The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• A compass that lied about the rain
• An emote that ended a conversation for good
• Weapon effects that kept burning after you sheathed
• A long session that stopped getting heavier
• The chandelier in the Ancient Stone Crypt

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British before thee, with an accounting of what thy makers were about upon the Sabbath. Thy compass has ceased to lie to thee about the weather. A blade put away at last consents to stop burning. A chandelier in an old crypt may finally be snuffed. And a simple bow to a shopkeeper could end thy acquaintance with him forever. Not one line of new code was written yesterday, and yet twelve separate matters became true. That is the whole shape of tonight's show. We begin in the rain.

Picture this. You are standing in a field. It is raining on you. Rain is going down the back of your neck, water is running off the brim of your hat, and the sky is the color of an old coin. And you glance at your compass, at the small word in the corner whose entire job in life is to tell you what the weather is doing. The word said clear. In the rain. On a day you could hear from indoors.

That has been put right. Two parts of the game were each keeping their own opinion about the sky, and they had stopped comparing notes. Now the word on your compass and the water on your hat tell you the same story. A tester stood out in bad weather to confirm it, which is more than I would have done on a Sunday.

And I want to defend the size of that one for a moment, because it sounds trivial. It is not. Weather in this world does things. It changes what you can see, it changes the mood of a place, and in some corners of the map it changes how a fight goes. But more than that, every number and every word on your screen is a promise we made you. If the compass will cheerfully tell you the sky is clear while rain is running off your hat, then you have every right to start wondering what else up there is making things up. Small lies are expensive.

Now here is the one I have been waiting all day to tell somebody about. When you speak with a person in our world, the camera can swing in for a close-up on their face. Some people love that. Plenty of others switch it straight off, because they would rather keep an eye on the road, or because a camera that moves on its own does unkind things to the stomach. Switching it off is a perfectly ordinary thing to do, and a great many of you have done it.

So. Close-ups off. You are halfway through a conversation with a shopkeeper. And you do what any well-raised citizen does at some point in a chat. You emote. You bow, or you wave, or you laugh at your own joke. And the shopkeeper stops answering you. Not just for that beat. For the rest of the conversation. You could type at that poor soul until your fingers wore down to stumps and you would get nothing back but a patient, pleasant silence.

And the cruel part is who it caught. This was not some exotic corner case reached by standing in one particular doorway on a Tuesday. It caught anybody who had switched the close-ups off, which is a great many of you, doing something as natural as waving in the middle of a chat. There is no message telling you what went wrong. Nothing on your screen admits anything at all. It simply looks as though the shopkeeper has decided you are beneath his notice, and you wander off thinking the people of this world are rude.

The reason is almost sweet. An emote takes hold of your character for as long as the animation runs, and the conversation waits politely for that to finish before it lets the other party speak again. But the moment it was waiting for was bound up in the close-up finishing. And you had switched the close-ups off, so there was never going to be one. The conversation settled in to wait for a thing that could not happen. It would have waited all night. I believe it is the most courteous piece of broken behavior we have ever put in front of a paying customer.

You bowed to a shopkeeper, and he took it as the end of the relationship.

It works now whether the close-ups are on or off. A tester turned them off, went and found somebody to talk to, waved at them like a lunatic mid-sentence, and got an answer. That one closed last night.

Next, one that has been quietly embarrassing us in public for a while. A good weapon in this game does not just sit there being sharp. It glows. It burns. It frosts over at the edges, it crackles, it does the thing you earned it for. That is the reward, and it should look like something.

And then you put the weapon away, on your back or at your hip, and the effect kept right on going. The sword was away. The fire was not. So you would find yourself standing in the bank, in your good clothes, hands visibly empty, having a civil conversation about storage fees, with a small private bonfire burning over your shoulder. Nobody mentions it. Everyone can see it. That is the worst version of a room.

There was a version of this that was worse still, where the effect went on burning in the air roughly where the weapon used to be, attached to nothing whatsoever, performing away for an audience that had gone home. And spare a thought for anyone trying to be discreet about their whereabouts. Hiding is difficult enough without carrying a personal light source you have no way to switch off.

And this is more than a funny picture, because putting your weapon away is a piece of body language. It is how you walk into a tavern and say, without having to say it, that you are not here for trouble. It is how you stand in a crowd without everyone edging toward the door. If you sheathe your blade and you are still trailing flame off your back, you have not put anything away. You have put it away and kept shouting about it.

The effects now go out when the weapon goes away, and light back up when you draw it. Somebody sheathed a burning sword on the test server, watched the fire go out where it should, drew it again, watched it come back, and signed the thing off.

Here is the one that matters most to the people who play the longest. The client's memory would climb over a long session. I do not mean a quick errand. I mean the sessions where you log in on a Saturday morning meaning to do one small thing, and you next look up and it is dark outside and somebody in your house is asking about dinner. Over hours like that, memory use crept upward, and when memory use creeps upward for long enough, things get slow, and then eventually something gives.

What makes this class of problem so miserable is that you cannot easily prove you have beaten it. A crash, you can reproduce. A wrong number, you can point at. But a slow leak gives you nothing to hold on to. The game failing to fall over this particular afternoon is not evidence of anything. It is optimism wearing a nice hat. The only real proof is somebody playing for hours on end while watching a number that ought to go flat and then stay flat.

So that is what somebody did. A tester sat down, played a long session on the test server, moved through scenes, did the ordinary things you do, and watched. The number held. That verification closed yesterday evening, and it is the one I am most pleased about, because it is the one you will feel without ever knowing why.

It matters more here than it would in most games, because of the way people actually play this one. Crafters sit at a table for hours on end. Decorators fuss over a single room until it is right, and then start on the room next door. Town governors spend whole afternoons walking their own streets and moving things three feet to the left. Those are not long sessions by accident. That is the game doing exactly what it was built to do, and it should not get heavier the more you love it.

I want to say plainly that this is the least glamorous job on the entire list. Nobody comes to a fantasy world hoping to spend an afternoon monitoring memory consumption. We asked, and somebody did it anyway, on a Sunday, and that is the whole difference between saying a thing is fixed and saying a thing is probably fixed.

Now. The crypt. And yes, this is the second chandelier I have talked about in two nights, and I would ask you not to write in about it. In the Ancient Stone Crypt there hangs a chandelier, and in a properly built world a chandelier can be snuffed. You put the light out. The room goes dark. That is a tool as much as it is a fixture. Darkness in a dungeon changes what you can see, what can see you, and how brave your party feels about the next doorway.

This one would not go out. You could ask it as politely as you liked. The crypt stayed lit.

Light is one of the quiet levers in a dungeon. Put it out and the same room becomes a different room. A party that douses the lights ahead of itself and creeps forward is playing a different game from a party that walks in with everything blazing, and both of those should be available to you whenever you fancy them. A light that refuses to go out takes that choice off the table and hands you somebody else's plan for the evening.

A tomb, my friends, is meant to be dark. It is very nearly the entire point of a tomb. And ours has been lit up like a ballroom, night after night, which does rather suggest that whoever is buried down there was still receiving guests. Well. The party is over. The chandelier can be snuffed. Somebody went down into that crypt late last night and put it out, and the verification closed just before midnight, which tells you a fair amount about how our testers choose to spend a Sunday.

Then there is your interact key. One key, one job. Use the thing in front of me. Open the door, pick up the bucket, speak to the fellow with the hat. Near the bank, though, it had developed opinions about which thing you meant, and it was reaching past all the obvious candidates into the bank's own containers.

The bank is where people keep everything they care about in this world. Their crafting stock, their good armor, the thing they will absolutely need in six months. It is the last place on the map you want a key with initiative and a helpful streak. It was picking the wrong target, and picking it confidently. That has been sorted out, and the interact key now leaves the bank's containers well alone. Checked on the test server and closed.

That is very likely the most-pressed key in the entire game. You hit it a few thousand times a session without ever thinking about it, which is exactly why a key that occasionally does the wrong thing is so unpleasant to live with. The whole value of a habit is that you get to stop paying attention. A habit you have to supervise stops being a habit and becomes a chore.

Four smaller ones after that, and they all belong to the same family. Things that were supposed to tell you something, and did not.

The tooltip for the Judgment spell would not show you its damage or its burst numbers. A spell that declines to say what it does for a living. You could always cast it and find out, of course, which is one way to learn, though not a way I would recommend attempting twice in the same fight. The numbers on a spell are how you decide whether it is worth weeks of your training time. Leave them out and you are asking somebody to commit an enormous slice of their life to a hunch. It reads properly now, damage and burst both.

A deed is a picture of the house you are about to own, so it really ought to be a picture of that house. The village home deed for the Elven Hut was showing something else entirely. You bought an Elven Hut, and the paperwork showed you a stranger's home. It shows its own house now. The store description on the market lot deed had a related complaint and has had that seen to as well.

And then the ice hot tub and the training orb, which were both grumbling every single time a scene loaded them in. You never saw the grumbling, but somebody on our side has to read it, and it buries the things that actually matter. An ice hot tub is already a contradiction in terms without also being an unhappy one. Both of them are quiet now.

Two more went through in the small hours. The automatons sound the way an automaton ought to sound, that buzz underneath the voice is confirmed working out in the world, and the experience tab now explains how pooled experience actually behaves. That last one was overdue. Handing somebody a large number with no explanation attached is a riddle, and people deserved better than a riddle.

One new report went onto the tracker as well, out of the nightly sweep through the forums. Somebody found a hump in the terrain, in the corner of a lot in a player-owned town at Celestis, big enough that you cannot place a decoration on it. It is filed and it is waiting for somebody's shovel. A patch of ground that will not hold a flower pot sounds like nothing at all, right up until it is your corner and your flower pot.

And that is the shape of the day, honestly told. Three commits went in yesterday, and two of them were about this very show, which is either admirable focus or deeply embarrassing depending on where you happen to be standing. Not one line of game code was written on Sunday. Twelve things became true anyway, because twelve fixes that were already written finally got proved by people who did not write them. That is two weekend days running now. I will take it, and I will keep taking it.

What I am looking forward to this week is the code moving again, because a weekend of proof is a fine thing but sooner or later somebody has to go and build something new. My thanks to everyone who spent a Sunday standing in a dark crypt, or waving at a shopkeeper, or watching a memory graph on our behalf. You are the reason we get to say fixed and actually mean it.

And on the compass and the sky finally agreeing about the rain, I will say only this. It took us a while, but we cleared the air. Good night, citizens of New Britannia.