Milestone 2 arrives

/ 8 July, 2012

For those who are interested in non-finished versions of things, here’s the latest snapshot of MMORPG Tycoon 2’s work-in-progress binaries.

MS2:

If anybody is running Linux and is really interested in trying a build, leave a comment or send me an e-mail.  Would give me a good excuse to figure out how to distribute binary builds under Linux.

Like milestone 1, this is basically a technology demo, intended to gather some basic performance data, particularly regarding the shadow rendering, which may be too expensive for some people’s machines, maybe.  If you play with it, I’d be really grateful if you’d leave a comment to let me know how well it ran for you!  (Or if I’ve managed to produce non-working binaries)

Notable new stuff since MS1:

  • Trees appear in the starting region.
  • Shadows, and smaller graphical improvements.
  • Ground geometry generation is now multi-threaded;  procedurally generating world content as you mvoe around should be much smoother now.
  • Several new terrain editing tools.
  • Experimental ground deformation under paths.  I’m not really happy with how this is working right now, as it makes it tricky to build roads to buildings, since the deforming road surface keeps jostling buildings around.
  • The region begins with a very basic building setup already in place.  Feel free to delete or move the existing buildings if you want to do something different.  You begin with an inn, two questing areas, and two quest-givers.  These are usually placed behind your starting position, so turn around after the game begins in order to see them.
  • Initial implementation of “logged in” mode, which lets you play the MMO.  There’s no good GUI to get to this right now;  it’s a magic keypress;  hold “space”, and with “space” still depressed, tap the “alt” button (“option” on OSX).  Doing this again will return you to normal edit mode.  While in logged-in mode you can fight monsters, gain levels, etc.  There’s no GUI yet for accepting or handing in quests, but that’ll come eventually.
  • Almost everything in the game can easily be dragged around.  Trees, buildings, monsters, logged-in players, etc.  (Only when no editing tool is active)
  • Editing tools (and abilities on logged-in characters) can be rearranged and moved from one action bar to another.

Less notable new stuff:

  • PC AI has been almost completely refactored since MS1.  The AI system now supports multiple characters per subscriber, and subscribers will invite their friends into the game if they like it, and will often tend to log in at the same time as their friends (Parties and Guilds aren’t implemented yet, so this isn’t very visible in this build, but it’s happening behind the scenes).  Right now, subscribers who have multiple characters don’t share world knowledge between those characters (where to find quest givers, etc);  they discover things fresh on each character.  I consider that a bug, but it’s not trivial to fix without throwing a lot of RAM at the problem.
  • There’s a color picker which is wired up to the fog, just as a proof of concept for how I’d implement a color picker.  There’s a sorting issue on its indicators, but it basically works.
  • There’s a thoroughly broken “Business” statistics screen that you should totally ignore, because it’s embarrassingly broken and awful.

Thanks for your patience as I got this together, everyone!  It took a whole lot longer than I wanted it to!  My goal is for MS3 to be in September, and I want to focus on visuals for it.  Getting tired of only having grassy hills and blue skies and simplistic buildings and ugly toolbars!  So the focus is on graphics for the next milestone.  :)

But for the rest of tonight I’m going to relax a bit, and play some Spelunky.  (Is that brief mention enough to warrant tagging this post with “Shameless Indie Plugs”?  Why yes, I think it is!)

 

History

I’ve found copies of the old milestone 1 builds too.  If anybody is particularly interested, those are also downloadable for comparison purposes here:

(I don’t remember why the OS X build only went up to 1.04, while Windows went to 1.06.  I assume that there were a few Windows-only bugs being solved in the final few patches)

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