The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Pets and summons that would not leave
• The loading screen that never gave up
• Game masters possessing creatures
• A crowns-for-gold exchange, built dark
• Six towns under a siege with nobody home

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British before thee, with an accounting of what thy makers were about on Wednesday. Thy conjured beasts have learned at last that when thou diest, thou diest, and they are to go with thee. The loading screen has learned to give up rather than hold thee prisoner. A game master may now step inside a wolf and wear it about the town. And somewhere in a locked room there is a merchant being built who will take thy gold in exchange for crowns and then burn the gold to ash. Come and sit. The tale of the wolf is the one I have been waiting all day to tell.

But we start with a smaller one, because it is where Wednesday actually began. You summon your tamed pet. It appears. It is wonderful. Fifteen seconds later it is gone. Nothing in chat, no reason, no farewell. Summon it again and you get the same fifteen seconds. Every single time. And the cause was ours, from the day before. We had taught the equipment slots to announce their own bookkeeping the way a real equip does, which is tidy and correct, and then an ordinary reload of your pack rewrote the slot holding your pet's collar. The game read that as you taking the collar off. Off came the collar. Off went the pet.

That one came in from Rinaldi, and it is fixed. But it was not the only thing wrong with your animals on Wednesday, and the second one is much stranger.

If you had an earth elemental out and you died, the elemental did not die. It also did not leave. It kept fighting. You are lying there as a ghost, and your elemental is still swinging at the thing that killed you. You walk to the ankh, and it leashes over and comes with you as if nothing at all has happened. You resurrect, and there it is. Waiting. Loyal. Hours later, if you had been away for hours. Meanwhile the tamed pet, the real animal you spent skill points on, took about ten seconds to give up and wander off.

So the wolf you trained abandons your corpse, and the pile of rocks you conjured holds vigil. That is the correct ordering of loyalty in exactly no world I have ever built. It is fixed now. Both go when you go. There was one piece of code handling the whole business and it only ever knew about tamed creatures, so summons simply fell through the gap and stayed. Rinaldi caught that one too, and two other players confirmed it inside the same day, which is how you know it was happening to everybody.

While we were in there, pets that stop making progress while chasing something now put themselves back on the ground and look for a fresh route, and drop the chase if that fails. This was reported on the airship main deck in Lamech's Bazaar, where a pet could stutter in one spot, endlessly, until its owner walked far enough away that it blinked back to them out of sheer distance.

Now. The loading screen. This is the one I actually feel bad about, because it took people's evenings.

If you asked to enter a scene and the game never answered, the loading screen waited. That is all it did. It waited forever, with no error, no message, no button, and no way out except reaching for Task Manager and killing the client. One player sat at sixty three percent trying to get into Castle Atos for several minutes before giving up on it entirely. That report came from Knightrider. There was a second route into the same trap, found by inuphet: if you had been dropped for being idle, your client could still believe it was standing in the scene it had just left, so the next request to enter one was refused before it ever left your machine. Same sixty three percent. Same nothing.

The wait now gives up after three minutes, tells you which place it could not reach, and puts you back on the overworld. And the client spots a request that was never actually sent, and does not sit there waiting for an answer that cannot arrive.

And then there is the part where you tried to quit. Because you did try, of course you did. And the game does raise a confirmation when you press Alt and F4 during a load. It has always raised one. It was drawing it underneath the opaque loading screen. So you would press the keys, and nothing would happen, and you would press them again, and still nothing, because the polite little box asking whether you were sure was sitting behind a wall of your own loading art. The prompt draws on top now.

Which brings me to our Linux players, who have been having an even funnier time. On Windows, quitting to desktop ends the process immediately. The Linux build had never taken that path. It waited out the engine's full teardown, which usually cost several seconds, and in one recorded case left the game running for over three hours after the window had closed. And all the while, a watchdog was logging a line every two seconds to say the shutdown was still going. That case produced six thousand four hundred and twenty four lines of log, about a megabyte of it, which buried the record of the ordinary quit underneath. So the launcher, reading that, filed the whole session as a crash. It looked at four and a half hours of play and concluded the game had failed to start.

That is all fixed. The Linux client ends its own process the way Windows does. The launcher reads the game's own shutdown record when the settings file comes back empty, so a clean quit reads as a clean quit and a session that really died is still reported. Crash reports now say how far a session actually got. And the launcher stopped filing the same incident two or three times over, which it had been doing since we made it stay open across a play session. A new launcher went out on Windows, Linux and macOS the same day, so all three carry it.

Right. The wolf.

Game masters can now possess a creature. Take direct control of it, steer it, see out of its eyes, use its attacks, speak as it with the words appearing over its head on every client in the scene, play its emotes, heal it, level it up, dial its pace up for a chase, and then hand it back mid-fight with an attack order so it carries on as a creature. It began the morning as direct control of your own summon and finished the day as control of any creature in a scene, handed over by the server, surviving a scene changing hands, refusing a second game master who tries to take one that is already being driven, and letting go on its own if the driver disconnects or holds it past a set ceiling.

What this is for is live events. It means the thing you are fighting can have a person inside it. The Cabalist who taunts you by name and then actually chases you down the street. The bandit chief who talks his way out of the fight. I have wanted that since the days when a good dungeon master and a dozen dice were the entire technology.

The review pass before it shipped was educational. Speaking as a possessed creature had never worked at all. The verb existed, the button was there, it looked perfect, and the words went precisely nowhere, because it had never been registered with the networking layer. Fifteen more holes came out of the same pass. First person was showing the game master the inside of the creature's own skull. Other machines in the scene were merrily running the creature's own mind alongside the person driving it, which is two drivers and one wolf.

And my favourite. Possessed creatures were stopping dead against anything with height, up to and including a rug. Floor decorations cut a hole in the navigation mesh, the clamp that keeps creatures on that mesh was still running while a game master was driving, so every step onto a rug got snapped straight back off it. The collision check sat down at the creature's feet with no step allowance, so ankle-height objects read as solid walls, and a creature already touching one could never move again for the rest of its life. A dragon, held in place, by a rug. Driven creatures now step and slide the way your own avatar does, with the step height scaled to the actual creature, because the shared value we had been using was identical on a rat and a dragon, which flattered exactly one of them.

The whole feature ships switched off until it passes a two-client test. And the test suite covering the ownership table had one method tagged as both setup and teardown, which quietly fails fixture discovery, so its seven tests had never run once. Split in two. All seven pass.

Now, something else was built on Wednesday, start to finish, in about four hours, and then deliberately turned off. A crowns for gold exchange.

The shape of it is a system merchant that sells bundles of a hundred crowns for gold, and the gold does not go anywhere. It is destroyed. There is a great deal of gold in this realm, more than there are things worth buying with it, and a sink that hands back something players actually want is a far kinder instrument than the alternatives. Prices work as a falling auction. A bundle goes on the shelf at a high asking price and walks down, halving over a day, toward a floor. If bundles sell quickly the next one starts higher. If they sit, the price keeps falling. With releases through the day the shelf reads as a ladder, newest and dearest at the top, oldest and cheapest at the bottom.

The floor is set just above what crowns trade for between players, and rather than guessing that number we went and measured it. The player vendor market has settled hard on three hundred and eighty five gold per crown, with standing buy orders for around seven times more crowns than sellers have listed. That is a market with a shortage in it, and that measurement is what the launch numbers are built on.

The care went into the money. Every purchase carries the exact price you saw on screen, so a stale window can never buy at a number that no longer exists. Two buyers racing for the same bundle end as one winner and one automatic refund. Every step marks its state before it pays, which means the worst a crash can do is under-pay, and a sweep comes along afterwards and makes the buyer whole by mail, keyed so a retry can never pay twice. A configuration file can close the whole thing in about two seconds without restarting anything. And there is a dashboard watching asking prices, daily throughput against target, refund anomalies, and whether any single account is quietly taking an outsized share of the supply.

It ships dark. Built, tested, wired to a dashboard, and switched off, because we have not settled the numbers and this is the sort of thing you only get to launch once.

Sieges next, and this one is a proper embarrassment. A town siege ends when the Cabalist holding the town is killed. That is the only way one ends. And the seats that place the Cabalist and his rings of creatures are built while the game is running rather than placed by hand, and the path they were handing the loader was missing its first part, so it matched nothing at all in the packed content. Neither the Cabalist nor a single one of his creatures appeared. So a besieged town came up completely empty, and stayed besieged, forever, because the only thing that could end it had never arrived. Six towns were sitting in that state.

All six have been released. The path goes over whole now, with tests holding its shape. And a game master can end a siege from the town they are standing in, going through the same record the ordinary victory goes through, crediting nobody with the kill, and freeing the town on the same tick so it can be chosen again straight away. Separately, siege creatures that had nowhere to stand were spawning right on top of the Cabalist, leaving whole stretches of the outer ring empty. Each spot now hunts for walkable ground near where it was meant to be before it gives up and piles in with him.

And when you walk into a besieged town, the Cabalist now carries a crossed swords marker on your compass and on the town map for as long as he stands, and it moves with him. He walks in from a town entrance, and the marker walks with him, rather than sitting politely on the gate he came through.

One more thing about the sieges, and I want to be plain about it. Twenty one of our own posts from the seventeenth onward went up with the details blacked out, because the siege rework had not been announced. That is not what redaction is for. Redaction is for addresses and credentials and the things that would get somebody hurt. Those posts are written out in plain language now and filed where they belong. If we are not ready to talk about a thing, we should not talk about it, and we should not tease you with bars either.

Now, the smaller things, and some of them will matter more to your evening than anything I have said so far.

If your graphics card has eight gigabytes of memory or more, the game should look sharper tonight. The client works out at first launch how much memory to spend on textures, and the old rule handed an eight gigabyte card about two and a half gigabytes. That is not enough for a busy town, so the game dropped every texture to quarter resolution to fit, and on an eight gigabyte card it was doing exactly that eighty nine percent of the time. Nine thousand frame rate reports from real machines showed the fixed cost hardly moves between a modest card and a monstrous one, because it comes from our art library rather than your hardware. So we hold back a fixed amount and hand the rest to textures. Cards with six gigabytes or less are unchanged.

If you have ever logged out on a beach and logged back in swimming, that was us. Logging out on the overworld was putting you back at the centre of the map square you were standing in rather than at your actual position. Inland that is a few paces and you would never notice. On a coastline it was often enough to drop you in the water, and sometimes under it. You now return to the spot you left, facing the way you were facing, and arrivals are checked before you are put down, so sea, mountain, waterline and solid rock all move you to the nearest real ground.

There is a new creature, though you will not meet it in the world just yet. The Scrying Eye is a tier five floating obsidian eye kept by the Obsidian Eye's order of sorcerers. It stays in the air, opens at range with a bolt and a channelled beam, drags you in with a pull, holds you still with a stare, and lashes with its tendrils if you get close. Kill one and it can leave a Scrying Lens on the corpse. It is the second creature we have built end to end from our own creature documentation and the first one that flies, and four things it taught us went straight back into those documents for the next person.

Two matters of lighting, both raised by Allium Oop. Street lamps and lamp posts used to fade out at about eighty meters, which meant the lamp you were walking toward went dark before you reached it, which is the precise opposite of what a street lamp is for. They hold their light at any distance now. Table lamps and lanterns still fade, as they should. And lights built into a house, torches and sconces and chandeliers, now offer the same Light Settings you get on a lamp you placed yourself, with colour, range, brightness and the night-only switch, saved per lamp and visible to everyone in the room.

Dungeon builders had a good day. Three new stair styles and a ramp, so a kit no longer has to borrow the grey stone staircase every time it changes floor level, each with its own blueprint and smelting recipe. The nine trap pieces are on sale at decoration merchants at last, from five hundred gold for a pressure plate up to three thousand for the nastier ones, where before only a game master could hand you one, which made the Dungeon Builder's Manual a rather frustrating read. And the marble breakable wall T intersections were reserving the wrong space for the room they sit in, which is why a doorway could refuse a piece, nothing could be built on the level below, and decorations hung high inside went to the owner pack when the dungeon loaded.

Beyond that, a hundred and sixty two tracker issues went closed on Wednesday, and I am not going to march you through them. About half were verification tasks finally coming home to roost after the fixes they cover shipped, and the rest were the usual carnival: windows opening behind other windows, carets pointing the wrong way, a login screen shouting at you in capitals, and a fountain in Brittany Alleys where the point you take water from had climbed up onto the statue and out of reach.

Four languages were topped up on the same day, French, Italian, Spanish and Russian, around four hundred and forty seven lines apiece, covering the dungeon trap pieces, the sheet music library, the siege barks, the crown shop, the login form and a good deal else. All four now read essentially complete outside the in-game books, with NPC dialogue at a hundred percent in every one of them. Elsewhere the obsidian armor and weapons finally got names that admit they are obsidian, a perfect harvest swing can now pay a node's rare byproducts, dancing with a partner for half a minute can teach you their dance, and a frost enchanted weapon stopped stripping the slow off your own ice arrow every time you swung it.

And the least glamorous thing we did all day, which I want on the record. The machine holding our source code, its history and several hundred gigabytes of art now has an automatic nightly copy on separate hardware in a different building, as does the account database. That was the last piece of this project with no copy anywhere else, which meant a bad enough day could have left us with the game's data and nothing to read it with. Both are checked by restoring them rather than by hoping.

Thanks tonight to Ceal Astra, whose dungeon stairs and partner dances both landed, and to Morkin for the marble T pieces, and to Garfunkel Humperdinck for the snow in Jotungrund, which was being stretched out of a smaller copy of its own texture and is now sharp. To Cora Cuz'avich for spotting that one alchemy combine was the only route around paying for obsidian chips. To Echondas for asking that clickable web links in chat be something you can switch off, which they now are. And to nyarkie, who confirmed more than one of tonight's stories on the day it broke.

I love these days. A day where six towns come out from under a siege that had nothing left in it to fight, where your elemental finally learns to let go, and where somebody on my team spent an afternoon teaching a possessed dragon how to walk over a rug. That is the job. Come and find us on the test server, break things, and tell us about it.

And before I go. We added a floating eyeball that drops a lens when you kill it. Which means that after all these years, New Britannia finally has contacts. Good night, my friends.