AVWW Beta 0.913 "Unraveling Mysteries" Released!

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Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2012/03/avww-beta-0913-unraveling-mysteries.html

This one has been a few days in the works, but has two major components to it.

Mysteries!
First of all, there are finally mysteries in the game, as well as puzzle rooms to solve to unlock clues from each mystery.  Right now there are two mysteries with a combined 28 clues between them, but there will be more mysteries added both before and after 1.0.  The mysteries are really fun because they allow you to learn some more about the world of Environ without it just being lots of exposition, and they also add a puzzle element that is lightweight, and optional, but fun-if-you're-into-that-sort-of-thing.

Mysteries themselves took a little over a solid day for me, but they represent the last major "type of game mechanic" that we needed to add before 1.0, so that's pretty exciting to have done.  We still have lots of content to add, but mysteries were the last new kind of broad mechanic that was missing.

Multiplayer Work
The rest of my time, and all of Keith's and Josh's time, has been spent working on multiplayer.  We'd thought that multiplayer was in a much cleaner state than it turned out to be, honestly.  We'd done a goodly amount of multiplayer testing on our own, but only in short-ish sessions over good connections in geographic areas that only spanned a few hundred miles.  And we were getting and fixing the occasional bug report from people playing on public servers like Toll's, but there wasn't much of that and so we presumed all was well.

Turns out that was not the case!  For some folks who were more geographically distant, or who were otherwise having lag issues, there were a number of severe MP issues that only cropped up in those circumstances.  We've now got a way of testing under situations of moderate or heavy lag internally for ourselves, so we were able to duplicate the issues (and then had to figure out how to fix them).  We fixed an absolute horde of these sorts of MP-specific bugs, and the MP experience is thus incredibly smoother under most conditions.

What Remains For Multiplayer -- And A Communication Breakdown
There are a few mostly-cosmetic bugs that we're still aware of, as well as a handful of not-cosmetic-at-all bugs, but in the main MP is now feeling a lot closer to a product we'd actually want to release as 1.0 next month.

The most concerning thing through this process, however, was that we just didn't get the feedback and didn't even know there was a problem -- normally people tell us when they run into issues right away, and since there were a number of people we knew were playing MP, we assumed that an absence of reports meant an absence of issues.

But in this case, it apparently meant that MP was so badly broken for a few people that they just assumed that it was some sort of working test version and that we knew about it; and thus said nothing.  And meanwhile other people were playing under situations that weren't high-lag, having almost no issues, and telling us things seemed great, which matched our own testing.

Far be it from me to chide anyone, because I know that everyone who takes the time to submit any bug report is doing us a huge favor, and it's not something they were required to do.  Testing our games isn't your job, etc, etc.

But for those folks who do find a bug that they want to see fixed, definitely I'd advise erring on the side of assuming we don't know about it.  We'd rather have to clean up duplicates than to have something important slip through the cracks -- in the last three years, this is the first time I can really remember where that almost happened, and frankly it was kind of scary.  If we had gone ahead with our original go-live date of next week, there would have been some major fecal matter hitting the proverbial fan, and we would have had no idea that was coming.

Serves us right for not doing our own better testing under conditions of lag, of course.  We just assumed that having two people in two different cities in North Carolina, plus a third person in Georgia, would give us real-world-enough results.  Ah, well; in the end it looks like it is all working out well, knock on wood, but that's definitely had us in a bit of a tizzy for the last couple of days and delayed some content updates.

More to come soon.  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.

[Penumbra]

I've been refreshing the forums waiting for the new mysteries patch since yesterday. I decided to just play the game anyways, and I was pleasantly surprised to find an update when i turned it on! Been very excited for this one, going off to find a mystery room!

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Make sure and unlock at least one of. The mysteries first!

[Penumbra]

As soon as I started up (I last quit inside a settlement) I had "The Mystery Of The Glyphs(0/18), and the other marked "Locked"

What did I do to unlock it?

I found a mystery room. It was really fun! I was able to get myself stuck though 

I have some other comments, but so as not to leave spoilers on how these work, I put it in Mantis.

[tigersfan]

Back to the original post for a second... Let me please say that as the guy who does the lion's share of the cleanup of duplicate tickets and such, I'm in total agreement with Chris that we'd rather have multiple tickets about something than to have anyone assume we already know about it and don't sent it in.

That said, I'm entirely grateful for each and every person who has sent in tickets, posted on these forums, or in other ways helped us to make this game what it is. This game, very literally would not be what it is right now without the awesome community here.

[Oralordos]

Sorry about the no new tickets thing. I make sure to send in tickets about any bugs I do find. Most of the time I am playing single player though so I do not have so many bug reports on multiplayer things.

[keith.lamothe]

No worries, we should have been clearer about where we thought MP was and thus what should be reported (i.e. anything), etc.  But we're on the same page moving forward

[Toll]

To add my own note as a server-runner... If you're playing on my server (and I welcome everyone!) and break it or cause some bug (and I encourage everyone to try to break it!), send me a PM about it so I can A) attach any relevant logs to tickets, and B) restart the server if needed. I might not respond immediately (I do sleep from time to time; generally those times are about 10PM-06PM GMT give or take an hour or two) but I'll never be annoyed at people sending me PMs.

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And also I just want to add my gratitude, in case that wasn't clear from the OP -- this game is night and day from the start of beta to now, it's insane.  Keith and I were just particularly shocked that MP could be in such a bad state with basically nobody telling us, and we've just been kind of reeling from that the last couple of days.  We really thought we were winding down on the bugs, but to find such a major cache of them makes us incredibly grateful to have this extra month of dev time suddenly.

Anyway, the other thing I should note is that clearly this new version has introduced a ton of new issues, both in solo and in MP.  We'll clean these up as soon as we can, and I'm going to be working all day tomorrow to hopefully get a lot of those knocked out, along with at least two new spells.  Sorry, three new spells.

Thanks for bearing with us during this unexpected rough patch that we've suddenly encountered based on the MP can of worms.

[TechSY730]

OK, from my AVWW install, it says I have 12 packages I gotta download.

Seeing that I am only at version .565, that seems too small. Is it downloading the "aggrigated download pack" that was released at the start of the 3rd beta cycle and upgrading from there?

In any case, as you can see, I have quite a bit to catch up on.

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OK, from my AVWW install, it says I have 12 packages I gotta download.

Seeing that I am only at version .565, that seems too small.

If you were to install AI War 5.0 and do an update, it would say about 3 updates to download.  If you did AI War 4.0, I think it might be as many as maybe 12-20 updates.  Obviously in all cases we do way more updates than that.

Is it downloading the "aggrigated download pack" that was released at the start of the 3rd beta cycle and upgrading from there?

Not quite, there's nothing specific like that we put out; though we did put out new installers, that's an actual separate executable, not an update zip.  The reason that the number is so small is that we can only push changes to entire files.  So every time our DLL changes, we remove it from prior versions of the zip so that you don't keep downloading that repeatedly if it's been a while.  Depending on what else changed other than just code itself, it might just be some XML files that total about 3KB for one update.  So we just delete the entire prior update out of the update chain and replace it with the new one.

So the last AI War update before the current one was 5.003, in terms of what is on the server, for instance.  With AVWW or AI War, we pretty much only have whatever the "latest version of the code and core xml files" is, in the very latest update file, and then we have whatever intermediate versions included a lot of other media updates.  Mostly music, sound, or graphics.

What that tends to mean is, wherever update you last stopped on (whether it was three versions back, or fifty), you have the minimum possible data to download to get to the current version; and the number of actual packages is kind of irrelevant, as it just depends on when we had what batches of other media originally released in our cycles.  We have to pay for update bandwidth, so we do our best to conserve it for our sake as well as yours!

[TechSY730]

So, I'm going through the tutorial again, and already noticed some awesome stuff.

1. The enemies feel a lot more fluid, and for the ones that you would expect to have some intelligence, seem smarter.
2. The upgrade system is awesome, and so is the enchants system
3. I loved the music of this game before, but now, when I heard the new in game version of the main theme, WOW! So rich and amazing! Great job Pablo!
4. The "sticky background walls" to "hang" platforms on is a great idea, and allows for platform placement flexibility but still allow for gravity influenced platforms.
5. I see that whoever is writing those epitaphs has still got that severe snark addiction.

However, already, I've noticed some concerns.

1. Even the basic fire-touch spell seems a tad expensive, but then again, that may be because I'm starting with a fresh character, and I even chose one with a lower than average max MP.
2. Thanks to the new "can't pass through enemies" rule, enemies that chase you can now trap you in a "cup like" corner. This is especially bad with skelebots, with their strong pushback, so you can't even try to go over their heads slowly to escape, they'll just shove you right back into the "cup". I have nearly died several times by being trapped like that with no way out short of killing them (a difficult task to do on time, due to my already mentioned below average MP)
EDIT:
3. The pre-placed platforms that are removed due to platforming difficulty sometimes seems to change, meaning what was reachable without platforms may require platforms on a later visit.



However, as I am not even past the tutorial yet, I'm sure I will see all kinds of awesome new stuff.

Also, I noticed you can jump while ducking now, although at a lower height and you stop ducking as soon as you are in the air. Is that intentional to fight the "I'm trapped in a one square high passage" thing?

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5. I see that whoever is writing those epitaphs has still got that severe snark addiction.

That's not snark, that's black humor.  And that's me.

1. Even the basic fire-touch spell seems a tad expensive, but then again, that may be because I'm starting with a fresh character, and I even chose one with a lower than average max MP.

If you don't like it, don't go for such low Mana.  Kind straightforward.  There's not a reason to be spamming the spell, though, and you can get really massive mana if you really want to.  The characters vary extremely much, from the glass cannons to the tanks with very little firepower, to the heavy-hitters that have very little in the way of attack sustainability.  If you choose one in the latter category and don't like that, then next time choose one in a different category -- or better yet, upgrade your existing character to be what you want.  If the mana is just a little too-low seeming, it's cheaper to upgrade that once or twice and then put the rest of your upgrades into making your attack and HP more awesome.  The more awesome your stat started out, the more each upgrade does.

2. Thanks to the new "can't pass through enemies" rule, enemies that chase you can now trap you in a "cup like" corner. This is especially bad with skelebots, with their strong pushback, so you can't even try to go over their heads slowly to escape, they'll just shove you right back into the "cup". I have nearly died several times by being trapped like that with no way out short of killing them (a difficult task to do on time, due to my already mentioned below average MP)

This is a fault?  You went into a dead-end, ill-equipped, with enemies in pursuit?  And the fact that they almost killed you is a concern?   In all seriousness, if there isn't a danger to making a mistake, there's no tactics.  That's something I realized with AI War, and gradually figured out how to apply here: if any given tactical position is equally valid, then there is no tactical decision making to actually be made. 

So with various enemies, you have various advantages and disadvantages.  Against some, with some spells, firing down a hill slope can be devastating.  Against others, it's almost impossible because of the nature of the straighshot (dumbfire) spells.  Sometimes having the low ground can be hugely to your advantage.  Other times you will actually want to lead enemies down a blind alley, because it gets them all lined up for a nice launch meteor or something -- but you'd better make sure you have the mana and cooldown time to finish them off before they reach you at the end of that corridor.

Most of the time it's bad to flee the enemy blindly into territory that you've not yet explored, because of the risk of dead ends; instead it's better to flee up or down when at all possible, or to use delaying tactics.  You can shoot skelebots in the legs to slow them down, for instance, and since they can't pass each other that can be really useful.  And so on and so forth.  But what my point really is that having tactical variety requires that some positions be better than others; and that some be downright terrible or completely amazing (though the less of the latter category the better).

EDIT:
3. The pre-placed platforms that are removed due to platforming difficulty sometimes seems to change, meaning what was reachable without platforms may require platforms on a later visit.

That would definitely be a bug, but I can't duplicate it.  Can you give added details?  Is it just the first time you go there, and then every time after is different?  Or is it different literally every time?  Is it a specific chunk?

Also, I noticed you can jump while ducking now, although at a lower height and you stop ducking as soon as you are in the air. Is that intentional to fight the "I'm trapped in a one square high passage" thing?

The "low jump" was an old feature we re-enabled because it's pretty useful for jumping gaps where there's a low overhead.  But yeah, it also helps with the situation you mentioned (with that you can also duck and stand up to inch along a narrow corridor).

Anyway, glad you're enjoying it.

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New one!  http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,10125.0.html

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Found it: http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=6835

* Fixed a bug that has apparently been around since we added the platforming difficulty; every time you loaded a chunk, it would further whittle away the platforms, until you eventually had none left, unless you were playing on a very low platforming difficulty.

Thanks!