Devlog on MMORPG Tycoon 2 Devblog

The Impenetrable Update

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 17:49:38 +1100

Hi everyone, happy new year!

Today, we have a tech update; largely due to the big performance improvements we achieved last year (and there are a few more in this build, too!), I’ve been able to turn on a feature that I never thought we’d be able to afford to do:

Players now avoid walking through large scenery objects! This is most notable around trees and various large structures. Note that we only do this for large, solid-looking objects on the ground. They’ll still quite happily trample straight through your meticulously placed flower beds (sorry not sorry!)

An MT2 Holiday Update

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 17:49:38 +1100

Hi everyone!

This is a small holiday update for everyone, containing a new exotic art pack and a bunch of bug fixes and other minor improvements.

Here’s what’s new:

Exotic Art Theme: Confection

Contains a new functional building theme, modular gingerbread houses, scenery items, and a customisable gingerbread man costume for your players (or your monsters, if you prefer!)

Improved bounding box generation for flex objects

This should make it much easier to click on bridges and walls!

Exotic Art Packs

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 17:49:38 +1100

Hi everyone!

In this big content update, we’ve gone outside our usual box and have two new art packs with styles outside of our usual high fantasy genre!

New themes:

Wild West

A full set of functional buildings in an old west style!
A new modular building type, perfect for making frontier settlements!
A mine cart bridge type!
Two new customisable character costumes - the cunning Desperado and the implacable Gunslinger.

Rivers & Bridges

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 17:49:38 +1100

Hi folks! This is another update that got a bit bigger than I expected! Let me tell you about it.

Districts

You can now place “districts” in your world. Districts let you create and define areas within your world.

Districts work a little like monster zones in that you paint them down onto the ground. Once painted, you can select them like any other object to modify them. Note that they are only selectable while the Terrain action bar tab is active; they’re hidden (apart from their effects on the map) in all other modes.

Ruins

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 17:49:38 +1100

Hi everybody! This update was originally supposed to just (“just”) be a simple content update, but.. it’s kind of expanded and morphed into something bigger, with a bunch of new features and AI fixes and improvements.

Let me tell you about them!

New stuff:

This was supposed to be the core of this new update; we’ve added a new “Ruins” theme, which includes a full new functional building set, plus a new modular building set, plus several new scenery pieces! This is all unlocked via a new ‘Ruins’ art pack you’ll find in the list of available development projects.

Redline

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 17:49:38 +1100

Hi folks! We have a second part of the Accelerator update today, plus a bunch of bug fixes and more! Stay tuned below the changelog for an update on me.

Major Changes

When we rolled out the Accelerator update two weeks ago, some players (mostly AMD users) had rendering problems, and so I hastily rolled back all the rendering-related optimizations and fixes from that update in a hotfix build. But thanks to some heroic testers whom I’ll never be able to thank enough, we found the bugs and now we’re ready to roll those rendering optimizations back out to everyone again, and that’s most of what’s in this update!

Accelerator

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 17:49:38 +1100

Hi folks! What, this? Why, it’s only the single biggest performance boost we’ve ever shipped, why do you ask? :D

Headline features:

Much faster game simulation!

With this update, even the largest saves we’ve received from players are now running at or near full speed on our test machines! This is a CPU-side optimisation, and I expect that the biggest improvements will be seen by players with large games, many players logged in at once, and at least three or four active world regions, with bigger savings the larger your world gets. There will likely be little or no difference for people who currently have just one or two regions active, and folks who are GPU-limited due to huge amounts of placed scenery will still be GPU-limited. (But hopefully running the simulation at max speed at least won’t make their frame rate actively worse any more)

The Weaponry Update

Sat, 10 May 2025 17:49:38 +1100

Hi everybody! It’s time for our latest new content drop, which this time is actually kind of a hybrid content/feature drop.

New in this update:

New weapon models! Our limited old weapon models have been removed, and are now replaced by literally 200 new weapon models, spread across 14 categories, and mapped to increasing quality levels so that higher item-level (ilvl) weapons look cooler and more dangerous than lower ilvl weapons!

The Progression Update

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 17:49:38 +1100

Hi everybody! This is arguably the biggest update we’ve ever done. I know I said “no more huge updates” after the Dungeons Update, but.. here we are?

So let’s talk about what’s new!

Major new features

Custom Rules

Maybe it’s weird for me to be mentioning this as a ‘major new feature’ right up at the top of the list, but we’re extending the sandbox options to give players a lot more freedom to pick their own experience. In this build there are several custom rules you can apply to your games, and you can change your mind at any time without needing to start a new game!

Progress on Progression

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 17:49:38 +1100

Hi folks!

First, I want to apologise for the recent radio silence; work on the Progression Update has been going on for a lot longer than I expected, as I kept finding more adjustments I wanted to make to the basic game structure, and time just got away from me.

This update has taken far longer and includes far more changes than I originally predicted, and I should have been posting updates here in the interim to let people know! Sorry — I promise I’ll be better about communicating what’s going on with development from now on!

The Feudal Update

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 17:49:38 +1100

Hi folks! This is another content update with even more new models for decorating and customising your game worlds!

We have a relatively short list of code changes and bug fixes this time, as nearly all my own time is going into the upcoming Progression Update, so you can think of this one as an “Oops, All Art!” update.

New in this update:

A complete new set of functional buildings, and a new matching modular building set!
A new wall style!
Several new scenery items!

Bug fixes:

Monosaves!

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 17:49:38 +1100

Hi folks! Every once in a while we release an update containing only “under-the-hood” changes, and this is one of those. A lot of people don’t really care about the back-end technical stuff, and that’s totally fine; please feel free to skip down to the ‘Also in this build’ bugfix section at the bottom of this post if that’s you!

But for me, the most exciting parts of this update are up here at the top, and maybe you’ll like them too!

Scenery Brushes

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 17:49:38 +1100

Hi everybody! Today we have a much-requested feature, a brush interface for placing down groups of scenery objects!

New in this update:

Scenery brushes!
Each scenery placement tool can now be put into a “brush” mode, where you can scatter scenery items across an area with just the sweep of the mouse. There are several different patterns available, with customisable densities, brush sizes, scale and angle randomisations, and more! Individual placements are of course still available, and scenery items placed using a brush can be further adjusted the same as any other scenery items!

Additionally, this update has a whole bunch of other minor quality-of-life fixes and improvements:

The Travel Update

Sat, 11 May 2024 17:49:38 +1100

Hi everybody! Today we have a content update, adding more variation to a bunch of travel buildings which have had fairly limited options up until now.

New in this update:

Three new flight point variants! That brings us up from 2 to 5!
Three new vehicle variants! Bringing us from 5 to 8!
Three new teleporter variants! Bringing us from 6 to 9!

Note, of course, that for each of these technologies (flight points, vehicle depots, and teleporters) you’ll need to have unlocked those technologies in-game before you’ll be able to access these new models and animations.

Early Access: January 6th!

Fri, 27 Dec 2019 16:30:00 +1100

I’ve put off announcing this far far longer than I should have, but we’re pretty rapidly approaching our Early Access launch, which is currently scheduled for January 6th (US time)

I’d say more things, but.. too excited, and too many things to coordinate for that launch! Go wishlist us on Steam to be notified just as soon as we launch!

Once Early Access happens, I’m expecting to have a long Early Access period, with feedback and ideas from players extensively guide further development of the game!

Character Updates

Thu, 13 Dec 2018 11:45:00 +1100

We’ve been doing some pretty big adjustments to characters in MMORPG Tycoon 2, lately! By and large, characters are becoming less blocky, while remaining very simple and flat-shaded. (We need to be able to draw them really quickly, since there can be thousands in view at any given time!)

I’d like to highlight a couple of notable changes from the past month, just as examples of what we’ve been up to:

Obsessions

Thu, 01 Mar 2018 22:28:23 +1100

That One Bug

Most experienced game programmers have a story about That One Bug; A war story they tell to amaze, amuse, or impress other game programmers, often over drinks at conferences or other meet-ups. They’re our industry’s equivalent of a fisherman’s “The One That Got Away” stories.

I’ve had a few of these “That One Bug” stories over my time in the industry. Perhaps the first one was a crash in the PlayStation 2 version of Test Drive Unlimited. This crash would only happen in a retail build, only when playing from a burnt disc (as opposed to running from a simulated file system over a network, which is a common console dev kit feature). It would only happen when in a full network session of eight online players for about ten minutes, and only if you were playing on one of the newer, slimline PS2s; not in any of the older models. And it was crashing inside a middleware networking library, to which we didn’t have any source code.

Letters From Myself

Sat, 12 Aug 2017 19:56:20 +0200

I wish I could give a hug to the me of a year ago.

When you’ve been working on a large codebase for a long time, it’s common to forget bits of it. You create a mental model which represents approximately what a class or a file or a function does, and then throw away your memory of how the inside of the class actually works, to make mental space for other things.

Ambient Occlusion

Wed, 22 Feb 2017 17:49:38 +1100

In computer graphics, “ambient” lighting is a way to roughly model indirect lighting. “Bounce” lighting, you might call it; it’s light which hits an object not because it is coming directly from a light source, but rather because it has bounced off some other surfaces in the area, before finally illuminating this one.

In computer graphics, we usually model ambient light by simply declaring that there’s a constant amount of light in the scene that’s going to hit absolutely everything. So everything in the scene will receive this much light simply by existing, no matter what else might be going on.

The evolving look of the game

Mon, 16 Jan 2017 23:58:45 +1100

Over the past week-and-change, I’ve been spending some time looking at MMORPG Tycoon 2’s rendering technology, and I’m getting ready to roll out a pretty major evolution of the game’s general appearance inside the MMORPG simulation itself.

Here’s a simple before and after shot; old shaders are on the left, new shaders are on the right. Drag the circular handle to compare the two.

There are several new things to talk about, here. First, the obvious thing; I’ve added shadows to our graphics.

Overviews

Wed, 07 Dec 2016 15:12:12 +1100

One of the pieces which has been missing from MMORPG Tycoon 2 for a long time has been a useful high-level overview of what’s going on inside the game simulation. You’ve always been able to see how many people are subscribed, and you’ve been able to look at each individually to see how they’re each doing, but there hasn’t been a single display which shows a big-picture view of what’s going on, so that’s what I’ve been working on over the past few days.

Socialising

Thu, 27 Oct 2016 15:36:47 +1100

Over the past week or so I’ve been working to really fill out the game AI and simulation. We now keep a reasonably lengthy history of each player’s activity, so you can inspect them and see what they’ve been up to in the past, not just where they are right this moment.

Please excuse the placeholder programmer-art building models; am currently waiting for proper ones!

The path taken by new one user

Similarly, I’m now adding real AI for working out how players feel about other people and objects within the simulation. When socialising with other players, they now engage in miniature social interactions with each of the other people in their social circle, and can sometimes react to them.

AI Systems

Thu, 29 Sep 2016 23:57:40 +1000

At the very innermost core of MMORPG Tycoon 2 are its AI systems; AI which determines how its simulated players act, and what they most want to do in any given circumstance.

Fundamentally, each of MT2’s simulated players runs an AI engine which is similar to the AI brains of the characters in a The Sims game. Each has a set of abstract needs which tend to increase over time; they want to feel like they’re advancing in the game, they want to interact with other players, they want to explore new places, and so on. Completing a quest reduces their need to advance for a little while. Having a nice chat with another player reduces their need to interact with other players.

Keys now going out to testers

Wed, 14 Sep 2016 15:23:54 +1000

So it’s finally happening; the first round of closed pre-alpha testers are now receiving Steam keys to test the Milestone 12 build of MMORPG Tycoon 2. I’m looking forward to finally seeing somebody other than me playing the game on Steam!

For those in this initial, extremely small testing group, please check your emails for instructions. For everybody else, stay tuned; I’m going to keep updating with the latest activity here on the blog, and on the forums.

Milestone Twelve Status

Fri, 09 Sep 2016 16:40:36 +1000

Hi, everyone! The following is just a quick list of the things which are left to do for the Milestone 12 build. I’ll be updating it as things get done.

This isn’t really a proper “blog” entry, so please forgive the dry “list” format! It’s really just for folks who want to watch as updates happen.

Milestone Twelve

TODO

Icons for buttons which are missing them
Implement placing of ground surfaces in towns
Update tutorial

DONE

Audio notification when new requests become available.
Adds tools to purchase and unpurchase regions, separate from setting levels on them.
Adds a cost for purchasing a region
Adds a cost for placing a monster zone, based upon zone size.
Adds on-screen prompt to visit game forum
Players can now cheat. “Players” is actually a really complicated word since it could either mean the human player, or the simulated players. Standard game thing to do is to take your game’s first letter and add “ims”; thus SimCity’s “sims”, and City Skyline’s “cims”. Therefore, our simulated players shall henceforth be known as “mims”. Actually, maybe that’s a bad idea.
Support for distribution via itch.io. (Is there any demand for this?)
Convert all remaining GUI to the new UI system.
Add tools to let the player heal, kill, and revive players. Because that sounds like fun.
Integrate FMOD sound library.
Game functionality is now split into three modes: “Inspect”, “Edit”, and “Grid”. Inspect lets you explore your game and watch people play. “Edit” reduces the visual clutter and proves world editing tools. “Grid” simplifies the view and provides various informational displays.
Fixed a whole lot of pathfinding bugs. Players should be much more reliable in terms of using roads when they’re available, and in terms of not walking through obstacles.
Add support for areas which contain holes. (Monster zones, cities, etc)
Buildings can now be edited; made larger or smaller, and have entrances added or removed.
New systems for placing towns and monster zones.
Added a visual effect on top of the road placement preview.
When placing a monster zone, the player can now choose what type of monster to place in that zone.
Minor visual polish on the cursor.
Buildings now snap to town grids, when placed inside a town.
Sound volume is now editable in the options dialog.
Building layouts are now correctly saved/restored.
Simulated players are now smarter about where to stand, when socialising with players of a significantly different size.
Fixed a bunch of processing that was happening on the first frame after loading a game, which could cause a pretty bug frame rate stutter for that first frame only.
Improved UI system scrollbars.
Pressing escape now aborts out of any dialog or window, or out of any placement tool you might have active.
Flattened desert dunes.
“Destroy” tool remains active after destroying something. Now you can more easily destroy lots of things!
Fix class global scale control.
Don’t draw things which are too far away to see.
The game now autosaves one exit, and after every five minutes of gameplay.
Correctly remove all old scenery props when changing scenery type. (Previously, some were missed sometimes)