Original:
http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2011/11/avww-beta-0543-black-wind-blows.htmlThis one is our first one since coming back from the Thanksgiving holiday -- hope everyone else who celebrates it had a great holiday also.
There are a number of important bugfixes to this one, including the "leveling up takes off my suit" bug that was causing a number of people to die a fiery (or frigid) death.
Windstorms have also seen a major expansion of their power, such that the wind is actually a force that you (and your projectile spells) can
feel in a tangible way. Thanks in particular to Armanant for his suggestions there!
On the forums, if you've missed it, there have lately been a number of threads where we're asking feedback on various things we're brainstorming about. The first one was
redesigning health and mana, followed by one on
inventory, another on
possible food systems, another one on
allowing players opportunities for cleverness, another based around
expanding the concept of permadeath in the game, and lastly a fun one where you can
submit epitaphs to be shown on in-game graves!
There's also been a lot of progress on multiplayer, which seems like a really repetitive and generic thing to be saying at this point. But lots more bugs were found and squashed, and Keith and Josh have been having increasingly successful tests. I think Keith's list of must-do-before-first-public-alpha-of-multiplayer items is currently about 9 items long, but it goes up and down pretty rapidly. Some of the recent bugs and regressions in single player have been results of the multiplayer heavy revamps, but that's settling down and really I think there's been remarkably little collateral damage there.
My hope is still to see a first public alpha of multiplayer sometime this week, or next at the latest, but that really depends on what further bugs are found as the testing cycle continues. Trust me, no one is more tired of that cycle than Keith, so we're really hoping that winds down shortly and he gets to do "something, anything else." But it's exciting to see multiplayer coming together, and we're both really looking forward to being able to play with our wives, speaking for ourselves.
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.
