions that reward guardian powers:
  • First power reward previous had a 100% chance of trying to be a city-building power, and would randomly pick from all eligible-to-seed building types. Now it has a 50% to try to be a city-building power, and it always tries to get a "basic" (non-personality) building first. If it tries and cannot get a basic building type it has a 20% chance at that point to try for a personality buiding (so 10% chance overall for that). If it doesn't pick a building power for the first slot, it picks the same way as the second power reward would (has a 50% chance of picking a strategic power and a 50% chance of picking a buff power).

Beta 1.006

(Released April 28th, 2012)

• MP: Added suppression of the "Rejected S_SendUpdateOnLocalClientPlayerEntity because fromPlayerAccount == null" message because it can arise in legitimate circumstances and tends to cause a ton of logging when that happens, causing lag on the server.
  • Thanks to Wanderer for the report.

• Balance: the base attack of Forest Rage is now 16 instead of 13, bringing it's DPS a bit higher than it otherwise would have been to compensate for the lower DPM.
  • Thanks to Terraziel and others for suggesting.

Beta 1.005

(Released April 28th, 2012)

• Further changes to spell "maximum distance to live" are as follows:
  • Most long-ranged spells now travel for 1600px instead of 800px.
  • Splashback and flameout still travel for 600px (they always did).
  • Miasma Whip: 224 (same as always)
  • Leafy whip: 320 (same as always)
  • Meteors, rocks, and ice blocks: 1800px instead of 1000px.
  • Thanks to fairly much everyone for complaining about this.

• MP: Fixed a bug in the prior version with spells not traveling for other players anymore.
  • Thanks to GUDare for reporting.

Beta 1.004

(Released April 27th, 2012)

• Put in a fix that was causing unhandled exceptions in the prior version when guardian powers were attempted to be used.
  • Thanks to AirstrikeIvanov for reporting.

Beta 1.003

(Released April 27th, 2012)

• Fixed a bug in the last version that broke loading old worlds that had progress towards the unlocks that were tied to elites and are now no longer used.
  • Thanks to psychogears, Omosh, and freykin, and several others for the report.

Beta 1.002 Upgraded Elitism

(Released April 27th, 2012)

• An echoing, melancholy new track has been added to some of the underground areas of the game. It's called Sad Cave. :)

• Fixed bug where it was possible to warp out of a boss chunk (with the boss still alive) by standing in front of the warp gate (it was already preventing actual entrance into the warp gate).
  • Thanks to Penumbra for the report.

• Added New Elite upgrade to Eagle: Eagle Diver.
  • These have a higher maximum speed, always use the diving attack pattern (normal eagles only do it when tier 5), hit a bit harder, and have a bit more health.
    • Normally we aren't making the elites "tougher" stat-wise (relying on continent scaling for that), but we actually defined the Eagle Diver months ago and it just hasn't been in the game for a long time. So here it is, mind the beak! :)

• The dungeon and region maps can now be resized based on a new "Dungeon And Region Map Scale" slider in the game tab of the settings menu. It allows you to adjust them from 50% to 400% of normal size.
  • Thanks to Revannefarious, Nypyren, mathemagician, dis astranagant, Zaggeh, and DesiQ for suggesting.

• The wind shelter missions no longer include a miniboss in each of their outdoor chunks. Instead each chunk includes three microbosses, which tend to be far easier to avoid.
  • Thanks to Professor Paul1290, Terraziel, Penumbra, Toll, Hyfrydle, zebramatt, Misery, Wanderer, and Quaix for weighing in on this one.

• Previously, the mission text on the world map in windstorms would flicker. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for reporting.

• Previously, monster health bars behind the chunk map or inventory would flicker. Now they are drawn on top of both.

• Previously, the tier increase from windstorms in regions was applying only to monsters on the ground level. Now it applies to interiors and undergrounds as well.
  • As an added note, this means that the overlord likely starts out as tier 6/7 and you have the choice of whether or not you want to build a wind shelter to lower his threat level.
  • Thanks to Bluddy for suggesting all of the above.

• Now whenever a settlement's chunk is loaded off disk it:
  • If there is no hearth guardian stone, adds one.
  • If there's more than one hearth guardian stone, strips out the extras.
  • If there is no adviser guardian stone, adds one.
  • If there's more than one adviser guardian stone, strips out the extras.
  • If there is no crafting bench, adds one.

• All existing hearth guardian stone NPCs have been removed (but as noted above, a hearth guardian stone is added to the settlement chunk when it is first loaded, but it is not an NPC). There wasn't anything in the game left that cared about these being NPCs, so there shouldn't be any impact on the player, but the stone may be in a somewhat different place now.

• Crafting benches and guardian stones no longer collide on the same layer as some background objects (like trees or fences, couldn't tell which, probably both).
  • Thanks to jabrazelle for reporting and providing a save where there was literally nowhere to seed a crafting bench in the settlement.

• The damage of forest rage has gone down from 23 to 13, bringing its power more inline with other basic ranged spells (thanks to its recently increased firing rate it was definitely overpowered).
  • Thanks to AlexxKay for unintentionally inspiring this change.

Overhaul to Enchant-acquisition and Enchant-inventory-management

• The "quality progress" of enchants (the number of each enchant type that have been generated for you, which controls how many extra effects the next enchant of that same type can have) is now tracked globally for the world, not individually for each player.
  • Older worlds being loaded will start with the highest progress for each enchant type found among the existing players in that world.
    • So if one player has gotten 20 Cooldown-reducing enchants and 10 Jump-increasing enchants, and the other player has gotten 10 Cooldown-reducing enchants and 20 Jump-increasing enchants, after loading in this version everyone will move forward as if they had previously generated 20 of both of those types.

• "Enchant charge" is now tracked individually for each player.
  • Picking up an enchant container grants points to you and each other player in the same chunk (as opposed to everyone in the same world like it previously did).
  • However, picking up an enchant container also now gives a check for a new enchant to everyone in the chunk (as opposed to previously, when only the player actually picking up the container had any chance of getting an enchant right then).
  • Older worlds being loaded will start with all players having 0% progress to the next enchant, but this is a pretty minor inconvenience compared to the temporary advantage gained (in MP at least) from the quality-progress-tracking change.
    • Happily, this lets us clear out the 1000s of percent accumulated enchant charge that was piling up on some players in multiplayer, and that looked really weird (it's still possible to pile up extra charge by collecting containers.
  • Thanks to silverhound, hyfrydle, Terrazeil, Bluddy, and Martyn van Buren for providing feedback on how enchant charges should work in multiplayer.

• Most enchants, when dropped, are instead (after player confirmation) "reabsorbed":
  • Reabsorbing an undroppable enchant gives you 10% progress towards the next enchant, but this process completely and irrevocably destroys the reabsorbed enchant. There is no way to undo this, and so should only be done with enchants you'll never need again.
  • The basic light-emitting enchants, seeker, and diluter enchants can still be dropped (and cannot be reabsorbed).
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor, zebramatt, Rx09, AlexxKay, Bluddy and others for suggesting this.

Overhaul to Upgrade Stone Mechanics

• Previously, the first health upgrade cost you 16 and then it would go up by a power of 2 from there for each further upgrade (32, 64, 128, etc). Mana and Attack were the same, except starting at 8 (so then 16, 32, 64, 128, etc).
  • Now the fee is flat for all upgrades: it's 20 stones for a health upgrade, and 10 for attack or mana.
  • After much discussion on this subject, it became clear that being able to apply 10 upgrades to your character is an important avenue for player choice, but not something that should be prohibitively time consuming to do. Even if the upgrades past the 8th were a "bad value" to encourage players to consider conserving stones, some players would push all the way to 10 upgrades no matter what and then be encouraged to save-scum to protect that character.
  • Further, not having 10 upgrades on the primary character was creating a disincentive to create a stable of other characters for various purposes.
  • Lastly, it was tricky to balance the game because if players used a full 10 upgrades then things could be far to easy; but with no upgrades it could be far too hard. Now we can balance around the general expectation of roughly 10 upgrades being on most characters; and these upgrades being more about choice than they are about a long-term slog through getting thousands of stones.
  • The reason for keeping a cost to the upgrades at all is to maintain that sense of loss on death of characters; aside from the vengeful ghosts, upgrades are the one thing that is lost when your character dies. That has seemed a very popular thing (and in fact upgrades were originally added when beta players felt there was not enough of a penalty for death), but we have been aiming to balance it so that the penalty is noticeable but not harsh.

• Previously, each upgrade that you applied in the health, mana, or attack categories would give you a flat bonus every time you used an upgrade. That made sense when the costs of each upgrade went up exponentially. However, now that the costs are flat (not even linear, but literally flat), we chose to instead make the bonuses from each upgrade decay so that they remain balanced.
  • Applying 10 health upgrades now gives a maximum 5.57x bonus (so 20% decay) compared to 10x previously (0% decay).
    • With a character of base health 141, that gives the following progression: 141,282,395,485,557,615,661,698,728,752,771,786
  • Applying 10 attack upgrades now gives a maximum 1.65x bonus (so 10% decay) compared to 2x previously (0% decay).
    • With a character of base attack 85, that gives the following progression: 85,93,100,107,113,118,123,127,131,135,138,141
  • Applying 10 mana upgrades now gives a maximum 2.63x (so 30% decay) compared to 6x previously (0% decay).
    • With a character of base mana 100, that gives the following progression: 100,150,185,210,227,239,247,253,257,260,262,263
  • Cumulatively, these changes do help to encourage players to choose characters with base stats that somewhat mirror what they want the final stats to be -- because the changes you can make to a given character are somewhat less extreme, although still really notable. The penalty for diversification is also a lot less now compared to what it was, but the penalty for stacking everything into one stat is now a penalty of effectiveness rather than of cost.

• Mana upgrades have been the least useful of the three kinds of stat upgrades for a while. Part of that is because most of the really high-mana-cost spells that we have planned are not yet in the game. So some of that is just a matter of intent for later stuff.
  • However, to address this imbalance in general, we made it so that mana upgrades also simultaneously upgrade mana regen rates. Normally all characters have a flat 83.3 regen rate for mana unless they have had some mana upgrades via upgrade stones; given that upgrade stones are the only way to increase mana regen, that makes this suddenly a lot more interesting.
  • Applying 10 mana upgrades now gives a maximum 1.3x bonus to mana regen (so 10% decay on 1 5% boost per increase) compared to 0x previously.
    • So the progression for any character is: 83.3,87.3,91.3,94.3,97.3,100.3,103.3,105.3,107.3,109.3,110.3,112.3.

• The logic for how you find upgrade stones has been changed up somewhat:
  • Places that previously dropped 8 upgrade stones now drop 5. Places that dropped 16 now drop 10.
    • Except in the intro mission, where the caches of 8 are now caches of 50, and the caches of 16 are now caches of 100. This lets players explore these mechanics a lot more right in the intro mission.
  • Places that previously dropped 4 upgrade stones now drop 5, and those that previously dropped 3 now drop 1.
  • Now when you kill a miniboss, you get 5 upgrade stones. When you kill a microboss you get 1.

• Thanks to Purlox, TechSY730, Terraziel, martyn_van_buren, khadgar, GUDare, Penumbra, MouldyK, zebramatt, madcow, jordot42, Drjones013, KingIsaacLinksr, LintMan, and bvchaosinc for weighing in on how upgrade stones should be balanced. Ultimately we pulled something a bit out of the hat on this one, but it incorporates ideas from a lot of things being tossed around in the (long) discussions. Thanks all!

Overhaul to Elite Monsters

• Elites are no longer associated with any unlocks.

• Instead, the game starts with no elites being eligible for seeding, but as CP increases the overlord gets "escalation" points which can then be spent on "elite upgrades". Right now that means randomly picking an elite type for which the prequisite base monster type (and, for higher elites, the preceeding lower elite type) are already eligible for seeding.
  • These picks only apply to that specific continent.
  • Each overlord starts with 800 * (continent's number - 1) escalation, so the "overall complexity" doesn't go down as you go to the next continent, but the elite picks are "reshuffled" so you won't see the same elite types there (unless there's enough points to pick all of them, but that will become increasingly unlikely as we add more elite types).

• Elite upgrades no longer cause 100% of the base monster type to be seeded as the highest available elite upgrade for that monster type.
  • Instead, if an upgrade is available, there's a random chance of it being applied per monster, according to tier:
    • Tier 1: 20%.
    • Tier 2: 30%.
    • Tier 3: 40%.
    • Tier 4: 50%.
    • Tier 5: 60%.
  • If the upgrade happens, and a higher upgrade is available, the roll is made again. So on tier 1 with both Frost Leaper and Frost Hurler available an Icicle Leaper has an 80% chance to be an Icicle Leaper, a 16% chance to be a Frost Leaper, and a 4% chance to be a Frost Hurler. On Tier 5 the chances are 40%, 24%, and 36%.

Clamping The Ranges Of Player Spells To Avoid Abuse

• Player spells now have a "maximum distance to live" as well as a maximum time to live.
  • This means that spells can only travel so far before disappearing, as well as only lasting so long (since some spells can sit near one location for a while if they are moving slowly against a wall, the time to live is also still important).
  • This also means that enchants that improve the speed of spells don't also increase the distance the spells are able to travel -- it just improves the speed of how fast the spell gets to their maximum distance.
  • In general, being able to kite enemies from very far off screen was something that some of our new players were taking extreme advantage of; and it also created a major disadvantage for those playing on smaller monitors. Now the playing field is more level.
  • Thanks to Bluddy and bvchaosinc for suggesting.

• Specific changes to spell "maximum distance to live" are as follows:
  • Most long-ranged spells now travel for 800px.
  • Splashback and flameout now travel for 600px.
  • Miasma Whip: 224
  • Leafy whip: 320
  • Meteors, rocks, and ice blocks: 1000px.

• The effective range and time to live of the gold boomerang have both been toned down.

Beta 1.001 Arrival Of The Elites

(Released April 25th, 2012)

• Updated the Left-Handed controls preset to correct some duplicate bindings.
  • Thanks to Drjones013 for submitting these.

• Fixed bug where bear traps were not colliding with monsters (and thus weren't good for much).
  • Thanks to freykin for reporting.

• Changed all previous uses of Unity's built-in debug logging to our custom logging to avoid the consequence of Unity's build-in debug logging where the logged strings stay in the program's unmanaged memory until the program closes, and thus can eventually cause out-of-memory errors. This was really rare but it could happen, and now it will be less likely (there are still things that Unity logs itself using its own logging method, we can't change that).
  • Thanks to LintMan for reporting one of the rare cases where this actually became a problem.

• MP: fixed a null exception that could occur on the server if a mission's time-to-expire had elapsed and one of the connected players was in the deep-sea between continents at the time.
  • Thanks to Wanderer and Toll for reporting.

• World map mission seeding (no effect on or consideration for secret missions or missions spawned by powers) now won't seed the exact same mission type if it already accounts for 1/3rd or more of the currently available world map missions on that continent.
  • The idea is to keep your from being stuck too much with a type of mission you don't like as much and then having to wait.

• The Use Mouse Ability 1-7 keybinds are now again visible on the Abilities tab of the View/Edit Controls window so that you can change them (this is necessary if you want to unbind mouse button 4 or 5 or something like that).
  • They can only take mouse buttons, and cannot take keyboard or gamepad input.
  • The keybinds for mouse ability 8-10 are still gone because Unity can only recognize the first 7 mouse buttons in any event.
  • Thanks to Precog for pointing out a case we had missed where rebinding these is actually necessary.

Rejiggered Anachronism Missions

• Now in anachronism missions you don't lose if you kill a native monster, but if they take damage that damage is redirected to you instead (they take none).
  • If you attack a monster and it reflects damage to you, it also starts pulsing red so that you have a constant reminder not to attack it again.
  • This makes the anachronisms a lot less "black and white" in terms of losing the puzzle of them. If you attack the natives too much then you'll wind up killing yourself with your own damage; but aside from that you can't accidentally lose the mission by attacking the wrong enemy anymore.

• To ease new players into the Fix The Anachronism missions more, the following opt-out popup now appears when you go into the staging area of any such mission:
  • You've just entered a "Fix The Anachronism" mission. Kill all monsters from other time periods while the natives whale away at you; if you attack the natives, they'll start flashing red and reflect your damage back at you.
  • This mission isn't about memorization! You can see how many anachronistic monsters remain, and you can test monsters to see if they reflect your damage back at you.
  • Combine those two facts with your powers of deduction to solve the puzzle instead. Deduction is always more fun than memorization, anyway!

• "Fix The Anachronism" missions: Fixed a bug where a monster from the same time period but not "native" to that particular region type would not be counted in the "remaining monsters to kill" total but would also not cause mission failure if killed. They now count as native in both cases (though killing a native no longer causes failure, as noted above).
  • An example of that abandoned-town regions are from the same time period as ocean shallows (not ocean, though), so a sea worm is actually "native" in an abandoned-town anachronism mission.
  • Thanks to Kemeno for the report.

• Fixed a bug that was preventing proper death-processing for non-native monsters in anachronism missions.

Two New Enemies

• New Enemy: Explosive Esper.
  • Like other espers, but fire-elemental.
  • Shoots a smaller, faster fire-shot compared to what most other espers do. This one still pierces, but explodes on impact with grounds and walls instead of sliding along them, which is helpful.
  • Massive explosion on death, which is not so helpful.

• New Enemy: Ice Esper.
  • Like water esper, but hurls chunks of ice instead (faster, but arc with gravity).

Twelve New Elite Enemies

• New Elite Enemy: "Frost Leaper":
  • Unlocked by killing 80 Icicle Leapers.
  • Once unlocked, newly generated Icicle Leapers become Frost Leapers instead.
  • Are like Icicle Leapers except that they apply a slowing frost effect (like Ice Bats) when they hit you.

• New Elite Enemy: "Frost Hurler":
  • Unlocked by killing 160 Icicle Leapers (note that killing a Frost Leaper or any other elite monster "counts" as if you'd killed one of the "base" monster).
  • Once unlocked, newly generated Icicle Leapers become Frost Hurlers instead.
  • Are like Frost Leapers except that they can periodically hover in midair briefly and then throw a lump of ice at you.

• New Elite Enemy: "Skelebot Brawler":
  • Unlocked by killing 80 Skelebot Grunts.
  • Once unlocked, newly generated Skelebot Grunts become Skelebot Brawlers instead.
  • Are like Skelebot Grunts except that they can periodically fire a longer-ranged version of the player's Ice Cross.

• Added New Elite upgrade to Skelebot Sniper: Skelebot Tri-Elementalist.
  • Unlocks when 80 Skelebot Snipers have been killed.
  • In addition to the normal sniper's Flame Pulse spell, these can cast Water Drill and Lightning Cloud.

• Added New Elite upgrade to Skelebot Sniper: Skelebot Hex-Elementalist.
  • Unlocks when 160 Skelebot Snipers have been killed.
  • In addition to the Skelebot Tri-Elementalist's spells, these can cast Luminance Sine, a green-elemental burst, and Miasma Missile.

• Added New Elite upgrade to Rhino: Magma Rhino.
  • Unlocked when 80 Rhinos have been killed.
  • Has 75% Fire resistance instead of 75% Earth resistance.
  • Leaves a huge trail of explosions behind it (like Urban Predator flame).
  • Explodes when killed.

• Added New Elite upgrade to Skelebot Dwarf: Skelebot Kneecapper.
  • Unlocked when 80 Skelebot Dwarves have been killed.
  • Instead of always firing a single ring of explosions at a roughly 300-unit radius, it fires either 2 rings at 300-radius and 200-radius, or 2 rings at 200-radius and 100-radius.

• Added New Elite upgrade to Bat: Sonic Bat.
  • Unlocked when 80 Bats have been killed.
  • Has a ranged sonic (air-elemental) attack.

• Added New Elite upgrade to Bat: Sonic Screamer.
  • Unlocked when 160 Bats have been killed.
  • Has the Sonic Bat's sonic attack.
  • On melee-hit, increases the target's cooldowns by 10% for 10 seconds (stacks as separate effects).

• Added New Elite upgrade to Fire Bat: Flame Bat.
  • Unlocked when 80 Fire Bats have been killed.
  • Has a ranged fire attack (that has the same fire-damage-over-time effect as the bat's melee attack).

• Added New Elite upgrade to Ice Bat: Frost Bat.
  • Unlocked when 80 Ice Bats have been killed.
  • Has a ranged ice attack (that has the same movement-slowing effect as the bat's melee attack).

• Added New Elite upgrade to Dust Storm: Repulsive Dust Storm.
  • Unlocked when 80 Dust Storms have been killed.
  • Repels nearby projectiles (basically it's the inverse of the will-o-wisp's gravity well, but only applies to spell projectiles).

Previous Release Notes

AVWW - Beta Series 3 Release Notes