The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Stone connectors close every mismatched dungeon doorway
• The Isle of Storms tutorial gains an exit
• Eight hundred and ninety-two NPC lines audited
• Add-ons can build real game windows
• Elementals no longer immune to their own element

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British at thy service, with an account of what thy makers were about this Friday past. Hear then. Every mismatched doorway in the player dungeons is sealed at last with honest stone. The tutor upon the Isle of Storms will let thee go the moment thou hast had enough of her. Eight hundred and ninety-two lines of NPC speech were called to account, and nine and twenty of them were found saying the opposite of what was written for them. And the fog of war has fallen upon a hundred and eighty-eight more maps of this world, with honors for those who lift it. But we begin somewhere smaller. We begin with a piano.

So. Somebody is sitting in a player town, playing the Grand Piano. Really playing it, animation and all. And somebody else walks up, takes hold of the piano, and drags it out from under them.

This worked. It worked on chairs, on benches, on beds. You could stow a bed into your decoration palette with a person asleep in it. We did have a check meant to stop exactly this, and the check only looked at the top level of the furniture, while on almost every seat in this game the part you actually sit on hangs off that top level. So the check looked at a piano, asked whether anybody was sitting on a piano, and was told no. Furniture in use now refuses a drag, a Take Item, a stow and an undo, even when the person using it is somebody else. And furniture can no longer be dropped onto a player, which used to pop the poor soul out on top of it.

Now. The biggest piece of work on Friday was stone.

Player dungeons are built from pieces that dock together, and those pieces have twenty different doorway shapes between them. Dock a wide arch onto a narrow door and the two openings do not agree. What we used to do about that was paper over the difference with a flat patch, which held up fine from the middle of the room and fell apart the moment you walked over to it. You could step into the gap beside a narrow door. You could see past the stone into whatever was behind it.

The game now builds a real connector for each pair of shapes at the moment two pieces dock. The larger doorway gets walled in with its own stone, set back a little so it reads as a wall, with the smaller opening carried through it, a fitted square or arched frame around that opening where there is room for one, a step where one floor sits higher than the other, and a collider so your feet believe all of it. Three hundred and seventy-seven of the three hundred and eighty possible pairings build one. The other three already met exactly, and they were left alone.

Here is the part I like. To check the work, the team built a showcase room with all one hundred and ninety pairings docked side by side, and then wrote a tool that stands at up to forty-eight places on each side of every doorway, from the floor to above the arch, and counts every line of sight that gets past the neighboring piece's opening.

The first sweep looked from eye height, the way a person does, and reported that almost everything was fine. Everything was not fine. The gaps were above the arches, where a person never looks and a camera absolutely does. Run properly, floor to ceiling, the tool found gaps on one hundred and fifteen of three hundred and eighty doorway sides. It now finds none.

And because each connector closes out to whatever its own piece was already covering, the work exposed two holes that had nothing to do with docking at all. The ceiling of the Ancient Stone Stairs stops short above its lower doorway, so from those stairs there was a bright band looking straight into the next room. And one of the arched stone halls had a hairline crack along its floor at the doorway. Both are shut. If you build with twenty different doorway shapes now, you get walls.

Next. The first twenty minutes of this game, which is the part that decides whether there is a twenty-first.

Anaïs, who teaches the First Steps lessons on the Isle of Storms, will now let you go. At any lesson, you can ask her to end the tutorial. She asks whether you are sure, then sends you straight to the start of your chosen path, at Highvale, Blood River or Solace Bridge, with the starter weapons and potions if you had not reached her combat lesson yet. And if you ask her "can I leave?" in the very first room, she now points you at the exit instead of talking about lessons.

While we were on that island we found something I would rather have found some years ago. Every new spirit arrived on the Isle of Storms male. Every single one. Whatever you had in mind for your character, it arrived male and stayed male until you reached the Magic Mirror and sorted it out. The name screen now asks you, right beside where you type the name, your spirit arrives as what you picked, and the mirror opens with that already selected.

The Magic Mirror itself got rebuilt. It used to load a separate scene to edit your face, then reload the entire island when you were done. Two loading screens to adjust a nose. The editor now opens over the world, the camera holds on the island's own mirror, the mirror stops its drifting so it will hold still for you, your preview shows in the glass, and Finish puts your spirit into the new body where it stands with no loading at all. It ships switched off until it has had a proper run on the test shard, and the first playtest already earned its keep. Closing the mirror left name plates and chat bubbles pointing at the editor's preview camera, complaining into the log after every edit.

Two more from that island, both small, both the kind of thing that makes a tutorial feel written by strangers. New characters were starting with the Ranged deck equipped while Anaïs stood there telling them about Blades. They start on Blades now. And her recording of that same lesson skipped words, so she has been re-voiced, and the new take keeps every one of them. Also, ending the lessons early is now written down the same way as leaving through the lunar rift, because a mage who cut the lessons short used to arrive at Blood River and receive Edvard's cheerful directions to a spare sword on his weapon rack.

Right. Conversations. This is my favorite kind of bug, which is the kind where nothing crashes and everything is quietly wrong.

Most NPC lines in this world hide behind a list of quest flags. Say this line only if the player has done this and has not done that. Eight hundred and ninety-two lines in the game carry such a list, and on Friday the team read every single one of them against the rule the game actually uses to read them. Twenty-nine did the opposite of what their author meant. Lord Marshal Declan Robinson gave you his full formal welcome on every visit, forever, like a man with a head injury. Byron kept introducing himself in Crooked Shank to people who have known him for years. And the devotional caretakers' reminder to go and defeat all four Cabalists disappeared the moment you killed the first one, which is roughly when a reminder starts being useful.

The same pass turned up fifteen more errors in the quest data, and one of them is wonderful. Seven lines in the Save Mildryd quest had their flag lists cut off at two hundred and fifty-five characters. The flags that would have stopped you were in the part that got cut. So a player who threatened Mildryd could come back and take a second ending as well. Over in Port Harmony, the news hawkers could be praised twice. There is now a test that fails on any flag list ending at exactly that length, because that is never a coincidence.

Then the finale. When the Oracle handed you the prophecy hunt, the game set every player on the virtue ending of Episode One. All of them. Which means one of the three endings could never happen to anybody at all, and a second came up at random each time you walked into the Oracle Temple. The ending you get now follows the prophecy the Confluence Podium gave you. And players whose virtues were strong in everything except Courage had been handed a prophecy book written for somebody else entirely.

Two more from that pass I want to say out loud. The eight Pages of the Dire Prophecy, the Xanthous Lens and the three Vermillion shards could be destroyed from your inventory. The finale needs every one of them and nothing in this world gives a lost one back. They cannot be destroyed now. And since the twentieth of this month, an account earning its first virtue score or claiming its free lot deed on a long-played character had that first save refused by the server, because account-wide records were being numbered against the character's list instead of the account's. That is fixed, and those save again.

One more from that pass, and this one is a delight. At the end of the Battle of Solace Bridge, if you had dismissed Charlotte Gray and reached Edvard on your own, Charlotte delivered her thank-you speech anyway, in chat, from wherever Charlotte happened to be. Edvard thanks you himself now, with the same reward. And Robert Villines will finish his sentence when he agrees to join you. His voice used to cut off mid-word, because the copy of him standing in the scene walked out of it the instant you handed over his whistle.

Let us talk about add-ons, because the people who write them had a very good Friday.

Until now an add-on could paint some widgets on your screen. As of Friday an add-on can build a real game window. It describes what it wants as rows and columns, labels, buttons, images and bars, and it gets our own window frame, dragging, resizing, snapping, a saved position, your skin and your window opacity, with no extra work at all. Then text boxes, check boxes, sliders, drop-down lists and scrolling grids, with our own hover tooltips on any part of it. Then frameless strips that sit behind the game's own HUD, with a cap so one add-on can never cover more than about a third of your screen.

There is a rule running underneath all of that which matters more to me than the toolkit does. Every add-on window sits on its own layer behind every real game window, and carries a tag and the add-on's name that its title cannot cover up. You will always know what drew the thing that is talking to you. The store's review now reads out every window title and button caption in a package and flags any that ask for passwords or account details. And an add-on's key checks answer false while you are typing in chat, so an add-on cannot read what you type.

The review pass on the new toolkit is a good list. The X on an add-on window always closes it. A window you have closed cannot be forced back open for three seconds, even by rebuilding it from scratch, so nobody can ship you the add-on version of a pop-up that will not go away. Hiding a text box hands the keyboard back to the game. And a click on an add-on window now reaches only the add-on that made it, which I mention because until Friday a click went to every add-on you had running. All of them. At once.

Two confessions in the same area. The call that lists your equipment failed whenever a slot was empty, which is to say for nearly every character in the world. And the call that lists your inventory had documentation promising quantity, weight, value, durability, crafter and icon, and what it returned was names. Just names. There are new calls now that return all of it, the old one still behaves the way it always did, and the documentation has been corrected to describe the thing that exists.

To go with all that there is a sample add-on called Avatar's Companion, written to be read and copied: a character sheet, a bag browser with real item icons, your active effects with timers, and a journal, all in one game-styled window, plus a compass on the HUD, with its own artwork. Ten files, each one covering a different part of the interface. Add-ons can also be told now when your target changes, when a buff starts, when you enter combat and when your bags change, instead of asking the game about all of it over and over, every frame. And the documentation site finally has the example add-ons the guide has been linking to. They were never published before. That is embarrassing, and it is done.

Combat now, and I want to start with the best sentence in Friday's notes.

A tester killed Brign, Lord of Water, on his own, by summoning a Water Elemental and standing back. Brign is a Lord of Water. His attacks are made of water. The summoned elemental was immune to water. So it stood in front of him and absorbed everything the Lord of Water had, indefinitely, at no cost, while the tester got on with the job. Elementals now resist their own element at half instead of being immune to it, which also means fire finally hurts Fire Elementals, lava golems, Pyre and the Spawn of Pele. Fire Elementals standing in lava remain perfectly comfortable, because some things are sacred.

The next one is less funny, and it has been wrong for a very long time. Knocking a creature down or stunning it while it casts is supposed to stop the spell. The cast bar turned red, and the bolt, or the heal, or the buff, landed anyway. The creature's mind stopped watching for interrupts about a sixth of a second into a two-second cast, so for nine tenths of every cast in this game nothing you did could stop it. The same gap had also switched off the rule that lets a single heavy hit interrupt a creature's cast. Both of those work again. Melee creatures still get to land the blow they are already swinging, which is fair.

Related, and from the same corner. A stunned creature already could not dodge, but its armor could still turn your sword aside while it stood there helpless, so you were taking glancing blows off a target that was unconscious. And a Shadow Spider stunned partway through a swing would still land that swing a moment later, which players quite reasonably read as heavy armor eating their damage. Both are fixed, and stun chance and duration are untouched.

Two matters of honesty. Discharge and Chain Lightning have always lowered the air resistance of whatever they hit, and the icon on the target only ever mentioned the stun, so half of what the spell did was a rumor. The icon says both now. And the Air Magic specialization description states plainly that the earth resistance it lowers is your own, which it always has been.

Bolster Balance had two things done to it. It now plays a casting animation, because it used to work perfectly while your character stood stock still with a glow on the hands. And it softens spell critical hits as well as weapon ones now, scaled by your Arcane Defense, so at a hundred in both, a spell crit that would have landed for double damage lands for about one and two thirds.

Last from combat, two for your ears. Stacked bleeds, burns and poisons were firing the hit sound five times a second, which turned a poisoned fight into a woodpecker. One tick sound a second per target now, with the damage numbers still showing on every tick. And combat sounds from a fight clear across the zone had been sitting at about a fifth of full volume at any distance whatsoever. They go quiet now past the range each creature was built for, which is thirty-five to fifty meters for most of them.

Three things about your map. Fog of war now covers every map in the game except the Isle of Storms and the three starter scenes, which is a hundred and eighty-eight more maps than before, towns and cities included. Three hundred and fifteen of three hundred and thirty-nine maps start covered, up from a hundred and twenty-seven. There is a new Exploration ladder counting the square meters you have personally uncovered, from Pathfinder at a hundred thousand up to Mapmaker at fifty million, and the server counts each revealed cell at its true size, which runs from one square meter in a tight dungeon to about nine hundred and ninety out on Jotungrund. Ground you cleared before the ladder existed starts counting at your first new reveal. And M now opens and closes the full map and does nothing else, with the round minimap on by default and given a key of its own.

Eight languages caught up on five weeks of English. Sixteen thousand three hundred and twenty-four lines, about two thousand and fifty per language, covering the Shield, Sun and Death skill additions, dragon and elf abilities, the forty Legendary titles, journal entries and loading tips. Chinese players had been reading two shield skills in English since the day they shipped. A second read corrected one thousand five hundred and thirty-three of those lines, mostly where a translator's term did not match the word the game already uses. There is a nightly count now of English still waiting, so five weeks does not stack up on us again.

A small pile of things we had already fixed once. Moving this project off its old version-control server left a handful of edits behind, and an audit went looking for them. The Ornate Wine Press had been standing in the world solid pink, because its wood and iron never came across, and pink is the color the game draws when it has no idea what it is looking at. The corkscrew was a gray shape. The Leather Bota Bag stood on end and was worth ten gold instead of a hundred and twenty. Two of the ornate tavern counters let decoration pets stroll across the countertop. Eight were found, the quick ones are fixed, and the rest are written down where they cannot be lost again.

And three players to thank by name. Ceal Astra asked for the gathering meter to wear the skill you are using, so it now carries quartz crystals for Mining, an oak twig for Forestry, a sage sprig for Foraging and a deer antler for Field Dressing, and the ring reacts to your swing, with a perfect hit throwing a white ring outward and a small burst of chips or leaves. The same player also spotted that the crafting station list had lost the coloring that greys out items belonging to a different station, and that is back. Barugon reported the launcher's language picker running off the right edge of the window on Linux, where all four pickers show at once. That row fits now. And Gravidy reported chat timestamps showing the wrong time of day on some machines, because the game had been working out your time zone instead of asking your computer for it. It asks now.

A hundred and thirty-four tracker items were closed on Friday, so here is the rest at a gallop. A creature killed on a pressure plate counted as standing on it until its body vanished five minutes later, which is why the fire arrow trap in Hilt Fortress almost never fired for anybody who had just had a fight beside it. A second trap in that same fortress had been built inside the stone under a corridor floor, where no foot could ever reach it. Every windmill in the world had its blades on the downwind side of the mast, pointing the opposite way from the pennants flying beside them. The Disco Ball Chandelier was scattering its lights across the floor of the room below. Two trees were growing through a house in East Perennial Trail. The name labels on the storehouse crates in Ardoris had sunk inside the crates. And a gold item worth nothing at all could not be picked up, which broke Take All on every corpse, chest and letter holding one.

The four Breach Lords are switched on for testing. Gael shelters players inside the Eye of the Storm, Wrauk drops a Burden of Stone the group has to share out, Pyre marks somebody with Kindle who then has to sprint clear of their friends, and Brign casts a Wellspring that only several players stunning it together can put out. Vitium's new fight is built behind a switch while it is tuned. And I should tell you that until Friday the throne court at the heart of his stronghold was still the forest camp the map had been copied from, so the seat of Cabalist power had tents, bedrolls and a few chests sitting in the middle of it. There are stone thrones in there now.

Also on Friday: a new public page listing what has changed between the old live game and the new one, fifteen hundred and fifty-one entries, each scored for how much it matters, and you can vote up the ones you want most. The new client goes to a private test branch on Steam with every build now, ahead of the first of October. And we took another pass over the team's own tools and locked a few more doors.

I will not be telling you which doors.

One last one, at my own expense. A test build of ours spent a day loading to a hundred percent and then stopping dead, because an interface file had been saved with the login screen switched off. You cannot log in to a game that has no login screen. There is a test for that now, and I have made my peace with it.

That is Friday. What I am looking forward to is the first person who builds a dungeon using all twenty doorway shapes purely to find out whether we meant it. We did. Go and try. And to whoever sat down and read eight hundred and ninety-two conversation lines hunting for the twenty-nine that lied: this world is better written because of you.

I did write you a joke about the fog of war. I am afraid I cannot quite make it out.