The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Anais and the seven voices of the Isle of Storms
• The loading bar freeze and the watchdog that slept
• Judgment, a Sun beam your allies feed
• Revenant Stance and the risen dead
• Specializations become a decision you make

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British before you, with an accounting of what your makers were about on Sunday. The startup that hung at the end of the loading bar now unhangs itself. The Sun school has a beam you must plant your feet for. Death Magic has gained a stance that burns your own life for power and raises the fallen around you when you go down holding it. And the child who greets every new soul upon the Isle of Storms had seven voices, no fixed place in the world, and could not spell her own name. We shall begin with her, for hers is the finest tale of the lot.

There is a child on the Isle of Storms named Anais. She teaches you how to walk, how to look about you, how to speak with people. She stops you seven times on the way through, and until yesterday she used a different voice at every stop. Pixie, then Riley, Bianca, Sarah, Luna, one voice with an Indian accent and one with a British accent. Seven voices, one small girl. And none of it was a bug in the ordinary sense. Every part of that system was doing exactly what we had asked it to do.

Voices in our game are cast per conversation rather than per character, and her tutorial is written across seven separate conversations. So the caster looked at her and saw seven different people. It is also careful never to hand two characters standing in the same place the same voice, so it went out of its way to make all seven sound distinct. It was being helpful. It was being helpful about seven times harder than anybody wanted.

The cause underneath that is my favourite thing I have read all week. The tool that reads our character files understands one way of writing a name down. Our editor switches to a second way the moment a name contains a letter with an accent on it. Anais has two small dots over the i. So the tool never found her name at all. It fell through to a leftover block that records what a character was originally copied from, and it read her back as, and I would like you to sit with this a moment, "Guard". Five of her seven stops were cast out of the adult guard voice pool. A small girl, voiced from the guard pool.

And the same copy-and-forget habit left the gatekeeper of Lost Vale wearing her name and her squeaky child voice while delivering his solemn gatekeeper lines. That one we have written up rather than guessed at, because what that character ought to be called is a decision for the people who write him, and not for a programmer at one in the morning. All seven of her stops are pinned to a single voice now, the one she already used where she stops you by the lunar rift. Twelve of our three thousand and thirty one conversations carry an accented name, and a test now sweeps all twelve, so this particular joke cannot come back.

She had also been vanishing moments after she appeared. Every copy of her carries a hidden marker, and all of those markers claimed the same identity, so the game saw duplicates and switched the later ones off. We fixed that. Then we found the marker has two working halves and we had fixed exactly one of them. The second had the same clash, had never been touched, and happens to be the half that brings her into view. She would still have failed to show up at six of her seven stops. The reason it survived the first pass is that it left nothing whatsoever in the logs. The game now names both objects out loud when two of them claim the same record.

Her name was spelled two ways at once, besides. The plate above her head carried the accent, she introduced herself without it, and the journal used the plain spelling in all eighty seven places it names her. Everything reads the accented form now. The placeholder name she wears before she tells you who she is was misspelled in two different ways across five copies of her, and I will not attempt either of them out loud. One last thing from the island. The final tutorial area, the one holding the lunar rift that sends you onward, had a corner where the ground simply ran out. Step in and you fell out of the world, and because the tutorial shares its map with the island itself, you were put back where you first arrived with no way to pick the lessons up again. That corner is solid, we swept the rest of the complex and found no others, the Oracle there has stopped framing the inside of a wall during her conversation, and the red developer text that printed into your chat at every stop is gone.

Now the other end of that same experience, which is starting the game at all. Some of you have watched the loading bar reach the end and then stop, on a blank window, forever. Here is what was happening. The very last step before the login screen pulled the front-end screen in through a single load that blocked everything else while it ran. On a slow disk, the window stopped answering right there. The reports show machines sitting on that one load for eight minutes before the player gave up and killed it. Overnight alone that accounted for fifty five startup failures from twenty three machines, on Windows and on Linux both. That load now runs alongside everything else, so the window keeps drawing and the bar keeps moving until you see the login screen.

While we were in there we found two more things making it worse. The progress bar parked itself at eighty five percent for the whole of the last and longest step, so a slow start looked precisely like a dead one, and a good many of you reported it as a lockup because it was completely reasonable to think so. The bar moves through that step now. And the watchdog, the thing whose entire job is to notice a start going wrong, switched itself off after ten minutes. A first start after a graphics driver update can easily run longer than that while the driver rebuilds its cache. So the slowest starts, which are the only ones anybody ever reports, were the exact ones leaving no record at all. It stays awake well past that now, and it writes down which card and which driver were in use.

The launcher got the best of it. A poisoned graphics driver cache is one of the ways this game gets stuck on a black screen and stays stuck, and the cure has been a button hidden behind a debug checkbox that almost nobody knew existed. The launcher now notices for itself that your last session did not close properly, presses that button on your behalf, and tells you in one line that it has done so. It fires once per crash. The first start afterwards can take a little longer while your driver rebuilds, and then you are back. There is also a new floor on the Windows version we support. Below it the game closed the instant it opened and wrote nothing anywhere, and the launcher read that as the game quitting early and suggested a Repair, which could never have helped. One player tried five times in eighty minutes. Now the launcher checks first, says plainly that the game needs a newer Windows, and declines to start it. Patching on that machine still works.

Sun Magic had the biggest single piece of work of the day, and it is a new spell called Judgment. You plant your feet and burn one target with a beam, for about what a Searing Ray would deal, once a second, for three seconds at the bottom of the tree and up to twelve at the top. While it runs you cannot move and you cannot cast anything else. Here is the part I like. Physical damage that anybody else lands on your target while the beam holds is stored inside the light, up to twice what the beam itself has dealt, and when the beam ends that whole charge bursts on them, with half of it reaching whatever is standing beside them. So a beam held to the end in a party that is hitting the same target is a very different spell from a beam held alone. One step, or one solid hit on you, and the whole thing ends with nothing to show for it.

Judgment is also the first spell in this game to use the channel effect, which has been sitting in our code for years with nothing ever authored against it. Naturally there were two faults waiting in there. Ending a channel cleared the flag through the target instead of the caster, which works perfectly for the only two channels we had ever shipped, getting up onto a mount and digging in, both of which target yourself, and falls straight over for anything aimed at a creature. And the beam itself was never torn down when the channel ended. Both are fixed, and the next spell to use it will find the road already built.

The rest of the Sun pass was mostly the school finding out it had been lying to itself. Summon Phoenix has a one in four chance to blind on hit, and it did fire, every time. But its strength was your Sun Magic Specialization multiplied by a constant, and the game holds that at zero for anyone who is not training that specialization. So for most owners, the phoenix landed a ten second debuff of minus nothing, drawn on the enemy as a cheerful fireball. It now takes real damage avoidance and real Dexterity from every target, and specialization adds on top of that. Sun Worship, the school's only attribute passive, raised your Strength. In a school where every single spell scales off Intelligence. It pays Intelligence now. And Elysian Illumination, the aura that pulses on everything hostile within three metres, was waking up the enemies you had just put to sleep with Dazzling Rays, roughly one pulse after you cast it. It skips sleepers now, the same rule your pets have followed for years.

Death Magic had the other half of the day. The school has always promised a resistance curse on Death Touch and Death Ray, right there in the skill description, and the roll for it was your Death Specialization times twenty five. Which is a flat zero percent for everyone who never specialized. So the description promised, and for most casters the spell politely declined. It lands thirty five percent of the time for everybody now, rising with specialization, and the curse itself is bigger and stacks deeper, stripping about thirty points of warding across two stats where it used to strip fifteen across one. The magic half of that helps every other caster working the same target, so a Death mage in your party is doing something for you as well as for themselves.

While sizing that up we finally checked the thing everyone knows, which is that undead are immune to Death magic. They are not. There is exactly one hard immunity in this entire game, and it is poison against undead and elementals. The only Death-typed immunities anywhere sit on your own summoned skeletons and liches, so that your Death Field does not murder your own minions. What actually kills the damage is the resistance curve, which bottoms out and rounds every hit to zero once a target is warded more than a hundred and ten points past your attunement. That is a very different problem from immunity, and it is one you can now do something about.

Which brings us to Revenant Stance, the new capstone, sitting under Summon Lich. Hold it and it converts a share of your own health into focus every second, and refuses you every source of healing you have, potions and your own regeneration included. In exchange it pays a large Death attunement bonus, worth most against exactly the things that shrug the school off. With nothing able to heal you it runs about twenty eight seconds off a three hundred health bar, and fifty five off twelve hundred. So it is a timer, and the timer is your life. And then there is the second half of it. Die while you are holding it and the creature corpses around you get up as skeletons and finish the fight for you. Up to twenty of them, out to fifteen metres, for twenty seconds, and they leave the bodies and the loot exactly where they lay. A corpse has to be under a minute old, so an old battlefield is not a free army.

And that magnificent thing could not be purchased. Not by anyone. A skill has to be listed by a trainer or it cannot be learned at all, and our authoring checklist has never once mentioned that step, so the finest new spell in Death Magic sat in the tree fully priced, with a tooltip, politely refusing every attempt to buy it. We wrote a sweep to catch that, and the sweep immediately found two more skills in exactly the same state. They are all on trainers now.

The other big change is one every character on the shard will feel. Which two schools you specialize in used to be a guess. The game worked it out from whether a mastery skill was set to train, it worked it out independently in four separate places, and nothing anywhere enforced the answer. Which means three simultaneous specializations were perfectly representable, and all three paid out, until a cleanup pass happened to run. That pass only ran when you used a skill, never at login, and it chose which two schools to keep by whatever order the skill list happened to be in that day. Your specializations are now written down on your character, the server checks them on the way in, and existing characters keep exactly what they had.

What you get out of that is worth the trouble. Training a school's Specialization skill no longer claims a specialization slot. Set all twenty one of them to train if you like, and your two specializations stay where you put them. Choosing a specialization is its own step now, taken at a skill trainer or at an Oracle Confirmatory, and so is giving one up. When both slots are full you pick which school to set down, rather than the game picking the lowest-level one for you. Swapping costs no experience at all. The school you set down keeps every point and every level, it simply stops counting. And you can read your specializations in three places instead of none, because until yesterday the only way to find out was to walk every skill tree squinting at arrows.

The Oracle has taken on new work too. Ask her to unmake your training and say the word, and every trained skill comes off at once, with every point of experience returned to your pool. It is free, and you may do it as often as you like. Masteries, specializations and the two elixir skills are left alone, since no trainer can hand those back. And she does mark you for it. There is an achievement waiting called Mark of Chaos, and it sits in the Social category of your journal, which I think is the correct place for it.

Now to a matter rather closer to my own heart. Sieges have moved into the towns. The scheduler that decides which towns lie under siege had been switched off since the day it was built, so every siege this world has ever known was one a game master started by hand. It runs on its own now, holding one authored town and up to four player-owned towns at a time. The old arrangement stands down with it, so travelling to a town no longer offers you a dialog about fighting through a separate battlefield or going around, and the enemy camps on the overworld clock are gone. Three siege settings that were always meant to be adjustable had never reached anything, because the machine that runs the sieges was never reading them and always used the shipped defaults. It reads them now.

The Leaderboards window went from six boards to twenty one. Two of those were nearly free, because the server has been counting zones and creatures every hour since the boards were rebuilt this month and neither number had ever been shown to a living soul. Eight more are built from four hundred and eighty seven per-account counters this game has been keeping for every creature family, boss, fish and craft, none of which had ever fed anything you could look at. Every row of the Fish board now names whoever caught the most of that species alongside whoever landed the biggest, which are usually two different people. Before this, a row read four hundred and twelve caught with nobody attached to it. And the Deaths board splits three ways, into creatures, players, and self-inflicted. That last one we have been logging for years and never once counted. The scores exist. You have simply never had to look at them.

Three things about your own settings. If your desktop trims your game window slightly, every resolution wider than the desktop came out at the same size, and the game read that as nothing worth saving. The Video tab made it worse by showing the live window size instead of your saved choice, so every new pick looked like it snapped back. Fixed, and reported by Allium Oop. Windows now resize from any edge instead of only the four corners, with the cursor telling you which way each one moves. And your backpack columns each have a switch, so you can put Quantity, Weight, Durability and Value away and hand all of that room to the item name.

Two for the combat-minded. A point of Dexterity used to be worth two and a half times more critical chance on a bow than on a polearm, for no reason anybody could defend, and both weapons now pay the same rate. That one was reported by necronut. Subterfuge Specialization finally pays off on damage as well, so a critical hit landed from behind adds half your specialist mastery to the multiplier, which at specialization eighty makes a backstab critical two and a half times a normal hit. And thrown alchemy bombs work more than once per scene, because the twenty second cooldown all four of them share was never being cleared. One throw locked the lot of them until you changed zones.

One more that should show up as a smoother evening. The client had been keeping decoration art in memory for the whole session, so it held every decorated lot you walked away from and memory climbed as you travelled. One recorded session went from about six gigabytes to about thirteen across an hour of zoning, then sat there for another ninety minutes doing nothing about it. The oldest unused art is released at each zone change now, and reloads if you need it.

Sixty six reported bugs went down yesterday, and forty one testing tasks were signed off. A good few of them were the same complaint wearing different hats. Our Linux players, for instance, had a small collection of buttons and sorting arrows that drew as empty boxes, across the chat window, the leaderboards, the emote list and the conversation window, because every one of them had been written as a text symbol that none of the fonts we ship actually contains. They are proper artwork now, and they draw everywhere.

Then there was a cluster of things sitting a short distance from where they belong. Two hanged bodies at Blood River Outskirts dangling forty centimetres to one side of their ropes, so the rope ended in mid-air beside the head. The name plate on a summoned air elemental, drawn inside its own skull. A lump of ground pushing up through a graveyard wall in Aerie. And a matching cluster of things that made no sound at all: six secret sliding bookcases that slid in silence, the frost giant of Jotungrund who grunted but stepped and swung without a whisper, and the great doors of Castle Brittany, which for years have made a noise closing and none whatsoever opening.

The remainder is a long and cheerful list of small indignities put right. Nine young white oaks that were painted into South Quel Woods and never grew. Seven town Explorer achievements asking you to find more landmarks than the town actually contains, which is a difficult thing to complete. Two birthday candle packs in the shop pointing at a candle that no longer existed. A fishing expedition advertising an exit off the stern of a ship that was never built, so people walked the back deck hunting for a door. And a bodice that displayed painted-on underwear after a Potion of Green Growth, which I am told is the sort of thing one only discovers in public.

That is Sunday. Two new spells, a school that stopped lying about what it does, a tutorial that will let a new player through it in one piece, and a loading bar you can trust again. What I am most looking forward to is the sieges, because for the first time the towns will come under threat on their own schedule, without me leaning over and starting one by hand. Go and defend something.

And one last thought before I leave you. Twenty skeletons stand up around you the very moment you fall. Some would call that an army. I call it a support group. They have no body, but every one of them has your back. Good night to thee, and be well.