AVWW Beta 0.917 "Toss Some Ice At That CPU" Released!

This one took us substantially longer than we thought it would, but that's mainly because I wound up going down a rabbit hole of performance improvements. 
 
Which is great news!  There's a whole host of mainly-CPU-related performance improvements all through here, with everything from chunk-gen (particularly key in multiplayer) to actually when you're running around.  Some of the most GPU-heavy enemy shot types (such as those from amoebas) have also had their load requirements toned down (in the process also making them more visually distinct from player spells, which is a double plus.

There's a new spell in here, called ice toss.  I'd wanted to add another couple of spells at least with this one, and we've got another enemy that is just about complete, but on the other hand I didn't want to keep delaying this release indefinitely.

There are also a lot of fixes and balance tweaks in here.  Large monsters drop more health now than small ones do, for instance.  The ocean shallows are a lot more unique and a lot more interesting to explore, and they also no longer have dead ends through them constantly.  So getting sea essence and coral is no longer the exercise in frustration that it once was.

Oh, and you can now place both wood platforms and crates in spaces that are normally too small for either (and when they grow into existence, they'll just expand to fill the space that they can.  This is hugely useful for when you fall down a narrow 1-tile-wide hole, for instance.  Previously that was a death sentence if you didn't have something special like a bat scroll, double-or-triple jump, lightning rocket, or an elusion scroll.

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.