Jun 29
A day of rest… or not.
So after pushing out all those bug fixes yesterday, I decided to take a day away from the MT2 codebase, before starting on work toward MS2.
…and it didn’t really work out. I ended up spending much of this “day off” playing with MT2′s shaders, just for fun. As part of that, I found the causes of the weird visuals on grass on ATI cards (my own fault; I had actually already fixed it on my ATI machine, and then forgot to commit the fix so that it’d be included as part of the 1.04 build) I also found that for some reason which I don’t currently understand, the floaters (the red numbers that appear when you place buildings) are causing really strange fog effects on ATI cards. I’m completely baffled by this, so I just disabled those floaters for now. They weren’t giving any useful information in the MS1 build anyway; I can figure out what’s going wrong with them later on.
While I was playing with shaders, I also switched to a nicer fog implementation. Higher quality, fixes some other fog glitches on ATI cards, and actually runs a lot faster, too.
No other changes in this build. So unless you’re running on an ATI card, it’s probably not worth bothering with the update. But you ATI users, this one’s for you. It’s MS1.05:
No OS X build for this version, since ATI on OS X wasn’t experiencing the rendering glitches in MS1.04.
As usual, if you give this a run on an ATI card, please let me know how it works out for you; whether the graphic glitches from previous builds are actually fixed now, or whether there are still some left. Thanks, guys!
June 29th, 2010 at 6:52 am
Windows XP SP3, NVidia 9800GT
- When placing a road segment, if the cursor is outside the window when the mouse button is released, the second node will not appear. In other words, you get a road segment with only a “starting” endpoint.
- While placing a road segment, if the cursor passes over a UI area, you “unlock” the ability to place a road into the sky. This is useful, as there appears to be no restriction against placing quest givers, or anything else, in the air… http://i49.tinypic.com/2vm7r7o.jpg
- Attempting to destroy a road node that lies between two other nodes does not actually remove the node. The node remains in its current location, but cannot be selected.
– Attempting to remove nodes that are adjacent to the now-deactivated node causes the same problem to occur with those nodes, even if those nodes are not connected to any other nodes (i.e. they are endpoints of the road).
– It appears to be impossible to destroy any building with an attached road node, as well.
— And on the subject of destroying, I would suggest that it be keybound to Delete and/or Backspace.
- I built a 4-way intersection of roads, and this seemed to confuse a large number of players: http://i50.tinypic.com/2zhmxz7.jpg
– This also occurred to a lesser extent with a three-way intersection.
– This one is probably intentional, but you cannot connect more than four roads at a single node.
– This does not appear to be caused by a lack of anything to do ingame; the players milling about the intersections are all labeled a “Questing” and will briefly swarm over to Quest Givers placed nearby. They will also fight any monsters that are placed near them. They just don’t seem to understand how to pathfind their way through the intersection.
- Moving the cursor in the vicinity of the action bar causes odd movement:
– Moving it from the action bar to the gameworld in any direction causes the tail to jump upwards.
– Moving from the gameworld into the action bar causes the tail to jump to right behind the head.
- Terrain coloring does not work when attempting to apply Grass coloring to the brown (Dirt?) color present on the default map.
- It would be nice if the “Terrain -> Terrain -> Mountain” tool raised terrain a bit more slowly. I found it difficult to build mountain ranges that extended away from the camera because it was hard to get the cursor off of a terrain node before it rose so high that it blocked the ones behind it.
- It would be nice to have the option to drag-and-select for things like raising the level of several grinding zones at once.
- After placing a Quest Giver and raising its level, you cannot quickly return to the Build NPC left-side action bar. This appears to occur because the Build NPC bar remains active underneath the individual NPC’s quest details action bar. Thus, after raising the level of the NPC, the “Build -> NPC” button on the lower action bar must be pressed once to hide that bar, and then again to bring it back up.
- Population, Forum Buzz, and presumably Subscribers and (Negative) Forum Buzz can all exceed their labeled maximums. Woo-hoo! Once this gets far enough, solid black bars begin extending past their intended space.
– Also, the labels on those bars don’t even show against their backgrounds until the bar is quite full.
- The game crashed after ~45minutes of stable play, shortly after I deleted that problematic 4-way road node.
June 29th, 2010 at 9:30 am
Looks normal now! Cheers
June 29th, 2010 at 3:07 pm
Very nice! I had a strange situation where I placed a high-level grinding area first (before anything else). Every subscriber flocked there for a while (even though there were no mobs there and tons of level-appropriate mobs/quests elsewhere. It took a few minutes, but they all seemed to wise up and move out in search of better things to do.
I had it crash after maybe 10-15 minutes of messing around with it. At the time, I had 5 or 6 grinding zones, 2 graveyards, and a road connecting the whole thing to the zone exit.
I let it crash into VS2008, but the disassembled code was (obviously) useless. I was hoping I’d be able to get you some info – if you want to send debug symbols my way, I could try to get you a better crash log and/or info about where exactly its crashing.
June 29th, 2010 at 3:07 pm
Right after I clicked Submit, I realized that I forgot to mention how much I enjoyed the implementation of the Terrain tool(s).
June 29th, 2010 at 11:13 pm
Thanks, guys! Awesome to have such detailed feedback. :)
RE: Applying terrain types (“Mountain”, “Fields”, etc) going too quickly, I completely agree. In my mind, this may become less of an issue once I’ve implemented a map view, so you can get a proper overhead view of what’s going on. I think I’ve finally figured out how to make that work well. (I’ve tried twice before, but the results felt really weird). In my head, I really want a mountain interface where you first designate a region, and then mouse-drag upward, to make the mountain as tall as you want. But I haven’t quite figured out how to make that work yet, though.
RE: Subscribers milling around level-inappropriate grinding areas. In MS1, when subscribers decide that they want to fight a monster and don’t care which monster (that is, if they have no hunt quests sending them anywhere in particular), they pick the closest grinding zone and just go fight the monsters there. The subscribers _don’t_ look for a level-appropriate grinding zone; just the closest one. And they’ll complain if the monsters they find are too far away from their own level. That’s a bug. They ought to pick the nearest level-appropriate grinding zone, and complain if that zone is too far away, rather than fight in a level-inappropriate grinding zone and complain about difficult/easy monsters. This bug is going on my list for MS2.
RE: Joe’s amazing list of comments/issues, almost all of those are going onto my MS2 list as well. (Exception: Maximum of four roads connected to any one building is intentional)
RE: ATI rendering finally looking normal, yay!
June 30th, 2010 at 12:18 am
Not a bug, but possible feature change, add a demolish structre to the build menu as oppsed to having it in the building sub menu.
June 30th, 2010 at 1:18 am
well, just when you comment on the last post, you find that a new one has been made, with some of the problemsi listed… doh!
No need to paste my previous comment, but found some new things for the list.
When having painted stone on the terrain, there are still small straws of grass.
Being able to raise and lower the terrain as a square and as a single block (opposed to the hills you make now) whould be nice. Also, flatten and smooth tools whould do wonders!
Movement speed should be a little higher on roads, in order to make them useful.
also, lags somewhat when creating huge areas of mountain/beach (but thats to be expected i guess)
June 30th, 2010 at 3:24 pm
Re: Movement speed on roads. I disagree, from the standpoint of a player. In a real MMO, roads tend to be safer (grinding zones are generally set a ways back from the road, or at the endpoint), and also serve the critical function of providing direction. As I recall, “Road Safety” at least was present on the UI in MT1.
In short, while roads may not serve an especially obvious purpose from the point of view of us developer-gods, they’re appreciated by the little ants scurrying about down there.
July 1st, 2010 at 12:32 am
In MTv1, “Road Safety” was a slider which affected the likelihood of a player finding a randomly generated monster when the player was following a road.
In MTv2, “Road Safety” is now a checkbox. If it’s turned on (which is the default), then monsters won’t be placed on a road. However, right now they’re not keeping far enough away from roads; they’re only insisting on being at least a meter from the very middle of a road. Which isn’t nearly far enough away to keep them from aggroing on players who are travelling on the road. For MS2, I’ll fix that so that they’ll keep further away from roads.
From a PC’s point of view, roads represent a safe way of getting from place A to place B. If players want to travel somewhere and they can find a road that will take them there, and the road doesn’t go too far out of their way, then the PCs will choose to take the road, rather than risk running into monsters.
From a developer’s point of view, roads give a couple of benefits. PCs will tend to stick to the roads (as long as there are appropriate roads placed), which means that they’re not blundering through high-level grinding zones on their way to the store. Similarly, roads can give PCs a safe path over water. PCs won’t drown in water (unlike in previous MMORPG Tycoons), but they don’t like spending a lot of time in it; it’ll generate negative thoughts.
Visually, I’m not really sold on the current appearance of roads; I think that eventually roads will be textures baked into the surface of the ground, rather than being extra geometry drawn on top of it. But that’s for sometime later on. :)
July 3rd, 2010 at 7:10 am
Thought I’d try this out and lo and behold, it just crashes on my system.
Last output to the console window:
http://i50.tinypic.com/1e8934.jpg
Running windows 7 (32 bit) and an NVidia 8600 GT.
July 26th, 2010 at 11:30 pm
Hey, looks like i missed all the release goodness while ive been away for the last month or so… shocker well im gonna get on it now, fun times to be had.!