AVWW Beta 0.539, "In-Game Reference Window," Released!

This one isn't what I'd planned on doing today, but I'm really glad that I took this detour -- and I think that even experienced AVWW players will be, too. 

The big new feature in this version is the "reference window," which lets you get at full stats for crafting, civ-level unlocks, and materials.  No enemies yet, but that will be coming sometime down the road along with a related "scan" spell.

Also included in the reference window is an advice and tips section, which basically replaces the adviser guardian functionality with an available-anytime tips section broken out by category and subject line.  That's SO much better than a bunch of paragraphs that were sequential and semi-ordered (since only so much ordering could be done).

The reference window, on the one hand, might be seen as being geared toward new players.  And I certainly hope it will help new players quite a bit.  But actually, I think that this will become something that even experienced players use on an ongoing basis as more spells and recipes and so on are added.  The reference window essentially saves you from having to run back to town every time you want to look something up -- and it saves you from having to find some external wiki about the game, too, which was another goal of mine.

I had planned to spend today adding a bunch of new spells and enemies, but I really felt like the reference was something that was needed first.  It's something that a lot of different players have asked for the various component parts of, and it's something that can be extended over time in terms of the tips it offers, and adding in things like icons and whatnot later rather than having it just be textual like it currently is.

There's also a couple of bugfixes in this one.  The GC exception one should be particularly welcome.

More to come tomorrow, although some of my day is going to be spent putting together a new installer build since it's been a while and since we're going to be having the game come to some new distributors.  But my goal is to also get some new spells in there tomorrow, too.  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.