The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Most windows stopped opening, and none came forward
• Decorating gains undo, redo and a terrain leveller
• Every surface map redrawn with real water
• A five-year lie in the damage-over-time tooltips
• Patch notes arrive in the launcher at last

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British before you, with an accounting of what thy makers were about on Tuesday. Near every window in thine interface had forgotten how to open, and those that opened had forgotten how to come forward. Thy decorators may now take back a mistake with a keystroke, and thy governors may flatten a hillside into a market square. The maps of five and twenty regions are drawn anew, with the seas at last painted as seas. And a small lie, told by a tooltip since the year twenty twenty-one, has been called out in public at last. We begin with the windows, for the windows had a truly wretched week.

So. There are windows in this game that offer help, and for a while now several of them have had two X buttons in the corner. Two. Right next to each other. And if you clicked the left one, expecting the window to close, it opened the help. What happened is that somebody gave the help button the close button's look, and that look is not a frame with an X in it. That look is the X. So the button faithfully painted an X, and then drew a small question mark on top of the X, and stood there looking like a man wearing a name tag over another man's name tag. That is fixed. And it is the smallest thing that was wrong with the windows.

Here is the big one. On the build that went out last week, most windows simply stopped opening. Your key for the journal did nothing. Blocked players, emotes, combat decks, decoration settings, lot deeds, nearby players, the recipe book, your titles. Nothing. And picking any of them out of the window selector menu also did nothing, so there was no way around it. One fault in the shared piece of code that opens a window took out forty-one of the forty-eight windows that sit on top of it, all at once.

The map key was the odd one out, and I love this one. It did produce something. It put a frame on your screen that could not be moved, could not be resized, and could not be closed. That was the retired frame the old map used to draw, still sitting there because the real map window never got as far as opening in front of it. So you pressed the button for the map, and what arrived was the ghost of the previous map, standing exactly where the map should be, and refusing to leave.

That was the morning. In the afternoon they found the other half of the problem, which is that a great many windows would open perfectly well and then refuse to come to the front. Your character sheet drew behind your backpack, depending on which you had opened last. The Oracle window, the tester window and the game master window could be clicked and dragged and would still stay buried. Fifty-two windows in total could never come forward, including the item preview, the vendor windows, display cases, the deco palette, the jukebox, the leaderboard and the loot roll.

The reason is the interesting part. Taking part in the window stacking order was something a window had to opt into, and the default for saying nothing at all was to sit behind everything. No warning. No error. A window that never mentioned the subject was simply parked at the bottom of the pile forever, and the game considered that a perfectly reasonable request. Seventy-six of the hosts had never mentioned the subject.

And this is where it gets good, because that same silence had a consequence nobody had connected to it. Take All. You stand in front of an open chest, you press Take All, and the game has to work out which container is in front. It does that by asking every open window how high up the pile it sits, and taking the highest. Every converted window answered that question with the same number. Zero. All tied. So the search kept the first one it happened to look at, which meant Take All would empty whichever container you had opened first, ignoring entirely the one you were standing in front of and looking at.

Two new tests came out of this and both of them deserve a mention, because the refactor that caused all this passed every check it had. Every one of those checks asked whether the code compiled. Not one of them asked whether a window controller could actually hold the window it was pointed at. There is now a test that walks every window controller in the game and asks exactly that, and when they ran it against the old code it flagged all forty-one. There is a second test that refuses to let any window stay quiet about whether it takes part in the stacking order. That default had shipped this same bug four separate times.

Now. Decorating. If you have ever spent an evening arranging a room in your house, you have had the moment where you nudge something and it is gone. Off the shelf, through the floor, into a wall, and you have no idea where it was to begin with. As of Tuesday, control zed puts it back. Exactly back. Position, rotation, scale, and the surface it was sitting on. Control why does it again. The history remembers fifty steps, and it works on moves, on stowing something away, on picking an item up into a container, and on placing one out of your pack.

What I like about it is the honesty rule. Decorating a shared lot means somebody else can be rearranging the same room while you are. So the moment another decorator changes anything, your undo history clears itself and tells you on screen that it has done so. It would rather admit it has lost the thread than confidently put your neighbour's chair somewhere your neighbour never left it. And if a replay cannot be applied exactly, it clears rather than half applying. There is one case it is honest about in a different way. If you place an item pulled off a stack and then undo it, the item merges back into that stack, and merging destroys the thing that made it that particular item. So the game tells you plainly that this one cannot be redone. It knows it lost the plot and says so rather than handing you back a lookalike.

The decorating strip has undo and redo buttons driving the same history, and a small list of your recent changes with what redo would bring back shown faded underneath. The whole undo engine was built and tested on its own before a single key was bound to it, which is the correct order to do that in and not the order anybody ever does it in.

Second thing from the decorating pass, and this one has been quietly rude to people for years. When placement refuses your item, you get a red preview and nothing else. Guess why. Now, the part that stings is that the code has always known why. It computes a precise reason for every single refusal, and it always has. That text just only existed in developer builds. So for years there has been a small helpful voice explaining exactly what was wrong, speaking only to us. Every refusal branch now carries a line a player can read. Limits name themselves, so instead of nothing you get told the interior object limit is reached at one thousand of one thousand. Decorations built from several pieces have always refused flip, scale and roll without saying so, so those keys looked broken. They now answer. And there is a new test that fails any future placement rule that ships without a reason attached.

Decorations will also tell you who put them there. Tooltips now name whoever placed the item and whoever moved it last, with a readable time, three hours ago for something recent and a date for something older. Both of those lines existed before, and both were thrown away whenever the player's name had not yet come back from the server. Which, on your first visit to any lot, was every time. The decoration list gained a column for it as well.

And for the governors and stewards among you. There is now a Terrain Leveller, in three sizes, up to thirty-two metres on a side. You drop one, and the ground across its square goes flat to the height of the marker, with the grass and the trees inside it cleared away. It is meant for the plazas and the market squares and the event grounds that a town needs and the land refuses to provide. Lot markers and houses have been levelling the ground beneath themselves since the middle of the month. This is the same power with a handle on it. Land that rises and falls more than a metre and a half across the whole square is still refused, but now it tells you the slope it measured next to the limit it allows, instead of leaving you to shuffle the marker around the hillside like a man looking for a phone signal.

The maps. All twenty-five surface maps have been redrawn, and the reason is that only three of the thirty captured maps had ever picked up the fixes made earlier in July. The other twenty-seven still had every fault, sitting there, unchanged. So they were all recaptured, and the difference is not subtle. Seas and large lakes are drawn as water now, instead of as the ground underneath the water. On the Shores of Malice that is about a quarter of the entire image that was previously just seabed. Seven more zones gained rivers and ponds they had never shown at all.

The missing buildings had a lovely cause. The capture camera floats fifty metres overhead and points straight down, and it was obeying visibility data that had been authored for a player standing on the ground. So it obediently hid everything a person at ground level would not see, from a vantage point no person at ground level has ever occupied. Whole structures fell out of the picture. The main docks at Graff Island were absent. Bridges were absent. And the houses in East Vauban Foothills were drawn with no roofs, so the map cheerfully showed you the furniture inside every home in the village. Nobody asked for that. It is fixed, and the roofs are back on.

Ore and cotton were being baked into the map images, which is what put those marks all over the ground everywhere there is anything worth gathering. Gone. Vauban Pass also had a hundred and fifty metre square of blue water lying across its hills, left behind from a body of water belonging to an entirely different zone. A lake from somewhere else, parked on a hillside.

And my favourite. There is a castle under the lake in East Vauban. The tool tints water over sunken ground, and it was tinting at eighty-two percent, which let about a fifth of the lakebed through. Enough that you could read the battlements of a drowned castle straight off the map. Anywhere the tool can prove the ground is below the surface it now tints at ninety-five. A drowned castle ought to stay a rumour. Shallow ponds and rivers keep the lighter tint, because seeing the bottom is rather the point there.

Now the one that has been wrong the longest. If two players put a bleed on the same target, each of you saw your own damage over time correctly, and each of you saw the other player's at roughly a tenth of its real value. Your rend reads zero to twenty-one damage a second. Theirs reads zero to two. Every client rebuilds another player's effect from what it knows about that player, and a trained skill level is the one input that never crosses the wire. So the shared calculation reached for the other person's skill level, found nothing, and fell back to the floor. Level one. This was reported on the forums in twenty twenty-one.

The damage actually dealt was never affected, and the timers always read correctly. Which means what we have had for five years is a tooltip that faithfully told you the truth about your own work and quietly slandered everybody else's. Five years of people reading each other's numbers and drawing conclusions. The tooltip now uses the skill level that travels along with the effect itself, which was there the whole time.

And while they were in there, something more interesting happened. The complaint underneath the original report was about stacking. Rend allows three bleeds on a target, and that count belongs to the target, so it is shared by everyone attacking it. A fourth application pushes one of the existing three off, and it might be yours, and you would never know. So earlier that day somebody gave each attacker their own set of three. Which is exactly what the complaint asks for, and it is also, when you sit with it for ten minutes, catastrophic. Five players rending one target would hold fifteen bleeds where three are authored. It multiplies what a group does with damage over time by the number of people in the group. Then somebody pointed out it does not check whether the attacker is a player, so a pack of creatures would get the same gift, applied to you.

So it was taken back out before it ever reached a build. The right instinct, entirely the wrong lever. What shipped instead is the thing the complaint really wanted, which is to be able to see what is happening. Effect tooltips now group stacks by whoever applied them, with your own listed first as You, each with its own numbers and its own countdown, instead of a stack of identical looking lines. Creatures name themselves the same way. And when you are carrying more effects than the status bar has room for and they collapse into a single square with a count, that square now tells you what each hidden effect is doing and how long it has left, ticking down while you hover it.

Fifth thing, and it is one I have wanted for a very long time. This game has never had patch notes. The launcher moves you from one build to another and tells you the two numbers, and that is the whole conversation. As of Tuesday, every build records which code it was built from, and that record now survives the housekeeping on the patch server that used to erase it within a few days. Given the build you had and the build you are getting, we can now work out exactly what changed between them.

The notes themselves are assembled from the work log the team writes alongside each change, filtered down to the things a player can actually see. Build and infrastructure work is dropped. There is a separate check that refuses to publish any line carrying an address or a credential or an internal detail, and when it catches one it reports only which rule caught it and never reprints the offending text. Which is a small piece of paranoia I find rather charming. It will tell you it stopped something. It will not tell you what.

The notes live on a page of their own on the website, open to anyone, no login. It takes the build you have and the build you are moving to and lists what changed between them, newest first, grouped by area. A build that shipped the same game content as an earlier one says so rather than showing you an empty page. And a new launcher went out on Windows and Linux that carries a link to it next to Play, and that opens the notes for you automatically once an update has actually installed something. Only when something installed. A repair or simply reopening the launcher leaves you alone, and there is a checkbox to switch the whole thing off sitting right next to the link. The link carries two build numbers and absolutely nothing about you or your machine.

Now, some smaller things that will improve somebody's evening. Two places the game had been paying you nothing at all. Undead summons now take health from their summoner's Death Mastery, which they were supposed to do all along. The health calculation was reading Death Mastery off the summon rather than off the summoner, and a skeleton has no Death Mastery of its own, so the whole term came out as zero every single time. Their damage had been reading it correctly from the summoner the entire time, a few lines away. At a hundred in both masteries, the bonus health goes from two hundred and fifty to five hundred and sixty-two.

And Meticulous Collection pays out again for anyone who ignores the harvesting swing meter. A hands-off harvest was capped at one meticulous, and that one handed over no resources, so all that extra waiting bought you precisely nothing. Worse, the meticulous bonus is not only materials. Every one of the hundred and forty-four meticulous reward tables carries an experience item and none of the ordinary harvest tables do, so every bonus that was swallowed cost you adventurer and producer experience as well. The counter on the harvest bar also carries across nodes of the same type now instead of resetting at every rock.

Two things to look at. Floating names over characters no longer draw through walls, terrain and buildings. World space text sits on a layer the main camera does not draw, so it had no depth information to test itself against and simply painted over everything. It compares itself against the scene per pixel now, so a character standing half behind a doorframe shows you only the part of their name you could actually see. And outdoor shadow edges have stopped shimmering. The sun was being re-aimed every single frame, by under three thousandths of a degree, which is far too little to read as movement and precisely enough to set every shadow edge in the world crawling. It updates every two seconds now while the sun is high, easing back to every frame near dawn and dusk where the shadows are long enough for a step to show.

Your windows also cannot be lost any more. Dragging one past the edge of the screen used to save that position, so dropping your resolution or raising your interface scale would strand windows outside the visible area with no way to reach them. They get pulled back in now, and your chosen spot returns when the screen grows again. In your inventory, the nineteen category buttons fold away behind a single row that names whichever filter is active, giving you back about a hundred and forty-eight pixels that were previously spent on filter controls before the item list got any, and each window remembers whether you left it folded. Column headings have stopped being cut off. And the small loot window is a single column of names again, which matters because it had been given the full five column table and a gold count in the millions was coming out as one, comma, two, three, dot dot dot.

One more before the sweep. Somebody went through every open task on the tester tracker and read the comment threads properly rather than pattern matching them. Thirteen tasks that testers had passed in plain prose were still sitting open, because the automatic closer only recognises the structured verdict the in-game window writes. Twenty-nine were marked ready to test while carrying an unanswered failure report, which sends people back through work they had already done and written up for us. Those went back with a reply naming what was taken from the report. And forty-three were already live on the test server but had never been moved off the state they were filed in, so they were invisible on the in-game board entirely. If you are one of the people that happened to, I am sorry. That is the worst thing you can do to a volunteer.

Lightning round. Thirty-two tracker issues went down on Tuesday, most of them interface bugs of the sort I would rather not describe in detail on a family podcast. The check boxes are square again, having spent some time as circles indistinguishable from radio buttons. The chat window can be dragged again, which was hard when the tab strip had left roughly three pixels of the title bar to grab. Your login screen no longer hides the Connecting message and its Cancel button behind the username panel. Deck editor icons went back to the size somebody drew them at, having shrunk from sixty-four pixels to sixteen. And three images belonging to the title screen intro had been sitting in the folder the loading art is drawn from, so your zone loading screen was sometimes a grey blur or the old title. While fixing that they found the picker had been skipping the last entry in the list, which means one of the twenty-six loading paintings had never been shown to a single human being.

And a confession. Two interface fixes shipped calls to three helpers without the file that actually defines those helpers, so the Linux build failed twice on a branch that could not compile anywhere. The file existed. It was sitting on somebody's machine, unsaved to the branch, working beautifully, being no help to anybody. Same day, there is now a check that runs when you commit, comparing what you are committing against what is still lying around in your working folder, and it refuses the commit and names the file you forgot. They ran it across the tree and it caught three more. All real, nothing false. I do enjoy a tool built out of pure embarrassment before lunch.

That is Tuesday. A lot of it was repair work, and repair work is what you get when a team rebuilds an entire interface in public and then goes back through it window by window with the lights on. I am looking forward to the first governor who levels half a hill into a market square and then discovers control zed does not work on hills. And before I go, one more thing about those skeletons.

The reason they were getting no health bonus is that the game kept asking the skeleton about his own mastery of death. He has none. No training, no diploma, not one single bone-a fide qualification. Good night, my friends.