Valley 1:Post-Launch Series 3 Release Notes

Official 1.509

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

Official 1.508

(Released January 5th, 2015)

• Since 2010 when we switched to the Unity 3D engine, we've been using their WWW class to load images from the disk asynchronously. However, in more recent versions of unity it's been a case where for a small number of people, if they had multiple network adapters on their machine, then the WWW loads from their own disk would load incredibly slowly. We didn't know until now what exactly caused that.
  • We've now created a new internal ArcenAsyncFile class that is our own implementation of the asynchronous disk calls (and will later be extended for network calls as well). This has been tested on windows, osx, and ubuntu, and it not only works, but seems to load noticeably faster than before. This should also bypass the issue that the WWW class had with getting oddly slow (if it doesn't, then something _seriously_ strange is going on, as they have almost no code in common).
  • Thanks to Vanreis for the latest report, and figuring out that this was related to the number of network adapters.

• The WWW class is no longer used for checking for game updates, but instead the new ArcenAsyncFile is now used.
  • This _should_ provide more fault tolerance when programs like AVAST want to kill the ability of the game to check for updates. Knock on wood!

Official 1.507

(Released December 22nd, 2014)

• Fixed an issue with reading in configuration files for particle effects on systems with language settings that use the comma for decimal places rather than the period.
  • Thanks to Amateur and whoozle for reporting.

Official 1.506

(Released August 29th, 2014)

• Fixed an issue on linux where the multiplayer server could not be launched via the in-game menu.
  • Thanks to Lucki for reporting.

Official 1.505

(Released August 15th, 2014)

• Fixed a bug that was causing some multiplayer games to not let a player join under certain circumstances. It was trying to put those players in a chunk that did not exist in a proper context for some reason, and thus failing. On the off chance that happens, the game now puts the player on the world map instead.
  • Thanks to jae and maiden masher for reporting.

Official 1.504

(Released August 8th, 2014)

• Updated the code for loading assets off of the disk to use the newer version that we developed for Valley 2. This results in much faster load times for everyone, but in some extreme cases makes the difference between excruciatingly slow load times and a reasonable time at all.
  • Thanks to RevelationOrange for reporting.

Official 1.503

(Released July 17th, 2014)

• Fixed an issue (very very old, apparently, but not very visible until the linux port) where the game was trying to load a bunch of nonexistent files.
  • Thanks to MachinaeWolf, Jirilius Maximus, and Nick Digger for reporting.

• Fixed a number of legitimately missing files in the last version or two of the game.
  • Thanks to MachinaeWolf, Jirilius Maximus, and Nick Digger for reporting.

Official 1.502

(Released July 17th, 2014)

• Fixed an issue where the linux versions were not able to set their screen resolution.
  • Thanks to GuardianTce for reporting.

Official 1.501

(Released July 17th, 2014)

• Backported a fix from Valley 2 that prevents some flickering in certain circumstances.

• Backported a speed improvement from Valley 2 that makes the game load assets faster.

• On OSX, there was an odd issue with the achievements popup from the steam overlay causing the game to go to a black screen. To work around this, the game only now logs them locally during normal gameplay, and submits them the next time you are starting up the game. This at least keeps your in-game play from being borked.

Official 1.500 Linux Support!

(Released July 17th, 2014)

• Fixed a crash bug that could happen if you visit the achievements tab prior to ever getting any achievements on your very first run of the game.

• The Unity engine (that runs the game) has been updated to version 4.2. For the most part this has no effect, although it does allow us to create a Linux version of the game for the first time.

• The new, faster, cross-OS updater that we first debuted in The Last Federation has now been brought to Valley 2.

• The OSX build is now universal (32bit or 64bit), rather than just being 32bit.

• Linux support (32bit and 64bit) has been added!

• Unless you use the public demo download, you no longer need to enter a CD key to turn the game from demo mode into full mode. This is very convenient for Steam, and for the download from our store.

Beta 1.207 Double Lightning

(Released August 24th, 2012)

• Lightning Rocket is now 3x faster than it was before, and lasts about 3x less time. This makes it about the same effectiveness as before, but it's a vastly more fun and satisfying super-high-jump. It almost feels like a different spell from that.
  • Thanks to Ulrox for suggesting.

• Fixed an issue in the mission staging areas where spells would not have their details or names shown, unlike on the world map.
  • Thanks to Maledictus and Pyrrhic for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where fire touch, storm dash, and command flares were supposed to give only 1 shard when incinerated, but they were still giving 100 instead. Fixed so that they now give 2 instead.
  • Thanks to SerinityFyre and Pyrrhic for reporting.

• 100 More new rooms added.
  • If you've been keeping up with these changes, then you know who they're from. If not, it's Benmiff. :)

• A new main menu style has now been adopted. This one has a picture backdrop instead of rendering a random chunk. That lets the menu load a bit faster as it doesn't have to create the chunk or load the extra images for that kind of region (which it then just dumps as soon as you go into the game). This also sets us up for later having a different main menu picture when heavy cat gets to that point in the creation process (although we're quite fond of this one, too).

• Crude urban sentinels are now allowed to seed in anachronism missions, because otherwise there would never be native monsters in abandoned towns.
  • Thanks to SerinityFyre and lavacamorada for reporting.

• Rising bubbles is now disallowed in freefall missions.
  • Thanks to Pyrrhic for reporting.

• Rising bubbles are no longer considered spell power class 2, so that they now get modifiers attached to their common variants that you find.
  • Thanks to Pyrrhic and lavacamorada for reporting.

• Spells of power class higher than 1 no longer will be found as loot from missions; the only way to get these now is to craft them. That makes it so that these spells don't seem broken when their common variants come with no modifiers.
  • Thanks to Pyrrhic and lavacamorada for inspiring this change.

• Rising bubbles, lightning rocket, summon tornado, summon dire butterfly, and summon rhino are all now disallowed from the journey to perfection missions.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting the exploits with these.

• Clockwork Probes and Urban Sniper Balloons are now banned from journey to perfection missions, as those made those sorts of missions really too hard.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• Journey To Perfection Missions no longer allow stealth enchants while you are playing them, as that was exploitative as well.
  • Thanks to Misery and jruderman for reporting the exploit.

• At every level of the dispatch mission interface on the green jade guardian stone in the settlement, there is now a "Give Gifts To Survivors" button. This button takes the player to the normal view settlement residents screen, but with the title "Give Gift To Which Survivor?"
  • Thanks to Pyrrhic and saveyourself007 for reporting just how obscure the gift-giving function could be even if you knew you could give gifts to NPCs.

• Rising Bubbles and Campfire are both now immune to being blown about in windstorms, as that was previously shortening their life and making them utterly useless in windstorms.
  • Thanks to Pyrrhic for reporting.

• The percentages of what seeds in stash rooms is now vastly improved. The little pointless bits of shards, and the extra enchant-charge containers (both of which can be found elsewhere plenty easily) no longer seed. The overall density of the good items has more than doubled as part of these changes.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

New Spell: Lightning Storm

• New Spell: Lightning Storm
  • Offensive directly-aimed spell that looks weaker than most, but which bursts into an intensely damaging cloud of lightning on impact. A well-placed shot will hit one enemy several times, and can even catch several enemies at once -- but watch out, as it damages you and your allies as well!
  • Thanks to zebramatt for suggesting.

Beta 1.206 Watery Warp

(Released August 16th, 2012)

• Another 100 rooms.
  • Want to guess who these are from? If you said (or thought) Benmiff... well, then you probably spend too much time reading these change notes.

• Minor typo fixed in the character progression portion of the Encyclopedia.
  • Thanks to Maledictus for reporting this.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version where the campfire spell would get caught on various background objects, like buildings and bushes and such.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version where rising bubbles wasn't actually damaging enemies.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• Fixed a rare cavern seeding bug that could lead to some sections over water that you would have to teleport in order to travel through.
  • Thanks to Yiab for reporting.

• Players are now 3x more likely to find mood gifts to give to their NPCs. There was a somewhat frustrating paucity of these before.

• When players are on the world map or in the settlement, it now shows a message in the chat log saying "Supercharged Overlord! Send survivors on dispatch missions to remove X more levels from the overlord." This only shows up if there are at least 1 extra levels from the citybuilding difficulty that are being applied to the overlord, and it gives players a good clue that they should be working on their NPCs rather than having that be a rude awakening way at the end of the continent.

• The "Things You Should Do" part of the planning menu now has a "Dispatch Survivors Against Overlord" option that shows up when the overlord is supercharged. This includes a popup message with more details about what to do about the situation, to help newer players.

• Fixed some bad MissionStagingArea room template definitions that were sometimes causing secret mission entrances to not spawn in interiors in recent versions.
  • Thanks to TKilburn and Yiab for reporting.

• The "only works during day" and "only works during night" spell modifiers now no longer prevent usage during the "off time", they just halve the outgoing damage of the spell.

• When the planning button is visible on the HUD, it now shows a little animation of the text to draw your eye to it more. Especially helpful for new players.

New "Lazy Bum" Guardian Power Scroll, And Better Distribution Of Guardian Power Scrolls

• Added a new guardian power scroll that you can get as a reward for secret missions: Lazy Bum.
  • The Ilari are able to immediately erase a mission in the region you are standing on. This causes another mission (that is potentially more to your liking) to spawn somewhere else.

• Look For Trouble, Lazy Bum, Scan For Survivors, Disjunction, and Place Ocean Buoy are all now considered "minor powers." This has a couple of very important benefits:
  • On secret missions, you now get 2 major powers and 1 minor power.
  • This makes the minor powers more common early into a continent (since they are no longer being diluted by the presence of all the major powers).
  • And this also makes it so that the major powers are no longer frustratingly competing with the minor powers that you want for smallish purposes but which aren't helping you toward your larger strategic goals.
  • All in all, this makes it so that there is less competition between short term and long term rewards when you're completing secret missions.
  • And of course this makes ocean buoys a lot more common, too, as previously those could be frustratingly difficult to find.

New "Time Warp" Spell Scroll

• A new Time Warp spell scroll has been added:
  • Single-use magic scroll that immediately shoots time forward a week into the future. This is long enough that all of the world map and secret missions will expire and get freshly recreated.
  • There is an extremely low chance of these being found in any stash room, so use them judiciously. No area is more or less likely to have them.
  • Thanks to Toll, Misery, LayZboy, GauHelldragon, and Tarmandan for suggesting.

New Spell: Water Dash

• New blue spell: Water Dash.
  • A burst of speed propels you forward at 150% of your normal rate, burning up mana until you release the left or right arrow keys. Also causes you to float in water and to move at your normal base rate in water, making it extra effective in oceans and other submerged locations. Does not work if your speed is currently reduced to zero. Automatically used if in your inventory and you double-tap left or right.
  • Requires both deep sea essence and sea essence, so you're unlikely to be able to craft this spell until your second continent.
  • Note that the mana drain on this is also 4x lower than storm dash, so you can get at least a solid sustained 12 seconds out of this on average.
  • Thanks to Carlos Vega for suggesting.

Beta 1.205

(Released August 3rd, 2012)

• Fixed a bug in the prior version that was causing an error message whenever interior rooms were generated. It was harmless, but annoying.
  • Thanks to Gravitycontrol for reporting.

Beta 1.204 Bubbles 'Round The Campfire

(Released August 3rd, 2012)

• Fixed a bug where region 0,0 was being considered passable to deep-sea-ships. This wasn't generally a problem (as that region and all bordering it are always land) but if some bug dumped you into deep-sea-ship state and onto region 0,0 (a default position if it gets really confused) you could be stuck as a landship for eternity.
  • Any character already stuck this way will be changed to non-deep-sea-ship state upon loading in this or a later version.
  • Thanks to kbullseye for the report and save.

• Fixed a room map (I think) that was able to keep players from progressing.
  • Thanks to mardor and Fill for reporting this.

• Another 106 rooms added to the game.
  • Yeah, this one's thanks to Benmiff again.

• Fixed a minor typo in the description of Umbra Vortex missions.
  • Thanks to Maledictus for reporting.

• Fixed an issue in multiplayer where if one player sent an NPC on a dispatch mission, that the dispatch interface for the other players would not be updated until they closed the dispatch menu.
  • Thanks to doubtful for reporting.

• Put in a couple of changes to prevent mood exploits:
  • NPCs that have lower than a 20% chance of success can no longer be sent on dispatch missions. This also helps make the dispatch interface less cluttered if you have a lot of NPCs with low chances of success for a given mission.
  • Previously, if an NPC was under-skilled and failed a dispatch mission, they would still get a mood bonus. Now they get the normal mood penalties unless they actually succeed in the mission.
  • Thanks to jruderman for reporting the mood exploits.

• Fixed a minor typo in the description of Wind Shelter Scrolls.
  • Thanks to Maledictus for reporting.

• 10 More rooms added
  • Thanks to Lavacamorada for those!

Two New Spells: Campfire and Rising Bubbles

• New red spellgem: Campfire
  • Deployable fire trap that burns for four seconds and then goes out.

• New blue spellgem: Rising Bubbles
  • Deployable water trap that rises into the air, allowing you to ride it if you wish.

Beta 1.203

(Released July 19th, 2012)

• Reverted the "make destroyed rooms not run the insert-special-objects logic" fix from 1.201 because it may be responsible for some of the doors-not-seeding situations in destroyed rooms.
  • So, for now, these may rarely get bosses again. Better than them not getting doors.

Beta 1.202

(Released July 19th, 2012)

• Fixed a rather critical bug in the prior version that was causing all sorts of things not to seed indoors: enchant containers, NPCs in rescue missions, spikes in freefall missions, etc.
  • Thanks to doubtful, Varone, Serasin, SerratedSabre, and Tydrian for reporting.

Beta 1.201 Entropic Leap

(Released July 19th, 2012)

• Fixed an outdoor boss room that was too long, and was throwing errors.
  • Thanks to vadatajs and GauHelldragon for reporting this.

• Five new really cool, really different staircases added.
  • Thanks to vadatajs for these.

• Mossy Barrel death shrapnel strength-per-shrapnel from 8 => 2.
  • Thanks to Moonshine Fox for showing us what a raging fox looks like after receiving 600+ damage from a barrel it could not see.

• Player Mossy Barrel strength-per-shrapnel from 8 => 4.

• Small typos fixed in two of the mystery clues.
  • Thanks to jruderman, doubtful and lavacamorada for reporting.

• Small typos fixed in pop-up messages.
  • Thanks to blahness for reporting these.

• There's now a "Build Farms" item on the things-you-should-do list if the continent's food production is less than the settlement's food usage.
  • Thanks to Ipkins for the suggestion.

• Extended the apply-conditions-to-target logic to affect all parts of a multipart target entity.
  • This logic is used for stuff like the bear trap slowing effect, spells with debuffs-applied-to-target, etc.
  • So this fixes problems like urban mechs not being slowed down by bear traps because the "leg" part did the hitting (the body actually does the movement, in code terms).
  • Thanks to Pyrrhic for reporting the bear trap vs multipart-entity problem.

• Bear Traps now cause affected targets to instantly stop rather than just killing their acceleration.
  • Thanks to Pyrrhic for the suggestion.

• Command Flare spellgems now only give 1 shard when incinerated (they were free at certain missions, making it kind of silly that they could be burned for shards).
  • Thanks to jruderman and Pyrrhic for the report.

• Storm Dash and Fire Touch now only give you 1 shard when incinerated since they can otherwise be farmed from the intro mission.

• Fixed a longstanding bug where building a new windshelter was not always recomputing all the distance-into-windstorm variables, causing it not to update properly.
  • Thanks to jruderman for the report.

• Fixed a bug where the clinging fetor projectile's strength was not being set when cast, and thus the damage calculation was following another code path and generally doing around 1 damage.
  • Thanks to Misery for the report.

• Added in 84 more room maps.
  • Thanks to Benmiff (again) for these!

• Fixed a bug with the citybuilding-difficulty-based scaling of the danger/difficulty of dispatch missions: those values were supposed to be _multiplied_ by 2 on Empire difficulty. Instead, Empire was _setting_ them to 2. Thus making them trivially easy for anyone, basically.
  • Thanks to Ulrox for the report.

• Fixed a bug in computing dispatch mission survival chance where the mood points where an intermediate result of mood/danger was being squared. This was fine for positive mood values as the idea was that if the ratio was 9:10 the actual result would be 0.9*0.9 = 0.81. The problem is that -0.9*-0.9 = +0.81, too (math class strike back!). Now it won't go below zero before that, so squaring is fine.
  • Thanks to Ulrox for the report.

• Fixed a bug where loot-goals lists were keeping entries from older worlds that were no longer valid (for example, a color-seeker enchant, which are no longer in the game), causing fatal errors if the player opened the escape menu (and thus the loot-goals display).
  • Thanks to Leafy Greens for the report and save.

• Will-o-wisp gravity now only affects you if it has "full" line-of-sight on you, meaning a straight-line (of tiles, not a literal line) has to exist from its center of mass to your top-center-point, bottom-center-point, left-center-point, and right-center-point.
  • Thanks to AlexxKay for reporting and providing a screenshot of getting stuck against a wall due to a wisp getting line-of-sight on the character's pinky toe.

• Fixed a couple longstanding bugs where destroyed rooms were still considered for the "insert special objects" (including chests and certain boss types) and "seed monster nests".
  • Thanks to Yiab for the report and save.

• Gold Boomerang is now ineligible for the increase-time-to-live and decrease-time-to-live spell modifiers because they have unintentional side effects when working with the boomerang's unique way of handling time-to-live (it waits until the time-to-live value is past a certain threshold before it's allowed to return, etc).
  • Thanks to Matthew Carras for the report.

• The mouseovers on the windows that tell you what a mission's rewards would be no longer tell you which modifiers the spell would have.
  • Believe it or not, this is by player request. A lot of them, actually.

• World map missions now have a 50% chance of rewarding (in addition to the spellgem) a building scroll. There's an even chance of a "basic" building or a "personality" building; if it can't find a valid power in the selected category it just doesn't add the extra reward.
  • Note that this will not retroactively add these to the reward list of missions that spawned in earlier versions (because it can't tell at that stage whether it was an earlier-version mission or a current-version mission that didn't make the 50% roll when it was spawned).

• In singleplayer, opening the escape menu now pauses the game. Exiting it via the "back to game" button will unpause it (even if the game was paused before opening the escape menu, and thus it wasn't the menu that paused it), but exiting any other way will leave the game paused. Added a note to the "local chunk is paused" message about what key to press to unpause, to compensate.
  • Thanks to binaryfruit for expressing a desire that we, well, MAKE ESCAPE PAUSE THE GAME.

• Added a new toggle to the settings window: "Disable Escape Menu Auto Pause".
  • When this toggle is enabled (by default it is not), the game will no longer pause when you open the escape menu (note that this is always disabled in multiplayer).
  • This also disables the auto-unpause when exiting the escape menu through the "back to game" button.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for the suggestion... before we even released the auto-pause behavior!

• Fixed a bug where picking up a stack containing over 10000 total items would only pick up the first 10000 and the rest would disappear in a puff of logic.
  • Thanks to Lthesaurus for the report.

• Greatly improved the generation logic for both underground anachronism and journey to perfection missions so that monsters will tend to bunch up less in most cases as there are now more pillars and troughs and divides in these.
  • Thanks to Misery and Pyrrhic for reporting.

• Interior journey to perfection and anachronism missions have now been updated to also be a bit more labyrinthine and difficult to traverse. For the former this makes it less easy for the player to just run and gun, and for the latter this makes it so that the monsters don't clump up so much as they otherwise were.
  • Thanks to Pyrrhic for suggesting.

• Fixed an issue with a specific room map that made it so that the exit portal didn't appear in some Boss Towers.
  • Thanks to Cinth, jruderman, Echomaster21, Kemeno, and DarkWasp for reporting.

• Previously there was an exploit whereby Greater Teleport could be used to move you around while you were still invincible. Fixed so that using it now makes you non-invincible.
  • Thanks to Omosh, khadgar, and Pyrrhic for reporting.

• A variety of the more complicated rooms designed by players will now work better thanks to the following no longer seeding on tiles marked as "blocked to bosses" in the map editor: vents, doors, mission portals and similar, warp gates, mission signposts and tombs and similar, any sort of item pickup that a stash room might have, etc.

• Fixed a bug where mission expiration timers would roll into negative numbers.
  • Thanks to wyvern83 for reporting.

New Monster: Entropic Esper

• New monster: entropic esper.
  • This monster is very much like the water esper, except much stronger and with a different graphic. It haunts The Deep and provides a more varied style of threat there now.
  • This also solves the issue of anachronism missions not having native monsters in The Deep in some cases.
  • These espers also show up during the Time of Magic forests, adding for a really uneven threat from them compared to other espers (which is actually pretty interesting). This is consistent with those forests basically being a haven for every type of esper that exists in the game regardless of what region type it would otherwise normally be associated with.

Two New Spells: Leaping Death and Flower X

• New Spell: Leaping Death
  • Offensive spell that is 10x less expensive than Creeping Death in casting cost and cooldown, and which also does 6x less damage, but also moves 5x faster and lasts 5x less time.
  • This spell requires iron ingots instead of clay in order to craft, and umbra micro vortexes instead of umbra embers. It also requires that you unlock it by killing all the monsters in a surface chunk of The Deep at at least level 10. So this is solidly a late-second-continent-and-onward type of spell.
  • The idea with this one is that it provides a more satisfying type of ranged spell in the purple entropy element -- one that is really easy to hit targets at range with, but which overall does less damage than its creeping death counterpart since it has the other advantages of movement and speed.

• New Spell: Flower X
  • An X of flowers bursts out of you, dealing area damage to anything it touches, including background entities. Cannot be aimed in any way; it is entirely based on your position.
  • This requires iron ingots, and also requires that you unlock it by destroying all the monsters in a level 6 (or higher) evergreen forest surface chunk, so this doesn't become available until early in continent 2.

Previous Release Notes

AVWW - Post-Launch Series 2 Release Notes