AVWW Beta 0.502, "Smashed Spawners," Released!

This one is actually our second beta update since 0.500 came out yesterday, but the first update was so puny it wasn't worth a news post for.  Yesterday was a busy, busy day -- and a really incredible day.  The amount of support and excitement for A Valley Without Wind is pretty incredible!

Today was a lot more productive, in terms of actually updating the game and getting to the things folks were wanting to see changed.  The changelog, which is linked above, is pretty long and inclusive, so for a lot of the details you'll just want to go there.

However, some highlights:

• Fixed a number of mostly-obscure crash bugs and other errors of that nature.  Nothing like having a suddenly wildly-larger playerbase for flushing those out of the bushes!
• Made it so that you can now kill monster spawners, but they respawn when you leave the area for too long.  This was our most-requested feature.  As a side note, minor loot drops from the small mobs is coming, but I didn't have time to get to that one today.
• Added a new spell, Death Touch, which is like Fire Touch on steroids.  This one actually costs mana, but it's great for quickly mining things and it's also great for taking out monster spawners more quickly.
• With their help, fixed a couple of exploits that some clever players had figured out in terms of gaming the invincibility mechanics to slay higher-level bosses than they should be able to.
• Fixed the gap where there often were few or no regions leveled 11-19 in most worlds.  There will definitely now be at least one non-ocean region of every level 1-1000 in the world, and generally there should be at least one region of every possible level above that, too, although there might be gaps here or there where 1097 happens to only have ocean tiles and 1098 has somewhere you can really visit on land, etc.
• Added several keyboard-centric control options for players that prefer not to use a mouse while they play.
• Added a number of fixes, tweaks, and additions that are OSX-centric.  In particular there is a nasty bug in just the compiled executables that Unity 3D generates, where the mouse cursor on trackpads leaps upwards above the top of the screen whenever you press a keyboard key.  We can't directly fix that bug since it's in the underlying engine, but we did put in a workaround tha seems to solve all the problems.  Folks on OSX who were having trouble aiming spells while doing something like, say, running, should now be trouble-free.
• Also added in a little mouse cursor underlay to make sure the mouse cursor is easier to see against all kinds of backgrounds; in interiors on OSX it was easy to lose the cursor, and in snowstorms on windows it was easy to lose the cursor.  Now you can see it everywhere for sure.
• And lastly, put in a number of fixes related to dead NPCs and what happens to them in the strategic/citybuilding interfaces.
• Along with a lot of other more minor things noted in the release log.

More coming tomorrow.  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.