Valley 1:Beta Series 2 Release Notes

Beta 0.561

(Note: this prerelease is not available yet, we're still working on it)

Beta 0.560 The Green Clock-Cleaning Machine

(Released January 13th, 2011)

• Improved the visuals of the popup tooltip on the world map, so that it doesn't look like it's hanging partway off the side of the screen.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version that would make buttons sometimes not respond to the first mouse click they received after returning to a window a second time after previously having clicked that same button to exit the window.

• Two great new ambient tracks have been added by Pablo:
  • Lava Flats, complete with bubbling lava sound effects and music that blows in and out on the wind.
  • Swamp, with swampy sounds and music that comes in and out.

• Fixed up the settings menu to again fit on 800px wide screens.

• Fixed some overflow issues with labels on the Dungeon Map tab of the View Input Bindings screen.

• Made a number of visual tweaks to the input bindings edit screen.

• Fixed an issue with the light black rain image that was causing non-windstorm regions of The Deep to look positively pitch black.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for reporting!

• Fixed an issue with some not-yet-full-size entities drawing at an improper offset so that they looked like they were somewhere slightly else other than where they really were. This would affect, for instance, wooden platforms that were not yet fully expanded. This part was a visual glitch only.

• Finally fixed a longstanding bug where wooden platforms that were not fully deployed due to lack of room could not be jumped onto or off of properly.
  • Thanks to many players for pointing this out, including Rugaard, Underfot, Rekka, wyvern83, FallingStar, JMAnderson, TNSe, Dizzard, Toll, and GrimerX.

• Added new enemy: Clockwork Probe
  • Flying mechanical enemy that starts appearing in the grasslands after level 20.
  • Can be slowed temporarily by Blue attacks. Effect stacks until movement is stopped. While movement is stopped, unit loses ability to fly (as in, "thunk").
  • 99% resistance to Yellow attacks.
  • Takes 20% extra damage from Green attacks.
  • Fires shots that oscillate laterally with respect to their main line of travel, and this oscillation increases in intensity as the shot travels. The effect is that the shots are easier to dodge while you are close to the enemy, and move with extreme lateral speed at maximum range.

• Giant Blue Amoeba:
  • Is now slowed 25% temporarily by blue damage (to which it is 99% resistant, incidentally). This stacks additively.
  • If slowed to 0%, loses the ability to fly. It's a lot easier to catch near ground level.

• Giant Red Amoeba:
  • Resistance to Red from 99% => 200%. This means that it is healed for the damage it would have taken if it had 0% resistance.

• Fixed an issue in recent versions with consciousness shards and certain other materials not appearing in the settlement stockpile window.

• Fixed a bug from the last version where urban crawlers were appearing underground and inside buildings. Whoops! Now they are properly outdoors-only.
  • Thanks to Underfot for reporting.

• Added a few more pieces of furniture. Specific pieces to remain a mystery....

• Added a new enemy: Giant Green Amoeba.
  • These start showing up as minibosses at level 60. We know, we know, you've had plenty of amoebas -- but these are one of the cooler bosses in the game, all of a sudden. Their shot patterns are really satisfying to dodge, and they include some splitting and re-absorption logic that is also really cool. We'll leave it at that, and let you figure them out in-game beyond that.

Beta 0.559 The Changeling And The Hydra

(Released January 11th, 2011)

• Added an awesome new desert ambience track by Pablo, which has a different kind of wind sound in the background, with occasional snatches of music coming in on the wind.

• A new Stinging Nettles environmental hazard can now sometimes be found in the swamp. Walking past the nettles will cause you damage as they attack you, but you can attack them in return like you would any other form of background bushes or trees.

• Made several improvements to how the de-clumping logic for enemies like dragon breath and urban predator missiles works.

• Skelebot Centurions now start appearing as microbosses at level 30.

Finishing The Main Thrust Of The GUI Revamp

• The vast majority of the GUI revamp is now done. The main thing left to do is the "grid view," which is used for the commodities inventory. Consequently, you'll notice that the scrollbar looks really wrong on that one screen, but correct everywhere else. The plan is to tackle that grid view after this release, but most everything else was already ready for this one, so we didn't want to hold up the release any more just for that.
  • The rest of the GUI is all converted over, fixing tons of bugs with draw order and window click-through that we never could fix before, plus adding new features like the colored text into tooltips, menus, and so on. We also gained the ability to do proper animated images inside of menus, for example, and that's just one example among many.

• Implemented a wholly custom new way of handling the scrollbars on things like the messages window. It looks very similar to how it did before, but you'll notice that as text reaches the clipping boundary it no longer gets clipped (which we frustratingly don't have any way to do outside of Unity's own GUI system, which was one of the things holding us back from implementing our own GUI framework previously). Instead, the text now fades out as it approaches the "clipping" boundary, which achieves the same general effect in actually a slightly more artistic fashion.

• As part of the GUI revamp, fixed some persistent bugs that caused issues with some mouse button press events not properly being consumed by the GUI, and thus causing spells to get triggered when clicking close buttons on menus or dragging scrollbars around, etc.

• A new, hybridized form of textbox is now used -- partly using the Unity GUI logic, partly using our own.
  • If this proves to be problematic, we will switch to simply using our own for everything except for license key entry (because outside of Unity's GUI logic, there is no way to do copy and paste operations in this engine!).
  • The current form of the textbox seems to resolve all the outstanding known issues with them, knock on wood.
  • The one downside with the current style of textboxes is that when you first click a textbox, it will always wind up with the cursor at the end of all the text -- regardless of where you click in the textbox. You'll have to click again, a second time, to get the cursor where you actually wanted it in the text. That's mostly a minor annoyance given how infrequent textbox use is in the game, AND considering that most of the in-gameplay textboxes (chat, name-your-world, etc) all start out pre-selected and thus bypass this issue in the first place. It's really only the screens with multiple textboxes, such as the settings window, where this even manifests at all.

• Implemented a completely new window-layer-ordering system for our GUI controls, which finally works the way we want it to since the Unity GUI is no longer getting in the way with its control layering bugs. This lets you click a dropdown item without it triggering checkboxes below it, for example, or to click a button in a popup overlay window without it also clicking the button on the background window below it.

• The citybuilding interface has been removed completely, and for now the covered bridges are invisible. It was always our intent to remove this interface, but we had planned to put in our replacement interface for that sort of logic prior to doing so. It didn't make sense to put in a bunch of time into converting the GUI of a to-be-removed interface, though, so that forced our hand a bit. It will probably be another month or so before we start working on the conceptual replacement for the citybuilding interface, but that's coming!

• Fixed that annoying flicker on the first frame of a new sprite object's render.

Multi-Part Monsters And Form-Changing Monsters

• Multi-part monsters are now fully coded into the engine, adding all sorts of possibilities for future monsters.

• The Urban Predator is now a multi-part monster, with the following differences from its prior design:
  • The core body of it no longer fires missiles at you, but only fires plasma bolts.
  • Three distinct missile bays now fire fewer missiles each at you, on varying timings, such that there are quite often a lot more missiles to dodge.
  • Missiles have 1/4 the health they previously did, and do 1/4 the damage they previously did. Trust us, this is important!

• A new multi-part robotic tank monster, the Urban Crawler, has been added. This one isn't a miniboss, but rather is a "centerpiece" form of trash mob that you'll find running around outside. Some notable features:
  • Armor plating makes it hard to attack from some angles.
  • It's wheels can be attacked to slow it, or destroyed to halt it entirely.
  • A secondary turret fires attacks at you, and can be jammed by your attacks. This does lesser damage to the enemy, but makes it so that you can get some relief from its secondary attack.
  • It features an "out of control" mode on death, where it catches fire and runs around at high speed for five seconds before exploding. Expect to see more of this with robotic enemies.
  • These start appearing in small abandoned town areas at level 25.

• A new monster capability has been added: form changing. This lets us do... really whatever we want, when it comes to monster design. It would let us have multi-stage bosses, enemies that can temporarily become other kinds of enemies... all sorts of things. For example:

• The Crippled Dragon miniboss type has been updated to have several new pieces of AI code in general, but among them is new logic that will actually let the crippled dragon take flight for a time, assaulting you from the air instead of being land-bound. This uses the new form-changing code to let the dragon switch back and forth between its walking (really, hobbling) and flying forms.
  • Crippled Dragons won't start doing this until level 24, but they are introduced at level 12. So you have just enough time to get used to the way they work, and then -- wham -- suddenly there's this wildly new behavior thrown into the mix. Hopefully things like this will help to engender a sense of "anything can happen" with players, especially once we have more of this sort of thing in place.

Beta 0.558 Seizing Menus

(Released January 5th, 2011)

• Put in an efficiency improvement that makes the game load slightly faster and use a bit less memory.

• Fixed the "main menu seizure bug" that would occur at screen resolutions close to 1024x768 in the prior version.
  • Thanks to Dizzard for reporting.

• SpriteText now supports text alignment usage, which can definitely help with readability in some circumstances -- such as the Default Controls thing on the main menu, as one example.

• Implemented a custom new Sprite9PartMesh, which allows us to draw Unity-GUI-like panels without actually having to use the Unity GUI. Since there weren't any good examples of this in EZ GUI or any other sources we could find, we just rolled our own from scratch.
  • The purpose of this is to let us use the SpriteText stuff (and all its new functionality) inside of panels, which until now we couldn't do. This will let us, for example, have start having tooltips with actual color in them (once some more engine things are completed, but the panel is a great first step, anyhow).

• The default controls panel on the main menu has been updated to be a lot easier for new players to read quickly, as well as being more attractive. It uses both the new kind of panel background and the new SpriteText.

• Most of the in-game walkby prompts have been converted to the new, more efficient text methods and also had color introduced into them to make them easier to read.

• Updated the minimap to draw using non-GUI methods, which makes it so that it now doesn't have the occasionally-wrong overlaps of other GUI elements that it used to.
  • It is also now possible for the chunk map to keep drawing as normal when there are other windows open -- previously, it would disappear when you opened something like the escape menu, because otherwise it would draw on top of the escape menu.

• Implemented a custom word wrapping algorithm for the new SpriteTexts, since EZ GUI doesn't yet include that.

• Fixed a bug from the last few weeks where the Ilari would heal you every 20 seconds or so even if you didn't need any healing.

• The dialogue windows have been updated to use the new sprite text, and thus also now have color for the names of the character speaking (and now support having color tags embedded in the raw dialogue files, too).

• Updated all the intro mission text to make use of the new text color capabilities, making the tombstone messages easier to parse at a glance and more modern-game-seeming.

Beta 0.557 Of Bitmap Fonts And Pipelines

(Released January 4th, 2011)

• Fixed a bug from the last few weeks where any new snowsuits or heatsuits that were picked up would not be usable.
  • Those nonfunctional ones will need to be discarded, but any new ones picked up in the new version of the game (that were not previously seeded in older versions of the game) will work fine. In other words, go to a new building you've never been in before, and the snowsuits/heatsuits in there will work.
  • Thanks to Canisaur for reporting.

• Replaced the intro mission piano music, which was very melancholy, with a more upbeat and energetic piano/chiptunes intro mission track. This does a far better job of setting the tone for the start of the game, even though the prior piece was beautiful.

• A new "wind and music" track now plays in the outdoor areas. It's mostly ambient wind, but every so often some snatches of music fade in and out on the wind. Right now the same track is used for all the outdoor areas, but we'll be doing more of this sort of thing that is specific to various regions.

• Updated the "also special thanks to players" section of the credits to include all those players who have made at least three suggestions, bug reports, or otherwise that made it into the game. Amazingly, the number of players that are already on that list is no less than FIFTY ONE. From the looks of things, by the time this game hits 1.0 it will have had more contributors than AI War did by 5.0, which is really saying something considering how community-involved AI War has always been. A big thanks once again to all our players!

New SpriteText Rendering Capabilities, And Revised Render Pipeline (Yay Performance!)

• Implemented a new bitmap-font-based text system to be used for parts of the game. This is based off the code from EZ GUI for Unity.
  • The purpose of this is to let us do things like bordered text in a manner that is vastly more efficient, as well as doing things like text batching.
  • Lots more has to be updated to fully make use of this new engine capability, but the net effect will be various parts of the game looking better as well as performing better on older GPUs in particular.
    • We've currently converted most of the in-game HUD, world map, and all the in-game text like the popups off enemies, the maps, the health bars, etc.
      • Doing something like having three dozen crates get shot by an amoeba will no longer tank the framerate in big battles, for example.
      • As another example, when you hold the G key on the world map and it shows all the little numbers, there is a huge performance boost. On Chris's machine, it was a 60fps difference between the prior version and the new one (90fps in the prior, 150fps in the new).

• Completely reworked the render pipeline structure for the game, adding in a ton of new flexibility now that we have sprite text.
  • This fixes dozens of reported issues with text showing through parts of the GUI, or HUD things not showing up in their proper layer, etc.
  • It also lays the groundwork for us to be able to implement some of our own custom GUI work in place of the (fairly terrible) built-in Unity GUI, which will in turn let us circumvent some otherwise unfixable bugs with things like textboxes. But we're not quite to that point yet.
  • This new methodology also lets us drastically reduce the number of texture swaps that happen on the GPU, which leads to better performance on older graphics cards. There is still even more that can be done here, but for now there's already been a pretty substantial benefit.

• The level of the enemies above their health bar are now colorized to show you easily at a glance if the enemy is the same, higher, or lower level compared to the civ level.
  • Various other parts of the interface have also had an infusion of color to help make them look both more attractive and clearer.

• Updated the text of the intro story a bit to be slightly more concise as well as slightly updated based on changes to the game in the last few months. Also added in splashes of color here and there in the text, highlighting certain keywords so that it's easier to visually parse at a glance.

Multiplayer Fixes

• MP: Fixed bug where Sunrise/Nightfall were only happening on clients in the same chunk as the caster.

• MP: Fixed bug where Storm Dash, Storm Rush, Ride The Lightning, and Lightning Rocket were only happening on the client.

• MP: Fixed a bug where normal time passage was not happening on the client.

• MP: Fixed a bug where the server was not telling clients what the current pause-state of a chunk was when sending them the chunk. So you could enter a paused chunk and it wouldn't be paused for you, etc.
  • Thanks to Walter Sullivan for the report. Hopefully it's not the one we're thinking of.

• Suppressed most of the developer-info messages that have been popping up (mainly in multiplayer) when an ability message referenced a now-gone chunk or entity, etc. It was helpful to see those messages for a while but it's basically confirmed at this point that the edge-cases which generate them are not actually problems and don't need to be made known to the user.
  • Thanks to many players for letting us know when they see those messages, it's helped a lot to know what is (or isn't, really) going on with those.

Beta 0.556 Urban Predation

(Released January 3rd, 2011)

• The environmental threat Ice Pirate Patrol Ship now works properly in multiplayer.

• Changed the fundamental way that entities apply melee damage, spells explode against things, and spells pierce through things.
  • Previously, there was a global melee cooldown on the entity, meaning that it could only hit one target per X amount of time.
    • Now, that global melee cooldown is per target. So if an entity is touching several melee targets at once, it can hit each of them independently of one another on that same X interval of time. So instead of hitting you OR me every 1.5 seconds, a skelebot hits me every 1.5 seconds, and you every 1.5 seconds, if it is touching us both off and on or constantly during that period.
  • Previously, spells that were piercing or exploding could only damage a given enemy once. That meant that if you did something clever like fire creeping death into an enemy, then splash back the enemy to knock them into the creeping death again, the cleverness accomplished nothing.
    • Now, piercing spells can hit each individual target once per second, so a single spell can hit a single enemy more than once. As another example, if an enemy is walking along inside a cloud of creeping death, the creeping death will keep damaging them once per second rather than them being immune to that cloud after the first hit.
  • All of this really makes things feel more natural, and opens up new avenues for player cleverness in the combat model.
  • Thanks to Armanant for originally suggesting this, way back in October. We shot the idea down at the time, but later thought of a way to do this that works really well.

• The gold boomerang spell has been updated to use the new piercing logic rather than the melee logic it had been using. This should lead to more reliable hits in all cases (not that we were seeing missed hits anyhow, but just in case).
  • It also means that if the boomerang hits a wall, that the boomerang will collapse rather than sliding along it, which just feels better balanced and more interesting. That's a big nerf to indoor use of the spell, but that's actually quite in keeping with Dizzard's original suggestion.

• Added a new Miniboss type of Urban Predator, which now starts appearing at region level 5:
  • Rains down exhaust (fire).
  • Fires plasma lightning shots.
  • Fires guided missile barrages.

• Put in some sanity checking to prevent potential issues when upgrading some older worlds into the more recent versions of the game.
  • Thanks to Nenad for reporting.

• The visuals and collision logic for the explosive shrapnel that comes out of barrels have been improved.

• Put in logic to keep the tiny fairy swarms, dragon breath, predator missiles, and things of that nature from clumping up on top of themselves as much. They will now quickly self-organize into something more like a line, which actually has the side benefit of sometimes making the clumps of fairies take slightly-or-majorly different paths. AND it makes them harder to hit as a single group with one launched rock.

• The effect of playing up on a +1 higher region level is now only 50% harder, rather than 100% harder. And on up 50% per level, rather than 100%.
  • Thanks to many various players for weighing in on this.

• Put in new logic that allows for magma traps and the predator exhaust fire to spawn more projectiles but with actually about a third of the network traffic by queuing them up in batches.

• Lava from hanging traps has been altered quite a bit so that it now looks more like a lava waterfall and not a bunch of individual falling balls of fire. In general this now looks pretty much like the predator exhaust.

• Hanging traps are no longer destructible -- this removes much of the advantage of experienced players knowing what they are in advance of entering a switch room that contains them.
  • Please note that crates are now an excellent way to deflect lava that falls from these.

• Hanging traps are now individually randomized so that they shoot out lava for between 5-10 seconds, and then have a 2-4 second break. Each trap has its own timing, but the timing of each trap will stay consistent so that you can memorize it if you need to.
  • Paired with things like fire shields and using crates to block lava, this totally changes the feel of the switch trap rooms such that it's now about timing and figuring out patterns, rather than about disabling the traps in advance or dying.

• Ice Pirate Patrol shots now make a crashing sound when they hit the ground, whereas previously they only had a sound when they hit you.
  • Thanks to Coppermantis for suggesting.

Beta 0.555 Headshotting, Kneecapping, and Ice Pirate Patrols

(Released December 22nd, 2011)

• Added in some more text for the NPCs so hopefully they won't always sound like they are griping.

• The cooldown on summon rhino has been further reduced to 30 seconds instead of 60.

• Knockback resistance is no longer a binary thing. It used to be that monsters either had it or they did not, but now there is a % of immunity that corresponds to the strength of the knockback attack itself. Therefore, some enemies might be immune to regular knockback from fireball or similar, but would still be knocked back by splash back or the summoned tornados.

• Neutral skelebots are now partly immune to knockback.

• Enemies (and summoned monsters) can now make "melee attacks of opportunity" while following some other target. This is most important during multiplayer, but it's also relevant in solo play when dealing with summoned monsters, decoy fireworks, or battles that include NPCs running around.
  • The general effect of this is that you can't run near a giant dragon or robot or whatever just because it is chasing something else -- it will still swipe at you and hurt you really bad.

• Redid a lot of the logic on how spells determine if they are allowed to hit allies or not. So your spells shouldn't accidentally be taking out bear traps, for instance, among other things.

• Creeping death no longer damages allies.

• Finally re-rendered the mossy barrel so that its perspective is now correct. It's been wrong ever since we switched to side view!

• Destroying the mossy barrels (usually found in the junkyard, occasionally elsewhere) now lets of fiery shrapnel that hurts players and enemies alike.

New Spells And Enemies

• Added a new Summon Tornado spell:
  • Summons a slow-moving twister that lightly damages enemies it touches, while also flinging lightweight enemies high into the air.

• Added a new Gold Boomerang spell:
  • Offensive spell that can hit multiple enemies in an arc, or even the same enemy more than once, as it flies outward and turns about in an attempt to reach its caster.
  • This spell requires the new Cat's Eye crafting material, which doesn't appear until level 25.
  • Thanks to Dizzard for suggesting a boomerang spell.

• Added a new Ice Pirate Patrol Ship enemy type, which actually shows up on the world map and then affects the surface areas of all regions in a certain radius of itself.
  • These are a group of vortex-crazed humanoids and haywire robots who have managed to jury-rig a strange flying warship. They will attack you if you try to adventure in a region near them (they'll have a red box around them if you're in a region they patrol). In theory they're out to plunder and might be paid off, but that nuance appears to have been lost somewhere along the way.
  • Regrettably, the poltroons choose to attack from such a distance that you normally would have no way to retaliate.
  • This is the first of what will eventually be several "shelled from a distance" sorts of enemies, and you'll be able to take them out by undergoing a mission to destroy their ship, kicking them off the continent once and for all. For now, though... all you can do is avoid their munitions!
  • Known issue: At the moment, these don't fire at you at all in multiplayer. They will soon, however.

Weakspots and Magic Emission Points For Enemies

• Weakspots have been added to the game engine, so that hitting certain spots on enemies can do 100% more damage (such as shooting them in the head), or cause the enemy to be temporarily slowed (such as shooting them in the legs). Other effects will follow later. Not all enemies will have any form of weakspots, of course (particularly very small enemies won't have any at all).
  • Note that in order to hit a weakspot on an enemy, the majority of your shot has to overlap the weakspot area and not the non-weakspot parts of the enemy. So, for example, if you fire some massive shot at the entire front of an enemy, it won't trigger the weakspots. But shooting a smaller shot just at their weakspot and hitting (or mostly hitting) the weakspot alone will trigger it.
    • Note that for some spells, like ice cross for instance, there are actually many projectiles that are all placed at once. So for those, each piece of ice collides with the enemy individually, and hits various weakspots or doesn't hit them, individually. Advanced players can use this sort of knowledge to their advantage, and can do things like jumping over a skelebot to launch an ice cross that hits them down the centerline, triggering multiple weakspots as well as doing regular damage, or jumping and doing ice cross just at the right spot at head-level of the skelebot in order to have two pieces of ice trigger the headshot weakspot.
      • And so on and so forth: the whole system here gives us a ton more flexibility for combat in general, and makes each enemy potentially a lot more tactical, even prior to use introducing multi-part enemies (which are coming soon).
  • There will be some other special types of spots, such as counter-attack-triggering... anti-weakspots?... that will have a different form of aggressive collisions. So in those cases you'll just have to have your projectile collide with any portion of the anti-weakspot in order to trigger its effect.

• Weakspot additions for existing enemies:
  • Skelebots and skelebot snipers now have a bit more health, but also now have weakspots on their heads -- you'll deal double damage to them when hitting them in the head.
    • They also have a slowing weakspot on their legs, giving you some interesting choices in how you attack them.
  • Crippled dragons now have about 15% more health, but also have a double-damage weakspot near their tails.
  • Giant blue amoebas have a double-damage weakspot on their underside, but it's very difficult to hit reliably (it's small, and amoebas really rain the shots down on you) and so we've not messed with their health.
    • Giant red amoebas have the same kind of weakspot, but it's even narrower.
  • Utahraptors now have a double-damage weakspot on their heads, and now have about 33% more health.
  • Skelebot overlords have a double-damage weakspot in the head, and a slowing weakspot in their knees. Given they were seeming to be kind of a grind before anyhow, we've left their health alone -- but feedback on this would be welcome.
  • Skelebot giants also have a double-damage weakspot on their head, and can be slowed on their legs. Their health has been increased by 70% to compensate, since they were kind of on the easier side to begin with.

• "Magic Emission Points" have been on our to-do list since alpha, and finally those are also in place.
  • Generally speaking you won't notice much about this, except that things will seem more cohesive with certain parts of the graphics. When a skelebot sniper fires his little fireball thing at you, it comes out of his clasped hands rather than randomly out of his midsection. When a crippled dragon breathes fire at you, it rears up and the fire comes out of its mouth rather than coming out of some random spot in the middle of its body.
  • The one gameplay-affecting part of this is that it will give some enemies different firing angles at you than before, but in the main that's a pretty slight difference. The overall buff this gives to polish, though, is something we're really pleased about.

Beta 0.554 Shield Dash

(Released December 20th, 2011)

• Found and fixed another room with the "flooding" problem.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for the report.

• Added in a new awesome Overlord arena from Coppermantis!

• Changed around the internals of how mana is tracked and synced in multiplayer. We had already started this process when we made the mana recharge a constant flow rather than a per-second thing, but now this process is complete. This will let us do cost-over-time things like storm dash, for instance.

• Fixed a small typo in the description of the Splash Back spell.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for the report.

• Missed the health bar tooltip in the recent redo of the game text after the power-coding session, this is fixed now.
  • Thanks to Aklyon for this.

• The tooltip for your mana bar now specifies what your specific character's mana recharge rate is (the rate is max mana / 20, so characters with more max mana recharge faster).

• The premise of how both storm dash and storm rush work has been changed quite a bit:
  • Storm Dash:
    • A burst of speed propels you forward at 300% of your normal rate, burning up mana until you release the left or right arrow keys, but you take twice as much damage during this time. Does not work if your speed is currently reduced to zero. Automatically used if in your inventory and you double-tap left or right.
  • Storm Rush:
    • Now identical to the new storm dash (which is closer to the older storm rush anyhow). Except that it costs half as much mana per second as storm dash, meaning you can run further or cast more spells while running.

• The mechanics of shields have been changed around dramatically. Aside from the individual elemental resistances, they all now work the following way:
  • A magical shield bursts forth to provide protection from up to 5000 incoming damage. Drains mana constantly while in use, so use the shield a second time to turn it off.
  • Thanks to superking for suggesting.

• Water Espers have been toned down in terms of their number and frequency of shots, and Lightning Espers have been toned down in terms of their frequency of shots.
  • Thanks to many players for suggesting this.

• The current max and base max health of your character is now shown in the hover-over of your health bar.

• The single-line mouseover tooltips on offensive abilities now shows their magic power and element as well as their mana costs, making it so that you can more quickly compare abilities without having to open your full inventory.

• Fixed a bug where energy pulse could not be used in multiplayer without throwing exceptions.

• Shields now cost two plums in addition to their other costs.

• In the prior couple of versions, ride the lightning was being granted in the underground caverns despite not yet being unlocked on the continent. Fixed to no longer seed ride the lightning in the intro mission.
  • Thanks to Baleyg for reporting.

• In light of fire touch's lower costs, ice burst and death touch have also had their costs reduced somewhat.
  • Thanks to Aklyon for suggesting.

• When a player is using shields, instead of showing a separate bar for shield health it now replaces their main health bar above their character with a bar showing shield health.

• A small mana bar is always now shown above the character's head whenever they are not at full mana. This makes it a lot easier to tell what is going on with your mana while you are in the middle of a fight, because often looking down to the corner of the screen is out of the question.

Beta 0.553

(Released December 17th, 2011)

• Fixed several deserialization issues from the prior version. The issue itself is fixed and won't affect any new or old worlds loaded in 0.553, but it's unfortunately possible that worlds that were loaded in 0.552 _may_ be unrecoverably corrupted. Or they might not, it's hard to say for all cases. If anyone has a corrupted world that they'd like us to try to recover, please make a mantis issue and we'll look at it on Monday at the latest. We always try to avoid having any sort of data loss, so sorry about this one!
  • Thanks to syndicatedragon, Zenith, and Baleyg.

Beta 0.552 Parallax And The End Of The World

(Released December 16th, 2011)

• Fixed a bug in the previous version where the minor health drops from monsters were not going away when they healed you. Cute, but wrong.
  • Thanks to Coppermantis for the report.

• Fire touch has had its power reduced somewhat, and its mana cost reduced vastly more. It's cooldown time is also now lower.
  • Thanks to zebramatt, goodgimp, wyvern83, BobTheJanitor, and Bluddy for suggesting.

• Memory crystals have been completely removed from the game, as the function they served is not coming back prior to version 1.0 at the very least.

• Thanks to Josh for greatly reworking the text in the reference info screens and elsewhere, updating it for the most recent versions of the game.

• Miasma whip's cooldown has been lowered.

• In most cases, the category-type cooldown of spells has now been made to be half that of the color-based cooldown. So creeping death causes a cooldown of purple of 4, but only a cooldown of long-range of 2.
  • Thanks to Toll and Hyfrydle for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug that was causing the game to crash when right-clicking wind shelter missions on the world map.
  • Thanks to TNSe, Hyfrydle, Arnos, and Dizzard for reporting.

• All missions now grant 1/2 the total xp needed to get to the next level (plus 1, to avoid rounding-down problems).

• The Deep no longer does that crazy blur thing -- that was interesting to try, but it just wasn't working out. People thought it was a glitch, or it caused headaches, or it was just annoying. It was thematically fitting for the area, but it made it too unpleasant to play in. That's something we've been meaning to get around to changing since alpha or so, but we just hadn't managed to do so until now.

Outdoor Parallax Backdrops

• The deciduous, snowy, thawing, and evergreen forests now have parallax backgrounds that makes them feel vastly more forest-y.

• The grasslands-with-tree-clumps regions now have a parallax background showing more of the trees, compared to their just-plain-grasslands regions.

• Added in building-filled parallax backgrounds for the small town and The Deep areas, so that they feel a lot more like you are in the middle of a big abandoned town.

• Added in mountainous parallax backgrounds for the ice age plains, thawing plains, lava flats, junkyards, and grasslands areas.

• Added in pyramid-filled parallax backgrounds for the desert areas, so that they feel a lot cooler and more distinct from other areas.

• The swamps now have a parallax swampy background.

• Added in a setting menu option that allows players to disable the new parallax backgrounds if they are giving their GPU too hard of a time.

Threat From Evil Overlords

• Now each time a period elapses on a continent (that is, when a mission is successfully completed on that continent), if the evil overlord is still present on that continent that overlord gets 1 period closer to destroying the continent.
• If the evil overlord succeeds, all players on that continent are warped away to a new continent (with the same base level) and the old continent and everything on it are completely annihilated.
• The number of periods this takes varies based on strategic difficulty:
  • On difficulties 1 and 2, this destruction never happens.
  • On difficulty 3, it takes 60 periods.
  • On difficulty 4, it takes 50 periods.
  • On difficulty 5, it takes 40 periods.
• If the strategic difficulty >= 3, and the continent overlord is alive, the number of periods remaining before destruction is shown on the escape menu.

Beta 0.551 Power Coding Finale: New Crafting Model, More Missions

(Released December 15th, 2011)

• Fixed the "flooding" fountain rooms.

• Fixed a bug that was causing the reference info window to be inaccessible on the world map.
  • Thank to Toll for reporting.

• The reference info window now automatically sizes down to the number of buttons it actually has available to show, which looks a lot nicer and a lot less overwhelming.

• The summon rhino summon-type cooldown time has been reduced to 1 minute instead of 5.

• Basically halved the mana cost of ride the lightning, and made storm dash cost 2/3 as much.

• Minor health drops are no longer saved with a chunk when it is dropped to disk (roughly 10 seconds after the last player leaves it) to prevent pools of health accumulating and encouraging an odd sort of stockpiling and backtracking.
  • Any such drops (or mana drops) in old chunk files will be removed when that chunk is next loaded.

• Updated the on-level-up "this is now unlocked" messages to better reflect recent changes. It'll need to be updated again soon, but one thing at a time.

• Made some improvements to the reference info screen of the game, reflecting some recent changes. Lots more needs to be updated there still, but again -- one thing at a time.

• Dropping an item now only drops one of that item.

• Added new 'Force Drop Quantity To "All"' keybind:
  • While this is active, dropping an item will drop all the items in the origin inventory slot, rather than just 1 item.

• Now if you somehow have two different stacks of the exact same item in your inventory (e.g. you used to have a Fireball I and a Fireball II in your inventory but they're now both just Fireball due to the tier-less change), doing a "swap" operation on them will instead combine them into a single stack.

• The inventory display will now show quantity in any slot that has a quantity greater than 1.

• Mana recharge is now much smoother rather than pulses every second.

• Giant Skelebot:
  • Base health from 70k => 100k.
  • Base physical attack from 5k => 9k.
  • Base magical attack from 1.5k => 3.6k.
  • These changes just make the stats the same as the Giant Amoeba, since there were reports that the giant skelebot was way easier than seemed right.

New GUI Visuals

• A completely new way of loading the GUI images has been implemented. This doesn't really affect loading time one way or the other, but it does increase our flexibility to be able to tweak the GUI in the future, and it does give us a slight RAM advantage on the multiplayer servers, because now we can avoid loading most of the GUI images.

• An awesome new GUI by Phil has finally been added to the game; Phil did the work back before the private alpha, but we just have finally had time to get it implemented!

• The AVWW logo has once again been revised to be more stylized and interesting, while keeping the same shape of the text.

Tier-Less Items And New Crafting Interface

• Item and gem tiers have been removed from the game.
  • Thanks in particular to Bluddy, for getting us working on this problem.

• Thus also the level caps on things like ride the lightning have been removed.

• And thus also the growing effectiveness of things like emit light, ride the lightning, lightning rocket, and flash of light, are now gone.

• The prior crafting interface, plus a lot of other unused interfaces that were relying on some of its code, have all been stripped out of the game.

• Added the following new cooldown categories, which will be used to link similar-scale spells in the recently-redone mana system, AND which are also used as crafting categories that you can use to find spells by function: Offensive Melee, Offensive Long Range, and Offensive Area Of Effect.
  • Also included as crafting categories are Movement, Defensive, Logistical, and Summon, but those were already existing cooldown types.
  • A given spell can be in multiple categories, which actually makes it even easier to find spells of interest when crafting.

• Spells must now be unlocked once on a per-continent basis in order to be used on that continent.

• The following spells are now unlocked for free on every continent: fire touch, fireball, ball of light, emit light, energy pulse, launch rock, tidal pulse, forest rage, creeping death, ice burst, ball lightning, storm dash, and miasma whip.
  • This gives a solid core of spells in each color that players are able to draw upon to have basic productivity on each continent right from the start -- we don't want people to feel hobbled when moving to a new continent.
  • That said, a lot of the cooler spells, including most of what we'll be adding in future updates, will have to be unlocked to be used on a given continent. So players get to go through the spell power progression with each continent, and additionally they get to make interesting strategic choices on what they unlock for the challenges on any given continent, too.

• When spells in player inventory are not yet known on the continent the player is currently on, the spell shows up with a red ring behind it (as if it were two tiers behind in the older system), and cannot be used.

• All player-owned gem, commodity, rare commodity, and city-related-only items are now stored only in the settlement stockpile on that continent.
  • So any time a player picks up such an item it goes straight into the settlement stockpile.
  • When an older world is loaded, all such items in a player's inventory are put into the settlement stockpile.
  • Older worlds may have multiple settlements on the same continent, in that case "the settlement" refers to the first settlement on the continent.

• KeyBind.OpenInventory_Commodities (defaults to KeyCode.C) now no longer opens the player inventory, and instead opens the new settlement stockpile window, which is a simple read-only display.

• The crafting costs for pretty much all the spells have been wildly reworked, and even the model of always having a single raw gem and one or two commodities to craft, is now broken. Now it can be any number of any of the above, and often is. Given the way that crafting materials are now acquired, and the method by which crafting unlocks stuff on a continent, this now makes a lot more sense.

• Copper Ingots, Iron Ingots, and Earth Essence are now seeded as rare commodities.

• The new crafting interface has two branches: Equip Known Spell and Craft New Spell.
  • In the Equip Known branch, you can browse spells by category, by element, by all known spells, or by all spells in general. Any known spell that you click will be added to your inventory, at no material cost.
    • Hence this is the "equipping" branch, rather than literally crafting something new. All those spells that you now get for free at the start of every continent, therefore, are just one-click additions to your inventory any time you -- or anyone else on the server, if it's multiplayer -- want them.
    • Any spells that are not yet known on the continent, however, will actually have to be crafted on that continent in the crafting branch before they can be equipped or used by anyone on that continent.
  • In the Craft New branch, you can browse spells by category, by element, by material used in their recipe, by all unknown spells, or by spells in general. Any unknown spell that you click will be unlocked on the current continent and added to your inventory all at once -- presuming that you have the materials needed to craft that spell.
    • Just to clarify, each spell only needs to be "crafted" once per continent, period, no matter how many players there are. Hence the centralized commodities inventory and the removal of whitelisting (see below) and all that sort of thing. After any player unlocks a new spell on a continent, then all players simply can choose when to equip it.

• The "whitelist" model used for some forms of loot where every player present in the chunk can pick up that item has now been turned off for those items since it really only applied to crafting, and now there's no longer any situation where it matters which player picks up a crafting ingredient.

• Removed spellgems from the new-player-account-in-existing-world "catchup" inventory because the new crafting system allows new players to simply pick up the gems they want from the already unlocked set.

• When loading an old world, the game will consider all spellgems currently in the inventory of any player as unlocked on all already-existing continents.

• When adventuring in areas that are lower than two levels below your current civ level, you'll no longer find stash rooms or gem veins.

• Reworked some key parts of the intro mission so that you now have to delve underground to find the spellgem crafting workbench. You can still harvest some gems as well if you wish, but since all the spells you would need to take out the second slime are available to equip right from the start, the only way to make players explore the caverns is to move the spellgem crafting workbenches down there.
  • Overall this keeps the same basic flow of the intro mission, actually, but with different objectives and objects at each part.
  • A neutral Ilari stone was also added in the first surface tunnels section of the intro mission, so that players have some source of getting more health.
    • Thanks to Toll for suggesting.

Missions Progress

• Added new Mission Type: Rescue NPC.

• Removed Migrate-Loner-NPC function from strategic map as it is now done via mission.

• Added new Mission type: Build Wind Shelter
  • Currently it's yet another rare commodity tower dungeon where killing all the bosses accomplishes the task, but it's a start.

• "potential wind-shelters" no longer seed on new continents
  • Old worlds loading will have any of the old "potential wind-shelters" (including those with non-hearth-guardians and hearth-guardians) removed, both the macrogame locations that show up on the world map and the corresponding in-chunk entities.

• Removed the Build-Wind-Shelter strategy command from the strategy map. Not that there are any potential shelters to target with it anymore.

• We've actually gone ahead and totally disabled the strategy map interface (it cannot be reached by the hearth guardian or the citybuilding interface); we'd planned to do that by the end of the current push but had been trying to replace all the functions (except ones that were no longer needed) with the mission equivalents. At this point, the remaining functions are still in flux and anyone trying to use them in this version would probably shortly find that work undone or irrelevant because of more fundamental changes. So we figured it was more courteous to just shut that part off now.

Beta 0.550 Power Coding Round 4: Mission System Basics

(Released December 13th, 2011)

• Player mana now regenerates over the course of 20 seconds rather than 30 seconds.
  • Thanks to numerous players for suggesting.

• The visuals of the ocean waves on the world map are handled a lot more realistically now.

• Put in a fix so that anytime the player's screen fades to black but they don't make the transition to a new chunk, the "lights will turn back on" after about a second.
  • This doesn't fix the underlying issue in the various cases, but it does prevent players from getting into potentially lethal circumstances, especially in multiplayer.

• Two different music themes are now played in the various chunks in the intro mission, rather than it always being the same single music theme.

• An awesome new ship sailing theme is now played when you're in the ship on the world map.

• A second ocean theme is now mixed in with playback of the main ocean theme in underwater caves and ocean shallows adventure exploration.

• The attack power of overlords and lieutenants are no longer multiplied. The challenge with a larger boss shouldn't be that they do a lot more damage with every hit -- otherwise you just die instantly without a ton of healing -- but rather should be that they have new attack patterns and longer life that makes them into a more challenging and interesting fight than standard enemies.
  • Thanks to Toll for inspiring this change.

• The general health baseline for characters has been increased a bit, making it so that it takes more hits to lose a health tank, and so on. With a shift towards longer sustained missions, and surviving all the way to the end, that will be important.
  • Thanks to Toll for inspiring this change.

• Fixed an issue in the prior release where the Ilari stones were not gifting you warp potions or healing you.
  • Thanks to Aklyon for reporting.

New Mission System

• On a per-continent basis, there are now always seven missions available for players to choose:
  • One of these missions will usually be two region-levels higher than your civ level, making it a very difficult "stretch" mission with better rewards.
    • EXP gained is 1/3 what you need for the next level.
  • One of these missions will usually be one region-level higher than your civ level, making it a difficult "stretch" mission with better rewards.
    • EXP gained is 1/3 what you need for the next level.
  • Three of these missions will usually be the same region-level as your civ level, making them the standard middle-of-the-road missions that most players will choose from most of the time.
    • EXP gained is 1/4 what you need for the next level.
  • One of these missions will usually be one region-level lower than your civ level, making it an easier mission with lesser rewards.
    • EXP gained is 1/5 what you need for the next level.
  • One of these missions will usually be two region-levels lower than your civ level, making it a much easier mission with lesser rewards.
    • EXP gained is 1/6 what you need for the next level.

• Rare commodity towers have been removed from the world map, and any prior rare commodity towers that existed in the world are either now gone or empty. The bosses are still there, but when you get to the end of them the reward will be missing because the data that it would use to generate the reward is now stripped out.

• The number of region levels that are shown around your character in the world map is now a lot lower -- it just shows the one you are standing on and the adjacent ones.
  • You can still hold the G key to see all of the region levels on the screen, same as before, but nowadays it's not as important to see a lot of the region levels in a general sense at all times, so removing clutter on the map really helps things like the missions stand out.

• Regions with an available mission on them now show their region levels at all times no matter what your proximity to them is, and they have a little tiny text under them saying "Mission" along with the icon for that mission.

• When accepting a new mission at a ruins object in a region, the game is now able to generate a second surface dungeon for the region, which it places next to your existing surface dungeon for the non-mission-related stuff. This new mission area is colored purple on the region map, and draws smaller than the main surface dungeon.

• Missions that are completed or abandoned now have their dungeons deleted after all of the characters leave that dungeon. The dungeons that are part of a mission only exist while the mission is active and in progress, and represent some areas of the region in question that you'll just not be able to find your way back to later (and in turn which get cleaned up off the disk and out of RAM, making the growth of world folders slowed while not needing to clear out the central region areas and really memorable non-mission areas that you might want to go back to).

• There is an abandon mission button in the escape menu that lets you change your mind if you start a mission that you later regret. Only one mission can be active on a continent at a time, so this is important so that you don't accidentally get into a mission that you just can't complete.
  • Abandon Mission does not work if any connected players are in the mission area, to prevent various exploits involving getting the reward for a mission without actually completing it (and thus causing a period to elapse and other missions to move closer to expiration).

• Warp potions don't work at all inside mission areas of regions.

• The first mission type, which is a Rare Commodity Tower mission, is now fully complete from end to end. It simply tasks you with tackling a rare commodity tower that it creates for you, and when you succeed in gaining the rare commodity the mission is successfully completed. This is a very basic mission that wraps in former functionality that used to exist outside the mission system, but it gets the mission framework fully off the ground.

• Rather than seeding memory crystals, some decidedly non-rare commodities are being used to fill out the "rare commodity" missions for now. More will be done with this in the coming week or so.

• There are now "Mission Exit Warp Stones" in the rare commodity rooms at the end of rare commodity tower missions. These will be at the end of most missions (unless the mission specifically involves escaping something, for instance), and make it so that there isn't a bunch of backtracking at the end of the mission (since you can't warp out of them).

Beta 0.549 Power Coding Round 3: Continents, New Mana Subsystem

(Released December 12th, 2011)

• Added in logic so that in any older worlds being upgraded from 0.547 on back, characters will be automatically put to full health. This will prevent them from dying from wounds that previously hadn't killed them but would under the new health rules, etc.
  • Thanks to Dizzard and Toll for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where vitality stones that had been converted from health potions and health scrolls in the prior versions were not actually usable.
  • Thanks to Aklyon and Walter Sullivan for reporting.

• NPCs now intentionally move to not stand on top of one another when waiting to talk to you.

• The action difficulty now directly affects the amount of cooldown time that enemies take. No rate of fire was going to please everyone, because players that want a more hardcore difficulty will need more enemy shots being fired at them, while players who want an easier difficulty need fewer shots being fired.
  • Featherweight: 3.5x the prior time is now taken.
  • Apprentice: 2.5x the prior time is now taken.
  • Hero: 1.5x the prior time is now taken.
  • MasterHero: no change from the prior version.
  • Chosen One: 0.8x the prior time is now taken, making it even harder than before.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for inspiring this change.

• The action difficulty also now directly affects the amount of telegraphing time that enemies take, giving players more time to react on lower difficulties.
  • Featherweight: 2x the prior time is now taken.
  • Apprentice: 1.5x the prior time is now taken.
  • Hero: 1.25x the prior time is now taken.
  • MasterHero: no change from the prior version.
  • Chosen One: 0.8x the prior time is now taken, making it even harder than before.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for inspiring this change.

• Made the pause-local-chunk logic more bulletproof, so that players in multiplayer can never get out of sync in terms of what their commands mean. If they are ever out of sync at all, any of them can press the pause key and they will all sync up to whatever that player was seeing.

New Mana Model

• Thanks to Toll, Penumbra, Hearteater, Bluddy, TNSe, Olreich, and Martyn van Buren for ideas that were a part of this.

• Mana now recharges on its own over the course of about 30 seconds. Characters with more mana therefore implicitly have a higher recharge rate.

• Mana potions, and mana restoration spell scrolls, have thus been removed.
  • Any of these which were previously in your inventory are just gone now.

• The "Use best mana restoration item" keybind has been removed, freeing up the U key for other things in the future.

• In place of mana drops from enemies, there is now a slight chance of shard drops from them again. It's 10% compared to a 90% chance of healing drops.

• Ilari stones no longer heal your Mana, they only will heal your health and remove negative status effects.

• Fire touch is even stronger now, but now requires mana to use.

• Death touch now costs a huge amount of mana to use, but does an even larger amount of damage.

• Pretty much all the other spells have undergone some rebalancing of that general sort, along the lines of their mana costs in particular but also to do with their power in several cases.

• A few of the spells actually cost more mana than some characters will be able to muster, which is another interesting decision point when choosing characters now.

• The base mana that players have is now 2000 instead of 1000.

• Cooldowns for players only are now saved to disk when the game is exited or closed (monsters and NPCs and such all have their cooldowns reset when the game is loaded, as has always been the case).

Spell Scroll Crafting Removal And Outfitter Crafting Removal

• All traces of "tech unlocks" and thus "tech books" have been removed, as alternate models for that have been decided upon.
  • The home libraries and home studies thus also no longer show up as green on the dungeon maps, since there is nothing special about them anymore.

• Spell scroll crafting, and outfitter crafting, have both been removed along with their workbenches being removed.

• The decoy fireworks spell scroll has been removed from the game. In its place, you now have decoy fireworks that are directly-deployable objects like bear traps are.

• Stash rooms in above-ground buildings now have a 12% chance of seeding some region-type-specific objects:
  • Thawing Ice Age Areas seed snowsuits, which you now can't get anywhere else.
  • Junkyards seed bear traps, which you can get elsewhere but this is by far the easiest way to get more.
  • The Deep seeds decoy fireworks, which you now can't get anywhere else.
  • Non-thawing ice age areas now seed moon lamps, which you can get elsewhere but not in this good of quantity.
  • Deserts seed heatsuits, but only 1% of the time. The other 11% of the time they just seed vitality stones.
  • Lava flats seed heatsuits, although you've of course got to have some sort of protection in order to get in there and get them to begin with. Using a neutral skelebot or another player who already has a heatsuit in multiplayer are both good ways to do this.
  • Both kinds of forest seed glyph transplant scrolls, which you can find in some other places but not remotely in this quantity.

• Stash rooms in underground buildings now have a 12% chance of seeding Transmogrify into Bat scrolls, which at the moment you can't find any other places.

• Warp scrolls have been removed from the game.
  • To compensate for that, the Ilari now refresh you up to 12 warp potions rather than four, making backtracking not required if you're not conserving your warp potions.
  • Note that the entire warping system that is currently employed is under review and might change in the next few weeks, although that mechanic is not a part of our current power-coding push as a replacement isn't fully fleshed out yet.

• The few spell scrolls that remain -- that would be elusion, glyph transplant, and transmogrify into bat -- now all actually do still have mana costs associated with them.
  • Spell scrolls themselves will actually remain after all, for rare single-use abilities like elusion scrolls. Spell scrolls are no longer MP-free, though.

• Gem veins now drop two of the kind of gem they have in them, rather than one. However, they no longer drop any gem dust.

• There is now a 14% chance of finding a random raw gem in stash rooms, making undergrounds not the only way to get new raw gems for crafting.

• Gem dust has been removed from the game entirely, and so you wind up finding a lot more shards instead in the random rooms inside of buildings (as opposed to the shard rooms), since there is also not any mana potions to find there. There's also now just a 30% chance of finding nothing at all in rooms like that.

• The region-specific objects in stash rooms, along with the bat scrolls and the raw gems, do not seed anymore in chunks that are more than two levels lower than your civ level.

• Old gem dust is now cleanly removed from your inventory in older games.

• Ice Burst is now a spellgem instead of a spell scroll, and now takes the place of ice cross as the sapphire-only spellgem.
  • Ice cross now costs sapphire plus cherry, making it a bit delayed before you can get this spell now.

• Insect Orb is now a spellgem instead of a spell scroll, and costs jade plus cherry.

• Summon Rhino is now a spellgem instead of a spell scroll, and costs jade plus granite plus cherry.

• Emit Light is now a spellgem instead of a spell scroll, and costs opal plus quartz.

• Lightning Rocket is now a spellgem instead of a spell scroll, and costs citrine plus magma.

• There is a new "summon spell" category of cooldowns, which right now is used by only the summon rhino spell, but which will be used by other future summons as well.

• Rhinos now set a 5 minute cooldown on all summon spells when that spell is used, along with a 5 second cooldown on all green offensive spells.

Continents

• Old worlds are now filled out to the next highest multiple of 20, plus 5 (so 25, 45, 65, etc) and called the first Continent.

• Now when you level up such that new regions are needed (currently that means hitting level 16, 36, 56, etc) a new continent is generated in the world, separated from all existing continents such that there's at least some space with no regions (not even standard ocean) in it. Meaning that it's physically impossible to "walk" from one continent to another.

• For the time being, vortex pylons are no longer being seeded into the world because they interact in... interesting ways with the new continents system.

• Removed the "Show Skies On World Map and Strategy Map" option from the settings window, as the new continents stuff makes that wholly irrelevant.
  • Instead, ocean is now always drawn behind the entire screen of the world map, making it so that the lands are in the middle of the ocean rather in a black cloud of RTS-style unexplored-fog.

• Port tiles have been added to the game, at the edge of the deeper ocean.

• Ports are always region level 20. On the first continent this means that you can't use the port until you reach level 20, but after that you should be able to use all ports as soon as they are discovered out in the world on other continents (otherwise you get trapped, and all sorts of other nasty things).

• Rather than being regions you can go into and explore, the port regions on the world map now let you get into and out of sailing ships that you can use to move about the deep sea (which you can't enter any other way).

• Movement on the world map is now smooth -- you can hold down the button to walk, rather than having to tap it repeatedly.
  • Thus no sound effect is played for characters walking on the world map, since with smooth movement that was particularly annoying.
  • Also the speed of the character literally moving is now about 2/3 what it used to be. This feels a lot less jerky and tends to dazzle the eyes less, while at the same time getting you where you want to go a lot quicker than the old tap-repeatedly system.

• The graphics for ocean shallows tiles are now vastly more obvious, and the graphics for the ocean tiles that have chunks you can go into are now distinct from "deep ocean" areas, too.

• Ocean shallows region tiles are no longer considered hostile, meaning that you can safely walk onto them and enter them at will.

• Ships can now sail through the ocean tiles, but not onto ocean shallows. Sailing onto an ocean tile does not automatically suck you into it.

• You now cannot use seaports until your civilization level meets or exceeds the level of the port.

• When in a ship, you now move substantially faster than when on foot.

• Changed up the way that overlords and lieutenants are now seeded by quite a bit. You'll now find one overlord per continent, and usually about 3 lieutenants. Their proximity to the start, or to things like settlements, no longer matters.

Beta 0.548 Power Coding Round 2: New Health Subsystem

(Released December 9th, 2011)

• Fixed a bug from the prior version where NPCs were running around at top speed all the time.
  • Thanks to Dizzard for reporting.

• Multiplayer: fixed bug where swapping items between slots and dropping items wasn't working in the previous version.
  • Thanks to Dizzard for the report.

• Multiplayer: Fixed a bug in the previous version where a new customerID/username pair connecting to a server would not be able to select a new character (thus preventing them from doing anything).
  • Thanks to Hearteater for the report.

• Multiplayer: Fixed a bug in the previous version (we think it was there before but didn't manifest the same way in the old MP-sync model) where red slime fire (and probably other "intelligent projectiles") would not hit players. It was probably also messing up slime targeting.
  • Thanks to Hearteater for the report.

• When crates are placed under water tiles in a map, the water (or lava) will now properly cover the crates, making for underwater crates.

New Health Model

• All changes are based on this discussion thread in the brainstorming subforum.

• Vitality stones have been added to the game. Using 2 of them causes your maximum health to double. Using a further 4 causes your max health to be triple your base max health. And so on.
  • However, if you take too much damage, such that your current health drops below 300% of normal while your health max is 400% of normal for instance, then your max health will collapse down to being just 300% of normal again.
  • Ilari and so forth which heal you up to "full health" now just heal you up to your 100% marker, and don't help you if you're higher than that.
  • Vitality stones can ONLY be used in settlements, so they are very much a "how far can I journey?" sort of stat.
  • Thanks to zebramatt, Hearteater, FallingStar, Teal_Blue, and Olreich to all contributing ideas toward this "health tank" model.

• Health Potions have been removed from the game, and all your existing health potions have been converted to Vitality Stones.
  • Since health potions are gone, the autopotion-on-death mechanics have also been removed. When you die, you're dead.

• The "Use Best Available Healing" keybind has been removed from the game, freeing up the Y key for something else later.

• If your character ever loses >= the amount of their base max health, when they have an inflated current max health, then they lose their inflated max health.

• Rather than showing the actual health value of your character, the health bar now shows the percentage of your character's base max health.
  • Thanks to Underfot for suggesting.

• Changed up how the item descriptions are rendered and calculated, so that they now use less ongoing RAM.

• Trash mobs now have a much larger chance of dropping minor healing drops, and they no longer ever drop nothing at all or consciousness shards.

• Player health is no longer scaled with the action difficulty. This was causing an exponential shift in difficulty, because with monster attack values AND player health shifting, that was two factors rather than one.
  • Monster attacks still scale with the action difficulty, of course, which means that the effectiveness of your health is still much better at lower difficulties; just not exponentially so.

• Vitality stones will almost never be seeded in chunks that are more than two levels below the current civ level (occasionally you will find one or two, but not much at all, really, compared to normal).

• Double the normal quantities of vitality stones seed in chunks that are 5+ levels above the current civ level.

• The actual percentage bar of your health no longer shrinks the maximum it is showing until you change chunks or use vitality stones. This way you aren't getting into scenarios where your health still seems to be at maximum even after you've taken a bunch of damage. But this part of the visuals still might need a bit of improvement.

• Heal scrolls have been removed from the game, and any heal scrolls that players once possessed are now converted to vitality stones as well.

• In the very short term it is necessary to have some sort of spellscroll to craft for only a jade dust by itself, so now it's possible to craft a single insect orb out of that.

Beta 0.547 Power Coding Round 1

(Released December 8th, 2011)

• A few more rooms added in by Josh.

• Various exterior chunk world-gen changes, making the world less annoying to traverse, making buildings more rare and exciting in most region types, and actually faster to generate and load as well. Oh, and usually much better to fight in, which is why this was done now:
  • Grasslands chunks are now much shorter in terms of height, so that there is no longer so much land above for amoebas and such to randomly get lost in (or for players to go hiding from said amoebas, as the case may be).
  • Settlement chunks are now narrower and shorter, making them less annoying to traverse if you need to pass them, and so that they have less sky area for things like amoebas to get lost in if they attack the settlement.
  • Ice age (regular and thawing) exterior chunks are now narrower, more mountainous, more likely to have surface tunnels, and less likely to have buildings.
  • Forest areas (both time periods) are now vastly shorter, but still just as wide. This makes for way fewer monsters in these chunks, and not remotely so much vertical traversal, while still having a very different feel to them from many other areas in the game.
  • Small abandoned town areas are now both narrower and shorter, making them a lot more focused and causing there not to be so exhaustingly many buildings. This also actually accentuates their unique feel in terms of having a town on top and surface tunnels under them, in most chunks, too.
  • The lava flats are a lot smaller vertically, and almost never have underground sections directly now.

• Fixed an issue with windstorms blowing characters and monsters around underwater extra much rather than not at all.

• Fixed an issue where monsters that were moving against a windstorm would sometimes not realize they could jump up to a ledge, leading to lots of trapped monsters in tiny dips in the ground!

• Miasma whip and fire touch are both now a bit stronger.

New Multiplayer Enemy Sync Model

• The multiplayer synchronization model for monsters has been changed from "monsters can be in very different places on different clients, but monsters move like they do in singleplayer" to "monsters will be pretty close to the same place on all clients, but can jump around on a client as it gets updates on the monster's position from the server". We were informed that the latter is tolerable, while the former is not. We'll see :)
  • Better smoothing for the enemy positions is coming later, but in the very short term we have some bigger fish to fry. Hopefully in a couple of weeks we can get these smoothing better.

New Internal Stats Math, New Character And Monster Balance

• All of the math behind all the character and monster stats has been replaced from the ground up. Since there are no levels of the style that we used to have (as of a couple of months ago), the complex formulae we had for these were doing nothing but making it more complex to calculate and really difficult to balance.
  • As part of this change, the stats of a lot of the monsters have really been shifted around quite a lot, as well. Generally speaking trash mobs have a lot more health and do more than the tiny damage they did before, and many of the bosses also hit for more damage now, too.
    • The net result on this may be too difficult in the short term, but we'll see. We're going for more substantial trash mobs, and there will ultimately be fewer of them as well, but right now they are still too plentiful in exteriors and undergrounds.

• There is no longer a cap on the max health, magical attack, or mana that characters can have applied to their stats. Previously it made an effort to balance those out for characters so that nothing went above a certain cap, and that led to overall more well-rounded characters. Now the characters will vary a lot more widely.

• Neutral skelebots, in exchange for their larger-than-average inherent health bump, now have a weaker-than-average magical attack.

• If you play up in region levels, be careful with this release. As part of a general rebalancing that will tie into missions and so forth in the next week, the scaling of difficulty between regions has gone up sharply.
  • An increase of one region level above your civ level is now a 100% increase in difficulty.
  • A decrease of one region level below you civ level is now a 20% reduction in difficulty.

• Monster nests no longer drop quite so many consciousness shards, and sometimes will drop health or MP now.

• Utahraptors and eagles will be in about half as much abundance as they previously were.

• Whenever players or monsters are damaged, they now flash white using a new kind of graphical blending mode that is new to our games.
  • This is actually going to be surprisingly important to balance for the game, because knockback isn't going to be balance-wise possible on a lot of enemies and yet you still need a way to tell you're damaging them.

• While we were at it, we found a small efficiency improvement to the performance of sprite drawing on the GPU. It's a really minor thing, but saves about four floating-point multiplications per pixel per sprite. So that certainly adds up, for older cards in particular.

• Background objects in the game now have quite a bit more health, making them more interesting to damage and destroy.
  • More changes to these will be coming, to make them more interactive (things exploding and actually mattering, etc). But for now this makes the seize spell actually matter again.

• Fixed a longstanding bug where enemies and players were dealing more damage than they were advertised to be doing, because of a math error.

• Skelebots (of all the trash mob sorts) now move much slower, but are immune to knockback.

• Regular skelebots now use a much higher enemy capacity, meaning they don't come in such large hordes (but individually they are so much stronger now).

• Enemies (like skelebots) that would previously walk super slowly when they were not pursuing a character, now walk normal speed even then.

• Skelebot sniper shots now draw a lot more efficiently, to go along with their slower movement. The enemies that use it now also telegraph for less time and fire them at a much faster rate than before.
  • The overall effect is much more shmup-y, while at the same time actually giving you vastly more time to react.

• Skelebot sniper shots also no longer knock the player back, and both they and NPC sniper shots are now piercing rather than explodey, so the shots are more threatening in multiplayer (being able to hit many players in a line rather than just one).

• Red amoeba shots also now are piercing, for multiplayer purposes in particular.

• Water esper and lightning esper shots now behave subtly differently, acting more water-y and lightning-y respectively.

• In general, the esper behavior and shot characteristics have been completely altered. They move faster, fire faster, have slower-moving shots, fire shots that move differently, and so on. They're a lot more challenging now, though at the same time actually possible to dodge when faced on an ongoing basis.

• Amoebas now fire more shots, but the shots are a lot slower than before.

• Eagles are now seeded in FAR fewer numbers, move substantially slower, and now hit you way harder than before. So it's more important than ever to dodge them (meaning you're hearing their eagle cry not much at all, or you die), but at the same time they are far easier to dodge because of not being so overwhelmingly populous. And they won't swamp your framerate or your network card.

Beta 0.546 Multiplayer Fixes Round 1

(Released December 5th, 2011)

• Fixed one of the network settings loca strings having a "(Pre-2.0)" leftover from AI War.
  • Thanks to Toll for the report.

• Suppressed a developer-info message that was popping up when someone built a wind shelter.
  • Thanks to Dizzard for the report.

• Now when a player transitions to a different chunk in the same region as you, your dungeon map will update to show their new location even if that was the first time any player had entered that chunk (it will now also drop the not-yet-visited "black line" indicator). Before you had to make a transition yourself before your map would update.

• Now when a player transitions to a different dungeon in the same region as you, your region map will update to show their new location even if that was the first time any player had entered that chunk. Before you had to make a transition yourself before your map would update.

• Now if a server does not receive any messages at all from a player account for 30 seconds (this should only be possible if you've actually killed or suspended the client process) the server will drop the connection for that account and thus make sure that you can always log back in to that account no matter how you disconnected after a not-too-long period of time.

• Fixed a rather... strange code typo (the programmer doesn't _think_ he consumed any alcohol during that phase of the development...) that was causing quit-game on the client to not properly disconnect from the server.
  • Thanks to Toll and others for the report.

• The server display now shows the number of players connected and their usernames and player-account-IDs (not their customer ID, just a unique-within-a-world sequence number for that account).

• Player customer ID's are no longer sent by the server to anyone, they're only sent from each client to the server, since they're only used for identifying (together with username) which player account to connect a client to.
  • Thanks to Toll for the suggestion.

• The message the client shows when it has been refused login because that account is already connected is now a bit clearer and is now displayed much more prominently.

• The server now does a version check on a connecting client; if the client version doesn't match the server version, the login is refused (with a prominent message on the client). Otherwise, hilarity would ensue.

• Fixed several multiplayer-safety issues with item-swapping and item-dropping.
  • Note: the new implementation is pretty paranoid and will just not execute a swap or drop operation where the server doesn't see the same item and quantity in the target slot(s) as the client told it to expect, so if you run into a situation where a disagreement like that happens it may prevent you from using swap or drop until you disconnect or reconnect. Please let us know if this happens, and we can try to find the root cause behind that.
  • Thanks to leb0fh for the report.

• Fixed a bug where the server was generally content to not make any noise but had some kind of link to the Elemental Plane of Doordom and whenever a door was opened or closed anywhere in the entire world it would make a sound on the server.
  • Also fixed a related bug where the server would play the level-up sound, unable to contain its excitement.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where if a player was on the character-select screen and another player entered the character-select screen the first player's list of options would disappear and they would be unable to do anything (other than close the program externally).
  • Thanks to Hearteater for the report.

• Fixed a bug where viewing the strategy-map or settlement-management screens on a settlement with no npcs at all would cause null exceptions.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for the report.

Beta 0.545 Multiplayer Public Alpha (Opt-In)

(Released December 2nd, 2011)

• Re-implemented the OpenChatPopup KeyBind so it's ready for use when MP is available, and bound it to T by default.
  • Ingame_DoLookAhead used to default to T, now defaults to G.

• All regions are now considered scouted automatically (no more need to get your NPCs to do that for you).
  • This is a tiny first step into some other major changes that are coming.

Multiplayer Public Alpha Begins

• Very important multiplayer details here

Beta 0.544

(Released November 29th, 2011)

• Fixed a bug wherein many of the abilities in player ability bars from past versions of the game were improperly offset. The downside of this fix is that any new abilities that were picked up during 0.543 will be similarly wrong. Whatever you do, don't use any of the "pink box" abilities, as many of them will suicide your character. Just dump those out of your inventory somewhere discreet in your world. Sorry about the goof!
  • Thanks to Coppermantis, Ixiohm, and Zeliox5 for reporting.

Beta 0.543 The Black Wind Blows

(Released November 28th, 2011)

• Desert Burrowers have been renamed to Dust Storms, to prevent player brain implosion when the dust storm goes off of ledges.

• Fixed the bug in recent versions that was causing the dungeon/region maps to flicker in some cases. This was actually a two-part bug. One part has been there for a really long time, since alpha at least, and was a very minor performance drain in general. The other part was a multiplayer-related change that brought out the actual flickering in the last version. Both are now fixed.
  • Thanks to Aeronic and TNSe for reporting.

• Enemies, and objects like ventilation ducts, were still sometimes seeding in the interior windows inside buildings. Fixed.
  • Thanks to TNSe, Toll, and JMAnderson for reporting.

• Fixed an issue from the prior version where warp potions were not properly being gifted to players from the Ilari (only 0 potions would ever be gifted).
  • Thanks to TNSe and Coppermantis for reporting.

• Fixed a regression where once again when you warped to the same chunk you were already in it would give you a black screen and wouldn't warp you to the edge of the chunk if it was an exit chunk.

• Previously, the game would often take off a suit a player was wearing, or un-transform them if they were a bat, when they leveled up or when a savegame was loaded. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Dizzard, wyvern83, TNSe, and TechSY730 for reporting.

• Fixed a somewhat hilarious bug from the last version where, amidst the many changes to the AI behavior logic, the health/mana drops from enemies were accidentally given part of the vengeful ghost AI and thus were sometimes healing players and sometimes attacking them!
  • Thanks to Baleyg for reporting.

• Windstorms now have a much more notable effect on the adventure gameplay:
  • Players, monsters, and ranged projectiles are now blown by the wind during windstorm events, making it easier to move in the direction of the wind and harder to move upwind.
  • Players that are not moving now hunker down in their animation rather than standing there.
  • The effect is much stronger on enemies or players that are in the air instead of being on the ground, making jumping extra tricky.
  • Monsters that normally would walk/fly more slowly when not chasing a player now always move at full speed.
  • Thanks to Armanant for suggesting.

Beta 0.542 Centurion AI

(Released November 21st, 2011)

• Fixed a bug causing errors to pop up in the intro mission and other Ice Age areas.
  • Thanks to Aeronic and Smiling_Spectre for this one.

• Added an Atrium courtesy of Dizzard.

• Added a bossroom from Coppermantis.

• Loads and loads of multiplayer progress. Our two-players-one-server tests are getting increasingly lower bug counts, so that's a great sign that we should be hitting the public opt-in multiplayer alpha sometime soon. Hopefully this week or next!

• Previously, the game was accidentally showing -X% Resistance for monsters that were resistant to an element. Now it shows X% Resistance, which is actually correct.
  • Thanks to SNAFU for reporting.

• Plum trees can now be found in the "grasslands with tree clumps" areas along with walnut trees.

• Plum trees no longer have an incredibly-too-short hitbox.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for reporting.

• Several room maps of various types added by Josh.

• Added some randomization to the angles that are fired from both the giant (red and blue) amoeba bosses.
  • Thanks to tbogue for suggesting.

• The new AI behavior system has now been integrated, and advanced players will start seeing some of the effects of this pretty much immediately. More still needs to be done to make some of the new higher-level enemies feel even more unique, but bosses now shift between different behavior modes as they move around, making them a lot more threatening and interesting.
  • Details of the new AI behavior system here and even moreso here

• Skelebot Giants now randomize whether they chase you or not starting at level 5, and will chase you more and more of the time as the civ level goes up.

• Espers and amobeas now have a melee attack if you jump right into them.

• Some of the PNGs used by the game have now been packed with PNGOutWin, reducing their size by between 10% and 40%. This lets us use less bandwidth when giving you the files, and makes them load the equivalent amount faster off disk during gameplay, too.

• A new underground boss battle theme by Pablo is now used about half the time in underground boss fights, instead of the general boss music.

• The color of the text for boss and vengeful ghost names are now a bit of a different color to make them more easily recognized if there are a lot of names being shown at once.

• When a monster has multiple attack patterns (not like the amoebas -- literal different spells being used), the monster's name now shows what attack pattern they are currently in so that players aren't having to guess blindly.

• A new Skelebot Overlord enemy type now uses attack patterns from some of the other bosses, plus a new attack that is unique to it. More will be done with other unique attacks, but for now that certainly makes this boss unique enough and really dangerous.
  • The Skelebot Giants only come up to the shoulder of these new skelebot overlords!
  • Any new overlords that are created will all be Skelebot Overlords for now, and as more overlord enemy types are added new overlords will choose randomly between them (while also obeying any level-gating rules).
  • Any pre-existing overlords will remain whatever stat-upgraded-microboss types that they already were.

• A new Skelebot Centurion also uses attack patterns from several different enemies, as well as having tougher stats and a more imposing visage. These replace both regular skelebots and skelebot snipers past a certain point in the level gating.
  • This enemy is the first foray into multi-attack non-boss enemies, but there will be more! And this one will likely get some new level-gated abilities, too, for that matter!

• When players are taking heat or cold damage from the ambient environment, it now shows a burst of flames or cold whenever they do. This makes it a lot more obvious that the player is taking damage and why.

• Stashes no longer ever include coffers, as those were confusing if the player was already over the limit, as well as being possible to exploit those.

Beta 0.541 Plasma Bolt

(Released November 9th, 2011)

• Several interior room maps added by Josh.
  • One overlord boss room added by @B0FH.

• More furniture added in contemporary areas mostly.

• Fixed an issue with enemy speeds getting a bit wonky in some cases when they were not actively pursuing you.

• Added a new monster into the game -- we won't spoil what this one is, but there's a number of new AI features/behaviors associated with it. Look for it in lava flats if you want to find it quickly.

• Drastically reworked the internals of how enemies decide to start and stop chasing you.
  • Previously it was an overly-simple range check, where they'd pursue you when you were in range and stop pursuing you when you went out of that range. If they were damaged, that range was extended quite a bit in most cases, and if they were a microboss or miniboss they'd chase you pretty much anywhere in the level.
  • Now it's a lot more realistic-feeling. Enemies that are already chasing you will keep chasing you for longer, even if they aren't damaged, before giving up. This actually varies by enemy, so some are more persistent in hunting you down than others are.
  • The range at which enemies would even pay attention to you was too short in a few cases, such as with the espers: they would start firing at you only when they got right in their face, making them easier than they really should have been. They and a couple of other enemies are no longer so myopic.

• Completely rewrote the logic of when enemies decide to fire on you, how they line up their shots (in the case of specific-range stuff like circle of fire), and how they handle the choices to pursue or flee, while firing or not firing.
  • Right now there are 16 different general flavors of AI behavior in the game, and this is the start of some work that will let us make each one more subtle and interesting, and even later start doing things like having enemies switch between AI behaviors based on the context of what is going on.
  • We'd originally thought we would keep the AI in this game pretty simple, along what you tend to see in a Metroidvania game's basic enemies. But that's only so interesting for bosses in particular, and frankly for a lot of the smaller enemies as well. Turns out we just can't keep away from adding progressively cooler AI in our games!

• Fixed a longstanding bug with flying enemy movement in short-height interiors, where they were just flying along the floor for the most part.

• Insect orb has been nerfed severely.
  • Note that these are per-projectile damages, and there are a dozens of projectiles all at once (though now it's down to 36 projectiles instead of 96 of them).

• Some enemies now get new AI behaviors swapped in as they level up.
  • Level 5+ icicle leapers will now chase you.
  • Level 20+ skelebot giants now will chase you also.
  • Level 30+ amoebas of all sorts (giant and otherwise) now will kite you. Not sure how well this will work, but it seems worth a shot.
  • Level 50+ bats of all sorts start pathfinding after you rather than just doing simple homing.
  • Level 60+ fairies start pathfinding after you, too, rather than just floating around. The big fairies, we mean -- the little ones always pathfind for you.
  • Level 15+ desert burrowers start chasing you from quite a distance away.
  • Level 50+ eagles start acting like eagle divers.

• Previously, if you moused over the empty inventory right at the start of the game before picking up even your first item, the game would throw exceptions. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Aeronic for reporting.

• Added a new Plasma Bolt spell.
  • It's basically like fireball except smaller, slower at first and then faster, light elemental instead of fire elemental, and slightly weaker, cheaper, and quicker to fire.
  • Crafted with Opal + Walnut + Quartz.
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for suggesting.

• As always, lots more multiplayer progress. First recent test with a two clients on different machines, both playing on the same server. General success was had, but there's still more to do. Getting closer, though!

Previous Release Notes

AVWW - Beta Series 1 Release Notes