The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• A besieging army attacking its own Cabalist
• The book system grows up in one day
• Summons and pets survive the zone line
• A temple that measured itself six times too big
• The arena floor you could pick a fight with

Transcript

Hail and well met, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British before you, with an account of what your makers were about on Tuesday. A dark cabal laid siege to a town, and spent the siege beating up its own leader, who was standing inside a rock. The books of this world learned at last to be books, with ink and chapters and pages that turn. Your summoned creatures will follow you through a door. A temple that would not budge from its own lot proved to have been measuring itself six times too large. And the Oracle, who knows all things, was asked about Love and refused to answer. We begin there, because it delighted me rather more than it should have.

Here is how that one went. We had just finished writing her a proper guide to the Virtues. Truth, Love and Courage, the eight Virtues built upon them, the Devotionals, the Cabalists who besiege them. We put it live. We confirmed she could find it. Then two players, on the same day, asked her about Love and got nothing back at all. One of them typed the single word love, on its own, and she scored it as gibberish.

The guide was fine. It was her personality that got in the way. Her rules told her that virtue is a subject she answers in character, from the heart, and answering from the heart skips the part where she goes and looks something up. So she improvised. And on a bare question about love, she went one step further and decided this must be a question about the real world, and declined it, politely, as off topic. In a game about virtue.

That rule was correct on the day we wrote it. At the time the only virtue text she had was four lines of flavour, so answering in character was all she could do. Give her a real reference and the same rule becomes a joke at her expense. Virtue questions now go through the same look it up and cite the source path as everything else, with her voice intact. Ask her about Love now and she gives you the definition, the Candle of Love, and Ardoris, with the source attached. Three tests sit on top of that, because it would have crept back in the next time anybody edited her character.

Now. The siege of a town is meant to be a serious business. A Cabalist arrives, plants himself at your shrine, the Ebon Dawn fill the rings around him, and you and your neighbours have to go and remove him. That is the design. What was actually happening was closer to farce.

He was walking to the exact centre of the devotional. The exact centre of the devotional is solid stone. The walkable ground of that town runs straight underneath the shrine, so as far as the navigation was concerned, standing inside a rock was a perfectly reasonable request, and nothing anywhere objected. So he stood in the stone, could not move, and was awkward to hit with anything shorter than a spear. He now settles on the nearest clear ground beside it.

Then there was his army. The troops who fill the rings and the Cabalist they are there to protect were authored into two different monster factions, and in this game every monster faction attacks every other monster faction. So the bodyguard standing eight metres away would look about for the nearest thing to hit, find no player closer than his own commander, and hit his own commander. The boss would lose health with nobody fighting him. He would swing back at his own troops. A besieging army beating itself senseless in a ring around a man wedged in a rock. Inside a siege those two factions are one side now, and a test holds that list against the creatures a siege actually spawns, so nobody can put the infighting back by accident.

Two more from the same corner. A town with more than one devotional was sending him to whichever shrine came to hand, because the question being asked was whether the shrine carried a holy symbol, and every devotional in the game does. He now goes to the shrine of the virtue he actually opposes. And two players standing in the same town could watch him arrive in different squares, because three separate rules trusted whatever order the scene happened to hand them. All three sort the same way now, so the siege begins in the same place on every screen. A virtue is not a thing one chooses at random, and I am pleased that the enemies of virtue are now obliged to choose.

Books. This was the largest single piece of work in the day, and it all arrived at once.

You can format what you write. Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough and coloured ink all render in a published book. You may break a page where you want one, and mark a chapter, and marking chapters builds a working table of contents for you. There is a toolbar over the writing screen with the styles, seven ink colours, page break and chapter buttons, and a preview showing the finished book as you write. The length limit went from eight thousand characters to twelve thousand, because the formatting marks count against it and we did not care to charge you for your own italics.

Two new hands to write in, a flowing cursive and an ornate illuminated face, alongside the plain one and the runic one. The reading window draws each book in the hand it was written in now. Runic books had been rendering in the ordinary interface font all this time, which rather defeats the point of runes. The window itself got dressed as well: parchment grain on the page, a shadow down the gutter between the two facing pages, ragged deckled edges, chapter headings in manuscript red with an illuminated capital on authored books, a short page turn, and a bookmark per character, so a book opens where you left it.

And then, for those who want it, the book leaves the window entirely. There is an optional mode where opening a book gives you an animated three dimensional book over a dimmed world, with real page turn physics, fed by the same text as the flat window, so your formatting and your lettering and your illustrations all carry across. Reading only. Writing stays sensible. It is off by default until it has had a tuning pass in game, and the first pass was educational. The first book we opened was bright green, because the placeholder materials it ships with are flat green. Then the words ran off the paper into the void, because the page model only shows about eighty percent of its texture across. And the camera sat directly overhead, flat on, which is a fine way to photograph a book and a poor way to read one. It has a long lens at a reading angle now, so you can see the thickness of the cover and the stack of the pages, and it wears its real cover art.

The other half of the work is narration. There is a cache for narrated audio, a chapter by chapter player that rides the voice volume slider and keeps reading while you walk around and fight things, a Read Aloud button that appears on books which have recordings, and the offline pipeline that turns a book's text into audio a chapter at a time. Seven hundred and three authored books are enumerated and ready to be cast. None of them make a sound yet, because the first recordings are waiting on somebody sitting down and listening to them properly. I intend to be somebody.

Which brings me to Songs of the Sundered Blade. This is a book you can buy, with money, in the bookstore in Ardoris. Players have been buying it. And opening it. And finding nothing inside, because the text of a book lives on the localization side rather than in the item itself, and the step that fills it in had never been run for this one. It has its ninety-one pages now, which makes it the longest book in the game. It has been the longest empty book in the game for quite some time.

Your pets have been having a worse time of it than you knew.

A tamed sheep moves at two metres a second. You run at five and a half. So the sheep would run flat out, in the correct direction, with real commitment, and lose ground every single second, until the tether snapped it forward to catch up. Same for the chickens. Cats, dogs and pigs managed three. Ducks three and a half. Rabbits, squirrels, turkeys and frogs four. Spiders, scorpions, crocodiles, every spell summon and every quest companion, five. All seventy-one of them are now at seven, which is the speed the top wolves and bears have had all along. The bears, stags, horses and wolves were already keeping up and are unchanged.

On your own lot there was a second insult. Housing lots run a slowdown so the yard animals do not tear around the plot at full speed, which is right, but it was charged to every creature standing on the lot while the owner paid nothing. So on your own land your pet dropped to sixty-five percent, fell behind you crossing your own garden, and got recovered by its tether rather than walking. A pet set to Follow is exempt now. Stay, Patrol and the decoration animals still amble.

Then the buffs. Feed your pet a two hour food, walk through the door into the next scene, and the food was gone. Three previous attempts at this had failed to find the cause, because the pet's wounds came through the trip perfectly well, so it never looked as though the trip was the problem. It was. The pet arriving on the far side was being recorded as though it were being put away, which wrote an empty list of buffs over the remembered one, moments before the restore went to read it. Three other ways to lose a buff on that same journey are closed at the same time.

And the summons come with you now. Cast an air elemental, walk into the next scene, and it is standing there waiting, at the health it had, with its buffs still on it. Before Tuesday it was destroyed at the door and never rebuilt. Decoys from Chaotic Clone stay behind, which is what a decoy is for, and there is still only one pet slot, so whatever is out when you cross is what comes back. One thing goes the other way. A summon now draws on your maximum focus while it is out, on the same scale a tamed pet of the same level does, and a stronger summon costs more. Holding one used to be free. The elementals, the phoenix, the wisp and the daemon had no upkeep and no decay, and the only thing that had ever ended them was walking through a door. We fixed the door.

The Move House button. Some of you have a lot, and a house on it smaller than the lot, and no button offering to move the house. And there was nothing anywhere that would tell you why. No message, no note, nothing. The only way to answer the question was for one of us to go and look your lot up by hand.

So the first thing built was a way to ask. Type slash verbose housing and the game prints the rule that stopped it, the size of your lot, the measured size of your house, and the range of positions the house could legally take at each of its eight rotations. Then we ran every combination of a smaller house on a larger lot, seven hundred and sixty-two of them. Seven hundred and fifty-seven already offered the move. Five did not, and those five came down to two buildings whose recorded size is nonsense.

The roman temple is about thirty-two metres by fifty-three. It was on record as eighty-one by eighty-seven, which is wider than a castle lot, which is why it could not be moved on its own city lot. The measurement was including the building's navigation helpers, the invisible walkable patches that tell characters where the floor is, and the temple carries one of those forty-four metres off its own axis. Measured at its true size, it moves again, on city, keep and castle lots. The red barn is a different matter. Its own collision shapes reach a hundred and forty-three metres down one axis, so no amount of careful measuring will save it, and it needs an artist.

Two more housing repairs worth your time. Moving a house no longer parks it on top of your garden. The placement check was only ever comparing the building against the lot, so you could set a house down over a flowerbed and a bench and they simply stayed underneath it. The blocking items and the marked spot both turn red now, and pressing Enter tells you what is in the way. Anything the house was already standing over does not block, so a building authored over a flowerbed can still be slid and turned.

And storing a moved house no longer abandons the furniture. A house always returns to its original spot when it comes out of storage, but everything that had travelled with it when you moved it stayed behind at the moved position and the moved facing. So you would turn your house around, store it, take it out again, and receive your house facing front with its entire contents facing backwards. Every trip made the disagreement worse. Both come back together now. That one was reported by inuphet, and I would very much like to see the house that prompted it.

There is also a Reset Position button on the lot sign. It appears whenever your house is off the spot it started on, it brings everything placed on the house back with it, and it runs a deliberately shorter set of checks than Move House does, because the original spot is already known to fit. So you can put a house back even on a lot where the move is no longer offered. Decorations standing where the house belongs will still refuse the reset, and they glow red for six seconds so you can see which ones to shift.

Now, a fix and the fix's own consequences, both inside the one day.

In the Kobold Expeditionary Camp there is an arena, and over the arena floor there is an invisible zone whose whole job is to start the wave battle when you step into it. Clicking anywhere on that floor selected the zone as your target. As an enemy. And nothing in the game could clear the selection, so once the last kobold was down, your character carried on swinging at the middle distance and the fight never ended. This is part of the Path of Courage, which frees Sir Patrick. Freeing Sir Patrick should not involve a duel with the floor.

So the rule was changed to ignore objects of that kind, and about thirty-three others built the same way went with it, the ambient sound zones, the moving hazards, the invisible barriers. Levers, wall switches and everything else you can shoot with a bow have a real solid shape and were untouched. Bodies lying near the middle of that arena can be looted again as well.

And then, later the same day, the Magic Mirror on the Isle of Storms stopped answering clicks. The mirror is built the same way as those zones. So are both lunar rifts. So is the rowboat to Novia. And the mirror is the thing that gives a brand new character a body, so for a few hours our very first act of creation was unavailable on account of an arena floor in a kobold camp. The rule now asks for an interact prompt as well as the right shape. Thirty-three walk in volumes stay ignored, five clickable things came back, and a new character can be a person again.

While we were in there, walking into that arena when the wave battle will not run now says so, rather than saying nothing at all. And resetting quest state on a character who has not yet reached the mirror no longer flings them out to the overworld as a spirit, which is a poor way to meet the world.

A few smaller things, starting with waiting. The loading screen used to name five of its stages and go quiet for the rest, which left the longest waits sitting under a stale message. Six more stages report in now, including reading map data, which carries the true percentage, because it is the one stretch of the bar measuring work rather than elapsed time. There is a progress bar along the bottom edge, and beneath the real status line a dimmer second line rotates through thirty-four in world asides while you wait. Feeding the dragons. Filing the lot deeds. Reminding the skeletons whose bones are whose. The aiming crosshair no longer appears over the art at about eighty-five percent of the bar, which was reported by Echondas.

One thing fell out of that work that I love. The last loading tip in each pool has never been shown to anybody. Not once. The code that picks one asks for a number below the count and then takes one more off, so the final entry of the general list and the final entry of every scene list have been unreachable for as long as the file has existed. Somebody wrote those. Years ago. Nobody has ever read them.

Then, things you point at. Hovering a row in any list painted it near white, and list text is light, so the row under your cursor became the hardest row on the screen to read, at about two to one contrast. It reads at about twelve to one now, and it affected every list in the game. The bank window opens six hundred wide instead of four hundred and twenty, because at the old default on a common screen the item names were cut to a few letters and the Refresh button hung off the edge of the frame. And your backpack, bank and containers can be made narrower again while the display options are showing, having been stuck at whatever width you opened them at. That one was reported by Rinaldi.

Two ways to move, and one way to be absent. Holding Shift while you walk forward now sprints, alongside the old double tap of the forward key, which is unchanged, and there is a checkbox for anyone who wants Shift left alone. And typing slash A F K yourself finally holds. The keystroke that submits the command was clearing the very flag the command had just set, so your away status lasted about one frame. It is a proper toggle now, and it tells you when you are away and when you are back.

On our side of the wall, the player owned towns. A town's governor and its size are now fields on the town's own record. Changing an owner used to mean an export, an editor menu, a nightly job and a deploy. Changing a size took a whole client release for a one line difference. Both are a change on a panel now, picked up by a running town inside two minutes. The first real read of the shard was instructive. Eight hundred and eleven rows, of which four hundred and thirty-nine are real player owned towns. Three hundred and twenty-seven are empty shells left behind by templates, and forty are the old villages that hold lots but have no owner. Twenty towns have a deed and a shipped record naming different owners. And three hundred and sixteen are flagged locked by an administrator, which refuses every change to that town for everybody, the governor included.

The rest went by fast. A hundred and one tracker issues closed, about half of them testers signing off on work from previous weeks, which is unglamorous and matters more than anything else on the list. A good many of the remainder were tooltips caught lying. Judgment listing no damage, no duration and no burst, which is to say listing nothing. Two immobilize skills quoting a flat duration where the real one depends on the target. The weapon enchantments never mentioning their stun, their slow or their burn. And Revenant Stance, which drains your health, describing that drain in cheerful green using the wording of a heal.

In the world itself, rugs hang on walls again, planting barrels accept a seed again, and ninety-nine swamp trees across twelve player towns will now stop you rather than let you stroll through the trunk. A healing aura stopped painting a bright pink box on everyone it healed. The chill that makes melee land harder was being counted separately for every chill on the target, so four spells stacked to half again what one is worth. Revenant Stance was refusing to let you be healed after it had ended, by potion, by food, by spell or by your own body, until you changed scenes. And French players will be glad to hear that Earth Magic Mastery no longer describes itself as Air.

Behind the curtain, a second machine is coming up as a test shard, so that release rehearsals stop competing with the testers for the one everybody is using. There is a new service that can speak a line the game invents at the moment it invents it, running on a graphics card we already own and were not using, so a spoken line of that sort costs machine time instead of money. We benchmarked a fashionable new maths library and declined it, because it ran up to nearly eight times slower in our code and disagreed with the old one on most samples of one common function, and client and server have to arrive at exactly the same numbers or combat stops making sense. And one of our own editor tools had been resolving duplicate identifiers by rewriting the source art, which is the sort of thing you only find because somebody went looking.

That is Tuesday. What I look forward to most is the narration. Seven hundred books, read aloud to you, while you walk somewhere with a lantern and something follows you at a sensible speed. We are close.

And before I go, the price of admission. The very first three dimensional book we opened had a green cover, green page edges, and a great many leaves. Less of a book, we decided, than a leaflet. Good night, citizens of New Britannia. Go and read something.