The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• A day of proof instead of production
• Nine housing and decoration fixes signed off
• The first ten minutes of the game put right
• Combat that worked but never showed you
• Two new reports from the forums

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British before thee, with word of what thy makers were about upon Saturday. Two chandeliers may at last be put out by the hand that lit them. A village lighthouse has been persuaded to shine level and true. The first ten minutes of a new life in this world no longer greet a stranger with a crooked title and an empty hand. And three and twenty separate matters were declared settled by the very people who play here, upon a day when thy makers wrote almost no new code at all. That last part is the whole of tonight's show, so we shall begin there.

Two chandeliers. That is where I want to start. On Saturday, two different chandeliers, in two different buildings, were signed off as working. One of them hangs in a dungeon room, and it now goes dark when you switch it off, which it had been refusing to do for a very long while. The other is in a village home, and it now responds to a double-click, which is the only way any human being has ever tried to turn off a chandelier. Nobody wrote a line of code for either of those on Saturday. On Saturday we barely wrote anything at all.

So let me tell you what a day like that actually looks like from the inside. Three changes went into the code. Three. One of them was this show, the episode you heard last night. One was a note on the work blog saying that episode existed. And the third was the result of the nightly sweep through the forums. If you measure a studio by how much code came out of it, Saturday was a rounding error.

And then you look at the tracker, and twenty-three items closed. All twenty-three of them verification tasks. Every one of them checked by somebody outside the team who actually plays this game.

Here is how that works, because I think it is the most underrated part of making one of these. When we fix something, we do not close it and walk away. We write up what changed in plain language, we write the steps to go and see it for yourself, and we write down what you ought to observe if the fix took hold. That goes out to our testers. They go and do it. If it behaves, they say so and the item closes. If it misbehaves, it comes back with a description of what actually happened, and that description becomes a fresh bug, and what we had was never a fix at all. It was a hope with a commit message attached.

And the reason we work that way is a little uncomfortable. The person who fixes a bug is the worst possible person to check it. They know exactly where to stand. They know which door to use, which chair to sit in, which order to press things in. They walk the one path that was in their head while they were fixing it, that path works beautifully, and every other path in the world is still broken. Our testers have no idea where to stand. That is the entire point of them.

On Friday one of these checks came back failed. The tester went through the steps, the thing did not do what we had promised it would do, and by the end of that same day the failure had become a bug and the bug had been closed. I want to point at that, because a verification system that never fails anything is not a verification system. It is a receipt.

And a failed check is worth more to us than a passed one, which took me an embarrassingly long career to understand. When a tester says it works, we have learned one thing. When a tester says it did not work and describes precisely what happened instead, we have learned three or four, and one of them is usually about a part of the game nobody was looking at. The best bug reports I have ever received in forty years read like short stories. Somebody went somewhere we did not expect, did something reasonable, and wrote down what the world did back.

Friday closed forty-three items. Saturday closed twenty-three. Sixty-six in two days, all of them proved by hand, by people who spend their own evenings on this because they love the place. I have shipped a great many things in my long life on the strength of somebody telling me it works on my machine. It does not work on your machine. It never has. Thank you, all of you.

Now, the largest group of the day was houses, and it was not close. Nine of those twenty-three were about the places you live.

Start with the lighthouse. There is a village lighthouse you can place on your lot, and its beam had been shining crooked. Off level, out of focus, sweeping a bit of sky at an angle nobody asked for. A lighthouse has one job. It has precisely one job, and the entire recorded history of lighthouses is in agreement about what that job is. It shines level now.

Then there is the stables. We sell a rather handsome upscale stables, and until this week your pet could not be inside it. I would like to sit with that for a moment. We sold people a stable, and the animal could not go in. Your horse stood outside its own house, looking at it, thinking whatever it is that horses think. Pets go inside now.

A stone two-story row home had a roof problem, and this one is worth explaining, because it is a common trick that misfired. Games swap detailed models for simpler ones as you walk away, so that a house across town does not cost you the same as the house you are standing in front of. The simpler version of this one had lost its roof somewhere along the way. On the doorstep, a roof. From across the street, no roof. You had bought a very expensive tent, and the only way to prove otherwise to a visitor was to make them stand quite close to it.

A wall on a third floor stairwell landing in one of the keeps was refusing wall decorations. It was not broken. It simply was not a wall, as far as the game was concerned. You could see it. You could lean a chair against it. You could not hang a single painting on it, and if you have ever furnished a stairwell you know that a bare landing wall is the one thing you cannot leave alone.

Which brings me back to why chandeliers keep coming up. A chandelier looks like one object and is really three things wearing a coat. There is the model you can see, there is the light it casts, and there is the switch that connects them. When somebody double-clicks it, all three of those have to agree about what just happened, and the interesting failures are the ones where two of them agree and the third was never told. That is how a chandelier can go dark and leave the room lit, or leave the room dark while still looking lit. Both of those got sorted, in two different buildings, by two different people.

And my favorite of the housing set is an inn with a flickering window ledge, because that flicker has a cause and the cause is lovely. When two surfaces sit at exactly the same depth, the renderer has to decide which one is in front, and it has nothing to decide with. So it flips a coin. Every frame. Sixty times a second, a coin. That is the shimmer you have all seen on a wall somewhere and assumed was your graphics card giving up. Somebody moved one of those surfaces by a hair, and the coin stopped being flipped.

There was also a wall web throwing a square shadow next to a torch, which is what happens when the shadow gets drawn from the flat panel the cobweb is painted onto rather than from the cobweb itself. A spider's web should cast a mess of threads. This one was casting a postage stamp. And decorations can now be placed on the pier of a full water lot, which sounds minor right up until you have bought a water lot largely for the pier and discovered that the pier is scenery.

The second cluster is the one I care most about, because it is the first ten minutes of the game, and four separate items in it closed on Saturday.

The original title screen had been sitting off centre, shifted to the left. That is the very first image anybody sees of this world, the one that is supposed to say that careful people made this. Then, on the Isle of Storms, the Oracle was speaking in more than one voice.

Consider what the Oracle is. A vast and cold intelligence that watches everyone who arrives, weighs the answers you give to questions with no safe answer, and pronounces on the shape of your character before you have taken a single step in Novia. Deeply unsettling by design. Rather less unsettling when it changes voice halfway through explaining your fate, like a stage villain whose understudy has arrived early. It speaks with one voice now, as befits a thing that claims to know everything.

The island's tasks were not clearing when you left it. You would do everything the island asked of you, sail away, begin your actual life in Novia, and the tutorial would come along with you. Sitting in your task list. Permanently. A small polite note from your childhood, reminding you that you never did finish tidying your room.

And a brand new character was arriving with nothing in the first slot of the hotbar. The first slot. The one the game then asks you to press. That is four separate ways of making a poor first impression, all four closed on the same day, and I am glad to be rid of every one of them. First impressions in this genre are not a nicety. They are the whole of the audition.

The third group is combat, and all three of its items share a theme. In every case the game was doing exactly the right thing and refusing to mention it to you.

Judgment, Obfuscate, Frost Weapon and Shock Weapon had no cast animation. You would fire one off and your character would stand there, perfectly still, entirely unbothered, while the magic happened somewhere off to one side. The spell worked. Your character simply declined to participate in it.

The weapon enchantments had the matching problem at the other end. Shock, Frost and Ignite Weapon are buffs you lay on your blade, and when you hit something with that enchanted blade, nothing showed. The damage was there. The effect was there, in the arithmetic, doing its work in private. What you saw was an ordinary sword having an ordinary day. Both ends of that are fixed, and I would argue the showing is the point. In a combat system built on decks and timing, the flash on the hit is not decoration. It is how you know your build is working.

And a trainer who asks you to swap your combat deck was not accepting the swap when you did it with the hotkey. Do it through the menu and the task completes and everyone is pleased. Do it with the hotkey and you got a blank stare and no credit for a thing you had plainly just done in front of them.

The hotkey is how everybody does it. That is rather why we made a hotkey.

Now, three things about your possessions. If you stored a container at one bank and then double-clicked it while standing at a different bank, it would leap into your backpack, uninvited. You were looking at it, you double-clicked to open it, and instead you picked the whole thing up and carried it off, which becomes an adventure if your pack is nearly full. It opens properly now.

The chat log has started reporting what farming costs you. Seed and water, spent, written down where you can read it back. That is a small change with a real consequence, because if you farm at any scale it is the difference between knowing your margins and guessing at them over a mug of ale.

And previewing worn items in the store gained a mouse wheel zoom and an up and down tilt. If we are going to ask you to spend money on how something looks, letting you turn it over and look at it properly seems the least we can do.

Two more items came in from the nightly sweep of the forums, and I want to be clear that these were written down rather than fixed. One player asked that a mirrored or flipped house layout survive a house update, so that an afternoon of careful arranging is not undone the next time we revise a building. And somebody reported a backpack container going missing from their inventory after using a Teleport to Friend scroll, which is the sort of report I do not enjoy reading over breakfast. Both are on the tracker now, in writing, where they cannot be quietly forgotten.

The rest went down fast. Buff sounds had been replaying every time you changed scene, so every enchantment on your body announced itself all over again at every zone line. On your own, that is a chime. In a party crossing a door together, it is a small orchestra tuning up.

A siege Cabalist had been standing inside a town shrine. Within the stone. A dread commander of an invading army, embedded in sacred masonry like a raisin in a bun, running the entire assault from inside the furniture where nobody could lay a hand on them. They stand beside the shrine now, out in the open and thoroughly reachable, which I suspect they will come to regret.

The swamp trees in the swamp player towns had their collision wrong, so a tree was either something you walked straight through or something you could not walk around. And if you switched away from the game while it had your cursor hidden, your mouse stayed the game's property until you came back. Your mouse is yours again. That is twenty-three items closed, all of them at the middle priority, and not one of them the sort of thing that ends up in a trailer. They are the sort of thing that ruins a perfectly good evening, which I would argue is worse.

So that was Saturday. Almost no new code, and sixty-six proofs in two days. I have come to like these days rather more than I expected to. Code is easy to write and hard to trust, and a week spent earning trust is worth a month of typing.

Monday the code goes back in, and I am looking forward to seeing how much of it comes back marked failed, because that is the machine working exactly as it was designed to.

One last thing before I go. I asked why a chandelier took quite so long to sort out, and I was told the team got rather hung up on it. That is the joke. That is all I have. Good night from New Britannia, and go and switch something off.