AVWW Beta 0.928 "Achieving The Leading Causes Of Death " Released!

This one was supposed to come out yesterday, but then, well... it grew.  A lot.

Achievements
So, not that long ago we weren't sure if we'd have time to have these at all.  Then a few days ago I was saying we'd probably have 15-20 or so for 1.0, and then get to more later on.  Ah... yeah.  This version adds 104 achievements, which will be the sum total of what we do in terms of achievements for 1.0; and we will indeed add more after 1.0, too.  Did I mention that they all have unique art?  That's a lot of icons...

Lots Of Other Miscellany, And The Last Of The "Things We Learned At PAX East" Stuff
So, yeah.  The release notes are long, and varied.  A goodly number of fixes for multiplayer, and lots of fixes for solo also.  In no particular order, here were some particularly salient changes:

- The randomly generated professions of NPCs on continents beyond the first is now a lot more friendly.

 - Warp gate function is now clearer based on a second sign seeding in them, and you can also now use warp gates without actually entering them (handy if you're not being chased by monsters and want to save a tiny bit of time).

- Wooden platforms work oh-so-much-better now.  You can make literal staircases with them that you can just walk up by moving to the side.  And you don't fall through them crazily anymore when it looks like you shouldn't and you're walking across multiple of them.  And they hang onto background walls that are near sky a lot better now.  All in all: holy cow, these are completely different and better.  And there were some small camera improvements to the Y axis to support this, and that also makes a subtle improvement in terms of smoothness, too.

- Ridiculous numbers of more changes to the intro mission to make things briefer and clearer wherever possible, and to hopefully instill the idea that tactics actually matter when choosing your attack position, etc.  We also put in a lot more safeguards to prevent some of the more common shooting-yourself-innocently-in-the-foot cases that people were commonly getting into.

- This one is huge: the recharge rate for mana is now about twice as fast, but most characters also get less mana.  The full rationale is in the release notes, but basically: a) waiting around for mana recharge isn't fun; and b) having some characters that have access to high-mana spells that other characters can't even wield is really interesting, but only when they can actually cast those higher-mana spells with a good degree of frequency as well.  All in all the idea is to make mana a more valid and interesting gameplay choice to focus in, although obviously that will depend partly on the new spells we'll be adding soon to really make that pop.

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.