The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Offline companions summon, fight and retreat
• The Hidden Vale overworld gets ambient sound
• World entry stops waiting on your bank
• Seven towns stopped drowning their visitors
• The Clink riot finally opens the cells

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British here, with an accounting of what thy makers were about on Wednesday. Thy companions may at last be called by name, and they have learned to fight at thy side rather than stand and admire thy footwork. The Hidden Vale has its voice back, having been the quietest continent in all the world. Seven of your player-run towns have stopped delivering travelers into the sea beneath them. The prison riot in The Clink can once more open its own cell doors, which one would think is the whole idea. And somewhere in the woods, a cow has been telling people the time. We shall begin with the cow.

Here is what happened. A little while ago we taught the townsfolk to answer you when you ask them what time it is. They read the hour off the world clock and say it out loud. Small feature. Charming. And then a report arrived from a player who had asked a cow. The cow told him. In plain English. So did a dog, a cat, and a bear. Every creature in the game that carries a conversation file of any kind had been issued a pocket watch and the manners to use it. That is fixed. Only the speaking races recite the hour now. The bear has gone back to making bear noises, which is what the bear is for.

Now. The big one. Offline companions.

For a long time we have shipped three companions who will travel with you when you play offline. Fiona FitzOwen, Conrad Dupre, Ariel Rosehaven. Good characters. Written, voiced, modeled, standing right there in the game. And until yesterday, there was exactly one way to summon them, and that one way did not work. It handed the summon no item at all, the check that makes sure you actually own the thing refused it, and then the command printed the word success and walked away whistling.

It was, I think, the most confident liar we have ever shipped. It told you it had done the job. It had done nothing. There was no companion. There was never going to be a companion.

So there is a proper chat command now. Slash companions, and it will list them, summon one by first name, swap one in when all three slots are full, and dismiss one. The dismiss is worth a word on its own, because the conversation line that was supposed to send a companion away had been making that companion hostile instead. You would say, thank you, that will be all, and your loyal friend would turn and draw on you. Severance in New Britannia is a serious business. She dismisses now. She leaves. Nobody swings at anybody.

And then the part I actually enjoy. They fight like themselves now. Every one of the three had been running with no personality authored at all, no abilities tied to being hurt, and in Ariel's case none of the magical attunement that every other caster of her level walks around with, so her spells landed like a polite suggestion. Now Fiona and Ariel lean toward healing and support, and Conrad leans toward getting between you and the problem. Conrad goes berserk at half health and unleashes Whirling Blades when enraged. Ariel throws a Ring of Fire at half health and blinks out when she is nearly gone. Conrad will buff your damage resistance. Ariel will root what is chasing you and haste you out of it.

They also know when to step back. A badly hurt companion now falls back to your side and holds there until it has some health again, then rejoins the fight. Ariel breaks off at thirty-five percent, Fiona at thirty, Conrad at twenty-five, and each returns fifteen points above that mark. Before this, all three stood and swung until the last point of health was gone, which is brave, and also why you kept having to scrape them up. It is a short step out of melee rather than a panicked run, so a healer keeps healing while she backs away. And the thing you will notice first: a companion in its normal stance now joins whatever you are fighting without being told. It used to fight only on an explicit order, or for about three seconds after something hit you, and then it went back to watching. It had opinions about your technique. It kept them to itself.

One more, because it is my favorite sort of bug. A companion's level was worked out by taking nine tenths of your level and adding it to the companion's own starting level, with no cap on the answer. So a level five character had a level nine bodyguard. A level twenty character had a level twenty-three one. Your hired help outranked you, permanently, and the gap was baked into the arithmetic. A companion's level now follows yours and stops there. Four more are planned for the last quarter of this year, promoted out of the story: Edvard the Wanderer as a healer, Captain Bearfield as an archer, Marcus the Vigilante as a rogue, and Captain Kinsey as a tank who will take the shouting for you.

Second story. The Hidden Vale had no sound.

Not thin sound. Not quiet sound. None. You could cross that entire overworld map and hear your own footsteps and nothing else at all. Novia carries thirty-five ambient emitters. The Episode Two continent carries thirty-one. The Hidden Vale carried zero. There were three hundred and twenty-five audio sources sitting in that scene, and every one of them was a birthday firework rig holding no sound file, plus a single mimic noise. Three hundred and twenty-five speakers, all unplugged, and one mimic.

The player who reported this reported it as two problems. No ambience on the world map, and the Ambient volume slider does nothing.

Those are the same problem. The slider was working perfectly the entire time. It was faithfully, precisely adjusting the volume of silence. Turn it up, more silence. Turn it down, slightly less of it.

That map now carries twenty-four emitters and thirty-seven looping sources. Surf and gulls around the whole coastline. Town murmur over Kingsport, Braemar and Owl's Head. Forest beds through Ravenswood, Kingswood and Greymark. Marsh on all three swamps, the river north of the vale, and wind across the Wyrmsands, Wynton's Folly and the Moors of Northshore. The forests follow the clock, so you get birds by day, an owl at night, a dawn chorus in the morning and crickets at dusk. The hour is decided by the sound mixer rather than by the emitters themselves, which is why a forest can change its mind four times a day without a single extra object in the scene. The levels and the falloff curves were copied from the emitters the other two overworlds already ship, so nothing in there is a fresh guess at how loud a gull ought to be. Go stand on that map tonight and listen for a minute. It is a different place.

Third. What the game was doing while you stared at the loading screen.

We found this by reading two days of logs off the test shard. On the way into the world, before it would let you in, the game was loading every distinct kind of item sitting in your account bank. All of it. That work exists so that searching all your stuff is fast later on. The median was ten seconds. The ninetieth percentile was twenty-four. The worst single case was fifty-three seconds. Fifty-three seconds of you watching a progress bar because the game wanted a complete accounting of your storage before it would open the door. And if you had ever banked a player dungeon room, that one item dragged an entire room in behind it.

Nothing on the way into the world actually needs that list. So it loads in the background after you arrive now, twenty items at a time so it does not elbow anything else out of the queue, and it checks whether a loading screen has appeared before every chunk, so a zone change part way through cannot turn the rest of it back into a blocking job. On top of that, zone loads now mount the big shared map files in the background before the scene itself loads. In ten days of logs, twenty-five sessions had the loading screen sit completely frozen for ten to twenty-two seconds at exactly that step. Those two changes together are the biggest thing you will feel tonight, and you will feel it as an absence, which is the fate of all good loading work.

Fourth, and this one is a centimeter of arithmetic with a body count.

If you have arrived at Forewind, Aldwater, Endurance, Port Titan, Coral Cove, Brekken Bay or Taenby Landing lately, there is a decent chance you arrived underwater, beneath the town, in the sea. All seven of those player-run towns are built from one shared template, and that template's arrival point sat one centimeter above the ground. One. Every arrival then gets a random spread of about a meter in some direction, for the very good reason that we would rather not have ten people materialize inside each other. And the ground across that circle rises and falls by a few centimeters.

So when your random meter put you over ground that was a hair higher than your feet, the rule that settles you onto a surface refused that ground, quite correctly, because it was above you. It went looking for the next surface down. The next surface down was the water bed underneath the entire town. Roughly half of all arrivals. A coin flip. Every time. At seven towns. The fix is that the arrival point moved up by a little over a meter. One number, in one scene, and seven towns stopped drowning their guests.

Fifth, and I have been looking forward to this one all show.

The Clink. Our prison. It has a riot scenario, which is exactly what it sounds like, and the riot is supposed to open all twelve cellblock doors. Those doors have not opened in a very long time, and the cell doors also drifted out of step between players, so two people standing in the same corridor saw different doors. A riot in which nobody can get out of their cell is not, I think it is fair to say, a riot. It is a strongly worded complaint.

And the reason is lovely. The doors were never late. They were there the instant the scene came up, and they paired themselves into a group so that every player would see the same state on every door. Then, several frames later, the switch that runs the riot switched itself on, and that switch names all twelve doors. So the group was rebuilt around the switch, every door lost the shared name it had already agreed on, and the switch, finding itself in a group that made no sense, shut itself off. It turned itself on and then talked itself out of it. Shared doors, levers and switches now wait until a scene's variant has come up before they pair off at all. The riot opens the cells. The doors agree with one another. Bring friends.

Now a handful of smaller things that will improve somebody's evening.

Three about your crafting. If you tick Use this container for crafting while the chest's own window is open, that sticks now. Closing the chest used to put the old setting back, which is why the only reliable way to change it was to pick the chest up and set it down again. Locking and unlocking with the window open was being undone the same way, and that sticks too. Ticking and unticking quickly with a crafting station open could leave the station working off the old answer until you closed it, and the station catches up within a few seconds now. And Use lot storage works at a crafting station inside a player dungeon in Adventure Mode, where it had only ever worked in Decoration Mode, because the station was asking whether you were allowed to decorate. If a chest of yours lost a setting along the way, tick it once more. Thanks to Gravidy and to inuphet for the reports.

Two about your things staying where you put them. Decorations whose base is gone, the classic case being items left on a table that somebody picked up four years ago, used to vanish on every single visit without a word. The next time the owner loads that lot, those items get moved into the decoration list, where you can place them again. And gear you take off or put on in the last second before a zone change stays that way now. That change could outlive the room it was made in and then get dropped, so a helmet you removed at the gate could be back on your head when you arrived, or worse, be recorded against the next character you logged in.

And three small mercies. Loading a settings file with Window Layout ticked moves the windows that are already open, instead of waiting until the next time you start the game. Town hover panels, and the destination lists on wagons and balloons, say Discovered or Undiscovered in actual words. And two separate four-minute waits are gone: the one after a server restart where you sat reading a message about your character leaving the previous scene, and the one where being turned away from a town you are banned from left you stuck on the loading screen at every zone change afterward.

The lightning round, and I have to open it by pointing at ourselves. Three of this week's releases to the test shard died within seconds of starting, all the same way. A job would be cancelled to make room for the release, the editor it had started kept running, and the next job walked straight into a locked project. Every build step now goes through one guard that kills what is left behind, waits until it has actually gone, and takes the editor down with it if the job dies. That took four attempts across the day, and the fourth was mostly the guard learning to say that the machine needs a reboot instead of falling over on the way to saying it.

A pile of log noise went down at the cause rather than being muted. The crosshair was reporting itself as leaked on every zone load. A right-drag camera turn that ended during a load left your mouse pointer hidden for half a second. Rooted plants, which famously cannot walk, were filing formal complaints about their walking speed. And a Cabalist killed during a town siege used to have his corpse disappear at the instant the siege ended, before anybody could loot him, which is a poor reward for the effort. He keeps a normal corpse timer like everything else now.

Beyond that, sixty-two items came off the tracker, most of them verifications finally signed off. The guide wisp stops throwing a fit when the vendor it was leading you to stops being a destination. Blank Sheet Music no longer offers you an option it never supported and then wedges the window on the way. The lot list tells you it only opens in a town instead of doing nothing at all. Planter growth rates are held to the range we actually author. Recipes stop flashing No Recipe Found at you for a frame. And the launcher on Mac has stopped naming its own menu bar after the toolkit it was built with, which it had been doing, in public, for quite a while.

That is Wednesday. The thing I am most looking forward to is somebody standing on the Hidden Vale map at dusk with the crickets going, with a companion beside them who will actually swing at the thing that is biting them. That is a very ordinary sentence, and it took a lot of people a long day to make it true.

And before I go. I did ask one of those cows what time it was, back when she could still answer. She said it was half past pasture. I have been Lord British. Good night, and may thy dawn chorus find thee.