Valley 1:Pre-Beta Release Notes

Alpha 0.405

• Strategy map: Added more-than-just-the-name descriptions to for the macrogame location icons.
  • Still need to do this for resource deposits and pillaging monsters.

• Vengeful ghosts no longer spawn when characters die in settlements, in wind shelter chunks, or in any other location where an Illari is present.
  • This helps to prevent complete-sweeps of the settlement NPCs whenever one is killed or a monster arrives.
  • A message is shown in the text log letting you know that the NPC died, but was protected from "a fate worse than death" by the local Illari.

• The ride the lightning spell can now be used simply by double-jumping when it is in your ability bar. If you have multiple double-jump-activated spells in your ability bar, it will automatically use only whichever one is leftmost in the bar.

• The very first region in the game now always will spawn with only one surface chunk -- the settlement.
  • This makes it so that players have no chance of getting lost in that first region without finding the world map first, and immediately establishes the world map as the main way of getting around.

• A "Difficulty Shrine" is now seeded into each settlement, which allows you to change the action and strategic difficulties.
  • There are five options at each, with the middle option being the default on both.

• Blue Sapphire Guardian Stones are now called Adviser Guardian Stones, and one of them is now always seeded in each settlement next to the difficulty shrine.

• There is now more buffer space between the hearth guardian stone and the edge of the settlement chunks.

• Fixed up the dropdowns so that they don't feel awkward when clicking one to close itself.

• A number of player items that sometimes could be multiple tiers -- but which never differed by tier -- are all now being properly clamped to never having any tier at all.
  • Snowsuit/heatsuit, wooden platforms, seize, shrink, transmogrify into bat, flash of light, light snake, and all commodities other than raw gems and raw gem dust.
  • This lets these items actually stack with one another regardless of what level of gem or dust you use to craft them, which is far more convenient for the player. Previously these took up extra inventory space for no reason.
  • This also prevents confusion in the crafting interface when the player would think they could craft a higher tier of something that was really identical to their current tier. Now it's clear: if it says it is a higher tier, then it is actually better in some way.

• Strategy Map: now when you right-click a region it brings up a new region detail window that displays all the info from the region-mouseover tooltip plus a much expanded explanation of each item.
  • Still need to add an icon for rampaging monster entries.
  • Still need to add the migrateable npc icon.

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

Alpha 0.404

• Fixed bug where exiting to the world map while having the inventory open (expanded) made it impossible to enter a region from the world map (now it just un-expands the inventory automatically if you switch to some view other than the standard in-chunk one).

• Fixed a few bugs where the strategy-map and city-map scrolling speed was framerate dependent.

• Drastically improved the performance of the "scouting fog" on the strategic overlay, and also made it far more obvious when on light or dark region types by making it a checkered pattern.

• Changed the logic for finding "wandering" NPCs that you can choose as your character when you die.
  • Previously, it was always just five wandering NPCs from the time period of the settlement you were currently going to spawn in. Since you often will want to spawn in the same settlement for a long period of time, that's really limiting in terms of what NPCs you could select.
  • Now, as you move around the world and meet NPCs from various time periods, you'll unlock their time period for wandering NPCS.
  • The number of wanderers you can choose from is now the number of unlocked time periods times two, but never fewer than six.
    • Thus at the start you get 6 ice-age folks to choose from, then when you meet your first NPC from another time you get 3 from each time period to choose from, and so on. Eventually when you've met folks from all 7 time periods, you get 7 wanderers to choose from, 2 from each time period.

• A warning is now shown in the character selection screen when characters will take heat or cold damage in the region you'd be spawning them in. This doesn't ever happen at the very start of the game, but if you're based out of an ice-age settlement are selecting a non-ice-age character, that is an important warning.

• Fixed a bug where the normal hud ability bar icons were still taking mouse input when on the strategy map and elsewhere.

• Changed strategic scouting so that an npc always scouts the full cross pattern (the region clicked and all 4 directly adjacent, and one further out in each direction from those if a scouting specialist, though scouting specialists don't seem to seed right now), rather than going around in a certain order and stopping at the first "interesting" result.

• Strategic Map Region Mouseover now draws:
  • Summary text (the name of the region and world coordinates like before).
  • Picture of terrain type (like before, but 16x smaller).
  • Name of terrain type.
  • Icon and name of each macrogame-location (i.e. rare commodity dungeon, settlement, evil outpost, etc) and resource deposit.
    • Does not yet do an icon for "there is an npc here that you can migrate" because we're changing that logic soon.
  • Some text about a pillaging group and the name of the leader if any (no icon on these yet, the rendering is trickier for these).

• City Map, when mousing over a cell where a click would be interpreted as issuing a "build structure" order:
  • Displays a green "placement" ghost of the selected structure type if the order would be permitted.
  • Displays a red "placement" ghost of the selected structure type if the order would hit an error.
  • If there would be an error, displays the text of that error in the task info box at the top.

• City Map structure list in the bottom-left corner:
  • Added a mouseover tooltip, but it's just the name of the structure, more needs to be added here.
  • Clicking an entry now selects it.
  • All entries are drawn at 96x96 (the largest currently in the game), smaller images are centered within that box.
  • Only draws at most 3 entries now instead of 5.
  • The upshot is that the list now stays still a lot more.

• Strategy Map: now no longer shows the rescuable-npc icon on regions where there's only a situation where an npc will be spawned if you go to the right chunk, since those were not actually rescuable before they were generated (during first entrance of a player into that chunk) anyway.

• Fixed an issue with pop-in of rotated trees during windstorms.

(Released September 12th, 2011)

Alpha 0.403

• City Map: Added Grave, Library, Warehouse, Well.
  • Graves are not placed by the game or normally buildable, but they are in the buildable list (along with trees) in the F3 debug mode.
  • None of these have their intended functions implemented yet, just graphically present, etc.
  • Added "To Strategy Map" button, and on strategy map added "To City Map" button.
    • Still intending to add "End Turn" to the city map too, but there were extra wrinkles there.

• City Map: added ability to upgrade a house by right clicking on it. Costs are still placeholder and it has no effect, but makes them visually accessible.

• Strategy map and City map:
  • Minimap is now hid while these are showing.
  • Mouse-edge-scrolling area is now much narrower.
  • City map menu buttons placed higher on screen, fixed position.
  • Structure list bottom-aligned instead of centered vertically to avoid overlapping menu buttons.

• Added in glowy, floating, "vengeful ghost" versions of all the playable characters except the neutral skelebot, which can't turn into a ghost since it is a robot.
  • These move slowly and do a fierce melee attack on the player if they reach the player. A single hit of this sort is pretty well enough to kill the player. But on the other hand, the ghosts are pretty easy to avoid because they move pretty slowly. A single ghost is probably not too much cause for alarm by itself, but thrown into the mix with other monsters or especially bosses, it can be incredibly deadly.
  • Whenever a player or NPC dies, their character turns into a vengeful ghost and stalks the area where they died until someone comes back to kill the ghost. Or until they form a tactical unit (see below).

• Bosses and vengeful ghosts now show a red blip on the minimap in the same fashion that NPCs show a green blip. Seems only fair in general, especially when dealing with ghosts or microbosses.

• Fixed up some issues with the "bob up and down" logic for things like guardian stones not centering them properly on their actual collision box.

• Fixed up the collision offset of the fire burst spell, which was offset too low visually.

• The attack power of the skelebot dwarf has been thirded, as it was overblown before.
  • So has the attack of the giant amoebas.

• The physical attack of the skelebot giant has been reduced to 2/3 its former value, and its magical attack has been reduced to 1/2 its prior value.

• Added extra spacing between create world and load world, to prevent accidental mis-clicks.

• In recent weeks the collision boxes for some of the spells had gotten a bit wonky. Fixed this up for the fireball, fire touch, circle of fire, seize, tidal pulse, and launched rock.

• All enemies now target NPCs in their chunks with priority over players, since NPCs are the more finite resource.

• Bear traps were not actually triggering because of other collision tweaks in the last few weeks. Completely redid their mechanics, and they now work great.

• The map indicator for the chunk you would be moving to is now a lot smaller and is rotated on its side, so it's more obvious where you are versus where you're going to go if you go through a door.

• Fixed a bug that was letting you still use abilities from the ability bar if your character is dead.

• Put in several preventative measures to prevent the "medusa effect" from creeping in on static skies in some circumstances.

• The black bar denoting the edge of a surface chunk (left or right) is now only half as wide.

• When you have the region or dungeon map up, and you go to the world map or another place it isn't supposed to show, it will still hide itself but it will come back automatically next time you are in a place it should show.

• Vengeful Ghosts can now form a pillaging tactical unit when there are four unaccounted for.

• When a friendly character (player or settlement npc) dies, an event is recorded that reduces morale (multiplies by 0.95, once for each such event) somewhat for 10 turns.

• Removed old pillaging behavior where the pillagers would abstractly kill a random npc each turn they were left on top of the settlement square (plenty of non-abstract killing going on now, once they spawn in the chunk).

(Released September 9th, 2011)

Alpha 0.402

• Lots more work on the citybuilding interface, though it's still not ready for prime-time.

• Lots more character dialogue lines.

• Enemies now have a "capacity cost" attached to themselves, and the monster nests that spawn them now have to keep within a capacity budget. Previously there was just always a flat two monsters per nest that could be spawned, which was problematic with a number of enemy types. Bats, amoebas, and skelebot snipers in particular all spawn far fewer now, and espers spawn several fewer.

• The description text of the warp scrolls has been altered to include: "Visit any guardian stone to be refreshed back up to a minimum of two warp scrolls for free."

• The default controls (and the controls for all existing players so far) have been redefined to have the E key be the confirm/action key instead of the T key, for easier access with WASD players. The R key now cycles inventory bars instead of the E key.

• The minimap scale is now able to be increased all the way to 60, instead of just to 20.

• The default minimap scale is now 15, rather than 1. All existing chosen minimap sizes have been reset to this new default.

• The hopes interface, which is not really ready for prime-time yet, has been disabled. That's something for later into beta.

• The Crestsmith, Spellshaping, and Enchant/Disenchant workbenches will no longer appear until the civilization level reaches 15, 20, and 10, respectively. This keeps the very early game simpler, and honestly most of the advanced functions in these really aren't relevant until later, anyway.

• Fixed bug where mouse-fired abilities could happen from clicking within a gui window (like the messages window in the upper right).

• A new music theme is now available in a lot of the ice age buildings, small town buildings, and so on.

• The magic defense and physical defense stats have been removed from all characters and monsters. This simplifies the character selection process for players, and simplifies the balancing process for enemies. In general this was just complexity that was not positive, as there are more ways to accomplish something similar using abilities and enchants later.

• The stats of all prior characters and monsters from existing savegames have been substantially altered. The balance is hopefully a bit better, but it hasn't been tested a huge amount so feedback is very welcome.
  • This seems to have improved the scaling of stats between levels as well, but we'd definitely like more feedback on that.

• The dynamic skies will no longer go nuts when you first switch regions. They also will transition way more slowly when you move between regions on the world map, too.

• The "Utility" button in the in-game escape menu has been renamed to "Settings" to be more clear as to what it really is.

• Fixed a bug where, on static skies only, sometimes the background wouldn't draw and you'd get a "medusa effect."

• The left and right edges of surface chunks now show a black bar so that you can definitely tell you're getting close to the transition edge. More importantly, it makes it easier to know which way you should run when you enter a chunk from the world map, which was definitely confusing before.

• Any graphics cards that do not support shader model 3.0 will now automatically use static skies, since dynamic skies just draw a pink background on graphics cards tht don't support SM3.

• When the dungeon map has been offset using the shift plus arrow key combination, this offsetting is now remembered until the player goes into a different dungeon. Previously it reset whenever the map was closed, the room was changed, etc, etc.

• The dungeon/region map now does a better job of always disappearing when you go to the world map or the main menu.

• The messages in the upper right of the screen now show for 60 seconds instead of 10, since with just 10 seconds they would often disappear before there was really a chance to read them. Now there is lots of time, but they still don't hang around indefinitely.

• Monster movement speeds are now scaled by the difference between their level and the world civilization level. If they are 1 level higher they move at 80% of their full speed. At two levels higher its 100%. At 3+ levels higher it's 120%. At the same level as you it's 60%. One level less than you is 50%. Two levels less is 40%. Three levels less is 30%.
  • This also applies to monster spells that are cast.
  • All in all this helps with the difficulty tuning, where players who want a slower or faster game can play up or down region levels as appropriate.

• Monsters now grow into existence at a speed based on their movement speeds as per the above change. Monsters are not allowed to fire spells at you while they are in the midst of appearing, which gives you a little more warning time as well.

• Boss monsters now always show their health bar, with the background of it flashing between black and its normal color. This, plus the name of the monster instead of their type being shown above it, should really clear up any confusion about which monsters in a sea of monsters is actually the microboss. With minibosses and up it already wasn't a problem, but microbosses could be really tricky.

• Added in a new monster type: skelebot dwarf.
  • This monster is automatically swapped in for regular skelebots or skelebot snipers in building interiors, since skelebots are too tall to be used indoors (which has always been the intended case, but I never got around to actually doing a smaller enemy for those interiors until now).
  • These use a new skelebot variant of the circle of fire, and some different AI than any of the other existing enemies in order to line up their shots on players.
  • The accuracy of their firing scales with the diffence in levels between them and you.
    • If they are two or more levels higher than the civilization level, they'll pretty much nail you every time you get in their circle's area. If they're the same as your civilization level, they miss more like half the time, but still hit you a fair bit.

• In new settlements, the hearth guardian stone is now placed very near to the world map exit so that players can quickly and easily access it.

• In new settlements, the various workbenches and the covered bridge, aside from the primary three of spellshaping, spellscribing, and outfitter, are all placed near the center of the settlement chunk, rather than at the outside edge. This keeps things cleaner and less overwhelming with them, and clearly differentiates between the primary and secondary groups (and all but two of the secondary group are invisible until you start reaching higher civ levels, anyway).

• The name of the character speaking is now actually shown in their dialogue text, so that you can tell who you are talking to again.
  • This is particularly relevant for identifying what the hearth guardian stone even is, since other things refer to it by name but it wasn't labeled on itself!

• NPCs no longer stop running when they are overlapping another entity with interaction possibilities.
  • This prevents them from making it difficult for you to get into crafting interfaces, etc.

• When NPCs are running, their dialogue prompts no longer flash up as they pass you or you pass them.

• The NPC "stats block" on the strategy and city interface has been simplified; with recent stuff it was getting about a mile high...

• Players are no longer granted any spellscribing profession books right at the start of the game. There is only one spellscribe scroll to unlock as-yet anyhow (the rest all are unlocked from the start), so clearly this is something that players can live without and can go find on their own as they play.

• The profession books are no longer considered commodities, and instead now appear in the main ability bar. This makes them vastly easier to find as well as more convenient to actually use.
  • In addition, their tooltips are now a lot more clear about how to use them, so this really should be vastly more self-explanatory to new players than it was before (it was quite obtuse).
  • And lastly, when the player uses a profession book away from a guardian stone, a message is now shown explaining that they need to be near a guardian stone, and where those can typically be found.

• The old commodity-based profession books now get stripped out of player inventories on world load. However, there is now a new starting windfall at the 0,0 region settlement so that players of existing worlds can get another batch of profession books if they hadn't already used all their existing ones.

• Initial city map size increased from 10x10 to 75x75.
  • Old worlds will not have this updated yet for existing settlements as stuff is still in a lot of flux related to this.

• Trees are now seeded in the city map, and they block the placement of structures. Currently no way to cut them down but that will change.

• City map now has the same scrolling controls as the strategy map (mouse-edge or shift+arrow, ctrl accelerates either).

• All of the commodities now show a description of themselves, as well as their name, inside your commodities inventory.
  • The description explains what the commodity is in general good for, as well as noting where it can be found.
  • This also applies to memory crystals, consciousness shards, and the various crafting materials, of course.

• The various trees that drop things like cedar logs, plums, cherries, and walnuts now have a 100% drop rate rather than a 10% drop rate. It was too annoying the other way.

• Fixed a couple of crash bugs in the tech unlock interface when you open it in certain circumstances and there are no techs left to unlock.

• Can now order an NPC to cut down a tree in city mode (left click orders currently selected npc to cut down tree under cursor). For kicks this gives the settlement stockpile 1 CedarLogs unit.

• Fixed bug in the strategy and city interfaces where the npc list at the bottom of the screen was not being drawn if the selected npc's portrait had not already been requested to load.

• All of the crafting materials shown in the top bar of the crafting interface now also show their full tooltips including data on their name, what they can broadly be used for, where they can generally be found, etc.
  • Additionally, these show information about the tier of the material being looked at (when it has a tier), the quantity held, the quantity already spoken for in this recipe, and information about the fact that the recipe is not yet researched if that is the case.

• The Done buttons in the crafting interface also now include tooltips stating to click those buttons if you're ready to craft.

• Actual error messages are now shown when you choose a recipe that hasn't yet been unlocked, or that you don't have resources for, or that is invalid, etc.

• Added a "What's New? (Web Link)" on the main menu that takes players to the online release notes.

(Released September 9th, 2011)