Valley 1:Beta Series 3 Release Notes

Beta 0.905

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

• 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.

• 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).

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.

• 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.

• 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.

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