AVWW Beta 0.905 "Refined Gargantua" Released!

[Moo]

And it's just so much fun to implement stuff that tears y'all to shreds!

And from our point of view, to get new challenges to destroy!

[x4000]

And it's just so much fun to implement stuff that tears y'all to shreds!

And from our point of view, to get new challenges to destroy!

We enjoy seeing that side of it, too.

[Dizzard]

Even blocking incoming shots causes their invincibility to drop for just part of a second, do double firing some spells just right can get them.

If the skelebots are invincible then why do they need to block in the first place?

[BobTheJanitor]

If the skelebots are invincible then why do they need to block in the first place?

The invincibility chip takes up the same slot that their intelligence chip previously occupied.

[x4000]

Even blocking incoming shots causes their invincibility to drop for just part of a second, do double firing some spells just right can get them.

If the skelebots are invincible then why do they need to block in the first place?

Oh, it's super useful.  It protects whatever is behind them.  Very cool in practice, actually.

[Dizzard]

I was just playing an erect wind shelter mission in a desert....when I came across a below ground (not underground) area that didn't have any background tiles. So I was underground but could see the pyramids in the background.

Is this intentional? Really it looks more on the buggy side then something that's intentional. (because the background is cut off square like)

[x4000]

I was just playing an erect wind shelter mission in a desert....when I came across a below ground (not underground) area that didn't have any background tiles. So I was underground but could see the pyramids in the background.

Is this intentional? Really it looks more on the buggy side then something that's intentional. (because the background is cut off square like)

There's some problems with how it's reading in some of that stuff, but you were in a surface area, not underground.  The cut-off squarish backgrounds on the ladders is the only mistake that I'm aware of at the moment with those.

[BobTheJanitor]

If there were jagged areas (with proper edge art of course) where the ladders were but still holes leading through to the background view in some spots then it would look more like weird eroded rock formations and probably be fine. I can see where the confusion would come from if something looks underground but still has a huge blank open view behind it.

[Moo]

By the way - I'm loving the partially-complete ladders right now. They make climbing around caverns far more interesting.

[BobTheJanitor]

I'm thinking something is up with battlegrounds. I'm at tier 5, and when I pause and mouse over them, my allies have 3,000 hp, but upon taking one skelebot sniper shot their HP drops to 265. My base got plowed by a tower that was pretty close to it within about the first 10 seconds too. What up with that?

Edit: Shots appear to be hitting my base for 3,000 to 4,000 damage as well. Is that a 30% elemental weakness, or perhaps a 3000% weakness?

Edit edit: 3rd failed battleground: Are the towers supposed to attack you from basically unlimited range?

[x4000]

Sigh, the way that health is shown is basically proving to be problematic.  The health you have, versus the health some other object has, are two completely different sorts of numbers.  I'm going to have to redo that whole thing to make it so that it makes sense and is reasonably balance-able.

[Toll]

I must say, 0.906 is making me rather excited even before it's out Do you have a rough ETA on when it'll be out? No rush or anything, of course! I'd rather have a solid patch than a quick one.

[x4000]

I must say, 0.906 is making me rather excited even before it's out Do you have a rough ETA on when it'll be out? No rush or anything, of course! I'd rather have a solid patch than a quick one.

Probably sometime tomorrow -- there's some MAJOR internal math rework that is also going into this one, that fixes a ton of bugs but possibly creates some new ones.  And which is needed for us to be able to properly get everything balanced next week.  I'm down to... let's see... 117 compiler errors at the moment.

I should be finished with my part of this tonight, but then it will need testing in the morning from Josh.  And meanwhile I'll finish off at least one of the missions if not two or three (one is basically done, the other two are very close), presuming he isn't finding horrific numbers of bugs I then have to spend my morning fixing tomorrow.

This is an exciting release for me, too, for sure.  The changes in terrain alone are pretty insanely cool.

[TechSY730]

I'm down to... let's see... 117 compiler errors at the moment.

Sounds stable to me, ship it! 

But yea, I'm guessing to get that many compile errors, you changed one of the highly used internal APIs?

Yea, I've had to do that several times in my new job. 

[x4000]

Seven heavilty-internally-used fields, and then about a dozen secondary fields relating to them, maybe half a dozen methods relating to them, and then reassigning all the value assignments and usages of them that followed after.  About... I dunno, maybe 2k lines of code changes in all.  But the good thing is, the new way of doing it actually helps me find errors rather than obscuring them, and so I'm able to resolve a ton of bug reports (including at least two bugs that weren't even reported but that I found) all in one swoop.  Then it just remains to be seen how many bugs this adds, but at least those are short-term concerns rather than band-aids on band-aids, which always leads to problems.