The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• The bard school rebuilt, with full refunds
• Antialiasing that had never once rendered
• One player's icon report, a hundred and forty-four redraws
• Dungeon waygates, and the black screen that ate them
• Turning a whole town to face the dawn

Transcript

Hail, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British attends thee, with word of what thy makers were about upon Tuesday. The bard is rebuilt from the strings up, and the lute in his hands is at last worth the wood it was cut from. Every edge in the realm is smoothed, for the first time since this world was lit. A hundred and forty-four spell glyphs are painted back into their proper schools, because one of you looked closely and said so. And a governor may now take a whole town in hand and turn it, sun and stars and wind together, until the dawn falls where it was meant to. We begin, though, in a player dungeon, with a chair.

A chair is what finally gave it away. A player called nyarkie had just finished building out a dungeon with the random generator, which does what you would hope and fills the place with rooms and halls until the build points run out. Then they went to put a totem in it, and the dungeon refused. So they tried a chair. Refused. A torch, a chest, same answer every time. Only rooms and halls and stairs have ever cost build points, but the check guarding them could not tell a staircase from a stool, and it fired the moment the budget was spent. Which is to say, finishing your dungeon locked it out of its own furniture. It is fixed, and while we were in there the generator learned to place totems as well, straight from the chest you load the rooms into. Reported by nyarkie. Also requested by nyarkie. Busy day for one person.

Now. The bard.

The bard school has been in this game for years, and for most of that time playing a bard has been a strange experience, largely because a great many people who were not bards were also playing one. Here is why. Every bard song has a friendly half, and that friendly half carried a flag marking the caster as a friendly target. So the song you sang for your party also buffed you. And your pet. The songs cost no focus at all, because they had never been given a cost, and the only thing stopping you running the whole tree at once was the cooldown and the card draw. The endgame answer, for years, was to put a little experience into bard, hang every song on yourself, and go be a swordsman.

Then there is the instrument. The school has an instrument slot, and a skill called Voice Training which exists so you can sing without one. Voice Training shipped in twenty twenty-one, and the text in the game read, and I want to be precise here, this skill currently does nothing. That was accurate. It stayed accurate for five years. It stopped being accurate yesterday afternoon.

So. Seven of the bard's combat skills are retired. Atonal Aria goes first, which the community named by itself in both of the last two big balance arguments, and six others go with it. Every point of experience anyone ever spent on those seven comes back at full value, into the adventurer pool, to spend on whatever you like. Nothing anywhere was cut to pay for it. If you main a bard, you are not losing your investment, you are getting it back.

What replaces the combat half is a choice. Performance Stance carries the whole party kit at full strength and gives the bard none of it. Solo Stance turns that around. They share a slot with Berserker's and Defensive and the rest, so a bard can no longer be spliced onto a full combat build for free. And if you deal damage while you are in Performance Stance, your party support goes out entirely for a minute. Not dimmed. Out. A sliding scale would only mean everybody chips in a little damage and keeps most of the buff.

The other half is the one I am delighted by. Bards get an entertainer kit: Instrument Proficiency, Flourish, Dance and Group Dance. Adventuring now banks something called Inspiration, and watching a performer in town converts that bank into a bonus on the adventure experience you earn afterwards. There is a watch command and a tip command, tipping hands gold straight to the performer with no jar involved, and towns can build a Performance Stage out of the carpentry book. A bard playing from a stage holds a room half again as well as one busking in the street. Melody of Mending, incidentally, was drafted to reduce the party's battle fatigue. We do not have battle fatigue. It has a proper job now, banking Inspiration faster for everybody sharing a kill with the bard.

And instruments became real gear. Until yesterday a lute was a prop. No quality, no masterwork, no enchant. The new song formula reads exactly those three things, so it read the same flat number for every instrument in the world, and the shiny new Instrument Proficiency skill was worth precisely nothing at any level. Instruments now roll a quality from the carpenter who made them, take masterworks at a carpentry table and enchants at an alchemy table, and salvage back into scrap. A perfect, fully enhanced instrument is worth double a plain one. They still never wear out, before anyone asks.

One thing said plainly, because it matters more than any of the above. None of this is on a live shard. This is part one of several, and it ships as one package when the package is finished. Judge it when the whole thing is in front of you, on the test shard, where you can play it and tell us what is wrong with it. And the refund is real.

Right. This next one is embarrassing, and I would rather say it myself than have somebody else say it for me.

This client has never had antialiasing. Not on any machine, and not since the day it shipped. Every edge you have ever looked at in this world has been the raw stair-stepped thing the renderer handed over. And there has been a checkbox in the video options this whole time labelled Use Antialiasing which, when you ticked it, wrote a number into your settings that nothing on screen ever read.

Three things had to stack up for that. The way we light the world rules out the cheap hardware kind, so it is switched off at every quality level. The one software method we did have wired in sits behind a switch inside the renderer, and the people who wrote that renderer ship the switch commented out, so the code it guards was never in the build at all. And even had it been, the setting defaulted to off. Someone measured it properly, which is the part I like: they moved the strength slider on a rendered frame and counted how many pixels changed. Zero. Every time.

There are now four choices instead of a checkbox. Off, Fast, Quality and Temporal. Fast is a cheap edge filter. Quality is a heavier pass covering far more of the picture, about five percent of the frame on the test image. Temporal compares each frame against the last, and it is the only one of the three that does anything about the shimmer you get on distant fences and foliage, which is the thing that has always bothered me most about standing on a hilltop looking out. Your machine picks a starting point on first run based on what it can carry, and anybody who had ticked the old box gets Quality.

Two more faults dropped out on the way. The automatic performance tuner, the thing that turns settings down when your frame rate dips, could only ever take antialiasing away. It had no path back. So a machine that stuttered once stayed degraded until you restarted the game. And the new Quality pass did nothing whatsoever outside of play mode, which is exactly the sort of fault that ships looking fine.

A player wrote in about one icon. That is how this next one starts. They said the Summon Earth Elemental glyph no longer read as an Earth spell: gold had flooded the medallion and the green field behind it was gone. And then they added the sentence that turned a five minute fix into a full day. I bet the other elementals have it too.

Here is the convention, and it is a promise we make to you whether or not we ever say it out loud. A skill glyph carries two colours. The square border tells you what kind of skill it is. The round disc behind the art tells you which school it belongs to. You read both of those without thinking about it, which is the entire point of them. The borders were safe, because the tool stamps the original border back on pixel for pixel and fails outright if one differs. The disc only looked safe. The check meant to protect it averaged colour over a ring near the outer edge of the art, and that ring is seventy-seven percent border. It was measuring the half that was already protected. It read almost exactly the same number for Earth's green field as it did for a blue one. Two schools, one answer, check passed.

The audit found a hundred and thirty-nine of five hundred and thirty-three had drifted, mostly blues and purples gone gold. And measuring it correctly was harder than it sounds. Average the hue and the black outlines in the artwork drag the answer around, so a pale blue ice field averaged out to green, and the tool cheerfully asked for a green ice spell and got one. Exclude the gold emblem by brightness as well as colour and you keep all the gold shading, which is plentiful enough to win the vote outright, so Earth and Ice both reported themselves as amber.

Repairing the shipped art was tried and thrown away. Rotate the background colour back where it belongs and you rotate the picture sitting on top of it, which turns a yellow firework purple and a gold shield green. So a hundred and forty-four glyphs were drawn again from scratch, the elementals among them. Earth is stone on green. Ice has a blue core rather than a gold sun. Air and Water no longer come back painted as bare human figures, which I am a little sorry to have missed. All of that, because one person noticed one icon and said something.

Player dungeons next. A player asked on the forum for teleporters linking their own dungeons together. Perfectly reasonable ask. And when we went to look at it there were two things missing rather than one, because nothing inside a dungeon could move you between rooms either. Build a long one and you walked back. Every time.

So we built the Dungeon Waygate. It is a portal you place in your dungeon and attune to somewhere else: another waygate in the same dungeon, your own entrance, or a different dungeon entirely, arriving on the waygate over there that carries the name you aimed at. Every waygate says who is allowed to land on it, from nobody up to anyone who can already get in, so a link between two players needs both owners to agree to it, and a waygate never opens a door the front entrance would have refused.

Then we tried using one, which is always the moment. A waygate between two dungeons built on the same kind of entrance did not work. The screen faded to black, and then nothing. Every dungeon built on a given deed shares one scene name underneath, and the game has a perfectly sensible old rule that says do not reload the place you are already standing in. It looked at where you were, looked at where you were going, saw the same name twice, and refused the trip. After fading the camera out. It tells two dungeons apart by the lot each one hangs off now, which is the only thing that actually separates them. Two more fell out of the same trip: coming back out of a dungeon you had reached by waygate used to deposit you at the front gate of a town you may never have visited in your life, and the world map would show you back where you started, because the journey carried no map position with it.

The last one is my favourite. The waygate was built out of the same rift as the dungeon entrance, so it looked exactly like one. In a dungeon holding both, nothing told you which portal took you deeper in and which threw you out of the building. Waygates burn green now. It was also showing a wooden signpost as its icon in your bag, borrowed from the town teleporter it was cloned from, so you were carrying a signpost that turned into a hole in reality. It has its own picture now.

And here is the one I would have asked for myself. A player-owned town takes its sunrise from whatever template the map was built on. The sun comes up where the sun comes up. If you laid your town out facing another way, and a great many people did, then your main street faces the wrong horizon forever and your grand entrance sits in shadow all morning.

Changing it was technically possible and practically impossible. You rebuilt the map. Rebuilding the map destroys the walls and the lot placements, which means evicting everybody living there. So nobody ever did. John Markus asked for a better answer and there is one. The Town Console has an Orientation tab now: a slider, eight compass points, and a live preview, so the governor's own sky turns while they drag it. Save, and it turns for everybody standing in the town. Reset puts it back the way the map was built.

It is not only the sun, which is the part worth explaining. Move north and leave everything else alone and you have made a liar of every instrument in town. So the moon comes with it, and the stars, the sky, the compass, the north arrow on your map, and the wind, which takes the same turn so that a wind off the northern sea still blows off the northern sea afterwards. It swings around to the new bearing rather than snapping to it. Meanwhile nothing on the ground moves. Not a wall, not a lot, not a tenant. The facing is kept as an offset from the map the town was built on, so a town that never chooses one behaves exactly as it always has, and so does every other scene in the game. There is something properly satisfying about a governor standing in the middle of their own town, dragging a slider, and watching the sun swing across the sky while nothing else so much as trembles.

A few smaller things now, of the sort that quietly improve somebody's evening. Your windows first. Twenty-seven of the rebuilt interface windows were still carrying the old version of themselves underneath. Drawn empty, so you could not see them, and still catching the mouse. That is what made the quest hand-in window refuse your items and the map pick up hovers belonging to nothing at all. Both of those were found by players and patched one window at a time over months. The whole invisible layer is switched off for every one of them now. Dragged windows also snap to each other and to the screen edge, hold Shift to place one freely, and you can move a window by its left edge as well as the title bar, which matters more than it sounds when a long title plus an icon and three buttons leaves almost no bar to grab.

Your evening in town. A placed light can be set to burn only at night. Right-click it, open Light Settings, tick the box, and the lamp lights itself at dusk and goes out at dawn, so a town owner no longer has to choose between streetlamps blazing at noon and a town that is pitch dark. It works on the many decorative lamps that have no switch of their own. Towns can also hold more than one broadcasting phonograph, scaled to the size of the town, and each one now covers about fifty meters of ground instead of replacing the entire town's music. Before this, a second phonograph anywhere in the town simply overwrote the first, which is what every town with one on the town plot and another on a resident's lot has been doing all along. Both of those came from Isabel Ayin.

Sieges have stopped arriving all at once. Every town was reading the same hour off the same clock, so all the towns eligible in that hour went under siege in the same instant and came out of it in the same instant, which is how half the map ended up besieged simultaneously. Each town has its own hour now, redrawn daily, with a ceiling of eight besieged player towns across the world at any one time. The confirmation window names the town and the cabalists besieging it, and says what entering and bypassing actually do, rather than one flat sentence that named neither.

Two quieter ones worth knowing. Coordinates pasted into chat are links now: click one and the map opens with that spot ringed for you, and the map itself gained a readout in the corner and a Go to box that takes a pasted location. That was a wishlist request from Jack SinAssist. And skill experience is saved with a receipt. It used to be sent and forgotten, so a batch the server could not store was simply gone until you touched that skill again. The client holds each batch until the server confirms it now, and sends it again if it did not land.

The rest at speed, because there was a great deal of it. Fifty-odd tracker issues went down, most of them overnight and most of them small: spells with no sound, spells with the wrong sound, a spell whose thump arrived four seconds after the spell did, tooltips that forgot to mention a percentage, and letters in a puzzle box that were not centred in their little rectangles. There was also a creature that kills itself by exploding and then did not die. It stood there invisible, still targetable, still wearing its nameplate, and left no body behind. It dies now.

Skills that key off undead were asking whether a creature was undead and nothing else, so Ancient Undead, who are undead and also humanoid, failed the question along with most liches. Cleansing Rain and the Banish Undead weapon effect were doing literally zero to them, while two bleed effects were happily bleeding the very things they were written to spare. Moon Eater and Sun Eater now scale to their own cycles, which Barugon pointed out are not remotely the same length. Brewing casks only mature while placed in the world, so the time on a whiskey cask means something again. Buffs stopped replaying their cast sound every time you crossed a zone line, which for anyone running four or five of them was a small orchestra. traveller13 spotted that the rebuilt backpack had lost the controls for showing locked and quest items while the game was still obeying them, and those are back.

And a stack of work under the floor that nobody will see. A single refused message on an internal link used to take down every player connected to that server. It costs one message now. The combat bar's combo highlights are visible at last, having been drawn by tinting near-black artwork, and tinting can only ever darken, so a full-strength green was arriving on your screen as almost nothing at all.

That is Tuesday. I am looking forward to standing in somebody's town at dusk while every lamp in the place lights itself, and then finding a bard on a stage who is worth stopping for, and tipping them for it.

And I will leave you with this. Instruments now roll a quality, take masterworks, take enchants, and double what a good song is worth. Which means that after five whole years of Voice Training doing nothing at all, our bards are finally in it for the lute. Good night, New Britannia. Sleep well.