The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Two possession spells, held behind a lock
• Item tooltips stop folding you into the numbers
• Forty-six skill titles, unclaimed since 2013
• Kobold mages learn to support their group
• A texture tool, and a very large saving

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British before you, with word of what thy makers were about on Saturday. Two spells now let a caster step clean out of his own flesh and drive a beast about the world, though both are held under lock for the moment. Six and forty titles that have lain unclaimed in our records since the year two thousand and thirteen are being handed out at last. Thy tooltips have ceased lying to thee about thy sword. And the kobold mages have learned to look after one another, which I regret to report makes their camps a good deal worse for thee. Now then. Let us begin somewhere small and strange.

Picture two of you standing over the same dead wolf. You press the interact key. The corpse opens. You press it again and the whole lot goes into your pack. Your friend, standing right beside you, presses the same key on the same wolf. The corpse opens. He presses again. Nothing. Press, press, press. Nothing at all. Same party, same build, same wolf, about three feet apart.

The answer had nothing to do with the wolf. That second press is the take-all, and it was running underneath a guard that gives up the instant your cursor is sitting over any interface panel. The loot window moved onto our new interface system a little while ago. So the loot window was eating the key that empties the loot window. And where you keep your windows is saved on your own machine, which is exactly why it was you every time and never the fellow next to you. The take-all now reaches through the window it is emptying.

Right. The big one. We have started work on two spells that let you leave your body behind and take direct control of a creature. If you are specialized in Moon magic and you have an animal already charmed, a full-strength Animal Charm on that same animal steps you into it. If you are a Death magic specialist with a skeleton already standing, a full-strength Summon Skeleton takes over the skeleton you already have rather than raising a second one.

And here is the part I like. Your body does not vanish. It stays exactly where you left it, standing there, visible, and entirely killable, while you are off being a wolf somewhere. Holding on costs focus every second, and any damage to your own body ends the whole thing at once. So the spell is not a free ride. It is a wager. You are gambling that nobody wanders past the very obvious unattended body you left standing in the road.

The interesting work was in what everybody else sees. A possessed creature takes on the faction of whoever is driving it and shows their name, and that last part is load bearing in a way we did not expect. Outside a duelling scene our faction table calls any two players friendly to each other. So handing a creature a player's faction without also handing over the question of who it is allowed to fight would have produced a bear that no other player in the world could touch. We caught that before it could matter. The same pass found a carve-out that treated possessed creatures as ordinary monsters for hostility and damage windows, which is right when a game master is doing it and would have been an open door when a player is.

And my favourite of the small ones. While you are driving a creature the normal player input mode is switched off, so the escape key fell through to a branch that read it anyway. One press both handed the creature back and opened the options menu. You would come back to your own body and be immediately staring at the audio settings. Both spells ship switched off, behind two separate locks, until we have run a thirteen-step script on the test shard with two clients side by side. Nobody is possessing anything yet.

Now let us talk about your tooltips, because they have been quietly misleading you for a very long time. When you hovered a weapon, every line you read had you folded into it. The damage number on a sword sitting in your bag was the damage that you would do with it. Which sounds helpful, until you try to compare two swords and find your own Strength sitting inside both numbers, muddying the exact thing you were trying to measure.

Weapon and armor tooltips now read as the item's own. What the sword is, on its own terms. The item's enchantments and masterworks and socket effects still count, because those are part of the item, so an enchanted blade still reads higher than a plain one of the same type. What has been taken out is you. Hold Shift while hovering and you get the old reading back, with your attributes and your skills folded in, and the foot of the tooltip tells you which views are available.

While we were in there we noticed the tooltip had no idea what anything was worth. The Value line has always been base worth, so the only way to learn what a shopkeeper would actually hand you was to walk to the shop and open the sell list. There is now a line underneath saying what a merchant will pay, given as a range at the item's current wear, low for a shop that does not deal in that sort of goods and high for one that does. And every item tooltip now carries a line telling you how many you own. Thirteen carried, two thousand one hundred and twelve banked.

That banked number was the fun part, because the server has always known it. It counts every banked item to build the list it sends you at login, and then it threw the numbers away. Now it keeps them. Merchant shelves, vendor lists and crafting ingredient rows all show your counts too, and there is a right-click entry that asks the server how many of a thing your whole account holds, across your other characters, your house storage, your mail, your vendor listings, even your ransoms. It is a button rather than something a hover sets off, because the search behind it reads every container you own and we would rather you asked for that on purpose. Oh, and fetching a bank figure used to create an empty bank container in whatever town you happened to be standing in. So if you have been finding mysterious empty bank boxes in towns where you have only ever crafted, that was us. It has stopped.

Here is one that made me sit up. Our skill trees have always had titles attached to them. Train every skill in a tree to level one hundred and you are a Miner, a Blacksmith, a Tactician, with group titles above those and Magnificum Dominum at the very top for finishing every tree in the game. Forty-six of these have been sitting in the game data since two thousand and thirteen. Thirteen years. And in all that time not one of them was ever handed to anybody. The data was there. Nothing was reading it.

They are being handed out now, and they are retroactive. The server works your titles out from your stored character sheet rather than from anything your client reports, and it re-checks the whole ladder every time your client asks for them, so a missed grant heals itself at your next login. If you have a character of any real age, log in tonight and go and look at the Titles tab. There will very likely be several waiting that you earned years ago.

We added two new rungs above grandmaster while we were in there. Elder for an entire tree at level one hundred and fifty, and Legendary for an entire tree at two hundred. Elder Miner. Legendary Blacksmith. Seventy-four titles all told, plus four more that count skills rather than trees, so the two hundred line is reachable without finishing a whole tree. I should be honest about what a whole tree at two hundred costs. Cooking is the cheap one, at about seventeen billion experience. Tactics will run you past two trillion. If somebody earns Legendary Tactician I would like to meet them, and I would like to know what they did with the rest of their life.

Now, the kobolds. For years our kobold mages have had Strength and Damage Resistance authored on them, ready to cast on their friends. In practice they never cast either one on anybody, and there were three separate reasons stacked on top of each other, each one better than the last.

The first is the target choice. It skipped any ally at full health, sensibly enough, and then out of everyone remaining it picked the one who was least wounded. The kobold with a scratch got the shield. The one on fire got a thoughtful look. The second is the range. The rule asked the caster to stand twenty meters away from an ally it would only ever go looking for within ten, so a creature that did somehow choose a target would then walk away from it.

And the third is the best. Threat from a friendly effect was landing on the ally who received it. So on the rare occasion a kobold mage did manage to buff his packmate, the packmate turned around and attacked him for it. Which rather explains why they stopped trying.

All three are fixed, and the kobold mages are the first creatures in this game that actually support their group. They cast on whoever is worst hurt, they will shield somebody who has not been hit yet, and they can get a buff up in the moment the group notices you. Kobold camps are harder now, and we did not trim anything else to make up for it. Wishdragon asked us to look at creatures that help their allies, and this is the first step of a larger piece of work on enemy groups where some creatures support the others instead of only swinging at you. Most of the machinery for it was already in the game and had simply never been reachable, so the early phases are repair rather than invention.

That same evening we made those creatures a great deal quieter. A creature in a fight could try a new line every five seconds, and the shout a creature gives when it first spots you had no cooldown whatsoever. So pulling a group of six produced six simultaneous battle cries followed by a steady, unbroken stream of monster small talk for the length of the fight. There is now fifteen to twenty-two seconds between combat lines, and a group that spots you gives one battle cry between them. We also found that nine bark panels have been politely requesting their own custom pacing since the day they were authored, the Ravenswood bandits asking for ninety seconds and Kardan Nyx for twenty, and every one of those requests was written into one field and overwritten by another a moment later. Years of creatures asking to speak less often and nobody listening.

One more big one, and this is a tool story. We have a texture report that ranks what is eating your graphics memory. On a wide monitor every single one of the twenty-five rows it printed was one of the game's own frame buffers, and no piece of actual art was named at all. The report meant to tell you which textures are expensive was showing you the screen.

So on Saturday morning we split that list in two and then built a proper Editor window for it: every texture in the project in one sortable list, ranked by graphics memory, where you can select any number of rows and change their size caps, compression and streaming all at once. The useful bit is that you can tell it what actually shipped, read from the build, so it ranks the twenty-six thousand textures that go into a build rather than the forty-six thousand sitting in the tree. That distinction saved real work. Of sixteen hundred uncompressed textures, only nine hundred and fifty-nine of them ship. The other six hundred would have been an afternoon with no effect on anyone playing.

That tool was finished in the morning. By the afternoon it had been run over a thousand and fifty-three textures: three hundred and eighty-seven that shipped uncompressed are now compressed, seven hundred and thirteen had their size caps lowered, and two hundred more stream their detail in. Estimated graphics memory for that set at full resolution went from eight point seven gigabytes down to two. And a reading taken in a player town found that eight hundred megabytes of it was one medieval construction kit. The wood, the planks, the door frames. Which is to say the most expensive thing in your graphics memory, by a wide margin, was everybody's houses.

A few smaller things about your skills. The Skills window has a second view. Setting your training used to mean opening one of thirty-seven school sigils and hunting each skill down inside its tree, and there is now a List view that puts every skill you have learned in one window, grouped into schools you can fold up, with its training status beside it and a Train All on each school header. Separately, changing which schools you are specialized in now has to be done at a skill trainer or an Oracle Confirmatory, and any trainer will do. The school that gets pushed out is set aside rather than unlearned, so it keeps every point of experience it holds instead of draining away while you are not looking.

Your potions and your dinner have been given a level. Two hundred and sixty-six consumables now carry the adventurer level they were balanced for. At or above that level you get the full effect, below it you get a proportional share with a floor under it, and the tooltip tells you which level the item was made for and what percentage you are getting. The top potions used to add an uncapped slice of your own level on top of their listed amount, which meant a level five character and a level one hundred character drank very nearly the same potion. That is folded into the printed number now. Gathering and refining buffs are left completely alone, since a crafter can sit at a low adventurer level for an entire career, and it would be a strange thing to tax exactly the players a mining buff exists for.

Also, our beer was never officially food. Beer, wine and whiskey, all fifteen brews, were never flagged as consumables at all, which means the Consumable Duration Bonus from Elixir Extension has never once lengthened a single drink. Not in the entire history of the game. They are flagged now, so your pint finally lasts as long as it always claimed it would.

Two housing items. Claimed lots have a Teleport to Lot option now, on the right-click menu in both the Lot Deeds window and the Property Manager. It spends one Teleport to Zone Scroll after a confirmation, and it puts you in front of your lot rather than at the town's usual arrival point, so there is no long walk across town afterwards. It also greys out with an actual reason when it will not fire. And we closed a decoration scaling exploit where an item stacked on a resized decoration could inherit the larger size when you moved it, and repeating that trick grew things far past any designed limit. Sizes are clamped now on pickup, on placement, and again by the server, and anything already grown past its limit displays at its proper maximum.

The testers had a good day as well. Gravidy noticed that our crafting window was reading as three different alignments at once, the sort of thing you feel before you can name it. Measured on that window, one caption was one point four pixels out of line, another was zero point six, and the checkbox captions were off by about half a pixel. All three sit at zero now, and the fix went into the shared window styling rather than into that one window, which straightened all forty-two labelled fields in the game. And Allium Oop did more than report that open water reflects the same flat white at every hour of the day, and supplied the colours as well, the day tone and the clamp that keeps midnight dark without going featureless. Our water warms through sunrise now, cools at noon, greys out under storm cloud, and holds a proper dim blue at night.

The lightning round. A hundred and three tracker issues went down on Saturday. A good clump of them were windows misbehaving in ways I would rather not itemize on a family podcast: windows opening in the corner, windows forgetting where you put them, windows that could never remember in the first place. Our position store was only keeping the thirty-two most recently moved windows while about a hundred and seventeen were competing for the space, so moving one more made an older one forget. It holds two hundred and fifty-six now.

Then a pile of sound fixes. All twenty-four Ancient Undead were completely silent, every last one of them, because they share the lich sound set and that set reaches for a piece of skeleton that only the real liches have. No idle, no combat, no death noise. Our decorative cows had the identical fault against the horse sounds. The tyrannosaur had no footsteps at all and could not have had any, so somebody went in and hand-placed foot plants across every one of its animations, and found the crocodile has been creeping about in silence since the day we added it.

Elsewhere: Tirrag asked whether Lua add-ons could fetch a web page without freezing the game, and they can now, behind a permission per add-on that starts off and a manifest that has to name every site it will contact. Rinaldi pointed out that a dungeon's entrance sign was telling every passer-by what the place was built from, which is the builder's business, so it moved into the Dungeon Builder instead. Garfunkel Humperdinck sent us back to the Paladis Shardfall waterfalls for another pass on the crest foam. nyarkie caught a celebration message announcing the same boss kill three times in every zone for a solid hour. Player vendors can reprice a listing in place without hauling it off the shelf. And the fourteen fish that go in a fish tank now count toward the fishing collection, where catching a clownfish used to credit you with absolutely nothing.

That is Saturday. What I am looking forward to is the day both those possession locks come off and I can go for a walk as somebody else's bear. Until then, thank you for playing in this world, for reporting the strange things you find in it, and for being patient with a game that took thirteen years to hand out a title it had already written down.

One last thing before I go. Now that a necromancer can step inside the skeleton he raised, I am told the spell has one small side effect. He gains a very thorough understanding of his own inner workings.

He has finally got the backbone for it. Good night to thee.