This one is all about both monsters and multiplayer. And fixed slices. And nobody expects the Spanish Inqui... nevermind.
Clearly I've been working on this too long. Anyway...
Monsters
This is a really good batch of monsters, I have to say. The feral chicken is just awesome, and the hopping locust is such a crazy different monster, too. I'm also a big fan of the hungry ghost.
All in all 18 new monsters were added in this release, bringing the total up to 96 monsters in the game (not counting bosses). 4 out of the 12 biomes now have their full set of monsters (the others temporarily pull monsters from other biomes, as has always been the case so far with this game).
It's interesting, because several of the biomes are complete, a few others are nearly complete, and a few others are really barely started. The desert, for one -- until tonight, it only had the Ceiling Asp out of its set of monsters. Now it has three out of its total roster of 9 uniques planned, but that's still not much to get a sense of what the desert will really feel like at all. Funny how these things work out.
At the rate I'm going, I'm going to need two more days rather than one. I've decided to just bite the bullet and do that, rather than just cutting this off after one day and having 10ish fewer monsters than planned. That's because...
Key Multiplayer Fixes
Keith was also working today, and hoo boy did he knock out some key bugs affecting multiplayer. He also managed to get rid of that lockup that could sometimes happen when you were first creating a new world. He got rid of so much stuff from the roster for next week, in fact, that's why I feel like I can take an extra half day or a day to finish off the monsters properly.
Slice Fixes Continue
Last I heard today, Josh had it down to about 900 errors being reported by the unit tester of slices, down from 1100 yesterday. He was also a real presence today, helping out with some buildings stuff as well as that. Long weekend for Arcen, for sure.
Lots More Art!
There's a ton of polished art in this one, mainly in the variety of buildings in terms of what you will notice. And ohmygod does it look awesome. A lot of the most sketch-like buildings are now really superbly finalized. There's still many more that have to be updated to a minor or a major degree, but this was around a third of them all in one jump today, I think.
Other Miscellaneous Good Stuff
You now can:
1. Drop equipment from the escape menu.
2. Build clinics on the sites of destroyed robotic towers and thawing towers.
3. Have a much better chance at actually completing the robotic research facilities without having to turn down the difficulty (do let us know how that feels now).
More monsters coming tomorrow -- as many as I can stuff in. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have any version of the game. If you have the beta on Steam, it will automatically update for you. 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 the standalone game, you can download that here. If you already own the first game, just use your existing license key to unlock the sequel for free!
Ever consider doing these updates with a quick video along with the footage of what it looks like in-game? Consider the popularity and effectiveness of Minecraft snapshot release videos :)
ReplyDeleteIt's nice to read, but it'd be even better to see.
Would that I had time, but right now I'm just running all-out to get it done. Perhaps once 1.0 is out and we're hopefully doing further updates, I'll have more time -- it's a good idea if there's time, for sure!
ReplyDelete