The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• The silent greeting at the Battle of Solace Bridge
• Every book in the world reads itself aloud
• Mounts lean for every rider, all twenty-nine
• Nine ghosts registered as shopkeepers
• Boss trophies delivered and a banker's trophy roll

Transcript

Hail and well met, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British here, come down from the throne with word of what your makers were about on Monday. Every book, note and letter in the realm now reads itself aloud in a living voice. Your mounts lean into the gallop, all nine and twenty of them, and now they do it for every rider in sight. Nine ghosts in a ruined steeple were found to be holding a shopkeeper's licence, which is why your spells would not touch them. And a certain wanderer at Solace Bridge would not greet you, because the world had written your name down as an exclamation mark. We begin with him.

So there is a fellow at the Battle of Solace Bridge called Edvard the Wanderer, and for some time now he has refused to greet anybody. He is not sulking. His recording is perfectly fine. Every other line he speaks comes out as it should, he answers your questions, he says goodbye at the end. It is only the hello that arrives as silence. A player called Knightrider reported it, and what was sitting underneath it is one of my favourite bugs of the year, because it had been happening to about thirty-five thousand characters and almost nobody had noticed.

Here is how it works. Some characters in this world will ask what you are called, and you can type a name for them, and from then on they use it. Or you can click one of the conversation buttons instead, which is what most people do, because it is quicker. And the click was being taken as your answer. What got written into that character's memory of you was the punctuation off the button you pressed. A lone exclamation mark.

So Edvard's greeting drew on screen with an exclamation mark sitting where your name should have been. And the spoken lines are matched to the words on screen, so when the words changed into something that was not a name, the audio had nothing to match against and stayed quiet. Edvard was not refusing to greet you. He was looking at a name he could not pronounce, and declining to try.

Thirty-five thousand seven hundred and seventeen of those names are on characters on the test shard, and some of them were written this month. So a great many of you have been introducing yourselves to the people of this world as a piece of punctuation, and they have all been far too polite to bring it up. Clicking a button now stores nothing at all. The character keeps its own word for a stranger until you actually type a name, and any exclamation mark already on file reads as no name given.

While we were down there, Edvard had a second problem, which is that his lines to Charlotte Gray were coming out in an automaton's voice. Some time ago a copy was made of another character, and that copy kept Edvard's name in a field nobody was looking at, and it had been claiming his relayed lines ever since. The tool that assigns voices now trusts the name a character actually displays over that leftover field, and the four affected lines were recorded again in Edvard's own voice.

And then the third one, which is the one that makes me wince. A brand new character arriving at the Battle of Solace Bridge for the very first time could come through the lunar rift and find the place nearly empty. No Helpful Automaton. Most of the tutorial zombies missing. No Edvard either. They would all appear if you left the scene and came back, which is not a thing any new player would think to do. Spawning now always measures from where the player actually is standing, and one slow creature load can no longer hold up every other character in the scene.

Solace Bridge is where a great many people meet this world for the very first time. So for a while, our opening act was an empty battlefield, a man who would not say hello, and a machine talking in his voice.

I can only apologise. That was not quite the welcome we had in mind. All three are fixed, and Edvard will greet you by name now, assuming you gave him one.

Now. The library. Every authored note, letter and book in New Britannia has been recorded. Six hundred and eighty-three texts. One thousand one hundred and sixteen clips. Thirty-two hours of audio. You pick a scrap of paper off a corpse, you open it, and it starts reading to you in Arabella's voice.

Twenty texts are left silent on purpose, and eighteen of those are cipher pages. A puzzle read aloud is a puzzle solved, and that seemed unsporting.

Fourteen of the letters are not read by Arabella at all. They are read by the character who signed them. The way those were found is rather nice: look at the signature at the foot of each short letter, and match it against the voices we had already cast. So if a letter is signed by somebody who has a voice in this world, you now hear that voice reading it to you. It is a small thing that does something quite large to a letter.

One of them needed a second take. Emily's letter to Quincy ends the way a fond letter often ends, with a long row of x's and o's. And the narration read them out. One at a time. Ex. Oh. Ex. Oh. Ex. Oh. For the full length of the sign-off, in a warm and serious voice. It says "hugs and kisses" now, the letter has been recorded again, and the tool understands that kind of sign-off wherever else it shows up.

Two letters that nobody could find have been given homes. Flynn LeClot's map of Penmawr Island was showing placeholder text and no map at all, which is a poor showing for a treasure map. It now carries its hand-drawn map with the red X on it, and it drops from the pirates on Penmawr Island. And Arabella's own farewell letter now drops on the Isle of Storms, where she is no longer waiting. The voice that reads you every book in this world had a goodbye of her own that nobody could reach. That bothered me more than it probably should have.

The last five books that had no home anywhere were settled at the same time. Two were placed, two placeholder copies were retired, and the Stone Dragon prologue stays a hand-given reward, which is what its author intended. Of the seven hundred and twenty-four books in this world, the number you cannot reach is now zero.

While the voice team had the door open, they went after something that has been embarrassing us for a good while. A hundred and sixty-five lines were recorded again, because the characters speaking them had been reading their own stage directions out loud. Torvold Leafturn in Braemar does not glare coldly and nod his head. Torvold announces that he glares coldly and nods his head, and then does neither of those things. Those lines are recorded properly now, and a gesture written between asterisks shows up in your chat log as an emote, in the emote colour, with the asterisks taken off.

And the town crier of Avallon has been saying the name of his own town wrong, with the stress in the middle. The banker two streets away has always put it on the first syllable, which is correct. Eight lines were recorded again, and the two of them now agree about where they live.

The mounts. The lean has been out with testers for a while: your mount noses forward into a gallop, rocks back when you pull up, and banks through a turn, with the rider's legs going along for the ride and the upper body held closer to upright. It was ridden and approved on Monday, and it keeps exactly the values it has been running with. No retuning.

Then somebody asked the obvious question, which is which mounts this actually covers, and the answer is all of them. Nothing anywhere asks what you are sitting on. Twenty-nine mounts. Fifteen horses, four reindeer, the big cats, the chicken, and the coconut halves. Yes. The coconut halves lean. I am aware of what I have just said.

There is now a test whose entire job is to fail if anybody ever narrows that to some mounts, because the coverage here is the absence of a rule, and an absence is the easiest thing to lose without noticing.

It is a setting too, in the Interface tab, on unless you turn it off, and it takes effect while you are still in the saddle. It saves per machine rather than per character, so every character you play rides the same way.

The known gap was that only your own mount leaned. Everyone riding past you sat perfectly level, which looks very odd once you have got used to your own. The fix is the part I like. You could build another rider's lean by watching where they end up, but their position gets corrected over the network constantly, and every one of those corrections would have come out as a twitch. So instead it is built from what they mean to do: the direction they are moving and the speed they are moving at, both of which the game already sends you, and the speed already arrives as a smooth ramp. Intention is smoother than observation. Riders far away tilt as one piece to keep it cheap, and riders your machine has stopped animating do not tilt at all.

The cats got their own fix. Lion, black panther, jaguar, snow leopard. Until Monday, when you jumped, the cat did not. It froze in its standing pose, sailed through the air as a perfectly rigid statue with a person sitting on top of it, landed, and then stayed frozen for several seconds afterwards with no footsteps at all, apparently thinking the whole business over. They leap now. Their step sounds were also moved onto the frames where each paw actually meets the ground, so you get an even four-beat walk, a two-beat trot, and a gallop with that little airborne pause in it.

Here is the one I would have bet money on and lost. In the ruined steeple at Highvale Outskirts there are Frostgeists, and players kept reporting that the Frostgeists up there would not take a spell. Every glyph greyed out. Invalid target. And yet you could hit them with a sword all day long.

That is a strange shape for a bug. Immunity is out, because the sword works. Range is out, because you are standing right next to it. The answer was in the scene data, and it has been sitting there for years. Nine of the spawn points on those stairs and floors had the ghost marked as a shopkeeper.

A shopkeeper. The game treats a shopkeeper as a thing you talk to, so every spell that cannot be aimed at a thing you talk to greyed itself out and said so, while weapon swings, which can be aimed at such things, kept landing. For years there have been nine ghosts in that steeple holding what amounts to a retail licence. You could stab them. You could not set them on fire, because as far as the game was concerned you were shouting fireballs at a merchant.

And here is the detail that must have driven people to distraction. The pair that ambushes you inside the steeple was set up correctly. So the first Frostgeist always died normally and the second one always refused, which sounds like pure nonsense right up until the moment you know why.

The nine entries have been corrected, and a creature whose faction players fight can no longer be marked as a shop when it spawns at all. If it ever happens again, the log will name the exact spawn point that did it. A sweep of all four hundred and forty-eight scenes in the game found no other case, which is the sentence I most wanted to read.

Boss trophies. You beat one of the great bosses of this world and you are owed a trophy for your wall. A number of you were not getting one, and the reason is a gap in the calendar. The update that carried achievement rewards arrived before the trophies themselves did, so everybody who killed a boss inside that window earned a trophy that had not been built yet, and those were written off as lost.

They are not written off any more. Those trophies arrive in your bank when you log in, up to three a login, and kills from before we started recording achievement unlocks in late August are caught up the same way.

More to the point, when one arrives, it now tells you. A line in your chat and a banner naming the trophy, or a message at your next login if you were not there to see it. Before this, a trophy turned up in your bank with no announcement whatsoever, which from where you are sitting is indistinguishable from not turning up.

And there is a new thing at every banker in the world. Say "trophies" to any banker and they will check the roll. Anything you earned and never received goes into your bank there and then, and a window opens listing every boss trophy in the game as in your bank, on its way, or not yet earned. If you lost one, the banker will make you another for five thousand gold. The replacement goes straight to your bank and cannot be traded or sold, because a trophy you did not earn should not have a price.

The art got fixed too, and this is my favourite part. There are nine Cabalists. Nine of the hardest fights we have. And every single one of them gave you exactly the same trophy: a satyr head. You could beat all nine, mount them in a row down your hall, and every guest you invited would quietly conclude that you had an unusually specific grudge against one satyr. Each of the nine now carries that Cabalist's own hood and mask on a wooden plaque, Vitium's with his single-eye mask, and trophies already hanging on your wall change over without you having to touch them. Twenty-eight trophy icons were redrawn as well, because they had lost their transparent backing and were sitting on little black squares in your bag.

Your maps had a day too. All twenty-seven of the shipped Novia area maps were drawn again with the current tool. Bright rock used to come out as white glare, a blue band ran around every edge, a couple of them had black notches cut out of the border, and eleven of them now run properly to the edge of the zone with the position marker put back where it belongs.

And there is a beacon command. Give it a set of coordinates, or paste in the line the game prints when you ask where you are, and it marks that spot on your compass and on your map. Nothing is placed in the world and nobody else sees it. It shows through unexplored fog, which is rather the point of it, and it clears itself once you arrive. The Oracle can set one for you as well, and she will accept "fifty metres north of me" as an instruction.

Night Vision was making the world darker. Since the eighteenth it gave you a feeble brightening close in, and past its reach it pulled everything below ordinary night, moonlight and torchlight included. So for several days the spell was worse than casting nothing at all. It brightens properly again, it fades back to normal night at the edge of its reach, and it takes back only the light it put there in the first place. Corpse nameplates also read a brighter grey while it is up, so the body at your feet is legible instead of nearly invisible.

Two things about your pet. An aggressive pet used to let go of whatever it was hitting halfway through its own swing, and then stand about or wander back to you in the middle of a fight. It holds on now, and on a hillside it can be twice as far above or below you, sixteen metres, before it gives up. Also, the buff icons under a creature's or a pet's floating name have stopped blinking. They hung low enough that the creature's own head was passing through them as it moved. Reported by Ceal Astra.

The other pet story is better. Pets placed on water lots kept walking off the dock into the sea and snapping back. Three previous fixes went after the pet's wandering. The actual cause is that every water lot ships with an invisible walkable floor stretched across the whole lot at deck height, with nothing beneath it but water. On one tester's galleon at Beran's Reach, a third of the lot's navigation was that phantom floor, and three quarters of everywhere the pet chose to wander landed on it. The pet was walking on water. The floor is removed now wherever there is nothing underneath it.

Two control changes. Your jump key cancels a cast that holds you in place again, the way it did for years. A change back in July folded that away under Prevent Movement While Casting, which is on by default, so most of you lost the quick cancel and were left with the escape key. It is its own separate option now, off by default, which is what Barugon asked for on the forums in the first place. And turning Auto-Attack off can now mean no basic attacks at all, rather than off still meaning click to swing.

The bards. Voice Training is retired, and every point you spent on it comes back into your adventurer pool the next time you log in. Vigor returns faster with music in the room: about twenty minutes to rested sitting in a town on your own, about ten watching a performance, and about five while the bard keeps dancing. A bard playing to an empty room stays watchable instead of closing up after two minutes of quiet. And a tip is a public act now, with a line in local chat naming the tipper and the performer, and the sound of coin for everyone nearby. Tip anonymously and it says someone tipped. The amount stays between the two of you.

Chat has stopped fighting you, as well. Selecting text used to get worse the longer you played, because a line that lost track of your mouse button kept hold of the pointer and took every click after it. Lines let go now. Clicking a line no longer leaves your arrow keys paging the log. And the theme editor offers five body fonts, three of which are decorative, so choosing one of those turned your chat, your task list, your tooltips and every store description into blackletter. The words you actually read stay plain now. Headings and buttons can still dress up all they like.

Loading screens are quiet. Loading into the Far Hinterlands used to give you crickets, an owl and a full night ambience playing away under the loading picture, at any hour of the day, which is a bold choice for a screen with no world on it yet. Scene sounds move onto the muted mixer the moment the scene activates now, and the same wiring exists in a hundred and nineteen scenes, so all of them get it. Wind is audible in windy weather again. A swamp tree in North Celestial Wetlands has stopped growing through a boulder. A cypress in the south has stopped loading as a blur. The Rustic Antique Shop in Central Brittany has stopped growing a shelf out of its chimney. And three butcher sausages have climbed out of the floor, one of which was buried so deep it could not be placed at all.

House flipping is switched on, and it has a button now, rather than a key that nothing on screen ever bothered to name. Building blocks pressed tight against each other no longer travel as one lump when you pick one up. The sliding doors in the Shogun palace have stopped bowing off their tracks and through the wall. We published a Mac launcher signed and notarised by Apple, and then we published another one shortly after, because the first was missing a library and could not update itself, which is a very particular sort of failure for a launcher to have. Both release scripts now check that a build has everything it needs before it is allowed out of the door. The nightly build also failed twice on the same packaging error, because the jobs only pick up changes to the pipeline when somebody reseeds them. They reseed themselves now, and the release refuses to start if any job is behind.

Chat moderation moved onto a different machine, which gives the build box its graphics card back, and it runs in review-only mode with a page where every flag can be marked correct or mistaken. The fishing prompt when a fish bites is large, amber and sitting under your crosshair, after testers told us the old one was easy to miss. Distant harvest nodes show their own tool, greyed out, instead of a generic arrow. Breakable objects tell you what you are breaking. And the journal's help text has learned the difference between its and it's, which a player pointed out with admirable restraint. A hundred and two issues closed on the tracker, and forty-eight testing tasks signed off. Eighty-six of those were bugs, and I am not going to read you eighty-six bugs.

That is Monday. The thing I keep coming back to is the beacon. It sounds small, but being able to point at a spot and say "there, that one" and have the world agree with you changes how people give each other directions, and directions are how a world gets shared. Thank you for playing, and thank you for reporting, particularly those of you who see something strange and report it rather than assuming it must be you.

And now, because I have earned it. Why did the ghost take a job behind the shop counter? He heard the place had great spirit. Good night, and I shall see you in New Britannia.