AVWW Beta 0.527, "Greater Teleport and Lightning Rocket," Released!

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2011/10/avww-beta-0527-greater-teleport-and.html

This one is a quite a lengthy set of release notes, because I decided to make today a "mantis day" and just plow through a ton of the higher-priority bug reports, feature suggestions, and so on.  I also added a couple of random smaller spells and scrolls that I've been meaning to add for a while.

One of the most notable changes for many people will I'm sure be the changes to the minimap and the message log.  Both can now be cycled through more effective sizes, and when it comes to minimaps in particular, those now have a better method for scaling so that they won't intrude into so much of your screen real estate so often.

A few enemy spell-telegraphing improvements were made, a goodly number of world-gen bugs were fixed, and more multiplayer work was done.  Ride The Lightning has been refined, and a new Lightning Rocket spell scroll variant of it has also been created -- this one requiring a new umbra ember rare commodity to craft, though, making it not available until level 40.  There are now Greater and Lesser versions of teleport, too; the greater also uses umbra embers.

A number of other spells also got tweaks, tab-targeting got a number of tweaks and fixes, and so did warp scrolls and their related functions.  Lieutenants and dragon breath will no longer get higher-level than they should be, and there's now a quick-load button on the main menu for taking you back into your last world with one click upon application start (talk about a highly requested feature).

Definitely been a productive day -- the "mantis days" are always fun, even though I usually do at least a half dozen or so mantis issues each day, anyway.  But sometimes it's fun and relaxing to just really focus on the refinement and polish for a solid day or two.  Tomorrow my plan is to get back to the intro mission stuff, and hopefully get at least part of that release-ready.

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.

[Commiesalami]

And you can find Umbra Embers in your everyday commodity towers?  Or will you find Ember deposits underground?

[Dizzard]

Was there supposed to be a quickload button for the last world you played? I can't find it.

[@B0FH]

Was there supposed to be a quickload button for the last world you played? I can't find it.

The quickload button doesn't appear on the first boot of the game after updating (probably because the variable containing which world to load didn;t exist before hand), but it does work a charm on subsequent boots (or even after exiting to main menu).

[x4000]

And you can find Umbra Embers in your everyday commodity towers?  Or will you find Ember deposits underground?

Yeah, they'll be in rare commodity towers from now on.  Not underground... yet.  There's going to be a new, underground-only way of doing some rare commodity towers in general, but I've not yet had time to get those in place.

Was there supposed to be a quickload button for the last world you played? I can't find it.

The quickload button doesn't appear on the first boot of the game after updating (probably because the variable containing which world to load didn;t exist before hand), but it does work a charm on subsequent boots (or even after exiting to main menu).

Yeah, it wasn't keeping track of your last loaded world until now, so on first run it is like you've never opened any worlds.  Then after that it remembers it.

[Ixiohm]

Many nice changes in this version too

However, I don't like the new way in which the minimap scales, I think it's either to small (outside chunks) or to big (inside buildings). Or maybe I just haven't found the sweet spot in the setting for my resolution

Could you please bring back the old static scale, at least as an option in the settings.

[TechSY730]

Many nice changes in this version too

However, I don't like the new way in which the minimap scales, I think it's either to small (outside chunks) or to big (inside buildings). Or maybe I just haven't found the sweet spot in the setting for my resolution

Could you please bring back the old static scale, at least as an option in the settings.

Agreed, the options to use a dynamic scale vs. a static scale, both with adjustable amounts of scaling, would be nice.

[Hyfrydle]

No keen on the mini map changes I find sometimes it's too small. Can I revert to the previous scale?

[Dizzard]

Since we're talking about the mini map.

I'm not so much bothered by the scaling....what I don't really like is every time I exit a building it seems to scale itself down again each time. I wish it would stay in the corner at all times rather than scaling itself down. :S

[Itchykobu]

What a massive update....but my laptop died last night 

R.I.P. Acer Aspire - still under warranty though, so I can't wait to see how AVWW has progressed when it gets back to me.

[Hyfrydle]

I'm not so much bothered by the scaling....what I don't really like is every time I exit a building it seems to scale itself down again each time. I wish it would stay in the corner at all times rather than scaling itself down. :S

I'm not keen on this either I actually preferred the pre-patch map.

[Dizzard]

On another note, I'm not really sure I like how the overlords dish out exp.

I just defeated an overlord (my 2nd one) and while it was lv 40 (and I was lv 59) it still took me literally 30 minutes (may have been more I lost track) and tons and tons of potions. I ended up getting 500 exp for my effort. (which got me absolutely nowhere on the exp bar)

That was mostly because his health was almost 2 million. Although it might have also been because my two offensive spells need to be upgraded since they're getting weak.

In comparison I get almost 500 exp from most microbosses I can find around my civ level and they take about a minute to kill (if that sometimes) If I miss out on an overlord there's not much point in putting in the effort to kill them. (they'll just move their attention to a new overlord anyhow) Let them continue oppressing the people.

[x4000]

In terms of the minimap, I'm open to suggestions, but I don't think that the way it was before is terribly great given how many people seemed to be complaining about it.  I could always add that back as an option if you really want, but I think it would be better to come up with some sort of third option that meets things better.

One thing might be to just set a "max scale" additional option, for instance.  The building interiors that are small could only get, say, 4x larger than their default rather than always taking up 20% of your screen area.  Or something like that.

It seems like there ought to be a better way to accomplish what folks really want, because in the old style if you go into someplace like The Deep or even a lot of the Ocean Shallows areas, it's just not what I'd think of as functional for anyone.  Let me try adding that max scaling factor and see what folks think in the next version on that.



Regarding the EXP from overlords and things of that nature... those are finite in quantity, so those probably should give out a fixed amount of EXP whenever you kill them, that's true.


Sorry to hear about your laptop, Itchykobu!

[x4000]

New one: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,9373.0.html


Hopefully that will solve all the minimap issues, but I guess we'll see.  Technically the scaling is back now, just with a different (more direct) way of controlling the scaling, and with bounding boxes set on it.  So really, in a very literal sense this is combining the old approach and the new one, the more I think about it.