As expected, there were some pretty good bug reports from the Milestone 3 build.  I’ve now fixed the most important of these;  that is, the ones which aren’t going to be completely tossed away in Milestone 4 due to big system changes.  Big thanks to Joe and ZipBark for reporting these issues!

Here are the changes between milestone build 3 and 3.1:

• Pausing now correctly stops the clock.  (Previously, pausing stopped the clock, but the clock jumped forward after unpausing, to make up for the time it had been paused.)
• You can no longer build in midair by clicking outside of the world.  This fix also seems to fix the occasional terrain-edit or other tool affecting a strange position on the map, which I had noticed sometimes occurred while doing intensive terrain editing.
• You can now place any building in any order — all building restrictions have been removed.  (Previously, you had to place a respawn spot before any other building).
• As part of this, a couple of “buildings-which-never-unlocked” have become unlocked for placement.  These buildings are:  the tavern, the dungeon, and the capital.  None of these have interesting visual models yet, and only the Tavern has any effect.  Players who wish to socialise will prefer to travel to a tavern, if one is present, and may linger there for some time.  For the moment, I recommend against placing any of these three buildings;  none of them (currently) contribute toward players gaining levels, so they don’t help you with that part of the challenge in this milestone build.
• You may now no longer place a building in an inactive region, or in the ocean.  (You may still place them in a lake formed by a chasm which is placed near the ocean.  But PCs shouldn’t be able to reach such buildings, if my pathfinding code is working properly.)
• Found and fixed a problem with the frequency that new subscribers join your game.  This is now working a little better.  Note that as a result, you’re now in much more peril of having your region server crash due to overloading.  The game is probably too hard right now, since you really need to have an optimal layout for users to gain levels as fast as new players join.  Remember that if your region crashes, you must select the region’s tag and click the ‘Restart’ button in the context matrix to bring it online again and let people resume playing.  Potentially helpful hint:  You can ban a bunch of players in order to generate negative buzz about your game — this negative buzz will tend to help slow down the rate of new users joining.  (Unless nobody is talking about your game at all, in which case negative buzz will speed it up.  Marketing is complicated!)  To ban a player, click on him and select “Ban” in the context matrix.

Downloads:

• Windows MS3.1 build. (requires Windows XP or later)
• OSX MS3.1 build (requires Mountain Lion or later)
• Linux build (None yet.  Want one?  Comment below!)

Unless there’s something catastrophic found in these builds, this is going to be the last set of milestone 3 builds, and I’ll move on with developing toward the next milestone.  Broadly speaking, milestone 3 was about terrain and regions.  Milestone 4 will be about buildings and placements.  More details on that in a future post.