AVWW Beta 0.502, "Smashed Spawners," Released!

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Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2011/09/avww-beta-0502-smashed-spawners.html

This one is actually our second beta update since 0.500 came out yesterday, but the first update was so puny it wasn't worth a news post for.  Yesterday was a busy, busy day -- and a really incredible day.  The amount of support and excitement for A Valley Without Wind is pretty incredible!

Today was a lot more productive, in terms of actually updating the game and getting to the things folks were wanting to see changed.  The changelog, which is linked above, is pretty long and inclusive, so for a lot of the details you'll just want to go there.

However, some highlights:

• Fixed a number of mostly-obscure crash bugs and other errors of that nature.  Nothing like having a suddenly wildly-larger playerbase for flushing those out of the bushes!
• Made it so that you can now kill monster spawners, but they respawn when you leave the area for too long.  This was our most-requested feature.  As a side note, minor loot drops from the small mobs is coming, but I didn't have time to get to that one today.
• Added a new spell, Death Touch, which is like Fire Touch on steroids.  This one actually costs mana, but it's great for quickly mining things and it's also great for taking out monster spawners more quickly.
• With their help, fixed a couple of exploits that some clever players had figured out in terms of gaming the invincibility mechanics to slay higher-level bosses than they should be able to.
• Fixed the gap where there often were few or no regions leveled 11-19 in most worlds.  There will definitely now be at least one non-ocean region of every level 1-1000 in the world, and generally there should be at least one region of every possible level above that, too, although there might be gaps here or there where 1097 happens to only have ocean tiles and 1098 has somewhere you can really visit on land, etc.
• Added several keyboard-centric control options for players that prefer not to use a mouse while they play.
• Added a number of fixes, tweaks, and additions that are OSX-centric.  In particular there is a nasty bug in just the compiled executables that Unity 3D generates, where the mouse cursor on trackpads leaps upwards above the top of the screen whenever you press a keyboard key.  We can't directly fix that bug since it's in the underlying engine, but we did put in a workaround tha seems to solve all the problems.  Folks on OSX who were having trouble aiming spells while doing something like, say, running, should now be trouble-free.
• Also added in a little mouse cursor underlay to make sure the mouse cursor is easier to see against all kinds of backgrounds; in interiors on OSX it was easy to lose the cursor, and in snowstorms on windows it was easy to lose the cursor.  Now you can see it everywhere for sure.
• And lastly, put in a number of fixes related to dead NPCs and what happens to them in the strategic/citybuilding interfaces.
• Along with a lot of other more minor things noted in the release log.

More coming tomorrow.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time.  If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

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Added note: 0.503 is out now, with some mouse precision improvements as well as a fix to a crash issue that was introduced in 0.502.

And that's it for me tonight -- see everyone tomorrow!

[eRe4s3r]

These patches are proceeding in a nice direction
Still half a world from completion, but its getting there!

So about that Magic system, why not create a dual-spell casting system, where we can mount 2 spells , 1 in each hand, 2 spells of the same type (ie, you can also mount twice the same spell) give 66% more damage and increased chance for critical effects

Critical effects such as ICE spells = freeze, fire spells = incarnate, lightning spells = stun - and obviously immunities and weaknesses on enemies to either of those elements.

Also if 2 spells of the same type are loaded allow us to HOLD both buttons to create a charged super-spell of that type.

And while at spells, it'd also be cool to have Shield spells as well as Absorb and Reflect spells. As well as Aura Spells

Also there could be "zones" in the world where Magic is chaotic, no spell cast is the spell intended.. WILD MAGIC ftw

[Gallant Dragon]

So about that Magic system, why not create a dual-spell casting system, where we can mount 2 spells , 1 in each hand, 2 spells of the same type (ie, you can also mount twice the same spell) give 66% more damage and increased chance for critical effects.
...

Also if 2 spells of the same type are loaded allow us to HOLD both buttons to create a charged super-spell of that type.

I think someones hyped up about Skyrim...

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Yep, long way to go but that's always the way.

In terms of a dual magic system that's not planned, but in terms of customization of spells and combinatorial effects I think you will really like the crests system Keith devised.  It's not ready for primetime yet, but it's largely complete and lets you mix spells into crests that give compound or more complex effects, multishot, etc.  It's pretty cool.

[superking]

the ability to charge up spells by holding the button would be pretty neat though 

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the ability to charge up spells by holding the button would be pretty neat though 

Crests actually do let you do that already!

Not that they are in the game yet where you can get to them, because they're still glitchy in general, but that's definitely one of Keith's core design things with them.

[BomberJacket]

Wait, hang on a second. You guys made a 2D, sprite-based platformer in Unity?  Good Lord, I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

This is a bit off topic, but just out of curiosity as someone who's tried (and quickly gave up) making a 2D Unity platformer framework, how did you manage to avoid the edge slipping that's present with the Character Controller and its infernal baked-in Capsule Collider? Did you build a new controller from scratch? Or does a paid license give you the ability to alter the Character Controller's script?

[x4000]

Wait, hang on a second. You guys made a 2D, sprite-based platformer in Unity?  Good Lord, I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

This is a bit off topic, but just out of curiosity as someone who's tried (and quickly gave up) making a 2D Unity platformer framework, how did you manage to avoid the edge slipping that's present with the Character Controller and its infernal baked-in Capsule Collider? Did you build a new controller from scratch? Or does a paid license give you the ability to alter the Character Controller's script?

I'm not even sure what a Character Controller or a Capsule Collider are, actually, and we've been using Unity 3D for a solid year now.  Tidalis and AI War also are 2D and in Unity (though both were originally on a different platform -- SlimDX -- and we ported them over).

The short answer is that we don't use any of Unity's Game Objects, Physics, Networking or any of that stuff.  I agree it's terrible to work with for 2D in particular.  We use Lidgren for networking, we roll our own physics, and we do graphics via Graphics.DrawMeshNow.  We use unity for sound playback, it's shader functionality, its cross-platform nature while still giving access to C#, it's GUI framework (which stinks but is better than nothing), and it's zero-prerequisites nature.  Other than that, we use essentially our own custom engine running on top of the bare metal that Unity is able to expose to us.  We don't even use world coordinates or ever move the camera.  We have our own game coordinate space that we keep track of on our own.

[BomberJacket]

Dang, it sounds like you remade over half the features from scratch. You guys are hardcore!

As an aside, I bumped into issues with GUI myself. I ended up having to write my own custom GUI script that could produce buttons that played sound when clicked on. You'd think that would be in there already.

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Dang, it sounds like you remade over half the features from scratch. You guys are hardcore!

Well, we'd already made all those from scratch in SlimDX, which is just a C# DirectX wrapper.  So when we wanted to move our custom engine to be cross-platform (which DX and .NET are not), we looked around and chose Unity.  It took a solid couple of months to graft our engine on top of theirs, but I don't really like most of their actual engine.  Their core framework, though, is brilliant.  And some specific features, like the shader stuff, are also brilliant.

As an aside, I bumped into issues with GUI myself. I ended up having to write my own custom GUI script that could produce buttons that played sound when clicked on. You'd think that would be in there already.

Our issues are more along the lines of multiple windows overlapping, or textboxes going nuts when you have more than one that isn't contained in a window.  And it's not very heap-static, which puts more pressure on the GC than we like, etc.  Our GUI had previously been done in GDI+, which is a lot more functional but slow and not possible to do true fullscreen with with a .NET underlayer.  So there was another month or two of time (at least) into making a robust GUI framework that uses unity's framework under it but avoids most of their bugs.  We're thinking of just stripping out their stuff entirely for the GUI bits, though, and using some bits of EZ GUI to roll our own thing under our existing layer.  But now isn't the time yet, because we just don't have the time yet.


And, yeah -- Keith and I were both business programmers for a decade in my case, half decade at least in his case, before doing games professionally; we approach things from a different standpoint than most game developers, I think.

[BomberJacket]

Dang, I've never even worried about memory management before in my Unity projects. Still, nice to know I'm not the only one who's fought with the engine because I didn't want to make a 3D platformer or action game.

Good luck working on this thing. I played for like 8 hours straight after work yesterday and the last time that happened was when I first got Minecraft.

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Cheers, thanks!  That's awesome to hear.

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New version: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,9193.0.html

[Nalgas]

Fixed bug where dead NPCs would keep showing back up in the strategy/settlement-management layers after save/load.

    This should also work retroactively with old worlds, so if your agricultural economy is largely based on ghost labor you'll have some adjusting to do.
    Thanks to whoever reported this, we can't find it in mantis so it was probably during the earlier part of the alpha.

You killed my undead workforce...again!  You bastards!  Yes, that was me who reported that, all the way back on the 10th, apparently, and then I broke it even worse on the 11th.  My entire starting settlement has been both populated and staffed by zombies ever since.  I guess at least if they all get removed for good I won't have to feed them anymore.

the ability to charge up spells by holding the button would be pretty neat though 

Crests actually do let you do that already!

Not that they are in the game yet where you can get to them, because they're still glitchy in general, but that's definitely one of Keith's core design things with them.

Ooh, ooh, can I post that video I have of playing with them?  I think that's my personal favorite bug I found.  Moonwalking and climbing up/standing on top of the world map transition, all combined into one?  It's hard not to like that.