Valley 1:Beta Series 3 Release Notes

Beta 0.918

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

• Every time a chunk was created or loaded from disk, it was running through a full collision check on every entity in the chunk. That seemed to be somewhat pointless, because the entities had already collision-detected before they had seeded, and thus all this really did was cause extra CPU usage for nothing... we think.
  • If you start seeing anything that is overlapping oddly that didn't used to, please let us know and we can put this logic back in. But we've seen nothing of the sort so far.

• In the prior version, there was a memory leak during chunk-gen that could lead to game crashes and "out of heap" errors after a certain length of play (which would vary by how many chunks you genned and of what type).
  • Huge thanks to Terraziel and freykin for reporting.

• Fixed a couple of error messages that were referring to Tidalis when failing to connect to a server.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

Beta 0.917 Toss Some Ice At That CPU

(Released March 28th, 2012)

• Added concept of different non-boss enemies being able to drop different amounts of health-drops on death:
  • Crashed Landspeeder Robot health drop quantity from 1x => 2x.
  • Blue Whale health drop quantity from 1x => 4x.
  • Sea Worm health drop quantity from 1x => 1.5x.
  • Skelebot Centurion health drop quantity from 1x => 1.5x.
  • Will O The Wisp health drop quantity from 1x => 2x.
  • Clockwork Probe health drop quantity from 1x => 2x.
  • Urban Crawler health drop quantity from 1x => 2.5x.
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for the report.

• Non-giant green amoebas no longer get saved to disk with a chunk, and thus simply disappear if you leave the chunk for more than about 10 seconds and come back.
  • The main reason is that these are intended to only have a small amount of health: each set is given total health equal to the damage which caused that set to spawn. If the amoebas go to disk and come back, they will be healed to full heath, and even if we had it not do that it wouldn't seme right because the giant amoeba will have healed to full without reabsorbing the little ones.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor and Toll for reporting weirdness with the health of green amoebas.

• Fixed another bug that was causing the "dead" version of the urban crawler's wheel to "grow" up from the bottom of the wheel.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version that had entities in general growing up to their full size slower than they should have been.

• The exterior/underground generation algorithm is now a lot less likely to give really narrow holes leading down. Instead they'll tend to be fatter and thus easier to get up/down.
  • Thanks to Magus-k for suggesting.

• Made it so that the interior procedurally-generated rooms now have double-wide ladder spots leading upwards; this makes it a lot less awkward to navigate around in these rooms (and it makes more enemies able to get you through these tight passages, and more of your and their spells able to be fired up and down through these passages, too).
  • Thanks to a number of players for suggesting this since the start of alpha.

• Put in absolutely massive numbers of CPU improvements for chunk-gen. This is most noticeable for the really large chunks, of course, or the really intricate chunks like junkyards. Many of those have upwards of a 600% improvement in speed of creation, depending on specific circumstances and your specific CPU.
  • This is of course a nice little thing for solo play, because it makes things move along quicker. But it's an absolutely huge benefit for multiplayer, because it means that a sever under heavy load isn't interrupting other players' gameplay for such long periods while generating a new chunk.

• Really large tracts of sky in buildings (anything with more than 70 tiles in it) are now considered to just be a side-slice of the outside, rather than a window. This makes it so that large windows wind up still looking like just the roof, or a section between buildings, etc.
  • However, these areas are still blocked off as if there was glass there, so you still can't teleport out there and nothing will spawn out there. This is just a cosmetic change.
  • Thanks to Penumbra for suggesting.

• Inaccessible tracts of water in interiors (which are sometimes used for visual effect in boss rooms, for example) are now blocked off from players accidentally teleporting in there or anything else spawning in there, and glass now shows over the water.
  • Thanks for silverhound for reporting a bug that sparked this idea.

• Fixed a MP bug that nobody had yet reported (and possibly not experienced, it was that rare) where certain placed spells could be placed in different locations on one client/server and the rest. This is because each one was individually trying to create its own copy of the object using the same rules, rather than letting it be created once and then just copied across. That mainly only affected ball of light, crates, wooden platforms, and a few other things along those lines.

• Made it so that wooden platforms and crates can now be properly placed in areas that are too small for them. They'll just grow up to the maximum size that they are allowed to grow to, and then stop. This means that the existing wooden platforms now work in one-tile-wide holes in buildings and in the ground (previously it was definitely possible to get trapped in such a hole if you didn't have some manner of double/triple jump, a bat scroll, or an elusion scroll).
  • Thanks to Thanks to Magus-k for inspiring this change.

• Put in a new death explosion animation, and made it so that the logic for death explosion is now really different: rather than always being oversized and the same number of explosions, the number and scale of the explosions now matches the size of the enemy.
  • Also did the same thing with the invincibility lightning so that it scales to the size of the entity rather than just being a fixed size (though the visuals are otherwise the same).
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for suggesting.

• MP: Fixed a bug where regions were never being considered as having a windstorm on the client.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for the report.

• MP: Fixed a bug where dying could cause exceptions because the vengeful ghost spawn was trying to read more data than it was supposed to.

• Reduced the number of particles in the red and blue amoeba shots by over half; this not only makes their shots easier to identify in terms of where their hitbox is (the hitboxes have not changed), it also drastically reduces the GPU load from these particular attacks (which seemed to be some of the hardest spell effects on some GPUs, previously).
  • Thanks to Castruccio for inspiring this change.

• Improved the visuals of the darkness so that the edges of the darkness are visibly more rough and uneven, looking more stylized and realistic; it's a more complex, more fractal-looking edge, rather than something that looked too simplistic.

• At the same time as the base visuals for the darkness were improved, also improved their performance. Now, this isn't _quite_ an apples-to-apples test because this just compares the sum of all the changes since the last public version with the new version up to this point, but our results of an identical "standing there in a mystery room in the near darkness" test, at the same resolution on the same screen with the character not having moved one bit between tests:
  • Prior version: 64fps, 363ish draw calls, 41 texture swaps.
  • New version: 120fps, 375ish draw calls, 41 texture swaps.

• Fixed a couple of longstanding (all the way back to the earliest internal alphas) bugs with rotation of entities when an explosion happens near them. Now it a slight unnaturalness to it from before has been removed.

• Vastly improved the way that swinging lights work; previously they would flicker like mad, which just seemed odd. Now they actually have their light source swinging back and forth like you'd expect, which feels a lot more natural.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for reporting.

• Put in a small CPU efficiency improvement with the spatial partitioning, to prevent too many repartitionings when an entity hasn't actually moved at least one pixel since the last partitioning was done.

• While searching for what is making the on-death drops of items slow from bosses, discovered a number of cases where theoretically a client and server could disagree on what was being dropped; not any reports of definite bugs from those, but cleaned that up just in case.

• Boss monsters no longer drop consciousness shards; they instead drop just larger numbers of the same sorts of health drops that are dropped by their non-boss kin. This change serves several purposes:
  • After defeating a boss, it gives a player a boost toward progressing toward the next boss (if there is one). That way there's not a reason to grind monsters.
  • It slows down the rate of acquisition of consciousness shards a bit; players were getting too many of these things.
  • It makes it so that there is only one way to get consciousness shards (exploration in certain specific region types by shard color), which is a lot clearer than having it be that PLUS whatever drops were associated with the color of the bosses you've been killing (which often didn't match the region colors at all, of course).
  • It should actually help performance when killing a big boss, because fewer things are being dropped now. The big "death poof" of enemies is now a visual effect that is less connected to what is coming out of them.
  • The rare enchant containers that lieutentants and overlords drop on death are of course untouched; those containers serve the function that the shards once did, only much, much better, anyway. So in recent versions the massive poofs of shard drops really were not a helpful thing to the overall game design.
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for reporting that the performance would still drop when a big cloud of shards popped out of an enemy in the last version, which got us moving down this road.

• The game now has a full and color-coded reference of which regions have which consciousness shards and which gem types. You can see the high-chance and low-chance regions that have each of these by looking in the material compendium for each type of ingredient in question.
  • Thanks to Ixiohm and Toll for suggesting.

• It is no longer possible to get stuck in your own crates; instead you'll just pop right out the top of them. By extension, this also fixes the issue with being unable to ride crates upwards in water in MP (unless your lag is REALLY bad, it should work fine now).
  • Thanks to nickmame for reporting.

• Put in extra checks into the "I'm currently in an invalid position" logic so that you can't wind up getting pushed through a wall or other solid object (or having an enemy do the same to you). That was mostly only possible in multiplayer.
  • If you and an enemy wind up touching, and the enemy has you pinned against a wall, then consider yourself essentially grappled; greater or lesser teleport would get you out of that sort of sticky spot, but not much else will beyond knocking the enemy back (so splashback and similar are also useful here).
  • Thanks to nickmame and silverhound for reporting.

• In the last couple of versions, lesser teleport was not working at all. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Nypyren, BobTheJanitor, and Darthcaboose for reporting.

• Leser teleport has always sent out a "tracer" that determines where you actually get teleported to. Now this tracer is actually visible, however. The tracer also moves slower and takes a full second to get to its destination, rather than a quarter of a second, so that the whole teleporting process is slower but also less jarring.

• Previously, if the chunk generation/transmission took longer than about 1 second in multiplayer, then your character would pop back into the chunk they were already in before being teleported to the new chunk.
  • Now the game waits 10 seconds instead of 1 before popping you back into the other chunk, and a waiting message should show up if it's been longer than 1 second that you've been waiting.
  • Paired with all of the improvements to chunk-gen speed in general, that 10s range should really rarely be passed (though a combination of slow/busy server, complex terrain, and bad network connection could certainly all conspire to hit that).
  • Thanks to TyberZann for reporting.

• Finally fixed that longstanding bug where various entities (including ice shards from ice pirate shots, your own launch rock hits, etc) would not play their "on death" sound effect unless they were actually hitting a target (if they just hit the ground, they were eerily silent).

• Added a new blue spell: Launch Ice Block
  • Launch a small, fairly lightweight block of ice on a trajectory to hit enemies in its path. Great for quickly damaging crowds of enemies in tight spaces, or hitting enemies over obstacles.
  • This is very similar to Launch Rock in most ways, except that it's half as powerful, costs half as much, can be fired twice as often, and has a bit of different phyiscal handling characteristics in the air (aside from just being smaller, too, which is also useful).
  • In other words, this isn't the most original spell in the world for this game, but it does provide some new tactical options for players who want to specialize in the color blue, in particular. Expect some more combat spells like this in the weeks to come, with color-specific variants that are legitimately different from existing fare, but which also help to give players the various options they need to be effective with whatever color they most fancy.

• Both the ocean shallows surfaces and underground caverns are now completely different in how they are generated. This won't fix places you've already visited in existing worlds, but it does do two things for new worlds:
  • First, it makes these areas way less annoying, and so that acid gills aren't an absolute requirement any longer (although they certainly don't hurt).
  • Second, it makes these areas so that those dead-end paths that you would sometimes run into (and still will in the oceans until we fix that particular bug) no longer will occur.
  • Thanks to AlexxKay and Nypyren for reporting.

Beta 0.916 The Black Wind Shows

(Released March 26th, 2012)

• Rhinos have been renamed to "pocket rhinos" in reference to their diminutive stature, and to help clear up confusion on that.

• Made it so that the "Show FPS" line in the message log now also shows the number of draw calls and the number of texture swaps, since if FPS is an issue that's often related (and it doesn't really take any more screen space, anyhow.

• Put in an absolutely enormous CPU performance improvement for when there are lots of entities in a chunk all at the same time. Previously, whenever any sort of "is this a valid location" type checks were made, it was taking vastly too long to do these because it was doing a lot of math it didn't need to do for entities that it had no chance of intersecting.
  • So now it does a preliminary check to see if the entities have any chance whatsoever of colliding, and then just skips even evaluating them at all if not.
  • In a standard mystery puzzle room on a latest-gen i7 quad core with an 8800GTS (in other words, a very high end machine), this single change was good for a jump from 35fps to 132fps. The results won't be nearly so dramatic in all rooms, since most rooms don't have such high entity counts (all those puzzle pieces), but it should also help enormously in any case where there's a lot of projectiles being fired (aka, big battles).
  • Thanks to Bluddy and Castruccio for reporting things that helped lead us to this.

• Put in some more CPU improvements that should help with the efficiency of spawning new entities in particular.

• Fixed an issue where warp gates were still being able to spawn the side of the screen in ground level chunks.
  • Thanks to CodexArcanum and BobTheJanitor for reporting that this was still happening.

• Added a few CPU efficiency improvements to how certain things are calcualated for regions and for the world map (windstorms, turbulent water, etc).

• The world map now visually depicts where the wind is causing storms or turbulent water.
  • Thanks to zebramatt, Penumbra, MaxAstro, and Bluddy for suggesting.

• The way that turbulent water has been calculated has been changed around a bit. Previously, any water that was directly next to land was automatically considered non-turbulent. Now the water is only considered non-turbulent if the land it is next to is not in a windstorm.
  • This makes your buoy networks and your wind shelter networks have to connect with one another in a more interesting way.

• Fixed both puzzle pieces and urban crawlers wheels so that they don't shrink and then re-grow into place when they change forms due to being destroyed by the player.
  • This prevents several "getting stuck in them" issues, as well as just looks better in both cases.
  • Thanks to Penumbra for reporting the puzzle pieces, and KDR_11k for reporting the urban crawler wheel.

Beta 0.915 Dire Servant... From The Meadow?

(Released March 25th, 2012)

• Fixed a bug that has apparently been around since we added the platforming difficulty; every time you loaded a chunk, it would further whittle away the platforms, until you eventually had none left, unless you were playing on a very low platforming difficulty.
  • Thanks to techsy730 and Terraziel for reporting.

• Skelebot Guards are now Skelebot Grunts, and no longer have that "become-invincible" behavior. While that was fun in theory, it was not terribly fun in practice.
  • Thanks to chemical_art for the straw that broke this camel's back, so to speak.

• Fixed an obscure multiplayer bug that nobody had even found yet, where in some circumstances you could actually get shortchanged out of attractive consciousness shards or health drops from monsters if they went through the following procedure: spawned on the server, then collided with the client on the server and thus attempted pickup, then attempted to pass over to client but unable to do so because the client did not yet fully have the message that these drops even existed.
  • It was a rare sort of thing in any case, but it won't happen now.

• Fixed a longstanding bug where the positions of multi-projectile shots was not being set quite consistently between the spawning client (or the server) and the other computers in a MP game.
  • We've had a note in the code for ages to fix this, but it was a subtle thing and nobody even noticed. It's fixed now, anyhow!

• Fixed another obscure multiplayer bug that had yet to be reported: since a few months ago, mana has been something that is tracked on the client-side only in MP. However, it was still deducting the mana and checking the mana on the server as well. Normally this wasn't a problem, except for mana-using abilities that are executed first on the server and then secondarily on the client (normally it's the other way around for most spells). This basically just affected nightfall and sunrise, and maybe a few others, in prior versions of the game; but it would lead to those becoming un-castable in MP after not long of play.

• Previously, healing touch was not working at all in multiplayer. We've shifted it around to make it work completely differently, and actually it's now more useful in both solo and MP. The new description for the spell:
  • Touch-range healing spell that transfers a small amount of your life energy into a cluster of health drops. These health drops will then seek out the lowest-health player or NPC in the vicinity (like any other health drops), or will return into your own health pool.
  • Thanks to MaxAstro for reporting.

• Fixed a bug in recent versions where light sources would hang around for too long after their death.

• Ever since we added "windows" to interiors back in early beta, we've had ongoing occasional problems with stuff spawning in those windows that was not supposed to be. That all ends with this release (for new buildings, not existing ones).
  • Now, those "windows" actually will spawn with glass in them, rather than just being open air. The glass has occasional cracks which actually looks a lot more interesting anyhow, and -- most importantly -- the glass counts as being as solid as a wall for purposes of entity collisions. So you'll never have enemies, chairs, players, whatever, accidentally showing up in the window spaces. Or players being able to use greater teleport to get into there, etc, etc.
  • Thanks to many many players for reporting bugs related to this over the months. We finally nailed all the related stuff to this one. In particular, thanks to recent reports by Taverius and Toll.

• Previously, in MP the health of enemies was scaled to the maximum number of players who had ever been in that chunk since the chunk was last loaded from disk. That was something that clever players could theoretically abuse when paired with healing touch, however:
  • One player goes into the room and fights the boss or whatever it is, with just the boss at normal health. Two allies wait just outside the room. When the first player gets low on health, a second player goes into the room and the first player exits. The third player now heals up the first player, acting as a healing reservoir.
  • Things like that were possible in a variety of ways, to take advantage of the rules and thus make MP easier than it was supposed to be. Nobody was doing this yet, but it's our job to think of these sort of things in advance when we can.
  • The solution was to make it so that monsters now have their health buffs based on the total number of characters in the dungeon, rather than just the current chunk. This still allows for players to be in wildly different parts of a continent or a region without impacting the difficulty of monsters for one another, but within a single dungeon it's highly encouraged that players stick together or else they each face a stiffer challenge alone.

• Put in preventative code to prevent exceptions from being thrown when viewing a region that is slightly malformed in its data on the world map.
  • Thanks to TyberZann for reporting an odd case of this.

• Put in code to fix a MP issue where the number of drops-on-death generated on the server could cause a mismatch on the client that would throw an exception for no good reason. That whole bit of code has been simplified down so that the client just takes whatever the server hands it, rather than trying (and sometimes failing) to guess how many items the server wanted to send it. Remnants of older code, bleh.
  • Thanks to TyberZann and Hyfrydle for reporting a case where this could occur.

• Fixed a bug in prior versions where pushing the P key on the server console would cause exceptions. Now it just does nothing.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• Fixed a cosmetic issue from the last couple of days where the players' character would disappear right before going through a door or other passage.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for reporting.

• Previously, if you fired a spell through multiple puzzle pieces, and the spell triggered them all to be the same color such that you'd win the puzzle room, it wouldn't matter if the spell continued on and hit other puzzle pieces immediately afterward. Oops! Now it waits until all spells have been resolved before declaring you the winner of the puzzle room.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for reporting.

• Previously, the message log had a really ugly name for the acid water damage (and lava damage, ambient temperature damage, etc). PlayerEntityTakeWaterDamage1Over60 was just being used because we'd never set a name for that specific method, which is a rare thing but happens. We think we caught them all, but if you see any more things like that please do let us know!
  • Thanks to Penumbra, Nypyren, and Toll for reporting.

• The puzzle pieces from mystery rooms are now properly immune to even heavy knockback.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for reporting.

• Fixed a bug with the battlefield missions where their towers and bases were not getting properly vulnerable fast enough; it was only happening after the prior tower had died AND a full 30 seconds had passed.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting, although Keith and Pablo had also seen it internally and we'd just not had time to investigated it yet.

• Fixed some old text in the douse monster nest description that still referenced "levels."
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for reporting.

• Fixed another unreported bug, this one with the time to live bars of summoned monsters sticking around after they had died.

• Added a third summon spell to the game; this is one you can't get until the second continent, and it's got a humorous name/form but is actually pretty powerful.

Beta 0.914 Insecticide

(Released March 24th, 2012)

• Fixed a bug where some skelebots, skelebot giants, and skelebot overlords from prior versions of the game were not only still having regen (which was removed from them), but actually had super-regen which made them practically invincible. This only affected older worlds.
  • Thanks to Nypyren for reporting.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version where, instead of being retained for 30 seconds to allow for any latent ability uses to catch up with a given entity, the entities were being retained indefinitely.
  • This led to a lot of lag issues when many shots were involved, and to some definite unintended hilarity with anything pathing (NPCs in rescue missions, tiny fairies in fairy battles, etc).

• Fixed a bug in the prior version where monster health bars would stick around after their death due to the "hang onto this for processing, but please ignore it and make it invisible" logic not applying to the actual health bars.
  • Thanks to mrhanman, Nypyren, and Underfot for reporting.

• Fixed a bug that has been around for a while and which was leading to some boss rooms (or caverns, etc) to fill up with way too much water.
  • Note that one side effect of this is that any room templates that have crates placed under or next to water will cause that water to evaporate. There are a couple of room templates matching that criteria, but the effect there will simply be a dry room rather than a buggy one.
  • Thanks to Penumbra for reporting one manifestation of this, where mountains appeared to "float" over water in some cases.

• Fixed a longstanding pathing bug that became a lot more obvious due to changes in the prior version, which was basically making dead entities still collide with entities that would try to path after you. This was affecting rescue missions as well as things like tiny fairies.
  • Thanks to Nypyren, Underfot, and Hyfrydle for reporting two different cases where this was affecting things.

• Fixed a bug from the prior version where TAB targeting could still be trying to target enemies that were already dead, and thus seem not to work.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for reporting.

• Fixed an issue from the prior version where various projectiles were continuing through solid objects in a way they really shouldn't have been.
  • Thanks to Underfot and Terraziel for reporting.

• Made it so that trash mobs drop health orbs 100% of the time again, rather than 90% of the time. In the past it was always supposed to be 90%, but it was working as 100% because of a bug. It turns out players preferred that behavior in the main, so we're making it now work like it did before that bug was fixed.
  • Rather than always getting exactly 10 health orbs, however, the player now gets between 6-14 health orbs at random.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor and MaxwellDemonic for originally reporting the change, and Terraziel, Penumbra, Bluddy, Greywolf22, and Volatar for weighing in on the matter further as well as suggesting the variance in the amount of the health drop.

Beta 0.913 Unraveling Mysteries

(Released March 24th, 2012)

• Put in a major CPU efficiency improvement to entity-entity collisions; some of them, especially if they were larger entities or otherwise overlapping more than one background tile, were colliding with each other many times more than they needed to.

• Put in a fix to a crash bug that could happen (mainly in MP) if an invalid piece of the chunk was attempted to be scouted.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• Fixed a minor bug in the interior generation where hanging lamps could seed right over crates.

• The way that the the angle of shots that rotate to their movement angle are calculated is now based upon their actual movement rather than the movement they are trying to have.

• Fixed a bug that's been around for a while and that could lead to "blocky" backgrounds in many exterior boss arenas. This won't fix existing boss arenas that are messed up, but it will prevent new ones. If you see it again, please do let us know.
  • Thanks to Toll, Smiling Spectre, and BobTheJanitor for reporting.

• Eagles are now barred from being part of the supply depot meteor storm missions, because they wind up just flying around way high up where they are difficult to reach.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for reporting.

• Adding in of Murdoch as a name that can come up for several character types (first and last names), as well as a place name for a few places. And also, a couple of other small surprises along those lines.
  • We don't know how we ever let this oversight past us; AI War players know what we're talking about.
  • Thanks to Martyn van Buren and rchaneberg for suggesting.

• Put in a fix that should prevent players from ever getting stuck in monsters (which was previously happening mainly in MP in recent versions, but apparently occasionally in certain kinds of monsters in solo).
  • Thanks to MaxAstro for reporting the MP issue, and khadgar and BobTheJanitor for reporting the solo variant.

Major Improvements To Multiplayer (Most Particularly Under Situations Of High Lag)

• Fixed an exception that could occur in some instances when finalizing a chunk for use in multiplayer.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the first chat line in the multiplayer server was not displaying properly upon initial game load.

• Added the ability for us to internally simulate situations of really horrendous multiplayer lag. We're using those conditions therefore to hunt down a whole host of MP issues that really only manifest under situations of moderate to heavy lag, and have made excellent progress on resolving a number of those. That's the main reason for the smaller number of other changes to the game today; we'll be having more of these issues resolved over the next few days, too.

• Put in a change to make sure that any entities considered "absent from the chunk" but not yet removed due to whatever processing messages that are remaining, will not do melee attacks or be visible from the pause hovers, etc. This is at least part of the solution to the "invisible enemies" issue that a few players were reporting in MP under extreme lag conditions.

• MP: fixed a bug where the "kick all players out of mission area" behavior when a mission was abandoned logic was trying to withdraw the player entities from time before the transition, when only the local client can properly pull off the withdraw-from-time logic. Now the server just does the transition without that part.

• MP: fixed a bug where clients needing the "pick new character" screen would spam the server with many requests for a new character list. The results of this varied, but none were good.

• MP: fixed a bug where skelebots were not properly losing their invincibility when they moved because they were trying to use logic that only works (in MP) for player entities.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• Set a flag that makes sure that tier orbs are considered crafting ingredients for the sake of the "if someone crafts with this in MP, it is used up for them, but available for use by other players" logic.
  • This should fix the bug where somebody else crafting with a tier orb was using it up for you (and all other players), but it won't have a retroactive effect.
  • Thanks to silverhound for the report.

• MP: It's impossible to prove a negative, but we think we've solved the issue with "invisible enemies" that attack you during situations of moderate to high lag.
  • The problem was that the shots were dying and being removed from the game simulation on the server before their damage was actually applied to the target, leading to situations where the client thought the enemy was dead, but other clients and the server saw the killing blow as essentially having "missed."
  • Our fix to this was to make a grace period before we actually remove entities from complete consideration, so that "late hits" of that sort can actually happen like you would naturally expect, regardless of lag. This makes it so that the health state of enemies and players should now always be more consistent between the various clients and the server, knock on wood.
  • We were previously able to duplicate this with some good reliability with our lag simulator on, but so far in our limited testing since this change we've not seen it again. Please let us know if you do.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle and TyberZann for reporting.

• MP: Projectile time-to-live is now computed on each client and the server again (for a while it had been only happening on the projectile's owning procses); the non-owners cannot say "this is now dead" but they now preemptively treat the projectile as gone for the sake of what they show the player.

• MP: Now when a projectile's owning-process computes that it has run out of time-to-live, it not only sends the self-destruct message to the server (sometimes it is the server, but not for player shots) but preemptively treats the projectile as gone for the sake of the simulation and of what to show the player.
  • So Miasma Whip will no longer shoot all the way down a chunk in high-latency situations (where the self-destruct message takes a long time to roundtrip), but be preemptively suspended from render and simulation once the time-to-live has expired locally.

• MP: There were a lot of places where clients would do something like "if this projectile has expired and I don't have a self-destruct message queued for it, then create one and queue it", and this was generally fine in low-latency situations, but in high latency situations there was often a signficant delay between the time the message left the queue (because it was sent to the server) and the time the playback of the message's processing got back from the server.
  • Now the client will put the message into a separate list of "messages I'm waiting for the server to respond to" until it actually gets a response and messages in that list will count for purposes like "have I already sent a self-destruct message for this shot" to avoid the race-condition problems.

• MP: Fixed some bugs where the server would try to send have-to-come-from-client message types when it detected that a monster should be damaged by water or lava. Now it uses server-specific alternate message types for the purpose.

• MP: Fixed some issues where monsters could not properly melee crates and similar background objects in multiplayer, instead causing exceptions.

• Fixed a number of issues related to MP entity position smoothing in situations of anything other than tiny bit of lag. One of the more paramount issues here was a floating-point precision issue, where single-precision floats simply were not giving us the amount of precision needed for a combination of a high framerate, high lag, and slow movement, for instance.

• More smoothing work on entity movement in MP:
  • Sometimes when there are small rounding errors, enemies will get progressively more "behind" in terms of what you are seeing as their position versus what their position actually is. The former solution to this was rather brute-force, and just jumped the enemy to the new position; this was obviously fraught with issues and made enemies look rather jumpy at high lags (among some other specific cases and combined with other issues).
    • Now, instead, the client's playback of the enemy's position on the server is constantly looking at how far behind it is, and it's adjusting the speed at which the playback runs in order to catch up without it looking so jumpy. In most cases these are such small corrections that you wouldn't even notice, because this keeps the corrections from adding up to such a large accumulated amount that they reach the point where you would notice.
  • Previously if an entity on the server was sitting still for some amount of time, and then started moving, that would look pretty jumpy as well. That's because the queue of playback would see "okay, we've reached our destination" and would thus jump ahead in the queue rather than properly playing back the "he just stood here for another .05 seconds" or whatever the specific case was. This was part of what contributed to enemy speed fluctuations and jumpiness. And this was something that would really increase depending on the amount of lag you were seeing, which is why we tended not to see it at all before testing with the super-lag-generator.
  • Normally the server sends entity updates 10x per second. However, with a client with a bad ping to the server, this is a bad idea because that just means yet more network traffic to go awry, and we compound the latency problems by trying to send more data.
    • The game now therefor looks at your average roundtrip time (aka ping) and adds that into its calculations on how often to send you movement updates about entities. If you have a 100ms ping, you're going to be getting entity updates about 5x a second now instead of 10x per second, but overall things will still look a lot smoother and the network load will be less. If you have a 900ms ping, which is horrendous, you'll be getting updates only once ever second. The enemy movements will still look smooth, meaning that you can actually play, but you'll see some definite artifacts since your view of the enemy is a full second behind the times. Still more playable than the enemy jerking all over the place, though, and with a 900ms ping there would really only be so much one could expect from any MP game; there has to be a tradeoff somewhere.

Mysteries

• The first two mysteries have been added to the game:
  • The Mystery Of The Glyphs (18 clues)
  • The Earliest Knowledge Of The Wind (10 clues)
  • These particular mysteries are a bit more narrative in style than we'd originally thought some of the mysteries might be. It will vary from mystery to mystery, but these basically chronicle the further exploits of some of the first glyphbearers from the first settlement in your world -- you'll recognize lots of names from the tombstones in the intro mission.
  • In general, the goals with these "mysteries" is to help you increase your understanding of just what has happened to the world, and how the world works -- these are essentially totally optional side quests, but a lot of players have been clamoring for this sort of information and so for months now we've been planning on making these actually a gameplay activity (which we now have) rather than just some sort of backstory info dump that we put into dialogue somewhere.
    • Therefore even in these more narrative-style clues, a lot of things are not stated outright and have to be inferred. Reaching the last clue in a mystery doesn't just reveal all the answers, usually: to get a full understanding of what is going on, you have to consider all the clues and what they are telling you, as well as potentially put that together with things you might learn from NPC survivors, might read in spell or guardian power descriptions, or so on.
    • Marisa, Chris's wife, has been writing all the mysteries thus far.

• Note that more mysteries will be coming, both prior to 1.0 and after 1.0 and onward. Some of the largest mysteries of the game we'd frankly rather not reveal even at 1.0, because that gives us something to build up through the updates post release. But there are just reams and reams of smaller mysteries, and even some pretty large ones, that we're tackling in the shorter term. Just not... everything.

• There is a new "Mysteries Progress" section in the "Big Honkin' Encyclopedia" section of the planning menu. This section shows you all the mysteries that are currently in the game, and if you've unlocked them or not.
  • If not, it shows you what unlockable you must complete in order to unlock them.
  • If the mystery is already unlocked, then you can click in and read any clues that you've found. To start out with, they all just show "???" But as you unlock the clues, these turn into names identifying the source of the clue, which you can then click to read the clue in depth.

• The "Other Activities Of Interest" section of the planning menu now has a section for "Find Mystery Clues" whenever you have unlocked at least one mystery but have not yet found all the clues for it. This lets you easily keep track of how many clues you can actually pursue at the current time, versus clues that are in mysteries you haven't yet unlocked.

• Note that clues are found in a somewhat random order (when they are found).
  • If you have multiple mysteries unlocked and incomplete at once, you never know which mystery you're going to find your next clues for. If you want to control which mystery you get answers from first, then choose which ones you unlock first.
  • It's not completely random, however: there are internal break points where the clues start getting more specific, and so they are random up until you get all the clues prior to the break point; and then it starts giving you random clues from the next batch, until you hit the next break point within that mystery.
    • You can't see these break points in the game itself, so on the one hand this is sort of a case of telling you "too much information." But we had a sneaky suspicion that we were going to get some bug reports about clues being found out of order, or suggestions to withhold more helpful clues in a mystery until later, etc, based on seeing that it's not fully linear in what it reveals. Trust us: we've got them broken up in a way that doesn't reveal anything too early.

Mystery Puzzle Rooms

• Added designs for 20 different mystery puzzle rooms. The details of each puzzle is randomized each time you enter one of these in the game anyhow, so there's a lot more variety than it sounds like. Like with the boss rooms or most other types of room interiors, players can also design their own puzzle rooms. Any room with fewer than 80 puzzle blocks in it will be considered invalid and will automatically get failed, though. So you can't game the system by trying to make puzzles that are too easy (for the most part).

• Mystery puzzle rooms are now seeded into the game. They can be found in certain large buildings:
  • 80% chance in pyramids in the desert (pretty common building)
  • 100% chance in those giant military industrial complex buildings in the thawing ice age (pretty rare building).
  • 10%, 20%, and 40% chance in the lava flats towers (in respective order of tower size).
  • 10% chance in the windmills in the grasslands (come on, it's the iconic windmill -- there had to be a little bit of something there that was unusual).
  • 10% chance in the "dark gatehouse" which you can see sometimes underground and sometimes in The Deep.
  • This thus gives some special incentive for exploring certain large buildings, though as more buildings are added we don't plan on making an exhaustive public list of where you can find these and in what percentages. The above is mostly just for illustrative purposes, and you find clues when you find them; but any sufficiently large and impressive building will have some chance of having a mystery puzzle room.

• When you enter a mystery puzzle room (which shows up as orange-ish on the dungeon map, by the way), one of two things will happen:
  • 1. The room will be declared empty of clues, and thus the puzzle is pointless and it says this in a line in your chat log.
    • This happens when the room template is invalid (such as if someone is trying to cheat by making a room template that is too easy of a puzzle to solve), or when there are no active mysteries with clues available. If you haven't yet unlocked the mysteries themselves, don't go into mystery puzzle rooms or they will just turn up as empty.
  • 2. The room will tell you that there are X number of red puzzle pieces, and Y number of blue puzzle pieces, in the room; and that you will unlock a clue to one of your active mysteries when you make all of the puzzle pieces match one another.
    • We won't spoil exactly how this works, but suffice it to say it's useful to bring a variety of combat spells with you. The puzzles aren't super hard, but they do require some interesting use of brainpower.
    • Depending on the room template itself, and the randomization applied to which pieces are what color (it will be exactly 50/50 blue and red at the start, but the distribution is different each time), the difficulty of these rooms will really vary. If you find one that you simply can't solve, you can always move on until you find an easier room somewhere else. You won't miss out on any mystery clues by doing that. But again, these puzzles are only somewhat hard; they aren't like the advanced puzzles in Tidalis or anything.

• When you successfully complete a mystery puzzle room, a random clue is unlocked and gets added to your planning menu as well as popping up immediately for you to read.

Beta 0.912 Denizens Of The Tide Pool

(Released March 21st, 2012)

• A number of enemy spells have been renamed to not include the name of the enemy type since multiple enemy types actually use them these days. Having a skelebot overlord hit you with a "giant amoeba shot" feels really strange. So that one is now "Wave Fan Attack," for instance.
  • This is purely a cosmetic change, but it's an important one for clarity now that damage sources are identified by name in the chat log.
  • Some of the abilities that can only ever work with one specific kind of enemy (like the green amoeba stuff, or the missiles that are fired from the urban predator and literally match the graphics on its wings) have their names remaining unchanged and won't be reused by other enemy types anyhow.

• Updated the dragon-breath-fire style attack on both overlord types to instead be "major living fire," which has some slightly different characteristics.
  • Also gave the draconite overlord the plasma bolt fan attack instead of the fire fan attack, further making him different from the skelebot overlord.

• The clockwork probe now has its own attack visuals which are different from the will o the wisp attack visually, and which also is air element rather than light element.

• Snowsuits are no longer considered heavy, unlike heatsuits. This makes it so that you can use double and triple jumps in the ice age areas even when not playing an ice age character.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug in prior versions where placing a wind shelter would actually place five wind shelter missions all next to one another.
  • Thanks to Terraziel and khadgar for reporting.

• Fixed some bugs in how certain random choices were being made that was causing the last item in the set under consideration to never be picked.
  • Notably, this prevented the "Place Ocean Buoy" guardian power from ever being seeded.
    • Thanks to BobTheJanitor and TyberZann for reporting this symptom, as it led to discovery of the cause.

• Added two new settings to the graphics tab of the settings menu:
  • Show FPS In Chat Log
    • You can see your FPS (frames per second) in the debug menu by pressing F3 if you just want to check on it quickly. But if you're looking for a way to watch your FPS on an ongoing basis, this setting is more helpful as it doesn't cover a bunch of your screen with the debug menu.
  • Show Images-Loading-During-Gameplay In Chat Log
    • Normally you would not want to turn this on. But if you're getting image-loading related lag spikes and want to see what is being loaded and when (so that you can report it to us, presumably), then this is a helpful tool. We also use this internally to try to keep such lag spikes from happening in the first place.
  • Thanks to Bluddy for suggesting.

• Fixed several bugs with how ally minions were being treated too much liked summoned monsters in some cases; and actually fixed a few edge cases with summons that nobody had even reported yet.
  • The big takeaway from this one is that ally minions were not getting their health and attacks properly scaled with the continent tier before, but now they are. This was making battlefield missions get progressively more impossible as the continent tier went up, which was in error.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor and Professor Paul1290 to tipping us off about the battlegrounds issue.

• Fixed a bug where nightfall and sunrise would fail to cast if you had something tab-targeted.

• Fixed a bug in the prior versions where the pause menu hover-overs were not showing the actual attack strengths of the monsters (or your allies), but rather just their tier 1 strengths. Thus at higher tiers it was _really_ misleading.

• Fixed an oversight where the wind-shelter-eligibility logic was requiring adjacency to a non-stormy region, but really needed to require to a non-stormy _land_ region.
  • Thanks to khadgar for pointing this out.

• Ocean shallows are now from the contemporary time period, instead of the wild garden age.
  • Oceans, of course, are still from the wild garden age.
  • As part of this transition for the ocean shallows, all of the underwater-only monsters (carp and the whales) no longer will seed in the ocean shallows at all.
    • Thus the monsters that seed in the ocean shallows are now all able to move into and out of the water at will, which is important because that fits a lot better with the design of the ocean shallows we're moving towards (there will be buildings, and still more water than normal but a lot less water than there is now, etc -- but that's coming in a future release very soon, not today).
    • Also, this lets the water-or-non-water monsters migrate out of the ocean shallows. The oceans themselves are still immune to migration, but the ocean shallows are now considered just a watery kind of land.

New Monsters

• New Monster: Jellyfish
  • This magical denizen is actually able to float into and out of water without harm, and lives in the ocean shallows and ocean regions. We'll leave the details of them for you to discover, but they are essentially one of the more basic enemies for those regions (we're trying to tone down the ocean shallows in particular).
  • This one uses a new "Wave Spin Attack," we will say.

• Added a new Giant Jellyfish miniboss type.
  • This miniboss is a lot like the smaller jellyfish except larger and faster, and its attacks are faster and a bit different in styling, too.
  • The miniboss has two modes of attack: one where it paths after you very accurately and relentlessly, so that you can't hide from it; and another where it rushes after you much faster, so that you can hide from it but it's absolutely terrifying to try to run from in the open areas.
  • You'll run into these in both the oceans and the ocean shallows, and so now non-underwarer boss rooms in the ocean shallows that include minibosses won't come up without any boss types that are valid to seed there.

• New Monster: Sea Worm
  • This new monster is another that is for the oceans and ocean shallows, and moves into and out of water with ease. They are pretty scary, as they do massive melee damage if you get right up on them (plus they just look kind of freaky), and they have a ton of health and so are very inconvenient to kill. However, shooting them slows them way down, so avoidance is definitely the optimal strategy with these in almost all cases.

Mission Balance Updates For Several Mission Types

• Supply Crates in meteor storm missions are now immune to friendly fire.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for suggesting.

• Meteors are now more the primary threat in meteor storm mission instead of monsters:
  • Previously, supply crates had 224 health. Now they have 1792 health.
  • Previously, meteor storm meteors had something low like 50ish health. Now they have 900 health, making them very hard to destroy but still quite possible to knock off course, which is more interesting.
  • Previously, meteor storm meteors did 28 base damage. Now they do 224 base damage. Definitely don't let these hit you yourself, and having them hit through a stack of crates is now a lot more devastating than what most monsters will do to the crates.
  • A meteor storm mission now requires you to defend against 100 meteors rather than just 50.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for suggesting we make the meteors more the focus.

• All forms of bats are no longer allowed to spawn in anachronism missions, as they literally make some of these missions impossible.
  • Other excluded-from-all-mission-types enemies (urban crawlers, etc) also no longer will seed in meteor storm missions.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for reporting.

• Desert burrowers are no longer allowed to spawn in meteor storm missions, as they are quite too hard to hit among the crates there.
  • Other excluded-from-all-mission-types enemies (urban crawlers, etc) also no longer will seed in meteor storm missions.

• Previously, any missions in the ocean shallows would lack enemies because all of the enemies in that region type were aquatic-only, and thus not suitable for missions. We've fixed that this release by starting the process of introducing new enemies for the ocean shallows that can move into and out of water.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor, KDR_11k, and others for reporting.

Beta 0.911 Fifty Craters

(Released March 20th, 2012)

• Fixed a bug from the prior version where the scaling of new entities was wrongly being applied to things like energy pulse.
  • And also stuff like fire touch, making them unable to actually do any damage.
  • Thanks to KDR_11k, Entorwellian, and Taverius for reporting.

• The icon for enemies on the minimap (and players, etc) is now drawn from the center of mass of the entity rather than at their base. For really large monsters, that works a lot better.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for suggesting.

• MP: Fixed a bug where shot speed multipliers (from enchants, though potentially other conditions can give these) were only being applied on the process creating the projectile, so the server and/or other clients could have simulated them incorrectly (which wouldn't have hurt all that much, but still).

• Fixed an issue where it was still possible in a few terrain types to get inescapable holes in the prior version of the game.
  • Thanks to Penumbra for reporting.

• Fixed a bug from recent versions where the hearth and adviser guardian stones could spawn right on top of one another.
  • Note that this _should_ fix existing worlds as well.
  • Thanks to Penumbra for reporting.

New "Defend Supply Depot From Meteor Storm" Mission Type

• New mission type: Defend Supply Depot From Meteor Storm
  • An old supply depot has been discovered, but is under assault by a magical meteor storm raining down both meteors and monsters. If you destroy all the incoming meteors and monsters, the depot's resources will be recovered.
  • However, if all the supply crates are destroyed during the attack, the resources will not be recoverable.
  • There is only a surface variant of this one, since obviously the open sky is needed, but it can seed as a secret mission or as a world map mission after you've completed any six missions.
  • This mission is pretty neat because in a lot of ways it's like missile command, but with a lot of twists brought on by the spells you have and the general monsters the game has.
  • These meteors are a new kind of "powerful piercing" shot, by the way, which goes straight through most normal barriers except for the ground and walls. So these meteors not only go straight through your own crates, they also go straight through whole stacks of the supply crates.
  • The good news is that the meteors themselves have incredibly little health and can even be knocked off course, but there's a lot going on and the monsters tend to be causing horizontal destruction while the meteors are causing vertical destruction.

Beta 0.910 Grains Of Sand

(Released March 20th, 2012)

• A new edge is now used in the deserts instead of the plants that didn't look very desert-like. Now it uses a sandy edge that we've been meaning to create for a while, but couldn't because photoshop didn't support directly what we wanted to do. Instead we've updated our own GDI+ graphical helper tool to help us do what we wanted, and the results are a lot more convincing.

• MP: Fixed a bug in recent versions where the player list on the server display would be duplicated when the server was posting itself to the master server.
  • Thanks to Aklyon for the report.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version that was causing exceptions when generating rooms in some buildings.
  • Thanks to drjones013 and cathexis for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where eagles were never turning around once they had picked a flying direction. This was particularly problematic in fix the anachronism missions.

• Fixed a bug from the last couple of versions that could have doors floating in the air in undergrounds.
  • Note: this won't fix existing cases of the problem, but it will prevent new cases from cropping up.
  • Thanks to Penumbra for reporting.

• Creeping Death and Energy Pulse both now slide along walls to avoid problems with their extra-large collision boxes hitting tight areas. Large collision boxes plus long cooldowns plus dying on impact is not a recipe for fun.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for reporting.

• Energy pulse has gotten a facelift in general: it's now 3x as fast to fire, and 3x cheaper in terms of mana, but also does 3x less damage.

Beta 0.909 A Perfectly Anachronistic Escape

(Released March 19th, 2012)

• Fixed a bug where advertising a server would send a blank server name unless the "server name" textbox had actually been changed by the person running the server (despite said textbox being prepopulated with the world name).
  • Thanks to Toll for helping us find this.

• In the prior version of the game, the ranged attack of the enemies was always just showing as a duplicate of the melee attack. Whoops!
  • Thanks to Terraziel for reporting.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version where some testing code got left in and was causing seek resources issues for players on the world map.
  • Thanks to Aklyon and Nypyren for reporting.

• In recent versions of the game, the "Elemental resistance" popups, as well as the damage popups themselves, could spawn way too frequently on enemies that were being attacked by a lot of shots at once, leading to visual clutter as well as performance drops. Fixed.

• Completely redid the logic for how the Ilari healing works, so that hopefully that occasional bug with them not healing you in multiplayer is nixed.
  • Thanks to many players for reporting this over the months as we fixed this and then had it un-fix itself, but martyn_van_buren, Aklyon, Toll, and TyberZann most recently.

• Added a new kind of overlord: Draconite Overlord.
  • This one has a similar difficulty to the Skelebot Overlord, but they both function in somewhat different ways.
  • They are intentionally both a similar difficulty so that either can be used from the first continent onward, giving more general variety.

• Fixed an overlord room that was prone to flooding.

• Fixed a variety of problems with the seeding of interior doors not always working right in some boss rooms, and of having some ladders looking odd both on interiors and exteriors.

• The "don't fall off ledges, please" logic has been greatly upgraded for larger monsters. Now they are not afraid of holes that are too small for them to fall down anyway, etc.
  • Thanks to khadgar for reporting.

• Large monsters and normal/smaller monsters are now able to pass one another. Visually it just makes sense, and it makes for cleaner movement of the larger monsters in particular (with them not getting trapped by the smaller monsters).
  • Overlords move past any other monster but not each other; minibosses and other large monsters collide with each other but not any other monsters; and the "minor" monsters (like dragonfire, etc) collides with other minor monsters but not with other larger enemies.
  • Thus something like dragonfire doesn't get caught behind some other enemy, as it's really more like a spell even though it moves and can be attacked like a monster. And minibosses aren't constantly getting trapped by floating smaller monsters.
  • As the player, of course, you still collide with all monsters the same way as you did before. And any monsters you summon also collide just as normal with the enemies.

• When the player is invincible, monsters now move freely through them.
  • This is a help in solo or MP, in terms of letting monsters not get trapped against you in small areas and thus your having no choice but to take damage upon entering a room.
  • On the other hand, in MP this also prevents some cheesiness of letting one invincible player hold a melee monster at bay from attacking other players (that was already prevented for spells, but now it's prevented for monsters as well).
  • Thanks to Terraziel for suggesting.

• When players and monsters get stuck inside each others' geometry for whatever reason, the player now never gets their position shifted as a result of this; only the monster does.
  • Valid examples of why this might happen include: when a player enters a room and a monster is standing in front of the door; when a player is invincible and comes out of invincibility while a monster is walking through them.
  • This should help to cut down on the crazy cases where players are getting shunted off into some other part of the map on entering some rooms.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for suggesting.

• Non-characters and non-floating-objects now get shunted to the side instead of up or down whenever possible, now, so that you shouldn't see them standing on each others' heads anymore. That obviously looked pretty funny/strange, and, while rare, was definitely something that could happen.
  • Thanks to Vampyre for reporting, although we'd also seen it.

• "Head Seeker" enchants are no longer seeded into the game. They were a pointless addition, because all of the head-slot enchants are given through stashes rather than the regular enchants, anyhow.
  • The other four kinds of "slot seeker" enchants are all really useful and make tons of sense, though, so of course those are being left alone. This one just got added along with the rest and was an oversight on our part that it wouldn't actually be useful.
  • Thanks to Nypyren and Terraziel for reporting.

• Normally spells emit from the center of the collision box of characters and enemies, unless we specifically offset that (which we do for many enemies). But for characters, we'd always left it dead-center.
  • This caused problems for a long time when characters were miniaturized, but even more recently when we shrunk the hitbox for players to no longer include their heads and to be shorter when on stairs, this started making players unable to use spells on inclines and otherwise have some trouble at various points with spells hitting the ground prematurely.
  • Therefore, the spells now emit from a lot close to the character's head, which gives you better angles of fire in general throughout the game. The only downside is that if you are standing right under a really REALLY low overhang, you might have problems with your spells hitting that overhang. But unless you've pasted yourself to the ceiling with lightning rocket or something, that's not really even possible, so it shouldn't matter.
  • Thanks to Professor Paul1290, BobTheJanitor, and Penumbra for reporting.

• Underwater boss rooms will now seed 1/3 as many monster nests as they previously did. Please let us know if this still doesn't seem right balance-wise in the next version.
  • Thanks to Terraziel, tbogue, khadgar, and Nypyren for reporting.

• Put in some extra aggressive error prevention in some methods to prevent multiplayer issues reported by kianxineki.
  • Thanks to kianxineki for reporting.

• MP (server):
  • Fixed a bug where the server would stop re-advertising if its window was minimized (possibly also if it had lost focus, hard to tell).
    • Thanks to Toll and others for info leading to this discovery.
  • Added three lines of info to the bottom of the server display so server administrators can see if their server is actually re-advertising and showing up as posted.
  • To make sure that you can still tell what's going on even if the server window is minimized or whatever, it also logs the pertinent events to a new ServerPostingLog.txt in the RuntimeData directory.
    • This log should be sufficient and the aforementioned extra three lines of info on the server display itself will probably go away after we're sure this stuff is working right, but leaving them in until then.

• In past versions of the game it was possible for there to be vents of the side-link sort going into and out of destroyed rooms. That was always in error and should no longer be possible; it will even strip them out of prior worlds for you.

• Previously, it was possible for vents to spawn behind crates, which could then lead to all sorts of problems. This should now be fixed, but it was rare enough that we were having trouble duplicating it. If anyone sees it in a future version, please let us know.
  • Thanks to jerith, khadgar, and MooseHowl for reporting.

• Fixed a display bug in the last version where the health tooltip was showing incorrect values for your base max health compared to your current max health.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for reporting.

• Put in a whole bunch of logic to make it so that when players are added to chunks, they don't get displaced by enemies that might be in their way. In other words, previously if an enemy happened to be walking by the door you were just coming in through, then the game would spawn you in some random other location in the room, sometimes in an inescapable window. Yikes!
  • This is one that is super hard to test because it was already extremely rare (and entirely impossible to reproduce from a save after it would happen, although we know it was happening). So if you see this happening again in the new version of the game, we really want to hear about it and in as much detail as you can give us. When this happens, it's because something solid was in your way and you got shunted aside. REALLY shouldn't be happening anymore, but you never know.
  • Thanks to Nypyren and freykin for reporting, among others.

• Fixed an issue where there was a low chance that deciduous forest chunks could spawn you in such a way that you were completely trapped in a tiny cave.
  • Thanks to Penumbra for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where some resource deposits (and similar objects) could stack up on one another in underground caverns and so forth in a way that was definitely not intended.
  • This actually retroactively fixes existing savegames when you enter the chunks in question, too.

• Made a couple of key pathfinding improvements to the NPC pathfinding to keep them from getting stuck on terrain edges.
  • Also made it so that they now hover higher again, like they used to, rather than hovering by your feet.
  • Thanks to Taverius, tbogue, and CodexArcanum for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with entrances into underground areas (or buildings, etc) sometimes not being enterable because of an invisible mission entrance building that would be visible if a mission was present in the region.
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for reporting.

• Fixed a bug that was causing seeding problems with some indoor boss rooms that had large windowed areas that you could walk through.

• Heatsuits now reduce lava damage by 90%.

• Advanced heatsuits lava damage reduction from 50% => 95%.

• Completely new graphics are now used for warp gates, and these look much nicer now!

• While you are in a ship (not a canoe), the game will draw the name (right now just "Continent 1" or whatever) of each continent at the center point of that continent. If the center is off screen, it draws the name at the appropriate point along the edge of your screen.
  • In old worlds, the first continent is always "Continent 1" and it counts up from there. In new Expert-start worlds it will start at "Continent 2".

• Greatly improved the transient heap allocations of generating certain kinds of procedural interiors, and the performance of generating each one after the first one during a session.

• Added a second method for underground cavern generation that generates caverns with a very different feel to them. These new caverns will be used in certain specific kinds of missions.

• Added a second method for procedural "maze-like" rooms with a very different (much more open) feel to them. These new rooms will be used in certain specific kinds of missions.

• Revamping Master Hero and The Chosen One difficulties to be more fun for advanced players:
  • Monster Health lowered to make spells feel more effective:
    • Master Hero now has 3.2x multiplier instead of 4.5x (compared with 3x on Hero).
    • The Chosen One now has 3.5x multiplier instead of 6x (compared with 3x on Hero).
  • However, starting at tier 3, the shielding that the characters get from the continent tier increases by a lower multiplier each tier.
    • Master Hero now has 1.4x multiplier compared to the prior tier on each tier 3 or greater (compared with 1.5x on every other difficulty).
    • The Chosen One now has 1.3x multiplier compared to the prior tier on each tier 3 or greater (compared with 1.5x on every other difficulty).
  • Thanks to Terraziel for suggesting.

New And Updated Missions

Huge Upgrade To "Battlefield" Missions

• The ally minions in the battlefield missions were never intended to be neutral skelebots; that was always placeholder. Neutral skelebots are sentient beings like humans are, and wouldn't just be tossed away in battle if it could be avoided.
  • Now new non-sentient robot minions have been introduced specifically for the battlefield missions. They have their own graphics, which makes them also a lot more distinct any player-controlled neutral skelebots that might be fighting alongside them.
  • The new robot minions come in two sizes: large and small. The small ones now have 100 base health where they previously had 82 base health. The large ones now have 500 base health where they previously had 82.
  • The large ones are also now a lot more resistant to knockback, but only now seed about 9% as often as the smaller ones.
  • The large ones are red and come with a 60% fire resistance built in (no elemental weakness like was previously there).
  • The small ones are yellow and come with a 60% air resistance built in (no elemental weakness like was previously there).
  • The large ally minions no longer collide with the smaller ally minions, and vice-versa, and the large ones thus now move slower. This keeps the whole line of them slightly more condensed (the larger guys standing above the smaller crowd), while allowing for more variance in things like move speed.
  • The shots of the large and small robots also now match their color and element. So the red ones do fire element damage, and the yellow ones do air element damage, rather than both doing light element damage.

• Will O The Wisps can no longer be used in battlefield missions, because their presence simply makes things too difficult (not to mention making things look a bit glitchy when your guys start lifting into the air and you don't know why). These are supposed to be freaky denizens of the swamp, anyhow, so making them come out into common battlefields seems like not the best thing even thematically speaking.

• When your character is standing in front of the ally mission base in a battlefield mission, your character now gets healed by the base at a rate of 10 health every 2 seconds.
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for suggesting this as one way to add some more strategic decision making into the battlefield missions.

• Added a new spellgem that you can find in the staging area of battlefield missions, but nowhere else: Battlefield Command Flare
  • During battlefield missions, your allies are unable to pass command flares that you place. This lets you group them up and use them as you wish, rather than always having them running off individually. Command flares can't be removed, but expire after thirty seconds.
  • Thanks to Martyn van Buren, BobTheJanitor, and Terraziel for suggesting.

• To add yet more tactical decisions to the battlefield missions, enemies will no longer drop health orbs while in these missions. You can of course return to your base to heal up, but your allies are at the mercy of whatever health they happen to have, and whatever damage they take.
  • This solves the problem of enemies being both obstacle and reward (in the sense of the health orbs being a reward), and lets us focus on balance in a bit of a different way.

More Palatable "Lava Escape" Missions

• If any player stays in the lava for 5 seconds straight, the mission ends in a loss.
  • Note: once the mission is lost, the lava begins to recede.
  • Combined with the heatsuit changes (see above: now reducing damage taken by lava), failing these missions is now far less likely to be lethal. But don't let your guard down, between the lava damage and the enemies it's still quite possible to die.
  • Thanks to many players for feedback on how to make these more likely to be played.

• Now that the lava escape is less hardcore in terms of penalties, it can become slightly more mainstream. If you win 10 lava escape missions it assumes you must like them, and will then allow them to start seeding on the world map.

More Palatable "Journey To Perfection" Missions

• Tweaks to this mission type:
  • The player no longer takes increased damage.
  • If any player takes any damage, the mission ends in a loss.
  • Taking these together, the mission is just as hard to win, but loss is no longer necessarily lethal. The enemies and anti-air towers can still kill you normally, of course.
  • Thanks to many players for feedback on how to make these more likely to be played.

• Greatly updated the underground variant of this mission type. It's now a lot more distinct from the interior version, and it uses the new style of underground cavern terrain generation.

New "Fix The Anachronism" Missions

• This new mission type comes in two variants:
  • Fix Anachronisms In Building
    • A strange rift in time is influencing a building in this region, and creatures from many different time periods are flooding in.
    • Well, more than usual.
    • The interlopers are causing the rift to widen -- if you destroy them, the the rift will be sealed and you will recover the resources stashed in the building. But beware: if you destroy any monster that actually belongs in the local time period, the rift will burst wide open and the mission will be lost.
  • Fix Anachronisms In Cave
    • A strange rift in time is influencing a cave in this region, and creatures from many different time periods are flooding in.
    • Well, more than usual.
    • The interlopers are causing the rift to widen -- if you destroy them, the the rift will be sealed and you will recover the resources stashed in the cave. But beware: if you destroy any monster that actually belongs in the local time period, the rift will will burst wide open and the mission will be lost.
  • Thanks to Penumbra for suggesting (though we changed it from furniture to monsters that had to be destroyed).

• This is a particularly interesting sort of mission, because it emphasizes observation and puzzle-solving. Some monsters seed in multiple time periods, and so that's particularly tricky to know which ones to destroy. You'll want to pay attention to how many anachronistic monsters are remaining (there's a count of this), and use wit and strategy to figure out the monsters you are less sure about.
  • For instance, if you aren't sure about espers but there are more espers remaining than there are anachronistic monsters, then you've just eliminated them as being anachronistic. This isn't just a memory game; you can use deduction to figure out quite a bit.

• The other thing that is unusual about this mission is that there are a large number of enemies in these areas that you absolutely can not kill without losing the mission. Even in the stealth missions, you can kill the enemies that spot you; they are just more dangerous and more blind. These enemies aren't any more blind than usual, so having to figure out the monsters to target while avoiding the ones that are off-limits is challenging from a combat skill level even if you know the enemy types and where they belong by heart.

• Both the interior and the underground variants of this mission use the new terrain/room generation logic noted above. So they tend to feel very different from anything else you've seen before in terms of their construction.

Art Updates To Characters And Monsters

• The graphics for the following monsters have been reworked to use a more painterly and attractive style that blends better with the rest of the game's graphics:
  • Crippled Dragon
  • Utahraptor
  • Urban Crawler
  • Urban Predator
  • Summoned Tornado
  • Black Whale and Black Whale Spawn
  • Blue Whale and Blue Whale Spawn
  • Red and Red/Yellow Slimes
  • Clockwork Probes
  • All 32 vengeful ghosts.
  • Skelebot, Skelebot Centurion, Skelebot Dwarf, Skelebot Giant, Skelebot Overlord, and Skelebot Sniper.
  • Eagles
  • Carp

• The ice pirate patrol ship has been made blurrier so that it is clearer that it is way in the background.
  • Thanks to Bluddy for suggesting.

• A considerably cooler looking snowsuit visual is now in place for the equipable snowsuits.

• All of the characters in the game have been updated to have a watercolor painterly look to them. This brings out a lot of color and contrast which was kind of muddy before, and it also gets rid of the former details that looked like cheap 3D when shrunk to that scale. Now the characters look a lot more animation-style, to match their surroundings.

Beta 0.908

(Released March 17th, 2012)

• On the listing of spells that you can craft, it now shows how many ingredients you are missing for each spell, rather than just saying "missing ingredients."

• Fixed a crash bug with the prior version when trying to upgrade certain older worlds into the new version.
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for reporting.

Beta 0.907 Defeating The Regressive Guard

(Released March 17th, 2012)

• Fixed the error message "Could not find sound 'ServerFound'" when using the server list.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the shrink spell was causing exceptions when used in multiplayer.
  • Thanks to kianxineki for reporting.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version that was not letting anyone craft tier 3 spells... unless they were IN trial mode. Sigh.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor, Nypyren, and KDR_11k for reporting.

• Added in logic that makes it so that the "most missions that must be one" logic is now retroactive.
  • If you've won 20 missions and a new unlockable to win 16 missions is added, you now get the new unlockable unlocked immediately for free.
  • If you've won 20 mission as an unlock, and a new unlockable of "win 24 missions" is added, you get 20 towards the new unlockable.
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for suggesting, although we were thinking of it already.

• Fixed a bug where falling damage and damage from water, ambient cold, and so forth would get wildly inaccurate in multiplayer.
  • In the prior version of the game this was manifesting as an incorrect reporting of damage even in solo play, but the bug was extremely longstanding. This is what we mean about the new code helping us find bugs, rather than obscuring them.
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for reporting the display issue.

• In the prior version, enemies were meant to show their ranged and melee attack strengths (or a range of such strengths if they have multiple behaviors with varying attack powers), but it was not doing so. Fixed.

• Fixed a bug that was making it so that enemies would sometimes think they could not jump up to a ledge when in reality they really could, leading to some oddities in small spaces.
  • Thanks to freykin and MaxwellDemonic for reporting.

• Skelebot Guards no longer go invincible when there is not enough room above them for you to jump over them, or when they are in midair.
  • Thanks to MaxAstro and KDR_11k for reporting.

• In the prior build, the health drops were too strong. They are now about 30% of the strength they were in the prior build, which should put them back closer to what they had been in former builds.
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for reporting.

• Fixed a bug from the prior version where crippled dragons and fairies were not able to spawn their swarms.
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for reporting.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version where the amount of damage from fire over time was massively overpowered (we missed that in the scaling conversion pass).
  • However, while we were at it, we quadrupled the damage from fire in general, since players were complaining it was so tame it was not even a factor before.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for suggesting the damage should be higher.

• When you are damaged by acid water, it now also puts out the fire that is on you, if you are on fire.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for suggesting.

Beta 0.906 Of Terrain Upheavals And Server Browsers

(Released March 16th, 2012)

• Put in a change to multiplayer that should fix the longstanding occasional issue with enemies being able to spawn way too many of whatever it was they were supposed to be spawning (usually it came up with dragonfire, but more recently also with tiny fairies).
  • Since we could never really duplicate this, the fix is somewhat conjectural, but we've restructured things enough that it really _should_ be impossible for this to happen now, whereas before it was more ambiguous.
  • Thanks to ColdPrototype, Toll, Underfot, Clovis, and Terraziel for reporting.

• Removed some debug text that got left in during the prior version -- sorry about that!
  • Thanks to Nypyren and freykin for reporting.

• Fixed several room maps so that players won't get trapped by skelebots now that they can't be walked through.
  • Thanks to terraziel for pointing this out.

• Fixed a bug where an NPC rescued while on fire would still be on fire back at the settlement.
  • Also added another check to make sure the NPC is at full health after the rescue.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for the report.

• Fixed a bug where it was possible to use region-targeted guardian powers while standing in a port region, and for guardian powers to spawn missions in port regions.
  • Thanks to khadgar for the report.

• Added the ability to load saved input bindings sets from the view/edit controls window: simply select the set you want from the dropdown next to the "Load Selected Bindings" button and then click that button (there's a confirm).
  • Currently the only sets included with the game are "Default" (which is basically what the game generates normally) and "Left Handed Default" (which is very similar, but with some differences in movement, etc). More sets can be added, and the existing ones revised if it seems appropriate.
  • Thanks to Drjones013 for reminding us of the general importance of this sort of thing, and for working out the Left Handed Default set included with this.

• Fixed a room map that had an incomplete window frame, allowing the player to jump into the window.
  • This was discovered while investigating a different issue reported by CodexArcanum.

• MP: Put in some general compression on ability uses (which uses a tiny bit more heap RAM, but can cause large ability uses to substantially shrink in size: such as when many sub-entities are all spawned at once, this will no longer flood the network with remotely so much data.
  • Also put in a few other low-level network optimizations to make the networking model slightly more tailored to this game compared to what we were doing with AI War.

• MP: fixed a bug causing exceptions when succeeding in a rescue-npc mission.
  • Thanks to Aklyon for the report.

• Fixed a bug where attracting-drops (health drops, consciousness shard drops, etc) were being pulled by the will o' the wisp grav well.
  • Trivia: In AIW, we made it past version 3.0 without needing an immune-to-gravity flag; in AVWW we needed it before 1.0.
  • Thanks to tbogue for the report.

• Fixed several issues with the parameters of a mission area changing after that mission had been won; for instance, the special rules of the mission would stop working as soon as you had won it, sometimes with disastrous consequences.

• Rather than using switch-room-style switches for some of the missions (like the lava escape, and the new journey to perfection missions), there is now a combination "Mission Victory Exit" which looks cooler and acts as both the switch as well as the exit. This is particularly helpful because once you find the "switch," you now no longer have to then find the exit, because they are one and the same. This also helps us out with some more complicated seeding patterns, letting us not worry about the two of them potentially being annoyingly far apart from one another, etc.

• Monsters in the prior version would sometimes miss a chance to do a melee attack against you if you were using a shield. Fixed.

• Fixed a bug where dust storms would sometimes be invisible, especially in multiplayer.
  • Thanks to Aklyon and MaxAstro for reporting.

• MP: fixed a bug where the client would think the local player entity was at full health but the server thought it was not, so the health drops would swirl around you but the client would never try to pick them up (until more damage happened).
  • Thanks to MaxAstro for the report.

• Fixed a regression where healing drops would not stop targeting a player once they had targeted them, even if that player was now up to full health.

• There are now damage popups whenever enemies are damaged; this lets you tell how much you are damaging them without having to do a bunch of math in your head.
  • The way that "extra damage" weakspots are handled is now more compact, too, and is wrapped into the main damage popup itself.

• Cleared out a lot of old internal data about the world and NPCs that dramatically reduces the size of the regions.dat file -- by to 37% of its former size in one particularly large world we tested it with.
  • And actually, in that same case it also shrunk world.dat down to 90% of the size it had previously been. That's much less dramatic, but still a great savings.
  • These changes make it faster to transmit world data for large worlds across the network (and thus also interrupting other players who are connected less), as well as making saves of the world data a lot less disruptive in large worlds when playing solo (so you don't get periodic lag when the game is saving the region data to the disk, etc).
  • Also, every ability used in multiplayer is now about 1% smaller as well, which is really a pittance but still something.

• When you die, the game no longer instantly pauses if you are the last character in the chunk. That tends to ruin the cool ambiance of whatever it is that kills you gloating a bit (explosions finishing, whatever).
  • Instead, the game now pauses as soon as you bring up the character select menu (which is what prevents battlefield missions and similar from getting away from you while you choose a new character).
  • And by the way, the character select menu now draws over the game scene you were last looking at, so you're no longer blind to what was going on and just seeing blank sky; but it does dim the background a lot, so that you can actually see the text clearly.
  • When you're first starting the game, this actually thus gives you your first glimpse of the world map right away, rather than waiting until after the intro mission for you to see it at all.

New Spell, New Obstacle, New Mission, New Seeker Enchants

• New Player Spell: Fire Flare:
  • Hurls a harmless tiny fireball in the direction you indicate. When it detonates (due to expiring after time or hitting something) it illuminates the immediate area for 10 seconds.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for suggesting.

• New Obstacle: Anti-Air Robotic Tower (Homing)
  • Indestructible missile-launching robot tower that sticks out of the ground and won't bother you at all... normally. It's utterly harmless and you can walk past it without harm... again, normally.
    • If you use any form of Ride The Lightning (that includes Lightning Rocket), or cause yourself to be able to fly via any means (becoming a bat, etc), then this thing starts spewing really fast and fairly damaging missiles that home in on you and leave massive explosions when they detonate.
    • Note that using enchant-based double or triple jumps, or just plain jumping, won't cause it to bother you. It has to sense either you as a flying enemy, or a spell-augmented jump in order to fire at you.
  • These will be used in a couple of upcoming missions, as well as potentially seeded into some of the areas at random. These are considered a trap or an obstacle rather than an enemy.

• New Mission Type: Journey To Perfection
  • There are three variants of this which play out pretty differently: one interior, one underground, and one surface.
  • A hidden stash has been discovered in this region, but it is inaccessible due to a strange device that also vastly increases the lethality of any danger near it.
  • If you enter the area and disable the device (simply push the "off" button), the stash can be recovered. But beware: taking any damage whatsoever in the mission area will cause instant death. Thankfully, this goes for the monsters too. What? Oh yes, forgot to mention the monsters.
  • In the surface version of this mission, there are Anti-Air Robotic Towers strewn about fairly liberally.
    • This does NOT mean that playing as a bat is impossible. It just means it's almost impossible. It's actually pretty crazy as a different form of ultra-challenge to navigate the missiles as the bat through this mission.
  • This mission type is kind of the combat equivalent of the lava escape for platforming: it's the hardest-core kind of combat reflexes mission we can think of, and it's going to cater to a certain crowd. Normally this won't show up on the world map as a mission type, just as a secret mission. But if you win 5 of these kinds of missions, then the game assumes you like them and starts seeding them on the world map as well.
  • These don't show up even as secret missions until you've won 16 missions -- note that if you've already won some missions, this means 16 more missions starting from this version. It's entirely possible for you to have "unlock 20 missions" unlocked before "unlock 16 missions" since we added the second one later and they are each tracked individually.
  • Tip 1: Using the featherweight enchant is a super good idea for this type of mission. Even the slightest bit of falling damage is fatal, so if you don't want to be thinking about that, just put on featherweight.
  • Tip 2: In general, the kind of enchants that are useful for this mission are really different from other missions. Extra damage to enemies? That matters not a bit, because you already one-shot them. Extra protection from their damage? Again, irrelevant -- they one-shot you. This frees you up to think in some out-of-the-box directions with what enchants you actually use.

• Added "seeker" head enchants for each of the 5 enchant slots, and wearing one increases the chance that enchants you get while wearing it will be for the target slot.
  • Like the element seeker enchants these are not given from enchant containers but rather from stash rooms.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for the suggestion.

Major Enhancements To Terrain Generation

• Added a general new capability to our terrain generation logic: the ability to build up random structures of land, as opposed to just always starting with rolling hills and then chopping away from it.
  • This adds an enormous amount to our ability to do strange things to the terrain of levels and to build cool landscapes that feel exploration-worthy.
  • A number of the exterior areas have been updated to include this in various forms, such as ice age, thawing, lava flats, grasslands, etc.

• Since the beginning of time with this game, it was possible to have the offscreen two tiles to the left and right of a chunk drop down slightly or rise up slightly compared to the actual exit. This was annoying and caused some visual goofiness at some points, and is finally fixed.

• The exterior areas now make more sense in terms of how they put overhangs and partial caverns in places like the ice age thawing and so forth.
  • This also makes them a lot more interesting visually, and a lot more varied like the hand-crafted stuff in the intro mission is.

• The ground seeding logic for the swamps has been completely redone to be a lot more interesting and varied, and to feel more excitingly distinct from other types of regions.

• The ground seeding for the deciduous forests (the ones you start finding on continent 3) have also been completely redone.

Server Browser

• Added "Find Servers On Internet" button to the Multiplayer menu.
  • Brings up a window that polls our master server and displays currently available MP servers.
  • You can connect to a listed server by clicking the connect button on its row.

• Added to the server display:
  • "Advertise Server On Internet?" toggle; defaults to off, when on it notifies our master server that your server should be shown on the Find Servers On Internet list. Re-advertises every 5 minutes. If the master server doesn't get an update from you for 15 minutes it drops the listing.
  • "Server Name" textbox; defaults to world name, but remembers whatever you put in last. This is the name players will see on the internet-servers list.
  • "Max Connected Players" textbox, defaults to 8, but remembers whatever you put in last, and may be anything from 1 to 200. If the number of currently connected players is greater than or equal to this number then further login requests will be rejected.
  • Changing either the server name or max-connected-players settings will immediately re-advertise your server with the updated info.

First Multiplayer Administrative Tools

• The administrative tools are all done on the client side, by players, rather than through the server console. This is to facilitate being able to have multiple administrators of a server that is not local to the administrators; as well as making the game more friendly to being run "headlessly" on a server without graphics present.
  • Please note that the below is merely a first pass, and we're going to be doing a bit more with admin controls prior to 1.0, as well as a lot more with it post-1.0.

• To "authenticate" as a server admin, a person must:
  • connect as a client to that server
  • open the chat window
  • type "cmd:claim_admin_rights {password}"
    • the server checks the parameter against the server's Game.Instance.GameSettings.AdminPassword
      • right now this must be set by adding the line "AdminPassword:" (followed by the desired password, of course) to the settings.dat on the server. This isn't the most user-friendly, but I wanted something simple and obviously-secure: the server application literally has no mechanism to change the value of the password, only someone with filesystem access to the machine can change it. Regrettably this precludes on-disk encryption, so hmm.
      • if AdminPassword is the empty string (or not set), the authentication always fails
      • else, and if the parameter == AdminPassword, that client's PlayerAccount's HasAdminRights bool is set to true on the server until they disconnect

• After that, there are a few commands (all of these are case-sensitive, btw) they can use:

• cmd:release_admin_rights
  • just sets their HasAdminRights to false

• cmd:kick_player {number}
  • kicks the player account whose PlayerPrimaryKeyID equals the parameter.
    • Note: the parameter is NOT the customer ID, but rather the "in what order was this player account created on this server?", and that primary-key-id is displayed next to the username in chat, on the server's interface, etc

• cmd:ban_player {number}
  • adds the target player account's customer ID to the world's list of banned customer IDs; if the player account is on it is kicked from the server
    • Note: the parameter is, again, the PlayerPrimaryKeyID and not the customerID because customerID's are never shown in-game; BUT, the ban is against the customer ID to prevent circumvention by changing username

• cmd:unban_player {number}
  • the mirror of ban_player

Huge Cleanup Of Math Internals For Health And Attack Powers

• The entirety of the stats of the damage that enemies and characters could do, and the damage that spells could do, was built in a very patched-up fashion previously.
  • This was simply due to how the game kept evolving and changing, and so the underlying code got more and more convoluted. It was time to clean house!
  • And so we did, and this has fixed innumerable underlying issues with various things, and will make it incredibly easier for us to do further balance work in the next week... but it also leads to the possibility for some new bugs in the short term.
  • In general, except where noted below, we've tried to keep the actual balance consistent with the prior version of the game. If something seems off, then either there was an old bug that got swept away (revealing an imbalance), or there is a new bug (that we just need to know about and fix).
  • Either way, we really want to hear about balance concerns over the course of the next week in particular, to really get this nailed down tight. From testing internally so far, it's feeling pretty good, though, which is a good sign.

• One change that will be immediately obvious is that all entities now use the same scale. Previous versions had your health at one scale (visibly), but enemies and other objects using a completely other scale. Under the hood they were all the same scale, but you had to divide by 3600 and then multiply by 100 to get the player scale compared to the rest of the scale of the game. The interface did a wonderful job of masking this, in the main, but it would lead to things like an enemy attack damaging you for 50 damage and damaging your allies base for 1800 damage. This wasn't a bug, it was the exact same number under the hood! But my god was it confusing; we mainly did this in the first place in order to test out the lower numbers, but then it just kind of stuck around for good.
  • Anyhow, so now everything uses the new, lower-number scale. Everything has been converted down consistently, but now you see ice bats with 45 health instead of 1600 health, etc. And your fireball 1 now does 16 damage instead of 580.
  • These numbers are all the same equivalents, but now it's the smaller more manageable numbers that players had requested, but without the confusion of using two numbering scales instead of one.
  • One downside is that we have had to convert health to being floating-point rather than integer-based, which is how we were visually displaying our integer-based health in the GUI anyhow. So nothing is really changing in the GUI, but under the hood this has a few minor consequences that we decided were ultimately worth it. Because of the way we do multipliers on tier, difficulty level, enchants, and other factors, nothing other than floating point or very large integers is precise enough to give us accurate numbers.

• The number of randomized stat upgrades recieved by each boss has been halved, as the number of stats into which those upgrades could be poured have also been halved.
  • Also fixed a rather critical bug that nobody had noticed but which we found in the code, where bosses were often getting waaaay too many buffs applied to their various stats, most notably health. But only some of the time. This was really messing around with balance.

• The carp have had their attack power tuned down very slightly.

• Sometimes the black whales were able melee you in the previous versions, despite not supposed to ever be able to. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for reporting.

• The desert burrowers have had their attack power tuned down by well over half (man they were hardcore). Same with their health.

• The strength of bear traps has tripled.
  • Thanks to FallingStar for suggesting.

• In past versions, the strength of both urban predator missiles and land speeder robot missiles was mistakenly about 3x too low. Fixed that for you! ;)

• The skelebot dwarf attack has had its power buffed about 1.5x, as has the skelebot giant.

• In past versions, the icicle leapers have hardly had any attack power (it seems), due to a bug in the math for their attacks. The new math underlayer helped us immediately find and fix this.

• Slimes no longer hurt you when you touch them, they only hurt you with the fire they spawn.

• Damage Per Second Per Mana has been removed from the inventory screens, as it was misleading or useless, depending on who you ask.

• Both DPS and DPM now show their upgraded amounts like the actual damage stats do when looking at learning a new tier of a spell.

• Any damage applied to any characters from past versions of the game has been removed, setting them all to full health, because otherwise with the internal health value changes things would be dying left and right (including your characters).

• Known issue: any summoned monsters from past versions of the game will likely have an attack strength of nothing in the new version. So if you've got summoned rhinos running around, they'll be useless in the new version. But any new rhinos spawn will work properly, and the old rhinos only last for 30 seconds, anyhow.

• Somewhere in the prior version of the damage math calculations, the players were getting a 50% boost to their attack power compared to the actual code-set versions.
  • After our revamp of the damage math calculations this bug was fixed, but that unfortunately left the player spells then feeling extremely anemic (because, well, we'd all gotten used to the 50% higher values, and in fact we'd been balancing around that).
  • So, we've now buffed the underlying spell attack values for all the player spells by 50%, which should make things feel exactly the same as they were in the prior version (again, except where balance changes to enemy health or spell power was specifically noted in this release).
  • Thanks to Terraziel for noticing the 50% discrepancy in our DPS exports and reporting it.

• The health of NPCs no longer gets buffed by the continent tier when they are out of the settlement. Your health doesn't get buffed in that way, so having theirs get buffed was confusing; because if you switched to them in a settlement, their health would be a lot lower, like yours.
  • On a very related note, the player character, on continent tiers higher than 1, has always been granted extra shielding from incoming damage: 33%, 55%, 70%, and then 80%. That's why the higher tiers aren't just complete slaughters.
    • Embarrassingly, we'd forgotten about this. And it also was not being applied to NPCs. Now it's being applied to NPCs, and is also being shown both in the escape menu and the paused hover-over menu.

Cooldowns Cleanup

• The concept of entity-specific casting speeds has been removed from the game.
  • This had already been removed from the GUI for player entities, and their values just set at 5, but the internal values were still being used and causing some confusion in some cases.
  • Player are already able to adjust their casting times by wearing enchants, and that is of course remaining in effect. We've just taken out the base stat attached to the entity itself, not the concept of varying cooldowns.

• Boss enemies were still able to have varying casting speeds, which wasn't really that interesting. Now they don't vary in that stat anymore; when we have "boss modifiers" in the future we'll be able to achieve this same thing in a more interesting and visible-to-the-player way.

• Previously, the internal casting speed of 5 that was attached to all players was making it so that their spells were firing at about 50% faster than the internal code values would indicate. This was of course expected, and was reflected on the GUI, but now that the internal modifier has been removed we've gone back through all the actual internal definitions and converted them to 50% faster so that the speed of spell fire rates should be the same as in the prior version.

• The cooldown of Plasma bolt's long range entry has now been lowered to match that of its white entry, making it have more DPS.

• For display purposes, the cooldowns in the tooltips are now rounded to two decimal places regardless of if they are a little more specific than that. This keeps the list condensed and doesn't get confusing with two "0.55" entries when one is really "0.551" and the other is really " 0.553." We're talking about milliseconds here, so for practical display purposes these display differences mean nothing.
  • In the past, the interface also only showed one decimal place for these no matter what (so "0.5" and "0.55" looked the same). Now if there are two decimal points of precision it will show that.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for suggesting.

Beta 0.905 Refined Gargantua

(Released March 12th, 2012)

• Put in more robust handling of some of the xml files, so that a missing folder doesn't cause a game crash but instead just causes a TellTheDeveloper message.
  • Thanks to freykin for reporting such a crash.

• Fixed a typo from yesterday that was causing the game to not create hallways in desert buildings.
  • freykin's report mentioned above also spawned this fix.

• Fixed an issue where a number of the arcane ingredient descriptions had incorrect information in them about what tiers were required in order for them to drop. Now this is automated, so no arcane ingredient should ever have wrong text of that sort again; if it's seeding when it shouldn't, in the future, then it's a seeding bug rather than a textual one. This is not true of common ingredients.
  • Thanks to Terraziel and BobTheJanitor for reporting.

• Previously an npc wounded during a successful rescue could die upon the player entering the settlement due to the amount of lost health. The NPC is now healed to full before being moved to the settlement.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for the report.

• All the apostrophes in the region names have been changed to the ASCII version. This should eliminate the underscores in region names of new continents/regions. Unfortunately, if your region has already been created with an underscore, it's stuck.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for bringing this to our attention.

• In the last couple of versions, stuff that was supposed to appear on the second continent wasn't appearing until the third, and so on. Sorry about that!

• Fixed a bug where, once again, ice pirate patrols were able to seed on ocean or port tiles. They can still seed on ocean shallows tiles, but not ocean tiles themselves.

• Fixed an issue with Gold Boomerang not being able to hit all the enemies in its path properly.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where gravity well effects could apply to immobile enemy actors (some buildings are actually "actors" rather than static objects to allow them to shoot at stuff, spawn things, etc). Notably, the will-o-the-wisp was exploiting this in battlefield missions to rather overtly take ownership of the player's base.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for the report.

• MP: fixed a bug where the NPC entities sent to the client as part of a chunk transmission were not being linked back up to the NPC data.
  • Previously, the NPC data hung onto the original entity object and the entity running around in the chunk (on the client) was a separate entity object altogether, but with the same entity ID.
  • One downstream bug from this was that if you glyph-transplanted to an NPC, it would find the npc by the entity ID and switch the player's currently-controlled-entity to the original npc entity, which had never been added to the chunk and thus the game would get confused because the player was no longer in a chunk but was not on the world map either, and the player would have to disconnect and reconnect to continue playing.
    • Thanks to MaxwellDemonic for reporting this bug, leading to the overall discovery.

• MP: fixed a bug where when an entity changed from a player entity to a non-player entity (or vice versa), the server and/or client could keep handling them with the multiplayer model that applied to the old state (preventing ability uses after a glyph transplant, for instance). Now it will recompute which model to use after such a change.

• MP: fixed a bug where the client could get "stuck" thinking that a non-local entity had a "pending collision check" but never marked it as resolved because the client doesn't do collision of such entities.
  • This was normally harmless, but if that non-local entity became the client's player entity then it was unable to actually change the position because position changes normally aren't allowed if the entity has a pending collision check. But collision checks are normally only done during position change, hence being "stuck".
  • Fixed by making a collision-check that is aborted by the client due to being a non-local entity clear the "has pending collision check" status of the entity.

• Fixed an enormous number of physics bugs with enemies getting stuck in each other or in other pieces of geometry, and of players no longer being able to ride crates up in water, and a lot of other related stuff there.
  • Also fixed it so that these corrections for enemies now work properly in multiplayer, which was never the case in the past.

• Vastly improved the physics of how "getting stuck in a crate" works. This happens when you drop a crate on yourself or on an enemy, for instance, and then suddenly you (or the enemy) find yourself unable to move.
  • For players, this can be an interesting way to "hide inside a crate" by ducking, when it comes to incoming spells that aren't piercing (or spells that are melee.
  • For enemies, they now take it properly and stop struggling to escape from the stack of player crates that you may have amassed. Instead they focus on meleeing the heck out of those crates until the crates are gone (which doesn't take long, sadly), and then moving on with their day like normal. Rather than meleeing the crates while spazzing out in a really buggy looking way.

• Fixed up the graphics for the rhino to remove their white outlines.

• Whenever your character takes damage, this is now logged in the chat log.
  • There is a bit of a delay with this, so that it can aggregate same-source data sources and put them into one message that is easier to read rather than spamming your log with as-it-happens messages.
  • The purpose of this isn't for you to realize you're being damaged as-it-happens (there are already popups and other visual cues for that), but rather to be able to go back and look at the log of what recently damaged you right after a bit of an encounter.
  • Thanks to khadgar for suggesting.

• Player crates now collide with top-solid platforms, making it easier to stack those up.
  • Thanks to Smiling Spectre and MaxAstro for suggesting.

• The "Global" cooldown category has been removed from the game -- this was something that basically put a floor on the frequency at which spells could be fired (at 0.5 seconds), since there was no way to modify this one via enchants or other powers.
  • Additionally, this prevented simulcasting spells of different colors/types that basically had no cooldowns in common except for the global one.
  • Both of these things kind of constrained things in a way that stifled some advanced bits of gameplay; we once thought might be technically necessary for networking, but turned out not to be.
  • Thanks to Terraziel, KDR_11k, and BobTheJanitor for suggesting.

• The type of fences used in the settlements no longer drop lumber, because lumber is not supposed to be available until tier 3 and that was really confusing things.

• Fixed a bug with a core seeding component that was causing clusters of entities not to seed correctly, and which was also causing enemy towers to not seed reliably in battlefield missions.

• Decoy fireworks can no longer fly, but rather fall to the ground instead. Otherwise it was quite too exploitative for non-ranged enemies.
  • You also can no longer use them underwater.

• The attack strength of summoned rhinos has been quadrupled.

• The tooltips on ability bar slots (both with and without details) now show the icon of the ability's element.

• Now when targets resist or take extra damage from an attack due to elemental resistance/vulnerability some floating text appears saying so.

• Fixed a bug with the gender-setting on entities always making them female. Whoops!

• When picking a new character it now tries harder to have both male and female choices available.

• Lieutenants now drop a "Rare Enchant Container" when they die; picking this up does not grant any enchant points but instead immediately gives you an enchant with at least 2 higher-than-average effects (even if you hadn't found enough of that enchant type to be able to get one with 2 extra effects, unless that enchant type simply doesn't support 2+ extra effects).
  • Overlords now drop 3 of these.
  • Thanks to Underfot and Terraziel for inspiring this change.

• Fixed the telegraphic stance never having worked properly in MP before (though the monsters did pause properly).

• Normal weakspots now only trigger if the entity (i.e. projectile) hitting them is no larger than the weakspot (in terms of rectangular area).
  • "Aggressively" collided weakspots like the Giant-green-amoeba's counter-spawn ignore this rule, since they want to get hit.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for the suggestion.

• Fixed a bug where fire/air/earth shields were all 1/4 as strong as water shield.
  • Thanks to Minotaar for the report.

• Fixed a bug where the Seek Resources guardian power could generate missions that gave guardian powers as rewards, instead of giving, you know, resources.
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for the report.

• Fixed a bug where a monster spawner suppressed by Douse Monster Spawner was still counting towards the chunk's population cap. Now the cap will be properly (if temporarily) reduced due to suppressed spawners, and if all the spawners are suppressed in a chunk then new monster-spawner-caused spawns won't happen until at least one spawner is no longer suppressed.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for the report.

• Fixed a bug where the "Power Cannot Be Used Because Settlement Lacks A Required Resource..." error message was showing the internal identifier of the material rather than the localized name.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for the report.

• Added a new "Risktaker" enchant type:
  • Goes in Torso slot.
  • Always gives +100% Damage Taken. Ouch.
  • Always gives +20% Outgoing damage (extras can increase this).
  • Optional extras are heavily offense-focused and have higher ranges than normal, so a high-quality Risktaker is likely to be very good for dps. But very good for dps on both sides.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for inspiring this addition. We didn't quite call it "The Broom of Doom".

• Ice Cross 1 no longer costs any cherries to unlock. Just a single blue sapphire for tier 1, which means that players can actually find and craft it during the intro mission.
  • The crafting costs for ice cross 2 and up remain unchanged.
  • Thanks to Darloth for inspiring this change.

• Launch Rock 1 no longer costs any iron ore to unlock. Just a single green sapphire for tier 1, which again means players can actually find and craft it during the intro mission.
  • The crafting costs for launch ruck 2 and up have therefore also actually been reduced in cost by a single iron ore compared to what they were previously.
  • Thanks to Darloth for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where any world without an intro mission (so any advanced or expert starts) was generating its "region interior data" way too early, making the continent generation slow and making the game more prone to having older-style outdoor dungeon types on existing continent (fortunately that's not something we've changed lately, so it really has little effect overall).

New "Skilled" Combat Difficulty

• Added a new "Skilled" difficulty level between the Adept (default) and Hero (recommended for experienced gamers) difficulty:
  • Monster damage percent: Adept 0.5; Skilled 0.75; Hero 1
  • Monster cooldown multiplier: Adept 1.5; Skilled 1.25; Hero 1
  • Monster telegraphing time multiplier: Adept 1.25; Skilled 1.13; Hero 1
  • Monster health multiplier: Adept 1.5; Skilled 2.25; Hero 3
  • Accuracy of monsters using things like circle of fire: Skilled takes the same as hero, which is better than adept.
  • Monster speed multiplier: Adept: 0.8; Skilled 0.9; Hero 1
  • Multiplier to healing: Adept 2; Skilled 1.5; Hero 1
  • Damage from environmental things like being set on fire: Adept: 15; Skilled 18; Hero 20
  • Note that any previously-chosen combat difficulty of Hero and up has now been bumped down by 1. If you liked Hero difficulty (or higher), you're going to want to go back and reset your difficulty to that or things will suddenly be too easy. If, on the other hand, you were playing Hero because Adept was too easy, but Hero was too frustrating even so... well, you shouldn't have to do anything, as you should now be on Skilled automatically.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle, Darloth, TyberZann, and Toll for suggesting.

Terrain Generation Upgrades

• The exterior grasslands terrain generation has undergone a pretty massive overhaul, so that now lakes, ponds, and dried-up canyons can seed in them in addition to the regular rolling hills that you're used to with them. We'd thought about doing this with a mix of hand-crafted and procedural techniques, but -- as with some of the other regions that we've recently upgraded -- we found that we could get a pretty awesome result with just procedural techniques and so left it at that.

• The lava flats have now been redone to be a lot flatter and a lot more lava-filled.
  • Also, given that the utahraptors are now immune to lava and can in fact run through the lava at full speed (or even hide in it), the lava flats are a new zone of terror unlike what you've encountered before.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for bringing this misery upon us.

• Fixed a bug in recent versions where inescapable surface tunnels could form in the junkyards.
  • Thanks to Smiling Spectre and tbogue for reporting.

• The tiny annoying one-high humps in the ground that were making players and monsters have to jump over them pointlessly are now being stripped out of exterior locations.

• Put in a couple of serialization changes for chunks that makes them approximately 30% smaller even in their already compressed state.

• After much internal fiddling, the game now supports angled grounds under water. This makes those underwater areas feel a lot more natural and interesting, which is important for a lot of parts of the game now (not just the oceans and ocean shallows, but also the new ponds/lakes in the grasslands, or the lava pools in the lava flats, etc).

• Interior staircases are now able to be seeded underwater for the first time, which is as nice and helpful there as it is for exteriors.

• Much of the outdoor art that was seeded in the prior version was seeding FAR too often. This has been corrected.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for this report.

• Ponds and other open-to-the-air small bodies of water (not the ocean) now draw with background plants along their edge, which looks a lot better.

• Lava was still drawing as pretty soupy and transparent in recent versions. Fixed so that it is now almost completely opaque. When a utahraptor jumps out of a lava pool at you at breakneck speed, it's one of those heart-stopping moments. Watch carefully for movement in the lava, but at the same time that's really hard to do if you're already being chased and/or if a windstorm is blowing ash everywhere. So... yeah. Lava flats were always meant to be one of those optional and hardcore sort of areas, and now they really live up to that (finally).

• Fixed the issue with vents and underground side passages seeding inside lava and acid water.
  • Thanks to jerith, TyberZann, and khadgar for reporting.

• Previously, in underground caverns and surface tunnels, you could get ladders that were so dense that they would form rows of ladders two or three or even more columns across.
  • Even on the lowest platforming difficulties, this was simply too many platforms, and led to all sorts of problems such as not having room to seed underground buildings, underground holes (side links), and so on.
  • Therefore the game now prunes those back so that there won't be two columns of ladders within three columns of one another. This keeps it so that on a low platforming difficulty you can still get out of undergrounds relatively easily, but we don't run into things not having room to seed and all those other negatives.
  • As part of this, we also made it so that ladders now don't go quite as near to the ground in undergrounds and surface tunnels. This gives more room for the ground-cover-level stuff to seed, and it's still well within jumping distance, so it mostly just keeps things cleaner and seeding better.

• Vastly improved the terrain of the battlefield missions. Now:
  • There is always a guaranteed flat ledge right at each end so that the allied and enemy bases start suitably far apart from one another.
  • The terrain itself is really hilly and varied now, making these way more interesting (and actually having some cover to them, etc, too), while still leaving lots of small plateaus where enemy towers can lurk.

Enemy Behavior Upgrades

• After months of agonizing about the AI for this, and all the side effects and ramifications of such a change, we've finally put in cliff-avoidance for ground-based walking enemies.
  • This leads to interesting new emergent behaviors such as them standing on a cliff looking at you menacingly, guarding you from getting easily back up that cliff. We still have more to do here to make this even _more_ interesting, but this is a definite improvement.

• Added the capability for our game engine to fully replace monster types with upgraded versions of that monster type -- as opposed to adding new monster types next to the older, weaker monster types.
  • This is useful because, for example, we currently have the Skelebot Centurion get unlocked and start appearing next to the Skelebot Snipers and regular Skelebots. But those early monsters are pitifully weak by later-game standards once you have a goodly number of enchants and unlocks, etc.
  • The thing is, we still don't want to just ditch regular skelebots and skelebot snipers. For one thing, there is a grace period where the centurions _should_ be mixed in with the regular, weaker foes. Then after those periods, the regular skelebots and skelebot snipers need to evolve their own behavior/stats/etc -- permanently -- while keeping their same art.
  • So now we suddenly can have three late-game enemies that are interesting, rather than everything narrowing down to skelebot centurions out of that particular line of three monsters, as one example. This is a lot more powerful and interesting, it allows us to reuse the art from early-game monsters even in the late game (while of course still introducing completely-new monsters at the same time), and overall it lets us maximize our assets while providing yet more sense that the world is growing and changing around you.
  • Bear in mind we have to actually implement upgraded versions for this actually to mean anything for any given monster, but now we have the capability to do so.

• Skelebots of all types have now lost their regen ability. It just wasn't that interesting, didn't look right in a lot of cases, and caused extra graphics/network load for not much else. We have some more interesting ideas in place for these instead.
  • And given how ineffectual the previous regen ability was, you won't even notice the absence of it, from a balance standpoint.

• Fixed up some incorrectness with how the urban crawler was avoiding holes, which was instead making it pretty much just sit still.

• Fixed several enemy movement AI bugs in the prior version, that were leading to things like the icicle leapers occasionally crawling.
  • Thanks to Underfot for reporting.

• Regular skelebots are now called Skelebot Guards, and they now have a new ability.
  • Whenever they have chased you to a ledge that they cannot cross, they now simply stop, cross their arms, and make themselves invincible.
    • They thus won't be able to get at you, but if you come into range of them they will melee you. So you can't just snipe them from a distance unless you are actually in range of them chasing you, or they haven't yet reached the edge of where they can chase you.
    • In _most_ cases this doesn't make the skelebot guards any harder than they ever were, but in small confined spaces where they are on some ledge that you want to get up, it can be quite problematic! And way more interesting.
  • Additionally, the skelebot guard now also has a literal guard behavior for when it has caught up to you but you are higher or lower than it -- such as if you are on a platform over its head. It then stands and waits, invincible, for you to come into range of it again.

• Utahraptors should now respect deep holes and not fall down them... unless you are on the other side of a ravine and they want to get you. Then they should jump recklessly at you. This hasn't been tested as fully as we would normally do, because utahraptors have to migrate substantially before this even really becomes an issue, but let us know if you run into trouble with it (and please give us a world file that we can use to test, if so).

• Skelebot Snipers and Skelebot Centurions no longer pursue you. Instead, they wander around in their designated area, and fire ranged shots at you whenever you are in range.
  • Also espers and clockwork probes now have this behavior (non-boss amoebas already did).
  • Somewhat surprisingly, this makes them vastly more dangerous than their previous kiting behavior.

• Will O The Wisps, now path after you, rather than kiting you, which makes them a lot more deadly given their suck-you-in gravity ability.

• The collision boxes or jump parameters of a number of enemies have been adjusted, making them behave a bit more naturally.

• Monsters now have more of a physical presence; rather than being able to pass each other at will, and rather than being able to stack up on one another, they now all take up physical space that blocks each other AND you.
  • This means that a monster with weak melee could still be an obstacle that you have to kill in a narrow hall, for instance.
  • Character-to-character non-collisions have remained the same as what they were in prior versions. Having NPCs able to pass one another is pretty important, and you being able to pass them as well as other characters, too.
  • And also spells continue to pass through allies like they always have, as well.
  • This is going to be a source of some amusing bugs for a while, of the sort where two rhinos go head to head and leap at each other infinitely, neither wanting to let the other pass, for instance, or two tanks stacked on top of one another.
    • But these things can be sorted out, and ultimately this feels like a much more tactile sort of experience with the enemy collisions being handled this way.

• NPCs and enemies are no longer so sluggish about jumping over small obstacles in the land, making them feel more effective and fluid.

• Improved the collision boxes of characters and enemies walking on slopes. Previously the character would visually sink down into the slope some, but their collision box would not shrink to match. Now it does, making slopes an extra effective place to find cover for both the player and enemies.

• The way that melee attacks are now launched by enemies is now a lot more reliable, such that there should be few-if-any cases where you touch an enemy and they don't get you.
  • This should also massively help with the gold boomerang spell missing some targets as it flies through the air and hits a line of enemies, since for various reasons it is using melee under the hood.

• Skelebot Guards, Snipers, Centurions, Giants, and Overlords now have a new ability that allows them to use their melee attack against
  • These smaller types of enemies now also all now have knockback on their melee attacks, meaning that they can knock both you and your spells around.

• Player summoned tornadoes can now knock back spells as well.

• Fixed a bug with the size of the regular amoeba shots still being too large and thus them not being able to fire them quite a lot of the time when they are too near to walls, etc. Also fixes those shots not going through small spaces properly (making it now more dangerous for players), and being too hard for the player to dodge (making it now easier for players in a different way).

• Completely redid the premise of how the ranged AI logic works. Previously, the logic about both what enemies a character would fire at had too much connection to what character they were chasing, if they were the chasing-sort of enemy.
  • This was problematic during NPC battles or during multiplayer, among other things, because it meant that sometimes enemies would miss shots of opportunity and they would tend to concentrate their fire far too much on a single player out of a group.
  • Now the ranged enemies intentionally flip through in-range targets at random, firing off shots at whoever they can as much as they can, regardless of who they are actually chasing.
  • This makes enemies a lot more dangerous and unpredictable in multiplayer in particular, but also during things like NPC rescue missions or battlefield missions.

• Greatly simplified some of the AI internals, so that more logic is consolidated and we're at less risk for edge-case bugs in the future.

• Improved the pursuit logic for enemies in multiplayer (or group NPC battles of various sorts in solo), so that all the enemies will no longer tend to bunch up on just a single target. This also works when you have allied NPCs who are together fighting against multiple monsters.

• Greatly improved the wander logic for flying AI enemies, such that they now fly around at a more appropriate pace (the speed they always could move at, but which they weren't moving at recently when wandering because of bugs).
  • They also have less of a tendency to slide along walls or the ground for extended periods of time, instead tending to "lift off" of the ground when they can.
  • They also are a bit better of getting themselves out of corners when they get stuck in a corner, although it does tend to lead them to have a tendency to "guard" a section of corridor sometimes rather than patrolling the whole thing. This varies, and actually works out more interestingly, anyway.
  • In outdoor chunks, flying enemies now don't fly way off up into the sky when wandering; the only time they would now do that is when they are actively chasing you.

• The wander logic for walking enemies has been completely redone. This was a lot less complex than the wander logic for flying enemies, but it still makes these enemies a bit less predictable and a bit more responsive to their environment. Honestly this was working quite well already, but this tweaks out a last few things.

• The way that vengeful ghosts work -- in a physics/combat sense is now completely different.
  • It used to be that if they touched you they did major damage, and they spewed stationary miasma blobs everywhere they went, which would deal you minor damage if they touched you (but you could attack the miasma blobs to kill them).
  • Now the ghosts are completely non-corporeal and don't damage you if you touch them. They also don't spawn miasma everywhere they go, they only spawn those when you are in range. The miasma blobs also are now more spell-like, in that you can't attack them, you can only dodge them; and instead of being stationary, they move slowly. The ghosts also now glow briefly purple each time they spew a miasma blob.
  • This makes the mechanics of the fight pretty different, because the miasma blobs from the ghosts are no longer blocking your shots at the ghosts. However, it's more of a ranged battle with more-dangerous miasma shots moving around a lot more, so that makes it challenging in a different way without it being kind of a boring tedious task. Also, given the new physics model for enemies, we kind of had to do some reinvention here to make these make good sense as ghosts.

• Several fixes to skelebot guards and so on.

• Several improvements to the efficiency of melee and piercing attacks, causing lowered network and CPU load when there is a lot of that going on.
  • Also at least one correctness fix, that allows a piercing spell to hit a single target multiple times without stopping touching it, so long as its cooldown is short enough. Great for creeping death, in particular, but also some spells the enemy uses against you.

• The differing movement speeds for monsters have been removed; that was something that was used to keep monsters from stacking up back when they did not collide, but now it just makes them crash into each other and try to jump on each other's backs more.

• Added in a new ghostly attack mode where things like eagles can still actually melee attack the player (or whatever else they would normally melee attack) while still passing through them like they always have. In other words, eagles, dragon fire, and a few other things continue to work equivalent to what they did in the last major release in terms of collisions.

• Utahraptors and Urban Crawlers now have a higher population cap cost in their seeding logic, meaning that you'll see fewer enemies when they are around (and fewer of them in particular).
  • This is good, given that they are so much stronger, and are more intimidating when they are a bit more rare.

• Any monsters with too high of a population cap cost no longer are valid for battlefield missions. At the moment this just excludes utahraptors and urban crawlers, but we know that in the case of the latter in particular this was something people had been wanting.

• Monster behavior-pattern-related-data is no longer shown in the pause menu.
  • So you can no longer see what their exact firepower is for a given spell they currently are using, or what spell they are currently using.
  • This was too much information, and encouraged players to repeatedly pause throughout the battle to see what the enemy was up to currently.
  • Now whenever you check the stats for an enemy, those are going to be the stats for that enemy during that battle unless the tier changes during the battle; the behavior shifts you'll have to watch the actual playfield for.
  • As an added bonus, this is now one less thing we have to transmit across the network in multiplayer, saving some more bandwidth. And it also lets monsters do behavior swaps as fast as we feel like it without there being any adverse networking effects.

• Blue and Black Whales are no longer directly dangerous to touch, and in fact you can run along the surface of them if you need to while you are fighting them. It's their spawn that come after you that you have to worry about.
  • For the record, that was already previously the case with the Crashed Landspeeder Robot as well.
  • And now that is also true for the urban crawler, except for its back wheel (which will still damage you).

• Fixed several rather substantial bugs that could let players and enemies get stuck inside secondary pieces of other entities (such as the back wheel of an urban crawler, as one example).

• Made a few improvements to how both NPCs and regular flying monsters handle pathfinding around sharp-edged corners, such that they are no longer getting stuck or slowed at those points.

• The entire "Kiting" behavior pattern has been removed.
  • Monsters now either pursue you in some direct fashion, or they fire upon you while wandering according to other rules. This fits with most other similar games in the genre, and actually makes the monsters more dangerous because they are either getting WAY too in-your-face with chasing you (versus just getting nearby with kiting), or they are wandering around unpredictably while still firing at you (versus moving in fairly predictable patterns while attempting to kite you).

• The health of allied minions in battlefield missions has been tripled, as they were simply too fragile with the rebalanced work on battlefields.
  • Additionally, their attack strength has tripled. Man these robots were getting the raw end of the deal before.

• The AI logic for the battlefield missions has been completely reworked in terms of its implementation -- largely both sides behave the same as they did before, but minus a number of smaller glitches.

• Dragon fire and red slime fire now behaves much better, and clumps up vastly less. In the case of the dragon fire, it also tends to spew out of the dragon further when being emitted, so watch out for that.

• Tiny Red Fairy Swarms are now only 2 fairies instead of 16, and the tiny green fairy swarms are no 4 instead of 8.
  • However, the health and movement speed of the tiny fairies has gone way up, along with their time to live.
  • They are a lot more interesting to flee from now, they have less of an impact on CPU usage now, and they are harder to kill as well as being more interesting to avoid.

• There really are a variety of collision models now used. Mostly enemies are solid toward each other and toward you, but for bats the optimal strike pattern is to hit you and then keep sailing past, so that's what they still do. However, unlike in the past versions they continue to collide with one another, which feels more natural.

Water/Lava Handling

• The progress bar that would appear on enemies that wandered into water or lava has been removed, as we're finally redoing how the water/lava handling for enemies works.

• Previously there was an issue where underwater enemies, harvest objects, etc, would not drop items on death. This was based on some very old logic.
  • Now any non-boss object simply doesn't drop any items if it hasn't been damaged by a player. Thus enemies that fall into water, or who are killed solely by NPCs, don't grant you big piles of health or whatever else lying around, which was the point of the other logic way back when.

• Enemies are now damaged by acid water and lava again, depending on the type of entity.
  • Additionally, those with immunity to one or both of those environmental hazards now show that immunity in their pause menu hover-over.

• Monsters that are immune to either acid water or lava (or both) no longer have their movement slowed when moving through it.

• When it comes to all flying enemies and acid water or lava, they are now either: immune to the liquid in question; or completely unable to enter the liquid in question.
  • This is pretty much along the lines you would expect. Red amoebas can move into and out of fire but can't even go into acid water. Blue amoebas are the opposite. Green amoebas simply can't enter either liquid.
  • With bats and similar, this is also the case. So it's interesting in that you can hide from regular bats underwater if you've got some acid gills, and you can then snipe them from there.

• Walking enemies are now smart about water and lava and will not intentionally walk into a liquid that will harm them. Using knockback you can knock them into water, though, which is half the fun!
  • THAT said, it used to be that water would kill enemies in 5 seconds and you in 60 seconds, which was quite a disparity. Now it will just kill you both in 60 seconds, even-steven (though obviously if you have buffed your health via upgrade stones, you still get extra time).

Beta 0.904 Umbra Vortex Missions

(Released March 6th, 2012)

• Fixed some bugs where dropdowns on the difficulty dropdowns could draw partly off the screen.
  • Thanks to Gallant Dragon for the report.

• Fixed a bug where the while-paused tooltips on whatever objects were near the mouse cursor would show even while the mouse cursor was inside a GUI window.
  • Thanks to Toll for the report.

• Added a "Back To Game" button to the bottom of the menu that comes up when you press ESC during the game.
  • Thanks to Smiling Spectre for pointing out that all the other menus had "Previous Menu", "Cancel", etc but this one could only be directly closed by the keyboard.

• Changed Light Snake to use to same sound effect as Fire Shield.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for the suggestion.

• Now when you pick up an item the game shows the total amount available to you after the pickup, in addition to showing you the amount you just picked up.
  • Note that crafting materials will generally show different totals to different players, because crafting materials are gathered by all players but spent individually once-per-player.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for the suggestion.

• Previously you would be getting 1 spawner every 30 tiles, now you will be getting 1 spawner every 50 tiles. To compensate for this somewhat the minimum has been made 2 spawners. This makes for fewer trash mobs swarming throughout boss rooms, although they are certainly still there.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for suggesting.

• The tooltip description of the platforming difficulty now includes notes about the reduction in background ladders that was introduced in the prior release.

• Corrected the positioning of the "Windstorm!" notice that shows during windstorms; it was previously drawing on top of the health meter.

• As a rule, warp gates are never allowed to spawn inside of missions. However, there have still been a few cases where they were erroneously marked on the dungeon map as having a warp gate in missions, leading to confusion. This has been fixed, and should retroactively affect existing worlds as well.

• Fixed several bugs related to the background-ladder-hiding based on platforming difficulty in the prior version:
  • The hidden ladders no longer show on the minimap.
  • Fixed the hidden ladders sometimes showed up as visible but actually weren't letting you fall through them.
  • Thanks to Hunter Vega, khadgar, and Terraziel for reporting the various problems here.

• As sort of an aside to the above fixes, also reduced the CPU load on the server for combining "Cross tile layers," and similarly reduced the needed data storage for each chunk by a moderate bit.
  • This does mean a bit more CPU processing each time a client/solo player actually loads the chunk for play, but that's actually pretty negligible and was needed to solve some of the problems above, anyway.

• Platforms inside buildings are no longer removed based on the platforming difficulty, except in boss rooms.
  • As Terraziel put it, "it doesn't add a very much to exploring them, in a way it almost makes them feel less like buildings."
  • We'd been on the fence about this, thanks to Terraziel for helping us decide to do it.

• Fixed a bug in the prior versions of the game where platforming difficulty wasn't actually saving, but was just reverting to the default every time you re-loaded your world.
  • Be warned that it had been inverting it with the currently invisible-and-unused strategic difficulty, so now that we've un-inverted that your platforming difficulty could be something you didn't expect. Might want to check that out!
  • Thanks to Terraziel for reporting.

• Made it so that the only types of missions that will show up via "Scan for resources" guardian powers are those that would be showing up on the world map anyway.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for reporting that lava escape missions were still showing up through this.

• The mission staging areas and underground/interior secret mission entrances are now somewhat larger rooms, making them less cramped and less likely for oddities to occur.

• Fixed a bug that was causing missions that were abandoned to not count as "concluded" if they were secret missons or guardian-power-created missions.
  • This was letting players endlessly re-roll those missions, rather than simply having those missions disappear for a time.
  • For regular world map missions, the logic was already correct, since the goal there is to not let players just cycle missions which would immediately respawn anyhow with different rewards, etc.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for reporting.

• Previously, there were only two ways to get Rescue NPC missions: through guardian powers (which require NPCs as well as guardian power scrolls), or through finding these missions as secret missions.
  • The problem was, the more types of secret missions we added, the rarer the Rescue NPC missions would become, to the point where players could be looking for hours and hours for a single NPC. Yikes! NPCs are supposed to be fairly rare, but not remotely like that.
  • Therefore, we've introduced a brand-new type of dungeon node that seeds in about 30% of underground caverns, and which has an even lower chance of being seeded in very large buildings (usually between 1-10% depending on the building).
    • This dungeon node is a "Rescue Mission" node, which works just like a "Secret Mission" node except for the following differences:
      • The mission can only be attempted once. If you succeed, fail, let the rescue mission expire after you encounter it, or simply abandon it, that mission is gone forever and that rescue mission node won't ever spawn any more rescue missions.
      • All of the missions spawned in the rescue mission nodes, naturally, involve rescuing NPCs. So no matter how many non-NPC-related secret mission types we add, this never gets diluted.
  • Just to note: You'll still see rescue missions crop up as secret missions like you always did. But as we add more secret mission types, that's going to seem like the NPCs are getting rarer and rarer that way, simply because of the dilution effect. That's what has happened so far.
  • All in all this keeps NPCs somewhat uncommon, but gives a sure-fire way for us to insure that there are always NPC rescue missions that you can find in a reasonable amount of time, no matter how many more non-NPC missions get added.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor in particular for reporting the issues here.

• Now, once a continent is seeding 7 world map missions at once, if fewer than 3 of the available world map missions have materials (instead of powers) as a reward, the next mission is forced to seed materials instead of powers for rewards.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for reporting how material-rewarding world-map missions could become pretty scarce.

• 19 new underground cavern backgrounds have now been put into place:
  • 2 new desert underground backgrounds are now used for all desert undergrounds, and differ substantially from the surface tunnel backgrounds.
  • 2 new crystalline lava underground backgrounds are now used for all lava undergrounds (including when you venture very far underground), and differ substantially from the surface lava flats backgrounds.
  • 2 new The Deep underground backgrounds are now used for all The Deep undergrounds, and differ substantially from the surface tunnel backgrounds.
  • 3 new ocean underground backgrounds are now used for all ocean undergrounds, and differ substantially from the surface ocean areas (so it looks like caves you are in, rather than open ocean, when you're in the caves).
  • 10 new crystalline underground backgrounds have been added into the general mix of backgrounds used for all other kinds of general undergrounds. There are still the various dirt-style undergrounds also, but these more crystalline ones make for more exciting and unusual caverns that you can come across.
  • Thanks to Bluddy and Hyfrydle for suggesting.

• During the actual rescue phase of an NPC-rescue mission, the exit door will be blocked to you (and display a message to that effect) until the npc has actually made it through the door (or died). This will help against the confusion people were experiencing when they were leaving the chunk before the npc actually escaped, causing their position to reset.

• Boiler Tanks will now not seed in smallish chunks, since the densities were getting a little crazy.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for the report.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version that was causing the Seek Resources guardian power to sometimes report it could not be executed when in fact it could.

• Changed a typo in the tooltip about elusion scrolls to make their description more clear.
  • Thanks to khadgar for pointing this out.

• Corrected some bugs that could occur to cause holes to the sky in some underground caverns in rare cases.

• There are 16 new "Vortex Battle Room" designs that are used specifically for the new "Destroy Umbra Vortex" missions.
  • These were all created by Chris, but like with the boss room templates (or any other kind of room template), players can create their own and submit them.

• There had been a bunch of art that had been included into the game, but due to the rush of trying to get things ready for the Beta Series 3 push, never actually got seeded into the game. This is now done. Television anyone?

• Hallways in desert regions should now be seeding vases that can be used for gathering clay.

• In a move that is sure to bring fear and despair to the already beleaguered world of Environ, monsters have learned... how to double-jump. Oh, don't worry -- outside of a certain new mission type, none of them actually know how to do it. Yet.

• The requirements for the boss gang missions to be unlocked have been raised from 3 boss tower missions to 10 boss tower missions; these are way harder than they were recently, and new players shouldn't run into them that fast.
  • For anyone who had already unlocked them, you'll have to do them again; and past boss tower mission wins don't count when a new unlockable is introduced like this; sorry!

• Taking the place of boss gang missions in terms of being unlocked after three boss tower missions, there are now "Destroy Umbra Vortex In Cave" missions that appear as secret missions.
  • As a secondary unlock condition, they'll appear on the world map itself once you reach continent 2.

• Oh, yeah, so by the way -- new mission type called "Destroy Umbra Vortex In Cave."
  • An Umbra Vortex has opened up in a cave in this region, with several nasty micro-bosses swirling around in it -- and making it so that gravity does strange things, such giving you infinite jumps. After you win a few of these missions, the infinite-jump ability will also take hold on the micro-bosses themselves, and as you win more and more of these missions the micro-bosses will get more and more plentiful.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for suggesting.

• Fixed a couple of things about the unlocks menus:
  • The "Remaining To [X]" numbers were resetting to their full amount (rather than staying at 0) after the unlock was complete.
  • The sorting of many of the unlockables really wasn't the best.
  • Thanks to Smiling Spectre for reporting.

Beta 0.903 There Was A Hole Here

(Released March 5th, 2012)

• Fixed the "seed monster nest type" messages in the prior version (they were harmless, but annoying).
  • Thanks to Terraziel for reporting.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version that was letting any character with double or triple jump enchants jump forever, even if those enchants were removed. This was one of those "short term bugs from rejiggering the whole ongoing conditions logic."
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor, MaxAstro, and Terraziel for reporting.

• Fixed a longterm bug where non-combat background objects were having their healths buffed by difficulty level. This was never really much of a noticeable issue until the last release, but now it was super annoying.
  • Thanks to Terraziel, zebramatt, and MaxAstro for reporting.

• Fixed a huge bug in the prior version where players and player allies were mistakenly having their attack powers boosted by the combat difficulty in the same fashion as monsters.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for reporting.

• Added some null-checks to prevent crashing in npc-rescue missions when exiting the chunk while escorting the npc.
  • Thanks to kof91 for the report.

• Fixed a bug where the game would crash if the OS prevented it from writing to certain files (notably, region interior data). It will now just complain bitterly in the chat log so that the player can know something is wrong but without causing additional errors due to not handling the exception.
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for the report.

• After cooking up a quick "how many hits does it take to kill an enemy at each difficulty, with base damage at equal tier and tier +1" calculator, the following changes have been made to enemy health balance:
  • Master Hero difficulty multiplier dropped from 5 to 4.5.
  • The Chosen One difficulty dropped from 8 to 6.
  • Lightning Esper and Water Esper base health dropped from 3000 to 2000.
  • Desert burrower base health dropped from 5000 to 1500.
  • Icicle leaper base health dropped from 2500 to 750.
  • Hanging trap base health dropped from 8000 to 3000.
  • Skelebot dwarf base health dropped from 2000 to 1000.
  • Green Fairy base health dropped from 10,000 to 3000.
  • Red Fairy base health dropped from 15,000 to 5000.
  • Red and Red/Yellow slime base healths both dropped from 2500 to 1500.
  • Skelebot overlord base health dropped from 230,000 to 160,000.
  • Will O' The Wisp base health dropped from 10,000 to 1500, but their magical and melee attacks both increased 3x in return.
  • Clockwork Probe base health dropped from 10,000 to 6000. This means they are still really tough, but each one isn't half of a miniboss in terms of health (which was a bit over the top).
  • Fire bat health reduced from 4000 to 1000, but physical attack also doubled.
  • Ice bat base health reduced from 3000 to 750, but physical attack also doubled.
  • Giant Shadow Bat base health reduced from 8000 to 6000, but physical attack also doubled (man these are dangerous in a new way, now).
  • Bat base health reduced from 1000 to 500, but physical attack also doubled.
  • Skelebot base health reduced from 6000 to 4000.
  • Skelebot sniper base health reduced from 5500 to 3500.
  • Thanks to zebramatt, Terraziel, BobTheJanitor, and Bluddy for helping to inspire a lot of these changes.

• Summoned rhinos and summoned tornadoes now only last for 30 seconds, rather than indefinitely. This solves a number of issues with them (ability to really flood an area with them, various problems with balance, various problems with them never disappearing in settlements, etc).
  • As a general design rule, all summoned monsters will now have a time to live of some sort, rather than just lasting forever.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for inspiring this change.

• Fixed an issue from prior versions of the game where lowering the falling rate of a character would actually let them jump higher.
  • The reason has to do with the velocity shift when the character stops moving upwards and starts moving downward. At first the game is just stopping the character moving upwards as fast, before it transitions into actively moving downwards, because otherwise it looks abrupt and odd. This is what we'll call "hang time."
  • With the falling speed reductions, this was actually affecting the length of "hang time," which is still slightly a misnomer because during hangtime you are actually moving upwards still.
  • Now, during that "hang time" period where you are still moving upwards, but the game is adjusting your acceleration to start going downwards, none of the falling modifiers have any effect. This makes it so that the length of "hang time" is always consistent (well, it still varies based on jump height modifiers, but that's actually proper), but once you start actively moving downwards you move downward more slowly with a falling enchant.
  • Thanks to Terraziel and BobTheJanitor for reportng.

• Fixed some bugs where glyph transfer wasn't setting the right "where is this npc" flags, causing issues when moving npcs between settlements.
  • Thanks to Clovis for the report.

• Fixed some problems where npc data would not be created for a new player entity on remote clients in multiplayer. It's not clear if these were actually causing problems.

• The platforming difficulty now causes the background ladders (the ones that are pre-placed in levels) to get a lot less frequent on higher platforming difficulties.
  • This is something that is done when the chunk is loaded, and it simply hides the ones that aren't appropriate for your specific difficulty level, so this _will_ affect existing worlds and it also is something that you can tweak as you play and the platforms will appear or disappear as you change the difficulty (you have to leave the chunk, let it drop to disk, and then have it reload, for that to happen, though).
  • The chances of a given piece of ladder getting removed are as follows, by difficulty level:
    • 1: 5%
    • 2: 10%
    • 3: 20% (default)
    • 4: 60%
    • 5: 80%
    • 6: 95%
  • Note that this is on top of whatever the seeding already was -- so on any difficulty, of course, you're getting fewer ladders as you go down further into caverns. That doesn't get affected by this difficulty-based change either way.
  • Thanks to Penumbra, KDR_11k, and Bluddy for suggesting.

• Extra jump enchants now are gated:
  • The "Kill 500 Espers" unlockable has been replaced by a "Kill 40 Espers" unlockable, and this is now a prerequisite to unlock before double-jump will start appearing.
  • There is a new "Kill 5 Utahraptors" unlockable that is now required in order to get any triple-jump enchants. This means that triple jump is now not accessible until continent 2... and if you've not faced any utahraptors lately, they are incredibly terrifying nowadays.
  • Thanks to Bluddy for suggesting.

• Removed a second "or" from the description of the secret missions.
  • Thanks to hyfrydle for pointing this out to us.

Beta 0.902 The Kid Gloves Are Officially Off

(Released March 4th, 2012)

• Fixed an exception that could occur mousing around the inventory.
  • Thanks to Minotaar and kof91 for reporting.

• Put in some attempted preventative handling where if a music or ambient-sounds file does not exist, the game will tell you about it and not try to load it, rather than erroring out. We're not sure if this is even the problem, or if it's something internal to the unity engine itself, but at least this eliminates one possitiblity for the occasional "GameMusic+<LoadMusicAsyncInner>d__0.MoveNext ()" error.
  • And actually, now put in yet another round of preventative handling here that should be even more reliable. If anyone sees this again, please let us know.
  • Thanks to jerith providing a semi-reproducible case of this.

• Put in several fixes to water/lava seeding in interiors, so that when automated water is seeded it will work better and not have strange gaps next to stairs, etc.

• Fixed a bug with stairs being possible to hang in an invalid position over no solid ground, leading to wonky physics.
  • Thanks to Smiling Spectre for reporting.

• Made it so that in the oceans and ocean shallows, interior boss rooms are now filled with water -- that way the bosses and enemies from that kind of region can actually seed!
  • Previously, these rooms were just completely devoid of bosses, making them automatically won. Whoops!
  • Thanks to jerith for reporting.

• Fixed a number of issues with monster spawner spawning, especially in oceans, of late. This was often leading to far too few monster spawners in something like the ocean or the ocean shallows boss chambers, and no spawners at all in some boss rooms of regions of those sorts.

• Previously, monster spawners were accidentally being removed when bosses were destroyed. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Smiling Spectre for reporting.

• Previously, the boss chunks in the intro mission were not changing into former boss rooms when their bosses were killed, nor were they having their boss music stop once the bosses were gone. Fixed.
  • Thanks to GrimerX and others for reporting.

• Updated our spritefont engine so that it now has some mappings of some unsupported unicode characters ("fancy" apostrophes and double quotes, for instance) and now maps those to their prosaic ASCII cousins. This keeps those sorts of characters from drawing invisibly and making it look like we can't tell I'd from Id when someone typed up some dialogue in MS Word.
  • Thanks to jerith for reminding us about this.

• Updated our spritefont engine so that any invalid characters it finds will be rendered as underscores rather than just being rendered invisibly and causing glitchy problems. That way the offending textual definition in whatever xml file can be found and corrected, versus the game itself just appearing glitchy.

• Completely redid the premise of how "ongoing conditions" are applied to players and enemies. This basically refers to enchants, and effects that get applied to you like being set on fire, running from storm dash, etc.
  • Previously, most stuff was being handled on addition and on removal of the effect. So if your damage was to be doubled from storm dash, it would set those flags on your character when storm dash got turned on, and would remove those flags from your character when storm dash ended.
  • That approach had the advantage of being very CPU-friendly, doing the least possible amount of calculating while a condition was applied to you or an enemy. The thing is, there really don't tend to be that many enemies or characters in a chunk in the first place to where this would become a CPU issue (it would take thousands at once to really become a problem), and it had the drawback of being rather brittle from a code standpoint: if small code errors were made, then you could wind up with ever-spiraling more damage incoming while you storm dash, or immunity to fire not going away after fire shield was taken off, or whatever else.
  • Those drawbacks weren't a big deal when we had only a handful of ongoing conditions, but now there are several hundred thanks to enchants, and this was now a major issue. And in fact, the ever-spiraling-upwards damage from storm dash was happening in recent versions, which is what prompted this change in the first place.
  • The new methodology wipes all of the from-ongoing-condition flags back to their default states every frame, and then loops over all the ongoing conditions that are currently applied to you to get the final stats, and then uses those stats for the rest of the frame. That means a bit of extra processing per frame, but any CPU from the last 10 years will laugh at the difference, and it keeps us programmers from introducing accidental bugs that are a real pain to hunt down.
  • The _downside_ of this change is that it's a fairly substantial change, and in the short term we may have just introduced a raft of new bugs of the sort that we're trying to prevent. If you find any such things, please let us know and we'll fix them. Past a few days from now, this is something that will drastically reduce bug counts from this sort of thing, though, and it's possible that even in the next few days you won't find anything amiss from this (we checked ourselves pretty carefully, but that only goes so far).

• Fixed a bug where things that modified your incoming damage -- such as enchants reducing that damage, or miniature and storm dash increasing that damage, were actually having their modifiers added TWICE. This made a 2x boost in incoming damage actually a 3x boost in damage, and so on.
  • Thanks to GrimerX for reporting this one a month or so ago -- it's a bit of an older bug.

• Improved the way that double-tap handling is calculated. If any other key is pressed in between a double-tap, it no longer counts as a double tap.
  • In other words, previously hitting Left Right Left would cause storm dash to the left if you hit it fast enough, same as just Left Left would. Now Left Right Left doesn't count as a double tap, and thus no storm dash gets activated.
  • Thanks to khadgar and Toll for reporting.

• Put in a couple of sanity checks to prevent players and NPCs from ever having health or mana that are below a certain pitiful amount (previously, in super rare cases the max mana could actually be negative on a character, which was completely glitchy).
  • Thanks to Minotaar for reporting.

• The cooldown on forest rage has been lowered from 0.75 to 0.5.

• Spell are no longer ever slowed down by the wind, they are only sped up by it. This keeps the game feeling more interesting and fast-paced in windstorms. If you're upwind (or the enemy is), they have a definite advantage in terms of firing on you. However, you nor they are now not penalized below your regular firing rates.
  • Going along with this, the amount of extra speed granted by the wind direction is now doubled, but only when the spell is moving a certain speed already in the same direction of the wind. This means that (for instance) normally slow-moving sniper shots can be terrifyingly fast in a windstorm. And at the same time, if you are angling up at an angle to hit an enemy that is downwind of you, you've got to worry about your angle of fire being thrown off by the wind blowing it. Actually, that applies for enemies also.
  • We'll see how this feels, it's a bit of an experimental change but it seems better than the old way.
  • Thanks to Itchykobu for inspiring this change.

• The graphic of forest rage has been improperly centered for a long time, and so never rotated properly. Fixed.

• Fixed an issue where warp gates could spawn in the exit-from-surface-chunk side area.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for reporting.

• Added a new, and fairly rare, Advanced Heatsuit that can only be found in the lava flats:
  • Protects from the intense conflagration of the lava flats, and against being set on fire, while worn. Additionally protects against the cold, and reduces both damage and movement penalties from lava.

Difficulty Shifts Relating To Monsters, And Character Progression

• Previously, there was a bit of an inconsistency in how upgrade stone upgrades worked.
  • Every time you upgraded your health, it would increase by your base health -- meaning that having more base health made every upgrade more powerful. This has remained the same.
  • Every time you upgraded your attack power, it was just a flat 10% increase, so the same for every character. Now the base attack power of the character makes this anywhere from a 6% increase to a 20% increase per upgrade, based on their base magical power.
  • Every time you upgraded your mana, it just went up a flat 70 mana. Now this, too, varies by your base mana power. Those who have high mana to begin with can get ultra-high amounts of mana much more easily, whereas getting much more mana at all is pretty difficult for characters who have extremely tiny base amounts of mana. The amount of mana that it increases by is never less than 50, though, so it's never a complete waste.
  • Thanks to Armanant for pointing out the inequity here.

• In general, monster health was not at the level it was a few weeks ago, due to unintended consequences of various rebalancing. Actually, all difficulties were erroneously having monsters at the same level of baseline health, even, which was one of the central problems. Therefore, a correction was in order:
  • Featherweight monster health is 0.3 of the "baseline" health.
  • Apprentice monster health is now 0.75 of the "baseline" health.
  • Adept monster health is now 1.5 of the "baseline" health.
  • Hero monster health is now 3 of the "baseline" health.
  • Master Hero monster health is now 5 of the "baseline" health.
  • The Chosen One monster health is now 8 of the "baseline" health.
  • One effect of this is that you'll really want to get to having at least one tier+1 spell as soon as possible for dealing with even casual enemies. Since that already happens pretty quick for most players, that just goes from them being completely cheesy to being a good challenge. Also, it makes tier 5 a lot harder in general, so you'll want to make heavy use of enchants there to deal with the threats the world is throwing at you.

• Summoned monsters and player ally minions no longer get their helath messed about with in the manner of enemy monsters.
  • This means that they are much more powerful now on featherweight and apprentice, but they are now a little bit weaker on adept and incredibly weaker on hero and up.
    • How exactly this will change battlefields on the very highest difficulties is something we'll have to experiment with; in general we want to make more ways for you to buff your allies for these sorts of things in general, so that will just probably become required at the highest difficulties in order to carry a battlefield mission off.
    • For summoned monsters, the reasoning here is that, like any other spell you would cast, your spells should not get more powerful (or weaker) on a higher or lower difficulty level. So that's just bringing these in lines with every other spell you have.
    • For regular NPCs, it is worth noting, they are not affected by this one way or the other.

Beta 0.901 I May Or May Not Want To Be That Guy

(Released March 2nd, 2012)

• Fixed a bug that was causing tombstones to seed in stash rooms instead of enchant containers!
  • Thanks to Moo for reporting.

• Fixed a bug from a couple versions ago where a monster would always only drop one "item drop" entity on death, and packed everything into that one drop. So bosses dropped a single "shard" (that was actually all of them) instead of a cloud of them, etc.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for the report.

• Battlegrounds:
  • Now work in MP. Previously ally minions would just ignore enemy minions and run right by them. Enemy minions generally did the same. Now they actually target each other and fight, etc. This should also help NPCs in MP NPC-rescue missions actually shoot and be shot at.
    • Thanks to Underfot for the report.
  • Minions now close up the range a bit tighter before standing still.
  • Along with that, they now try to spread out a bit better so that your allies aren't all standing on one spot (and generally taking aoe damage from even simple projectiles).
  • Fixed a bug that was effectively creating a 0.5 second "global" cooldown on ally shots in the sense that at most 1 ally could shoot per 0.5 seconds. This was causing a lot of strangeness, and some other bugs elsewhere in the game.

• Since the tombstones-in-stashes was so interesting, now tombstones will tend to be seeded in stashes in general in addition to their other stuff.

• Lava escape missions can no longer be seeded on the world map as missions. You'll now only find them as secret missions.
  • These are meant to be very punishing for players who like that sort of thing, and as such having them relegated to secret-only status makes good sense.
  • Thanks to many players for complaining about this, including rchaneberg, Terraziel, and BobTheJanitor.

• Fixed a bug where the open-region-map and open-dungeon-map keybinds couldn't fire while a popup (tutorial message or otherwise) was showing. Particularly amusing when the tutorial popup is telling you to open the dungeon/region map.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for the report.

• Fixed a bug where health drops could heal again after being flagged for removal after the first heal performed by them, causing them to be much stronger in multiplayer due to latency.
  • Thanks to TyberZann for the report.

• Fixed a bug where when a continent was generated that had no valid location for a port region it would just dump the new port region on world coordinate 0,0, complain about it in the chat log, and call it a day.
  • Now if there's no valid location, and there's already a port region it just doesn't seed any more for that continent and done. If there are literally no port regions on the continent (and no places to put one) it just ditches the newly generated continent and makes a new one.

• Tooltip for Miniature no longer claims that double-tapping down will activate it.
  • Thanks to MaxAstro for reporting.

• Fixed an error with a particular boss room map that could lead to that room being flooded with lava.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for reporting.

• A sound effect now plays when "do not worry" messages appear.

• An explosion sound effect now plays when urban predator missiles explode.

• The urban predator plasma shot now uses a different sound effect.

• Casting a light snake now uses a different sound effect, as do teleport, greater teleport, plasma bolt, and energy pulse.

• New spell that can be crafted: Storm Fist:
  • Mid-power touch-range spell that knocks you and your target back when used. A little bit useful for harvesting, but actually works better as a minor way of knocking yourself up to ledges that are just out of reach, along the ground while ducking, or similar. Just don't knock yourself into any passages from which you can't escape!
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for suggesting.

• Whenever NPCs move between chunks, their dialogue is reset. This should prevent them from complaining about wanting to be rescued after they are already at the settlement, but let us know if that doesn't work.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor and Ixiohm for reporting.

• Mana costs should now reflect their true values on spell descriptions if those costs have been reduced by enchants.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for reporting that they previously did not.

• The cooldown entries are now shown in a greatly condensed format in spell descriptions; rather than taking up one line per type of cooldown, they now show on a single line in a much less wordy fashion, sorted by length of cooldown time.

• Damage Per Second, Damage Per Mana, and Damage Per Second Per Mana are now all shown in the description of offensive spells.
  • And yes, these numbers take into account your current tier, any enchants you're wearing, your own innate stats, and so on. Just like all the other spell stats.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor and Terraziel for suggesting.

• Fixed a small typo in the description of wooden crates.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for pointing this out.

• Fixed a typo referencing "Guaridan Ilari".
  • Thanks to terraziel for pointing it out.

• More dialogue work has gone into a lot of the NPCs from Marisa.

Major Improvements To Enchant Acquisition And Design

• Enchants are now given every 200 enchant-points (for reference, each container gives from 8 to 12 points), rather than a sliding scale based on how many enchant points you've "spent" in the past.
  • In fact, there is no longer really a concept of "spending" the points on item effects, etc. The only purpose of the points now is to space enchants out temporally.
  • Incidentally this means that the progress indicators are now always right, because the question "how many points will the next enchant cost?" is now answerable instead of merely guessable.

• Each enchant type (that can be given from containers, not the stash-room-ones) now internally has 5 "quality tiers".
  • The first quality tier is what the first enchant of that type generated for you in that world will always be; just the base effect which is always the same.
  • The second quality tier is what the second enchant of that type generated for you in that would will be; the same base effect, but with one optional effect.
    • Additionally, there is a low chance that a second-tier enchant will be an "Uncommon", and the optional effect will be chosen from a more powerful set.
  • The third quality tier is what is generated after the game has already generated a certain number of enchants of that type for you (i.e. after you've had a few second-tier ones). Enchants of this tier will have the base effect and two optional effects.
    • There's still the chance of an "Uncommon" with one extra-powerful effect, but also a lower chance to be a "Rare" with both effects being pulled from the more powerful set.
  • And so on. Right now there are only two more tiers (3 and 4 extra effects, respectively), but it is likely that more will be added later if this system works well.
  • These quality tiers, it is important to note, are not shown but can kind of be inferred. Since multiple bonuses to the same stack condense into one single stat (three damage boosts of varying numbers just combine into a single damage boost showing their total, but this is still quality tier 3 rather than quality tier 1).
    • So in some senses, we really shouldn't even be telling you about quality tiers, because they are not visibly manifest in the game. But since there's been a lot of discussion about the enchants progression of late, we felt we'd share at least a few of the details here.
    • The net effect to players is that the first time they get a kind of enchant (say, acid gills) it just does the base effect. Then for a while after that, it has the base effect plus a little better, unless they find an uncommon version of it (yay that player, in that case!). Then after a while, they're getting even better versions, and so on. From our testing the progression feels really natural and should be pretty familiar if you've played other games with procedural loot.
  • One other key thing to note is that, internally, these quality tiers are tracked per base enchant. This is important for several reasons.
    • First of all, if you use something like the fire seeking enchant in order to better your chances of getting fire-related enchants, that means you'll actually get to the higher quality tiers of fire-related stuff somewhat faster. But a lot of your other colors will lag behind.
    • Secondly, whenever we add a new enchant base type, you start at the bottom. Right now we have double and triple jump enchants. If we later add a quadruple jump enchant, for instance, and you are on continent 15 and have put in 500 hours into the game, you're still going to start with quad jump quality tier 1 and have to work your way up from there. It will be significantly underpowered compared to the other enchants you're getting for a while.
      • This is actually good in a lot of senses, because it doesn't mean you need to restart your whole world every time we add a new base enchant type, just so that you can go through the progression in a satisfying way. Our goal with all added content for the game (now that the base mechanics of the game itself have settled down) is that no matter how far along you are in the game, you'll get a fun and interesting progression with that new content. That's really the only way to keep long-term interest in a given world, rather than having players periodically starting over new worlds every time a bunch of new content gets added.

• The number of optional effects available to each base enchant type has been _dramatically_ increased, and that's without the other whole new kinds of enchant effects (mana-regen-buff, etc) planned for 1.0.
  • Accordingly, the game no longer tries for any kind of brute force duplicate-prevention. You only get one of the first tier for each type, so no duplicates there. It's possible at the second tier but not terribly likely since you only get a few of those before moving on to tier 3 (it will happen, make no mistake, but we're talking a very occasional pair of duplicate enchants, not a string of 17 identical things).
    • At tier 3 the game would have to roll the same for both optional effects from a fairly large set, given not-very-many chances before progressing to tier 4, and so on. So the chances of getting fully duplicate enchants goes down almost geometrically as the quality tiers rise. For that matter, so does the variety (though sometimes the variety is just a percentage point or two of some stat, it's still variety even in those cases -- we're not sure how many unique enchant combinations there are now in the game, but tens of thousands would probably not be a bad guess).
    • If you're playing a world started before this version you'll likely get some duplicates of the first-tier stuff since you already have them, but it should be a pretty shortlived time that's happening to you. And now that you're getting new enchants on a more predictable basis, rather than on ever-increasing intervals, that won't be as annoying in the first place.

Difficulty Split: Combat And Platforming

• The game has had its "action difficulty" split into two separate difficulties due to a growing divide in players over the platforming aspects of the game. Instead of one "action difficulty" that covers everything, there is now a "combat difficulty" which covers everything combat-related, and a "platforming difficulty" which covers everything platforming-related.
  • Thus players who are not as good at combat, but love hardcore platforming, can get the experience they want.
  • And likewise, those players who hate platforming but want as stiff a fight as the game can give them, can also get the experience they want.
  • And of course everything in between.
  • Thanks to a number of players, but BobTheJanitor and zebramatt most of all, for making it clear to us that this change was needed.

• The new platforming difficulty levels are:
  • 1 I Have No Desire To Be The Guy
  • 2 I Am Afraid Of Heights
  • 3 I Can Jump, Thank You (Default)
  • 4 I Get Mistaken For A Certain Plumber
  • 5 I Am Not The Guy, But I Am Close (This is what Chris likes)
  • 6 I Am Already The Guy

• The general rate of lava rise in the lava escape missions has been toned down some. What was difficulty 4 on the older "action difficulty" scale is now difficulty 5 on the new platforming scale. And consequently, difficulty 6 has been toned down a bit because it was probably impossible for anyone. Difficulty 4 has thus also become much tamer, and difficulty 3 slightly tamer. Difficulties 1 and 2 are unchanged, as they were already incredibly tame.

• Tooltips in the game wherever you can change the combat difficulty now make it clear what the combat difficulty actually affects:
  • Monster health, speed, telegraphing time, cooldown time.
  • Monster spell speed and damage dealt.
  • Accuracy of certain monster spells like circle of fire.
  • Damage to players from combat effects such as being set on fire.

• Tooltips in the game wherever you can change the platforming difficulty now make it clear what the platforming difficulty actually affects (so far just this):
  • Amount Of Damage Taken From Falling
  • Rate of lava rise

• The method for calculating falling damage has been completely changed.
  • Old Method (based on number of pixels fallen):
    • >= 4000: 100% base health
    • >= 3400: 80% base health
    • >= 2800: 60% base health
    • >= 2200: 40% base health
    • >= 1600: 20% base health
    • > 1000: 10% base health
  • New method:
    • Must be >= 1000 damage
    • Base multiplier calculated as: distance / 10000.
      • Note: this part of the calculation in particular could stand to be more interesting; we welcome feedback on it, but decided to start simple.
    • Base multiplier further multiplied by difficulty:
      • I Have No Desire To Be The Guy: 10%
      • I Am Afraid Of Heights: 50%
      • I Can Jump, Thank You: No Change
      • I Get Mistaken For A Certain Plumber: 150%
      • I Am Not The Guy, But I Am Close: 200%
      • I Am Already The Guy: 300%
    • The fully adjusted multiplier is then multiplied against the base health of the character, and that is the final damage dealt.
  • Thanks to zebramatt for getting us looking at this in general.

Major Improvements To NPC Rescue Missions

• Completely did the pathing work for the NPCs being rescued:
  • They can navigate themselves around whatever obstacles, like the shadow bats do. They don't have to have line of sight to you in order to work their way around complex geometry, and you can leave them behind with confidence that they will catch up (presuming that monsters don't kill them while you ditch them).
  • They are now perfectly capable of following you through any terrain that is at least one tile high or wide. Their hitbox in general is now less than one tile tall, which is needed in order for the pathing noted above to work. It's also needed in order
  • They are now able to fire while moving, so they will continue to help you but you won't be forced to wait for them to fire at something they have no hope of hitting.
  • They no longer try to keep a "safe distance" away from you, although since they move a bit slower they will tend to lag a slight bit behind which serves the same purpose. Thus there are no longer cases where you can stand on the door to the exit of the area and they can't escape with you (talk about frustrating to get to the end and then have them not go through!).

• Fixed an issue in prior versions where if you left a room with an NPC being rescued, the NPC would revert back to their original position in that room (While still being vulnerable).
  • Though this is difficult to test with the above fixes, so if you see this recur please let us know.

• Previously, NPC stats were not being increased with the continent tier. Meaning that rescue missions on tiers greater than one had vastly higher difficulty thanks to their too-low health.
  • Now any NPCs who are not in a settlement get the same tier buff from the continent that ally minions get.

• Fixed a bug where sometimes NPCs who were rescued wouldn't actually make it to the settlement alive, but rather would die when you left the mission.

Previous Release Notes

AVWW - Beta Series 2 Release Notes