AVWW Beta 0.534, "Settlements Ahoy," Released!

This one is our third and final release of the day. 

The thing I'm most excited about it is the work that's been done on the intro mission framework.  The mission-as-implemented-so-far is just a tiny cave that you walk out of (yay), but what that tiny cave represents is pretty substantial for my ability to now move this mission design out of the word processor and into the game.

The thing that I expect many existing players will be the most excited about in this one is the changes to settlement seeding logic -- there are now hard minimums on how infrequently settlements can seed on the world map.  That wasn't previously the case, so we had some players who were level 60-70 before seeing their second settlement, while other players were finding their second settlement easily by level 20.  That was definitely too much variance!

There are a number of other fixes and defensive coding bits added in this version, too.  If you have one of the few kinds of graphics cards that supports shader model 3.0 or higher, but which doesn't support vertex fragment programs, it will now auto-disable the dynamic skies so that you see the nice static skies instead of a hot pink sky backdrop.  Destroyed rooms are also now the thing that are the most likely to be missing if there's a missing door in a building room, which is another big plus.

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.