AVWW Beta 0.522, "Shadow Pathing," Released!

This one is our first release in a couple of days, which is certainly atypical for us!  There's a couple of things that have been going on.  Firstly, I was out yesterday for some personal reasons; nothing bad, so don't worry, but it was something that I needed to do and which took more time than I expected. 

Secondly, Keith has been hard at work ripping parts of the game's innards apart and fitting them back together in a way that will work for multiplayer.  That's led to a some new bugs internally (affecting single player as well since it's all one codebase), and we wanted to really hammer on it ourselves to get those ironed out before releasing even a new beta version to folks. 

Josh has been testing all sorts of things, and Keith and I have also been playtesting as we work on all the various new things, and at this point it seems clean so far as we can tell -- but we do advise you to perhaps take extra care and back up your world files just in case.

The game might look the same in solo, but it's really come an incredible distance since last Friday in terms of its multiplayer-readiness.  A surprising amount of the game is actually now playable in multiplayer in our internal builds -- go Keith! -- but there's still a lot of MP-specific issues that have to be ironed out before we'd want to do a release of that functionality outside the company.  Still, it's coming along a lot faster than I thought it would, so that's really good to see.  Still no ETA, but all the signs we're seeing are positive at the moment.

Content-wise, there are a number of new boss room templates, bringing the total up to 46.  The way that the shadow bats and dragon fire pathfind has also been extensively redone, adding some pretty major new capabilities into the AI for the game.  That feature was another big chunk of time for me, but it's something we'll be able to reuse for lots of flying or swimming enemies, and already fighting the shadow bats feels like a completely new boss compared to what it was.

Keith has another big batch of MP-related changes ready that are going to need some substantial internal regression-testing tomorrow, but assuming that we get that cleaned up well enough for tomorrow night, there should be another release then.  There's a lot of other stuff that will be coming from my end tomorrow, as well, so hopefully all of that will hit together.  This MP overhaul is affecting our normal release schedule a bit, but once we get through the worst of it (hopefully this week, it looks like, for the really major stuff), we'll be back to our regular schedule.

Enjoy!

Also in this release are a number of important fixes and tweaks that players asked for.  There's really a very diverse list, so I won't try to re-list them all here; see the release notes for details.

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.