The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• The eighty-one bug day and the loop behind it
• Guild wars can be declared now and fought later
• Sixteen hundred creature models measured for click areas
• Player dungeons get maps, budgets and record plaques
• Ten years of hidden achievements wake up

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British before thee, with word of what thy makers were about on Wednesday. Eighty-one reported troubles laid in the ground in a single day. Guild wars may at last be declared upon one day and fought upon another, as any honorable challenge ought to be. Fifty creatures across the realm may now be struck where they stand rather than about the ankles. And thy great deeds have been counted for ten years by a hand that never once thought to tell thee. We begin, though, with a kobold. He is very well spoken.

There is a kobold archer standing somewhere out in the world right now, bow drawn, thoroughly hostile, and for years he has been speaking in the voice of a well bred English gentleman. The kobold voice treatment only ever got applied inside the kobold city. Every kobold posted anywhere else, the archers, the guards, took whatever voice was nearest to hand, and one of them took a gentleman. I am in no position to criticize an English accent in this game. But that one was a little close to mine.

Every kobold in the world speaks kobold now, and the same pass caught a dockworker down at the port whose war cries were being read out to you one letter at a time. The new audio arrives with the next voice build. And that is roughly the shape of the whole day: a very long list of things that had been wrong for ages in ways nobody had looked at closely enough to laugh at yet.

Eighty-one reported bugs went down on Wednesday, each of them with a fix behind it. A hundred and twenty-five items in all came off the tracker if you count the verification tasks that closed alongside them. I have been doing this for a very long time and I have never had a Wednesday quite like that one.

Here is how it happened. We have an unattended loop that works the bug queue. It takes the newest report, reads it, plans a fix, makes it, tests it, writes it up in plain language, closes the report, files a task for the testers, and goes back for the next one. The loop has a name, which is RJ. On Wednesday morning RJ learned two new tricks. The first is that RJ can be told to work only the odd-numbered reports, or only the even ones, so two of them can grind the same queue without tripping over each other, and then each half got its own lock so both halves can run on one machine at the same time. The second is that when a report is finished, RJ posts a short note in the testers' chat channel naming the report, saying what a player will actually notice, and pointing at the testing task to pick up. Before that, a tester had to sit refreshing the tracker to find out anything had happened at all.

And then there are the bugs themselves. The Reset Window Layout button in Options. You pressed it. It wiped the saved layout off the disk. It moved nothing whatsoever on your screen. And then the next time you closed a window, that window wrote its old position straight back. The button worked perfectly. It simply did all of its work in a place you could not see. Escape had the opposite problem. One press closed every unpinned window you had open, the entire desk swept clear, and it takes exactly one accident to learn to be afraid of a key. Escape now closes one window per press, the one you used last, and keeps working down the pile. Pinned windows are left alone, which they were not before, because the pin drew itself in the title bar and then never told anybody it was set.

My favorite of the lot: dragging an item out of your backpack failed about half the time and looked like nothing had happened. The list only counted a drag while your pointer was still inside the row you pressed on. A row is twenty-four pixels tall. A real drag leaves twenty-four pixels inside a single frame. So half of your drags were never drags. That is also the reason dropping one stack onto a matching stack never merged them, which people have been reporting as a separate bug for a very long time.

Now, here is a good one. A player reported that they could not click on Brign, Lord of Water, down at The Breach. Brign is a boss. He stands about twice the size of an ordinary water elemental. The invisible shape that catches your click on him was still sized for an ordinary water elemental, and it sits at the feet, so it covered the bottom half of him and nothing above that. To target the Lord of Water you had to click the Lord of Water in the shins.

One line fixed Brign. But the question a fix like that raises is the interesting part, which is: how many others are like this? So we built a sweep that measures every creature model in the game against its own click area. Sixteen hundred and forty-two models. It found forty-nine more. Boss air elementals were catching clicks on thirty percent of their body and now catch them on ninety-nine. Boss earth elementals went from forty-four percent to a hundred and one. Twenty kobold variants, both daemons, Krang and his guards, the giant pirate skeleton and the giant mushrooms were all sitting in the same state. Every one of them had been scaled up by an artist at some point while the click shape stayed the size it was born at.

Two more things fell out of that sweep. Six creatures were carrying a solid invisible shell instead of a clickable area, including the large obsidian bear and all five oracle spiders, so you could walk up beside one and be stopped by absolutely nothing. And the code that hangs a name and a health bar over a creature was applying that creature's size a second time, which threw the plate up toward the ceiling above anything large and dropped it into the face of anything small. It measures once now.

The part I like best is what happened after. The sweep is now a test that runs on every build, so a new size variant that ships with a leftover click area fails the run instead of reaching you. Fightable creatures sitting in the healthy range went from three hundred and seventy-one to four hundred and eighteen out of seven hundred and twenty. There is clearly more of this to do. The difference is that we can see it now, and one player's report about one water elemental is what opened the door.

Guild wars. Two pieces, and I want to tell the first one properly because it is a little embarrassing.

You can schedule a war now. The declare window has a War Begins choice above the duration, running from immediately out to a week away, so two guilds can agree on Tuesday and meet on Saturday with both rosters warned well in advance. A war that has not started yet says so. The war list and the scoreboard read "Begins in two days, three hours" in their own color rather than counting down like a fight already underway, and nobody is flagged for open combat during the wait. When the hour arrives, the war goes live on its own, with the announcement and the warning and the countdown all turning over together. The duration choices shrink as the wait grows, so a war always finishes inside the fourteen days its record is kept for.

Here is the part I owe you. The server has accepted a start time since the day the war system first shipped, and it refuses to score a kill before that time arrives. The client was sending zero. Every single declaration, for years. Half of this feature has been sitting in the server the whole while, waiting patiently for a number that never came.

The second piece is worse, and it is also fixed. Declaring a war used to switch on the open combat flag for every member of your guild against everybody in the world, which is a great deal more war than anyone actually declared. Meanwhile the server only ever counted a kill toward the war when both players belonged to guilds named in a live war record. So your members took on the risk of the entire shard and earned the score from exactly one guild. A war now flags you to the guild you are at war with and to nobody else. Your own combat flag, combat parties and open combat zones all behave the way they always have.

Three smaller guild repairs rode along with it. A guild invitation asks before it goes out now, because Invite To Join Guild sits one line away from Invite To Party in the menu, and players were drafting strangers into their guild by accident. The Guild tab has a header at last, with your leader, your member count and how many are online, your description and your message of the day, all four of which the client already had in hand and none of which that window ever showed. And the guild activity log, thirty days of who invited whom and who was promoted and who changed the motto, opens as a proper window with sortable columns, filters and a search box. Until Wednesday the only way to read it was a chat command that wrote a text file into your game folder.

Player dungeons had the biggest day of anything on the list, and the last part of it went from the database to the interface between lunch and dinner.

Start with the small mercy. A dungeon owner can switch between Adventure Mode and Decoration Mode from inside the dungeon now, using a small panel in the corner that warns you first and reloads the place. Before Wednesday, every single pass of spawn tuning meant walking out to the entrance, flipping the mode there, and walking back in. The piece picker also explains itself now. It will tell you the doorway does not accept that set, and name both sets. Or that the piece would overlap another room. Or that it would cut a room off from the foyer, and name the room. Or that it would put you over the point budget, and show you your would-be total against the limit. The old signal for all four was a greyed out Accept button and your own imagination. The generator chest takes a seed as well, so a layout your friend rolled can be handed to you as a number, and the same pieces raise the same halls.

Then the map. Press M inside your dungeon and you get a live three dimensional model of it, assembled on the spot from the rooms actually standing there. Each room draws as a translucent block, a gold beacon marks where you are, the floor you are standing on is highlighted, and rooms that cannot reach the foyer draw in grey, so a wing you forgot to connect is obvious from across the room. It rebuilds itself whenever you change the layout and leaves your camera where you had it. The point budget behind all of this moved onto the server, which now checks every room as it is placed, and a dungeon's allowance follows the lot it is standing on rather than the lot it was first built on. Moving your dungeon up to a larger lot used to buy you nothing at all underground.

And then the records. Every player dungeon now carries a plaque at the entrance with the builder's name, the number of visits, the number of distinct adventurers, the permanent First Clear, and the record time and who holds it. Killing everything inside in Adventure Mode counts as a clear. First Clears and broken records announce to everyone standing in the dungeon when they happen. Storage, server operations, transport and plaque, four pieces, one afternoon.

And my favorite rule of the entire day: to open your dungeon to the public, you have to clear it yourself first, in Adventure Mode, on its current layout. Edit the place afterwards or swap the level underneath it, and it closes to the public until you go back and clear it again. No lord should send his people into a labyrinth he has not walked himself. It should also cut down considerably on the number of published dungeons that are one corridor with forty dragons standing in it.

Now for the strange one. We went looking at what the game already had for achievements, so we could plan what to add. The answer came back: all of it. There is a complete achievement system in this game. Validated statistics kept on the server. Tiered kill counts at ten, a hundred, a thousand and five thousand. A live feed out to Steam. It has been running since twenty sixteen. That is ten years. And in all that time there has never been a way for a player to see a single piece of it from inside the game.

Your Steam profile has known about your kills for a decade. You did not. We built the scoreboard, wired it up, connected it to a storefront, and then never showed it to the people it was actually about.

Two things shipped immediately. We audited the dormant catalog and found all twenty-nine rules already written, with every quest achievement already carrying a working conversation trigger. Six that looked missing were real, hiding inside question branches and dying-words scripts that the older exports simply do not show. Tests now pin the catalog and the trigger coverage so neither can drift away again.

And achievements celebrate themselves now. Cross a goal and you get a banner in the middle of the screen, a line in chat naming the achievement and the deed you did for it, an unlock sound, and the level-up lights. At login the game picks up whatever the server counted while your window was closed, crafting milestones and the like. A veteran logging in with ten years of backlog gets one calm summary line in chat rather than forty minutes of continuous fanfare, and I am told that outcome was considered and then rejected on grounds of mercy. The names match the twenty sixteen Steam catalog, so the banner and your profile agree with each other.

There is a plan behind it too, published as a page you can read and vote on. Twenty-four proposals, including a journal with progress bars and unlock dates, kill counters for all sixty-six creature families, kill credit shared with your whole party, a World Events channel that announces when a great boss falls anywhere on the shard, a celebration bonus for everyone online when it does, a quartermaster who trades deeds for mounted trophies, titles earned by doing rather than buying, and a shelf honoring twelve years of event history. It closes with a first catalog of a hundred and fifteen achievements, every one of them grounded in a real creature, boss, profession or place. There is a vote arrow and a comment thread on every card.

Three things about what you hear. Voice moved onto its own audio channel, so the effects slider stops changing the volume of spoken dialogue and the voice slider stops trimming your own footsteps and gear, and creature aggro, flight and death cries follow the voice slider where they belong. Both pipe organs were between two and ten times quieter than every other instrument in the game, worst at the top of the keyboard, and now sit in the same range as the piano. And the angry Spirit of Necropolis, on the two lines that describe it growling at you, printed the word and made no sound at all. It growls now, in a low drawn out version of its own voice.

Two recasts as well. Vinicius, the elf refugee at Blood River Outskirts, is a woman, and was recorded in the character data as male, so she has been answering every question in a man's voice. The record is corrected and her lines are recast. And Sequanna, the Titan of Love in Malice, has come off a warm southern accent that was picked for everyday roles and onto something gentler and less regional.

If you decorate, two presents. Any lamp, torch, chandelier or candle you have placed can be retuned after the fact. Right click it, choose Light Settings, and you get nine ready colors or the full picker, plus sliders for how far the light reaches and how bright it is, running from half to half again as much. Everything previews on the light while you drag it, and what you settle on is saved for everyone who visits the lot. That came straight from a wishlist request asking for a white that would not fight the wall color, and for enough reach to light a room with one chandelier instead of four. The lot outlines on the town map are also drawn as real lines now, holding the same thickness at every zoom level, on a dark edging so they stay readable over snow, with a small arrow inside each one pointing at the lot's front edge.

Governors got a window. The Town Console was the top voted card on the towns proposal page, and it is in the game: Overview, Lots, Citizens, Message and Spawn, opened from any lot sign or by typing the command. The Lots tab is a sortable, searchable table of every lot in your town with its claim state and policy, and it carries reserve, restrict and evict, all of which used to mean walking to each sign in turn. Message is the first editor the town message of the day has ever had. The screenshots we posted of it earlier in the day were taken in Braemar, which is not a player owned town, so the window had nothing at all to show. They have been pulled and will be retaken somewhere with a governor in it.

And the thing you are listening to is one day old. This is the second episode of the Herald. It gets written every night by a job that reads the day's work log, the commit history and the tracker, works out what actually mattered, and hands the script to my voice. There is a podcast feed you can subscribe to in any app, a transcript for every episode, and two weeks of back episodes were filled in on Wednesday, so the feed opens with fourteen shows rather than one.

If it ever says something unkind about my accent, that is entirely on me. I built the voice.

The rest of the day went down in a heap. Every body of water in the game reported a depth of five feet while you were aiming a fishing cast, because the measurement was landing on the water's own surface instead of the bed underneath it. Fireworks after the first one in a scene came out of your character's feet, with the cone sitting a step away on the ground looking innocent. Choosing Windowed in the launcher asked for a window exactly the size of your desktop, which put the title bar above the top of the screen and covered your taskbar, so the setting appeared to do nothing at all. And twenty-eight ship flags, on the galleon houses, the wrecked galleon and the poles around Kingsport, were streaming a quarter turn off the wind while the windmills standing beside them had it right.

Another forty-odd repairs to the interface went by in the same sweep, and most of them I would rather not narrate one at a time: tooltips wandering out of the window they belong to, columns sitting one place left of their headings, lists that bounced when you scrolled past the end, a mail subject squeezed down until the letters were unreadable, and a backgammon game that could not be finished, because the board offered you the one move the rules refuse and then would not let you take it back.

In the background, quieter but worth saying: a PvP plan went up with twenty-seven proposals weighed against nine other games, two forest trees were caught loading their bark and leaves at a fraction of the resolution they were painted at, eight hundred and ninety-nine new lines of translatable text were harvested, and a second development workstation was stood up so there are two places to build this game instead of one.

What I am looking forward to is the plaques. In a few days, when all this reaches the test build, names are going to start appearing on dungeon entrances all over the world, and somewhere out there is a player who is about to become the permanent First Clear of somebody's basement, forever. That is the good part of all this.

One last thing before I go. Every body of water in this world read exactly five feet deep. The sea. The lakes. The lava pool. So when the testers kept telling us the fishing lacked depth they were being literal. Good night to thee, and be well.