Valley 1:Beta Series 1 Release Notes

Beta 0.506

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

Beta 0.505

(Released September 28th, 2011)

• Gem veins, quartz outcrops, and the like now all draw in the foreground, so that the player and enemies walk behind them and so that they are never hidden behind mushrooms or whatever else.
  • Gem veins in particular now also emit a low-level light source, making them even more obvious.
  • Thanks to dumpsterKEEPER for suggesting.

• Dropped items (gem dust, etc) now have a bit of a sparkle to them to make them easier to see.
  • Thanks to a number of players for suggesting.

• Previously there was a bug with the most recent log message getting cropped if you had more than 200 messages, rather than the oldest message being cropped. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• When the gem vein has been cleared out of an underground gem vein room, and you are in that room, it will now change the color of that room on the dungeon map to the regular underground color, and call it a former gem vein node instead of a gem vein node. That way you can actually tell where you've been.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for suggesting.

• The neutral Ilari sites on the dungeon map now show up with a blue node rather than yellow, so you can tell them apart from the gem veins at a glance.
  • Thanks to Toll for suggesting.

• The shots from the giant amoebas and giant red amoebas now live for 10 seconds instead fof 2, making them not trivial to kite from an extreme distance.
  • They also will now fire at you from a much further distance than before.

• The skelebot giants also will now fire at you from vastly further away now.
  • And now when the skelebot giants hit you at melee range, not only do they knock you back, they send you really flying for several screens, and then shoot at you more with their fireballs.

• The skelebot dwarves have had their movement speed and acceleration both halved.

• The way that knockback is calculated is now a lot more accurate, and thus works smoothly with knockbacks that are extremely long-range like the skelebot giant. Before it was very jolt-y and only good for very short knockback.

• Fixed a bug where the higher amount of damage from the spell component of a player bat attack was still being applied.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• Fixed a typo in the tidal pulse spell description, and another in the transmogrify into bat description.
  • Thanks to jerith for reporting.

• Brought back functionality where the game version is shown in the upper left when the in-game escape menu is visible.
  • Thanks to Toll for suggesting.

• It is now possible to use either/or of the custom and OS mouse cursors. The default is just to the OS cursor now. This can be controlled in the first tab of the settings window.
  • Thanks to GrimerX, mrhanman, huw, and other players for suggesting.

• When a chunk is touched at all, such as each frame during a fade-out, the game now resets its seconds to keep alive.
  • This should hopefully solve the last of the issues with rooms that you can exit and return to and see things reset.
  • Thanks to Vampyre and Bossman for reporting.

• Put in code that will prevent a possible crash due to garbage collector suicide when custom textures are being created in memory after a long time playing in one session.
  • Thanks to orzelek for reporting.

• Put in some logic to prevent a crash when the OS says that access is denied on saving the world file. Now it simply shows a warning message to the player and tries again later.
  • Thanks to FallingStar reporting this happening sometimes on certain Windows 7 setups.

• Instead of showing a glowing border around enemies that are targeted with a the direct keyboard targeting controls -- which wasted a lot of RAM on the extra textures and also causes some hitching with really large enemies -- the game now instead draws a thin, color-pulsing line to the target. This is actually a lot more clear in the first place.
  • Thanks to AragonLA for reporting.

• Bosses and vengeful ghosts can now be targeted using the direct keyboard targeting even if they are offscreen at the time.

• Non-player entities no longer draw as moving on the world map. This again keeps their memory footprint lower with regard to the colored outlines that we're drawing around them; and it makes the players a lot more noticeable, too, by contrast.

• Fixed an issue where "overflow" vents were being seeded from destroyed rooms to other destroyed rooms, and creating the "vents to nowhere" that would bug out on players.
  • Thanks to a ton of players for reporting this.

Beta 0.504

(Released September 28th, 2011)

• Really revamped what happens under the hood with your character as you transition between chunks (going through doors, etc). Previously you could wind up falling before or after going through a door, or even getting hit by monsters or acid water or whatever during the brief period of paralysis that you'd have while the game was fading in and out.
  • Now it freezes you and makes you invincible during that period, in a way that will be multiplayer-safe, and thus the overall feel is much better.
  • There is also now no longer a 0.6 second delay before you can move after going through doors and such. Now you can move as soon as the fade-in has finished. You could already cast spells that soon, so the disconnect was jarring anyhow -- old logic, really. The issues that movement-delay was originally fixing are now fixed by the fade-ins and this freeze logic.
  • It's possible this will introduce some new issues (this is always the risk with any central change like this), so we'll be doing a release during the middle of the day today to make sure we're around to catch any backwash from this. But so far it seems clean!
  • Thanks to Lars Bull for reporting the issues related to this.

• Fixed a number of typos of "keyboard."
  • Thanks to arcee for reporting.

• The health bar is no longer shown over the little fire that is there when the player dies (it was showing at full health, to boot, which was even more confusing).
  • Thanks to Admiral for reporting this.

• Fixed bug where it was still possible to multi-generate a chunk the first time it was requested.

• The monster movement speed scales have been altered as follows (based on the differential between their level and yours -- with them moving slower the more overpowered you are against them):
  • <= -3: 0.3 becomes 0.8
  • -2: 0.4 becomes 0.9
  • -1: 0.5 becomes 0.95
  • 0: 0.6 becomes 1
  • 1: 0.8 becomes 1.1
  • 2: 1 becomes 1.2
  • 3: 1.2 becomes 1.3
  • 4: 1.2 becomes 1.5
  • 5: 1.2 becomes 1.75
  • >= 6: 1.2 becomes 2
  • The difficulty of monsters has been altered in other ways with the difficulty level settings and such anyhow, and so the original need to slow everything down isn't there as much.
  • And related to that, the framerates for the animations of the monsters simply aren't geared to look good below 1.0 speed, so we don't want players playing with those low speeds so much as it winds up looking jerky and bad when there's no good reason for that.
  • And lastly, when you play way up in region levels (six or more), the monsters are really a lot faster now, which adds to the challenge for players who are that good. As someone who always liked to play Mario 2 in double-speed, that sort of thing is neat to have as an option.
  • Thanks to GrimerX for inspiring this change.

• Warp scrolls can no longer be dropped, since doing so would allow for various infinite warp scroll exploits with guardian stones.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• Douse Monster Nest and Ball Of Light spells now leave a light blue blip on the minimap.
  • This lets players leave a trail for themselves with balls of light, and it lets them see when monster nest dousings expire (presuming they use them at all now, since monster nests can also just be destroyed -- though dousings persist past chunk unloads and reloads, unlike killing a monster nest).
  • Thanks to wigglestick for suggesting.

• Transmogrify into bat rebalance:
  • Player bats are now resistant to cold damage, but still not heat damage.
  • Player bats previously were supposedly taking more damage from enemies, but that wasn't ever fully implemented (looks like I got distracted before finishing that). All mention of that has now been removed, as I don't think it would have been fun anyway.
  • Player bats now only have 5% as much magical attack strength as normal, however.
    • This applies not just to their base magical attack value, but actually the attack power of the spells they use, too (those two components are generally added together).
  • Thanks to QuantumGoblin for originally bringing this up, and a variety of players for weighing in.

• When using healing items or mana-restoration items, the magical attack value of the character was previously being included, which was a problem for a lot of reasons.
  • Now it's just the base power of the item itself, which means that the effectiveness of these items is character-agnostic, which is a good thing so that you don't have to choose a good offensive character just to be able to heal.
  • Additionally, mana-restoration stuff had some really outdated logic that was tripling its effectiveness invisibly and behind the scenes. Now it does what it says on the tin, too.
  • The base effectiveness of tier 1 mana-restoration has been bumped up from 400 to 600 to compensate for these other changes.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• When healing potions are auto-applied, the logic for which one it chooses (if any) is now necessarily more complex.
  • At each step, it tries to find the lowest-tier health potion or health scroll that will fill the criteria, still preferring potions over scrolls if there are two of the same tier.
  • Step 1: If there are any potions/scrolls that will restore you to 3/4 health or greater, it chooses the lowest-tier one that will do so.
  • Step 2: If step 1 came up with nothing, then it looks for something to get you to 1/2 health or greater.
  • Step 3: If step 2 came up with nothing, then it looks for something to get you to 1/4 health or greater.
  • Step 4: If step 3 came up with nothing, then it looks for something to get you to 1 health or greater (hey, at least you'd be alive).
  • If none of the four steps come up with anything, then you're just plain dead and it doesn't waste a healing item.

• Settlement-management: added new "Boulder" obstacle type. Basically a copy of the Tree obstacle type except:
  • Different graphics (which are placeholder, please note).
  • Gives 10 Granite instead of 10 Cedar Logs when destroyed.
  • Seeds in 1/4 the locations that would previously have been trees.
    • This is retroactive (1/4 of trees in settlement maps from old versions will mysteriously become very rock-like in this version).

• Previously, all of the offensive spells shared one cooldown type. This really devalued having multiple offensive spells to use in a short-term succession.
  • Now the offensive spells are broken out by the six colors -- so color of spells will be an ongoing consideration when you are making combos of spells to use against enemies; you can't easily combo two offensive spells of the same color, but you can combo ones cross-color.
  • Thanks to MaxAstro for pointing this out.

• Decreased the standard global spell cooldown from 0.7 seconds to 0.5 seconds.

• Fixed a crash bug that could happen in rare circumstances (about 5% of the time at absolute most) if you died while running.
  • Thanks to kerzain for reporting.

• Fixed up all the destroyed room templates to be taller and thus not trap players who are neutral skelebots or similar.

• Put in some logic to prevent a crash when collision checks apparently were trying to run in an invalid chunk.
  • Thanks to Vampyre for reporting.

Beta 0.503

(Released September 27th, 2011)

• Put in a fix to reduce or remove the mouse lag depending on the game setup. Doesn't seem to fully reduce it on OSX for me, but for windows it keeps the cursor underlay and the cursor at 1:1 movement. And it's better on OSX. Unity has two different mouse subsystems, and instead of just using the GUI one now we're using both in conjunction for setting the mouse coordinate that the game actually uses for spells, etc. This is what AI War and Tidalis do, not sure why we didn't do that here before.

• Fixed a new crash issue from the prior version relating to killing guarding bosses and similar quasi-NPCs.
  • Thanks to GrimerX and mrhanman for reporting.

Beta 0.502

(Released September 27th, 2011)

• Fixed bug where guardian stones were... well, apparently eating food, sometimes. We're going to just try to forget about this one.

• Fixed bug where an npc dying would not actually remove them from the settlement list properly and they'd keep eating food and keep their previous residence and work assignments. Nevermind sick days, apparently you can't even call in dead on Environ.
  • This should also work retroactively with old worlds.
  • Thanks to arcee and others for reporting this.

• Fixed bug where dead NPCs would keep showing back up in the strategy/settlement-management layers after save/load.
  • This should also work retroactively with old worlds, so if your agricultural economy is largely based on ghost labor you'll have some adjusting to do.
  • Thanks to whoever reported this, we can't find it in mantis so it was probably during the earlier part of the alpha.

• Fixed a null-exception that could occur when dropping items (sometimes the drop would be caused inadvertently, and then hit this bug).
  • Thanks to kerzain for the report.

• Fixed alignment of the you-cannot-scout-that-region notice on the strategy map to not go off the top of the screen.
  • Thanks to Admiral for the report.

• Fixed a crash bug when clicking Buy License in the demo.
  • Thanks to Bossman for reporting.

• Now when you unlock a new tech it is announced in the chat log with the name of the recipe, the name of the profession (workbench), and the ingredients in the recipe.
  • Thanks to Admiral for inspiring this.

• Fixed an exception that could occur when walking across multiple hostile world map tiles.
  • Thanks to Kemeno for reporting.

• Fixed a couple of issues with the key binding screen:
  • Some general stickiness that was not intended with it staying in selection mode for a key even after you chose the key.
  • The mouse button binding was just blinking past your selection and not actually keeping it.
  • Thanks to kingisaaclinksr for reporting.

• Put in some safety garbage-collection calls for just before the save-world-metadata, save-all-region-metadata, save-specific-region-interior-metadata, and save-chunk operations, if the managed heap is over certain thresholds at the time. Hopefully this will prevent out-of-memory crashes due to the garbage collector being depressed and deciding that it'd be better to just let it happen.
  • Thanks to c4sc4 for the report and save.

• Fixed a super rare crash bug that could occur when loading a chunk from disk.
  • Thanks to mithrandi for reporting.

• Changed a bunch of resource and resource-gathering-related tooltips to hopefully clarify how to use the deposits visible on the world map.

• Fixed a bug where the "previous structure type" and "next structure type" buttons on the settlement-management interface were shifting around based on which structure type was currently selected.
  • Thanks to Toll for the report.

• Fixed bug where the Explorer trait was having no effect on scouting radius.
  • Thanks to shinseitom for the report.

• Added "Movement-Directed Keyboard Aiming" toggle to Game tab of Settings window.
  • When this toggle is enabled (by default it is not), and the "Aim Keyboard-Triggered Abilities At Mouse Cursor" toggle is disabled, and the keyboard reticule is disabled or inactive, then all your keyboard-triggered abilities will be aimed in the direction indicated by your movement keys. If you're not holding any direction keys down the default direction is straight ahead according to your facing.
  • If you're not clear on what this does, just give it a shot.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for the suggestion.

• Fixed several collision bugs relating to fire touch in particular, but really improving the collision of any spells that explode or pierce when touching other stuff.
  • It's possible that this might also have fixed that unintended splash damage thing with the amoeba shots, but I've not tested that. Feedback on that would be great!
  • Thanks to Lars Bull for reporting.

• Made it so that monster spawners can now be attacked by spells that hurt the background tiles, such as fire touch, energy pulse, ice cross, etc.
  • These have a huge amount of health, however, so with fire touch it would take like 30+ hits to kill an equal-level monster nest. Not done with this change yet, more coming below before tonight's release!
  • Thanks to a huge, huge number of players for suggesting that monster spawners being kill-able would be more fun.

• The "Just entered chunk invincibility" effect is now less subtle and more interestingly colored. This makes it more obvious where your character is when you start, and more obvious when you do and do not have the invincibility happening to you.

• The flame that shows after your character has died is no longer able to receive the just-entered-chunk invincibility.

• After leaving a chunk in the game, the chunk gets removed from memory after about ten seconds. This is not new -- it's when you see all the monsters that have spawned get reset, and so on. Now the following also happens:
  • All bosses, vengeful ghosts, and monster spawners get returned to full health.
    • This is to prevent various ways of "cheesing" high level bosses by throwing characters into the meat grinder, using warp scrolls cheaply, or otherwise. It also makes each boss fight something you have to win in a single stretch, rather than something you can whittle down over many return visits, which we prefer.
    • Thanks to Toll for reporting a specific exploit that hurried us to change this.
  • Any missing monsters nests that were previously destroyed are loaded back in. This is to prevent the game from getting boringly empty if you revisit areas you have already been, but while you are in an area you can still clear out the monster nests thanks to the recent changes.
    • As an added twist, the locations of these nests will be completely randomly added back in. They might cluster with other nests, or go to completely new locations, or be kind of where they were before. This makes for a much interesting return visit if you have some reason to make a return visit (such as a boss you failed to defeat, etc).
    • Thanks to several players for suggesting this.

• When you enter a chunk, you no longer get any invincibility added to yourself if you were in that chunk within the last ten seconds. This prevents abuse of running into and out of chunks to regain invincibility and attack bosses from that cover, for instance. And given that within that 10 second window most likely nothing should have moved within the room you left (multiplayer aside), the invincibility really isn't needed, anyway.
  • Assuming that you do make a mistake and exit a fight with a boss, you can either go back in inside the 10 second limit and pick up right whre you left off; or you can wait at least 10 second, heal up and do anything else you want to do, and then restart the boss fight with full invincibility.
  • Thanks again to Toll for the exploit that also required this change.

• Giant Shadow Bats, Giant Amoebas (both kinds), and dragon breath are all now immune to knockback from player spells. That was making it too easy.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• Improved the tooltip on Fire Touch to include more wording to make it clear to use them on gem veins.
  • Thanks to many players for suggesting this.

• Added a powerful new death touch spell that can be crafted.
  • Very strong touch-range spell. Extremely useful for destroying or harvesting background entities like monster spawners, gem veins, trees, and other resource deposits.
  • Thanks to Itchykobu, Procyon, and Toll for suggesting.

• Made the deploy-item abilities (platforms, bear traps, etc) ignore direct-targeting ("tab-targeting") and the new movement-directed targeting since all that generally accomplished was making it impossible to use those without the mouse, etc.
  • Thanks to Admiral for the report.

• Fixed a bug that's been around since before alpha where while you were fading from one chunk to another chunk, the destination chunk might get loaded from disk (or generated from scratch!) every single processing frame because it wasn't considered "pinned" by the game unless a player entity was in it and was forgetting about them. Now the chunk is considered pinned for a certain number of seconds after it was created (from disk or from scratch) in memory or since the last frame a player was in that chunk, whichever is later.
  • This was likely the cause of various issues, but the multiple boss notifications spam was one of them and there were a number of others that this likely solves.
  • Thanks to Toll for the report and save that finally put us on the trail of this one.

• The world map generation algorithm has been improved so that you are always now guaranteed at least one non-ocean region of levels 1-1000 in your world. Previously it was often skipping 11-19, as an example.
  • This will take effect for existing worlds as well, but you will most likely have a "crust" of higher-level regions before you get back to the missing lower-level regions on the other side of them, if you were having missing lower-level regions.
  • Thanks to eRe4s3r, Kemeno, Kronic, Toll, GabrielKronos, orzelek, brianc, and probably others for reporting.

• Added KeyBind "Switch Active Ability Bar (Reverse)" (Game tab of the Controls window).
  • Switches to the previous ability bar.
  • Has no default binding, it's just here for folks who want it enough to pick a key for it.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for the suggestion.

• Added in a custom mouse pointer that gets displayed under the regular mouse cursor. This adds to the contrast of where you'll be firing, especially in very white background areas, which can make aiming easier while still keeping the fluid speed of the OS cursor at any framerate, with vsync, etc.
  • For OSX players where the game is actually detecting their cursor in the wrong place, too, this underlay cursor should be reflecting the wrong location rather than the right one, which will aid in finding and fixing that bug.

• Put in a change to hopefully circumvent an odd bug in Unity OSX where if you hit a keyboard key when the trackpad isn't actively moving, the Y coordinates of the mouse would mysteriously flip negative. This only manifests in the compiled version of AVWW, not in the unity editor, which is why we never saw this until now.
  • This seems to fix all of the OSX mouse-related bugs, but please let us know if you see anything else with it (you'll be able to tell because the little custom cursor won't be under your mouse cursor like normal).
  • Thanks to oobleckthegreen, Admiral, RedSeraph, JaguarUSF, Sherlock, and martyn_van_buren for reporting.

• Added the "Left Mouse <=>; Right Mouse" keybind from AI War and Tidalis.
  • While this key is held, all Left clicks are treated as Right clicks, and vice versa. Very helpful for folks with one-button mice. It automatically is bound to the left apple key on OSX.
  • Thanks for RedSeraph for suggesting we bring this over.

Beta 0.501

(Released September 26th, 2011)

• Disabled memory archives since both the interface and the underlying story system need significant redesign.
  • Memory crystals are still being seeded in Rare Commodity Towers, but have a note about not being useful in their tooltip.

• Fixed a typo in the gem vein descriptions.

• Strategy Layer: The rescue-stranded-NPC action now requires that the settlement to which they would be moved have at least a net food production of 40, to help prevent players from getting into food consumption holes that can take many turns to get back out of.
  • As a result, the rescue-stranded-NPC action is now available at level 6 instead of level 4, because before level 4 there's no way to actually manage a settlement's food production (food consumption doesn't actually happen before level 6, but you'd still be in a tricky situation if you'd invited tons of npcs already).
  • Thanks to Toll and others for reporting the food-consumption vicious cycles that were happening.

• Fixed a bug where the rescuable-NPC icon was being drawn on regions and in region tooltips/detail-windows before it was possible to actually execute a rescue order.

• Fixed a bug where the rescuable-NPC icon would draw on the region but not the details.
  • Thanks to GrimerX for the report.

• Crafting: if your inventory already contains some of the item that would result from the currently selected recipe, the number you're holding (broken out into 3 numbers: how many of the same tier, how many of a lower tier, and how many of a higher tier; unless it's an item with no tier in which case it just shows one number) is displayed to the right of the big result card.
  • Thanks to Admiral and others for reminding us of the need to know if they're about to duplicate a spellgem, etc.

Previous Release Notes

AVWW - Pre-Beta Release Notes