The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Tamer's Grace, forty days of taming levels
• The Oracle's free reset stops unlearning everything
• A siege boss's health bar lied to everyone
• A full test run finds ninety-seven problems
• Castle Atos stopped hanging on the loading screen

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British here, with word of what your makers were about on the last day of September. Every pet that would no longer answer its tamer has been given forty days of grace. The Oracle will unmake your training without sending you back to the trainers to buy it all over again. A siege lord has been hiding his wounds from all but one of you, and that has been put right. And we loosed thirty-seven thousand tests upon the client and caught ninety-seven things we had broken, among them, to my lasting shame, a raccoon who had stopped digging. Come along.

Somebody on the chaos shard clicked a goose. Not a wild goose. A goose standing on a lawn, placed there by a player who wanted a goose on their lawn. The moment they clicked it, every attack rune on their bar went gray, and pressing any of them answered "Invalid target." The goose had taken the slot the game keeps for the thing you are fighting, and it would not give that slot back until you clicked somewhere else. About fourteen hundred times a day, across the shard, a decorative animal was holding somebody's combat deck hostage.

The reason is almost sweet. A house pet, a lot vendor, a merchant's pot: these are all built on a simplified body with no character behind it, and the game has always counted those as friendly. But when it went to look up which side they were on, the answer for a body with no character is neither side. Neither side is a perfectly legitimate thing to attack. So the click stuck. Pets still light up and show you their name when you hover them. They simply cannot be declared war upon any longer.

Here is the one I care most about tonight, because it was our fault and it took us two months to pay it back. In August we repriced five taming skills. Tame Creature, Summoning, Combat Training, Pet Attack Precision Training and Pet Hide Toughness Training all went to four times the experience they used to cost. The intent was reasonable. The effect was not. The same experience in your pools now bought fewer levels, and for a great many tamers Summoning landed below the number a pet they already owned requires in order to be called. So you had the pet. You had the bond. You had, in some cases, years with that animal. And it would not come.

So from today, every character in the world carries Tamer's Grace. Forty levels added to those five skills, on the ones you have actually trained, and the bonus drops by one every twenty-four hours until it is gone forty days from now. That is enough to call your pet tomorrow, and enough time to train the levels back honestly. It cannot be dismissed. Its tooltip tells you what today's bonus is and when the next point falls off.

The part I like is how it is built. It is not written into your character anywhere. There is no field that says "this one has grace." It is a single sum against the shard's own clock, applied at the handful of places where a taming level turns into power: the gate that decides whether you may summon at all, the rewards that raise your pet's level cap, the tame itself. Which means it reached every character at once. Characters that were logged off when we shipped it. Characters that do not exist yet and get made next Tuesday. And in forty days it stops mattering with nothing to clean up, nobody to migrate, no sweep through the database putting people back where they were. The whole thing is a date and a number.

Second gift, and this one is free for everybody this release. If you have ever walked up to a town Oracle and asked her to unmake your training, you know what used to happen. She gave you back your experience. She also unlearned every single skill on your sheet. All of them. So you stood there holding a very large pile of experience and a character who could no longer do anything, and before you could spend a point of it you had to go and find a trainer for every skill you wanted back and buy it again.

I have no defense for that. It was described as a reset and it behaved like a repossession. As of today she does the sensible thing: every skill drops to its lowest level and stays learned. All the experience above that floor goes back into your pools, every bit of it. If a skill you have learned depends on another one, that other one holds at the level it needs rather than falling through the floor and breaking its child. Masteries come down with the rest. Elixirs and specializations are left alone. Walk away, spend it however you like, and you never have to speak to a trainer unless you want to.

Now the siege one, which is a lovely piece of detective work and a reminder that in a game full of other people, each of you is looking at your own private copy of the same monster. Barugon reported that while fighting Nefas in Jaanaford, the Cabalist's health bar in his target window sat at the top of the bar for the entire fight, while the thing was obviously dying, because it did eventually die.

Here is why. For a creature like that, one player's machine is the one actually running it, and everybody else gets told about it over the network. A siege boss can be scaled up to twenty times the health its ordinary version carries, and that scaling arrives as its own separate number. Every other client was working out the boss's maximum health before that number showed up, and then nothing ever went back and did the sum again. So you had the boss's real, honest, falling current health being measured against a maximum from before it got big, which pinned the bar to the top and left it there. The one person whose machine was running the fight saw the truth. Everyone else got a propaganda bar.

It now watches for that number and redoes the sum whenever it changes, which also fixes the case nobody thought to ask about, which is walking into a siege that is already underway. The power bar under your compass is unchanged. That one follows the besieging army, and it had been telling you the truth all along.

Then there is the thing that ate the middle of the day. We ran the whole client test suite. All of it. Thirty-seven thousand five hundred and eighty-four checks in one run. Ninety-seven of them came back red.

That number sounds alarming and mostly is not. Forty-three of the reds were tests that had fallen behind the game, where we changed something on purpose and nobody went back to tell the test about it. Those were re-aimed, each one noting the change it had missed. Six are still red and each is waiting on a decision a person has to make. That leaves fourteen commits worth of real problems that no human being had reported, and it is the best argument for this sort of sweep I have ever been handed.

Because here is what it found. Raccoon pets had stopped digging. A file reference got rewritten at some point and the raccoon's dig animation was pointing at nothing, so the slot where digging lives was simply empty. No error, no complaint, just a raccoon standing there with its dignity intact. The totem-summoned Black Dragon was wearing effects sized for the full-grown version, which is five times its body. Two Baroque rugs could not be hung on a wall, because they had been copied from a leather bag, and a bag holds no opinion about walls. Custom themes saved in a settings file were being dropped when the file loaded. The bank's Refresh button was sitting outside the bank window whenever your gold total grew long enough to widen the row under it. And the fix from the day before, the one that brings a placed statue or chicken or practice dummy back after you walk away and return, had been undone by a merge.

Nobody files a bug report that reads "the raccoons are not digging." You would have to own a raccoon, be watching it, and remember what it used to do. The suite is the only thing in the building patient enough to notice.

One more large one, and it is the kind that makes people put the game down for the evening. Zoning into Castle Atos could leave you on the loading screen for about two minutes and then drop you out onto the overworld map, nowhere near where you were going.

What we had was a disagreement about how long a castle takes to load. When your client dials a scene server, that server waits for proof of who you are, and if nothing arrives it hangs up. Fair enough. The window it allowed was ten seconds. But your client runs that handshake on the same thread that is busy loading the town, and Castle Atos is a big town with a great deal of people and furniture in it, so on a slower machine that thread can be head down for ten to fifteen seconds straight. The server stopped hearing from you, concluded you had gone, and shut the door. Your client, still loading, then sat waiting out its own ninety-second timeout before giving up and sending you somewhere else entirely.

The server now waits thirty seconds. We found five of these in the logs since Monday, four into Castle Atos and one into Owl's Head, which is a satisfying number of hangs to be able to point at. The lesson is older than this game. Never let one side of a conversation decide how long the other side is allowed to think.

Three things for anyone who writes. Blank books now read Markdown files. Load From A File lists them, and a new Text Format choice lets you say whether a file should be read as Markdown or with the book's own style tags exactly as before. Headings become chapters. Bold, lists, quotes and dividers come through as the book's normal formatting. There is also a Preview, showing the pages as they will actually publish, and while a file is loaded, saving it again in your own text editor updates the preview on the page you were reading. That is the closest thing to a writing tool we have ever put in this game.

Centered lines in player books also sit in the middle of the page now, in the flat reader and on the three-dimensional page, where the Center button used to lose its marker on the way in. And books near the twelve-thousand-character limit that used curly quotes or long dashes would refuse to publish while the counter insisted they were under the limit. The server was measuring the upload in bytes and the counter was counting characters, and a curly quote costs three bytes. Both ends count characters now.

Money. A Crown Exchange purchase updates your gold and your backpack the moment it goes through. Until today the server was taking the gold and delivering the crowns perfectly well, and the window then told you nothing whatsoever until your next login. So it looked like a failure. One player, reasonably, tried again. And again. Eight bundles, eight hundred crowns and four hundred and twenty thousand gold later, they came and reported it. All of it had worked. None of it had shown up.

Vesper reported that standing beside a bard performing in a town did nothing for them, and it did not. The faster Vigor recovery only ever paid out if you formally chose Watch Performance and then kept facing the bard, and every way that could fail did so without telling you. Now being in the audience near a performer recovers Vigor on its own, about a point every seven or eight seconds against fifteen seconds standing in town alone, and around five while the bard is using Flourish. Your own Vigor bar shows over your head while you are listening.

Gravidy reported a button that ran away. Resting the cursor on the bottom edge of Resume, or of Play Online, made the whole window shudder, because the help text under the button was appearing, growing the panel, moving the button out from under your cursor, which made the help text vanish, which shrank the panel back. Every frame. The space for that text is now measured for the longest line it could ever show in your language, and it is only ever allowed to grow.

Two about long lists. The backpack scroll handle used to shrink to about three pixels on a full bag, which is not a thing a person can grab. Every scroll bar in the game now keeps its handle at least twenty-four pixels long. Dragging that handle to the bottom also used to stop short, with the wheel refusing to go further, so the last few items could not be reached at all. Every row is pinned to exactly the same height now, so the list stops changing length depending on which row happens to be drawn first.

Ninety-five tracker issues went closed today and I am not going to walk you through them. The broad strokes. The Oracle learned nine things players asked her overnight, got a whole new guide on books and writing because somebody asked how to import one and she had nothing to say, and can now tell you that there are forty-two repeatable quests in this game, thirty-seven daily, three weekly and two hourly, which nobody on the team could have told you either. She also needed telling twice that a merchant selling the recipe for sheet music is not a merchant selling sheet music. She was very confident about it both times. Her window finally remembers where you dragged it, too.

Then a drift of small indignities. Five guards and fishers scattered across the world have been failing to kneel for years, because their patrol asked for a looping kneel and never said how long to hold it. The button under the gathering meter was naming the wrong key, so players rebound that key to E, which stripped E away from Interact and broke their own ladders and doors. The mail Reply button used to show you a recipient list first, and clicking a friend in that list sent your reply to the friend. Chat logging would stop for the rest of a session after a single failed write to the file, without a word to you. Add-ons may now place twenty-five frames on your screen instead of eight, and can read every member of your party rather than only you.

And the rest in a heap. The Journal opens and closes with the sound of a book, and its task tabs put the newest thing at the top. Potions can be dragged onto your combat bar, which they could never do in any version of this game. A Chaos Trophy, half a meter of obsidian star, goes into the October login box for every account, and a Shiny Black Tricorn Hat takes the elm tree's place in the subscriber reward. The login and character screens draw proper black bars at the sides on very wide monitors instead of letting the loading art show through. And the Launcher now sends its own error lines back to us, so the next player stuck one file short of done does not have to go hunting for a log file to paste.

Tomorrow is the first of October and the switch, and I would rather be nervous about that alongside you than calm about it alone. Go and call your pet. Go and unmake your training and build the character you actually wanted in the first place. And if you meet Nefas, watch his health bar come down like an honest man's.

One last thing. We spent today teaching this game that a goose on a lawn is not an enemy combatant, which is a shame, because for a few weeks there, when one of them held your entire combat deck hostage, it really was a fowl target.