The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Seven launcher versions and five stuck-patching causes
• The ninety-four and fifty-seven percent loading bounces
• Eleven towns get their own walking maps
• A tier ten elephant, and a tiny one for staff
• Chaos Bolt tells you its five outcomes

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British here, with word of what thy makers were about on the first day of October. The launcher that could not finish its work was taken apart and mended seven times over in a single day. Two numbers that barred the gate, ninety-four and fifty-seven, bar it no longer. The guards of eleven player towns have at last been informed that walls are solid. An elephant walks in Novia. And the Chaos Bolt will now tell thee what it intends, including the one cast in sixty that sends thee straight to the monster. There is a great deal. Let us start with the launcher, because yesterday was a long day.

Somewhere yesterday morning, a player was watching one file arrive at a kilobyte and a half per second. For more than an hour. It was not stuck. It was moving, barely. And our launcher had a rule about giving up on a download that goes quiet, so it looked at that trickle and decided things were fine. Any byte at all reset its patience counter.

We had built the most patient piece of software in the building. Left alone, it would still be waiting now, happy as anything, confident that progress was being made.

That was yesterday's fifth fix, roughly. Let me start at the top. The day before, players updating to the new build were getting stuck at a thousand and eighty-nine files out of a thousand and ninety. One big file would fail partway through and the launcher would start it again from zero, every time, forever. So the first fix made a large file resume from wherever it stopped. That shipped, and within hours the uploaded logs showed the same shape one level down: the path that fetches only the changed pieces of a file was restarting each piece from scratch. A new player was stuck at three hundred and twenty-five files out of a thousand and ninety. So the pieces learned to resume too.

Then we learned something I did not know. If you ask a download server for the middle of a file it has not finished loading yet, it will not answer you until it has loaded everything before that point. Far from the source, that can take longer than the launcher is willing to wait. Ask for the whole file instead and bytes start arriving immediately. So the third fix was this: when the piece-by-piece path fails twice with nothing to show, go and get the whole file. The fourth was that when the download network cannot finish a file at all, the launcher fetches it from our own patch server and keeps what has already arrived. Some players were stuck on exactly one file, every single attempt, even after a Repair. The file was perfectly intact on both servers. The fifth fix made that switch happen after about a minute and a half instead of four or five.

And then somebody stopped chasing one cause at a time. Every launcher uploads its error log. We read all of them at once, fifty-nine sessions on the current version, sorted by what went wrong and how fast the bytes were moving. There were five separate causes hiding in there. Thirty-one sessions were the patient trickle. Thirteen were two copies of the launcher updating the same game folder at the same time, each breaking the other's downloads. Seven could not write to their own install folder. Four ran out of disk space partway through and were left with a game that would not start.

The last two are the ones that made me put my coffee down. An install pointed at a drive root, or at a shared Games folder with other things in it, could have unrelated files removed by the step that cleans up old game files, because that step followed folder links wherever they led. Two sessions. Nobody wrote in about it, which somehow makes it worse. That cleanup now never follows a link, stays strictly inside the game's own folders, and first-time setup gives the game a subfolder of its own. The folder fight is settled by a lock, and the second launcher waits and writes down who is holding the folder. Repair fixes the folder's permissions with one administrator prompt, and the installer grants write access to everyone on the machine, because the person typing the administrator password is not always the person who plays. Free disk space is checked before a download starts rather than discovered during one.

Two more things went in that you will never see. When the launcher notices a new build by itself, it now waits a random moment, up to two minutes, so a release stops sending every open launcher at the same cold cache in the same sixty seconds. And every release now pushes the changed files into the download network before players are pointed at the new build, so the first wave is not asking for files the network has never heard of. The launcher also stopped describing itself as the Chaos Shard in its own title bar, which it had been doing in front of everybody for weeks.

And the old launcher said goodbye. Every install of the original launcher, on Windows, Mac and Linux, now updates itself one last time to a final version whose only job in life is to tell you there is a new version and open the download page. We tested it against the live servers with an untouched old install. It takes about two minutes. There is something a little solemn about shipping a build whose entire purpose is to point at the door.

Now, the gate. We had a tester who could not get into the world. He would reach ninety-four percent on his first login of a session, sit there, and get dumped back to the overworld. Eight attempts in one day, eight bounces. His crime was being organized. He had three thousand one hundred and forty-one different kinds of item in his bank. The bank list arrives twenty kinds per round trip, so that is a hundred and fifty-eight round trips, which on his connection took about a hundred and ninety seconds. The client's patience for loading your equipment was a hundred and eighty seconds. He was nine or ten seconds of tidiness away from being allowed to play.

The previous build had squeaked in at a hundred and fifty-four seconds, so this had been creeping up on us for a while. Two changes went in. Nothing on the way into the world actually reads your bank, so your character now spawns and the bank list streams in behind you. And that hundred and eighty second limit counts from the last sign of progress rather than from the start, with a hard ceiling much further out, so a slow load that is still moving gets to finish. The timeout message also names whatever never answered, which should make the next one of these an afternoon instead of a week.

Fifty-seven percent was a different animal. A player kept getting thrown out to the login screen during a zone change, with an error message that had a function name in it, and the server logs insisted the shard was perfectly healthy. Two clients on the same household connection were hopping zones at the same moment and neither finished the handshake with the new zone's server. The client gives up after about five seconds. The server was still politely holding her hello fifteen seconds later. Roughly three in a thousand zone changes on the shard yesterday did this. The client now redials twice before giving up, and if it still cannot get through, the loading screen explains what happened in words a human wrote.

Two smaller doors. Starting the game from Steam used to log you straight into the Steam-linked account, every time, so anyone with a second account had to log out before they could log in. The client now remembers how your last login on that computer actually went, and offers you the form if that is what you used. And the Steam button on the login screen read "Log in through" and then simply stopped talking. The old screen put a Steam logo after those words, the rebuilt screen dropped the logo, and the sentence lost its ending without anybody noticing. Thank you, Gravidy, for pointing at it.

Character select also went back to listing your characters in the order you made them. The server had never asked the database for any order at all, so the list followed whatever order the storage felt like, and a data reload would quietly shuffle your family. And a first start of the test client now carries over your keybinds, hotbars and options from the live game, instead of handing you the defaults and wishing you luck.

Here is my favourite piece of work from yesterday. In Taenby Landing, a patrolling guard was walking through the back wall of the magic shop. Not near it. Through it, with the confidence of a man who pays no rent.

Several of our player towns share a single scene. Seven of them share the one Taenby Landing sits in. Each town's own buildings live in a bundle of objects that is saved switched off, and the bake that works out where people can walk only sees what is switched on. So every bake of that scene, going back to when it was built, recorded the town centre as a lovely flat open field. The guard was not clipping through a wall. In the only map he has ever been given, there is no wall. The shops are a rumour.

We taught the bake to switch a town's own objects on, bake with them there, and put everything back afterwards. For Taenby Landing that removed five hundred and sixty square meters of floor that never existed, and added twenty where the upstairs shop floors became walkable for the first time. Forty-four of forty-five guard patrol points still resolve, and the NPC spawn points went from sixteen of eighteen to all eighteen. Then came the part I liked: an audit that measures, for every town sharing a zone, how much walkable ground sits underneath that town's own buildings. All seventy-two shared zones, measured. That is how we picked the eleven towns that got the afternoon's work, each one now loading a walking map built from its own layout.

So pets and townspeople now go around the statue in Brekken Bay, the ruins in Port Titan, the raised platform and shops in Aldwater, the house on the square in Platinum Keys, the galleons sitting on the shore at Pericaliya and Exile Island and Parrot's Roost and Nesoskia, the guardian statue in Etan Glen, the rocks in Smaragar, and the circle of stones in The Beyond. If you have ever watched your pet take the scenic route straight through a monument, that is what was happening. Teleporter wagons and boats at town exits account for most of the remaining oddities, and we left those alone on purpose.

Now. There is an elephant in Novia. Somebody went looking through the animal rigs already sitting in the project and found a complete elephant that nobody had ever used, so we built a creature on it. Tier ten, level ninety-nine, four hundred and fifty health, four thousand experience for the kill, and about one point eight meters at the shoulder, which is roughly half the size of a real one. It belongs to the same faction as the stags, so it will leave you entirely alone until you attack it, at which point it fights back with tusk strikes. You can field dress it for leather. It is summon-only for the moment while we look at the model in the world.

I should admit how the tusk strikes work. There was no elephant attack animation, so the elephant is swinging on the Massive Crocodile's attack kit. It looks, I am assured, completely fine. But somewhere in there is a crocodile wearing an elephant, and nobody is going to tell it.

And because the rig was already paid for, there is also a small elephant companion for our staff, about one point two meters tall. It follows you around, it can be set down in a house as a decoration pet, it grazes when you tell it to sit, and when you dance, it stomps. It is not sold anywhere and it cannot be traded. I simply want it on the record that someone on this team spent part of their day teaching a tiny elephant to dance badly, and I approve.

Chaos Bolt. For a very long time, the Chaos Bolt skill card told you its range, its cooldown and its reagents, and absolutely nothing about damage. The reason is almost sympathetic. Chaos Bolt picks one of five outcomes per cast, and the standard tooltip layout would have listed all five stacked up together, which reads like one cast doing every single one of them. So somebody switched the damage display off, and then nobody thought about it again for years.

It now says "One outcome per cast" and lists all five with their odds. Fire with a burn, about a third of casts. Cold with a slow, about a quarter. Lightning with a chance to stun, another third. A curse that leaves the target hitting harder, about eight in a hundred. And one and a half times in a hundred, the Chaos Bolt teleports you to the target. It has always done that. Every Chaos mage listening already knew, because it has happened to them, in a dungeon, at a bad moment. Night Step's card now also admits where it puts you, which at night is behind the thing.

That was part of a wider run of tooltips learning to tell the truth. Valiant Warden used to print its ward as a protection modifier of eighty-five percent, where the real answer is that a well-built warden takes forty-six percent of each hit meant for the ally. Coup de Grace now states the target health its execute bonus actually starts at, worked out from your own blade specialization. Three heavy armour descriptions credited specialization for making their buffs last longer when the skill itself does most of that. Defensive Stance said it strengthened "your defensive skills" and now names all ten of them. Charged glyph tooltips quoted their single-charge duration no matter how many charges you fed them, so Pet Speed Training promised twenty seconds where six charges ran forty-five. And Rend stopped telling you the target does not need to be bleeding, in a sentence sitting directly beneath the line about Rend opening its own wound. Most of these came from one player working methodically through the heavy armour tree and filing every discrepancy through the in-game Oracle, and I am grateful for it.

Three things about your bags. Each bag window remembers where you put it, on its own, so they stop swapping places depending on the order you opened them. Dropping items onto a bag now puts them inside the bag, including a whole Shift-selected group, which previously did nothing at all. And the Delete key opens the destroy confirmation for whatever you have highlighted, while Delete in the search box still just deletes a letter.

Three things about your house. Light Settings now tints the lamp itself, so the colour and brightness you pick reach the glowing shade and the candle flame instead of only the invisible light inside. A placed practice archery target can be picked up and moved again, because pressing on it was selecting it as a combat target rather than grabbing the decoration. And broadcasting phonographs reach a whole player town again. Since August they carried about fifty meters, which in most towns means the music was a private concert for whoever stood closest.

Crowns learned to explain themselves. If some of your crowns are locked, or sitting inside a locked bag, every payment path used to count them as spendable, accept your confirmation, and then fail with something vague. The beautician at New You was the worst offender, telling people to please try again later, forever. The Crown Shop, deed upgrades, plot storage fees, dungeon points and packaging for trade now count only what you can actually spend, and say how many of your crowns are locked away.

Bards, I owe you an apology. If you were in Performance Stance and you put your instrument away, the stance pushed it straight back into your hands five seconds later. Along with the slow performance walk. And then did it again. And again, for as long as the stance lasted. A bard trying to leave a venue was being handed their own lute every five seconds, like a very persistent waiter. Putting it away now means putting it away.

One more, and this one is on me personally. The hanging rod on the Lord British Banner had rings that rendered as bright pink squares, because they pointed at a material that never existed. My own banner. In my own game. With hot pink curtain rings. They are blue now, alternating with the yellow as was always intended, and Barugon reported it, so Barugon has done more for the dignity of the crown this week than I have. Barugon also sent in a wishlist suggestion we have filed, for some way to slow or stave off Vigor decay.

A hundred and thirty-two tracker issues closed yesterday, ninety-two of them bugs. A large block of those were interface items from the ongoing conversion, and they cluster into themes rather than stories. Several windows went back to reporting things they had stopped reporting: the attention dots and new-sale stars on the Crown Shop and Rewards buttons, the Sale Ends timer that was getting clipped in half, the skill column's level-gain numbers that had become dark smudges. The compass letters on the round minimap now fit the gold ring at every size, measured across six theme fonts, having previously been out by as much as seven pixels. And you can choose your interface and title fonts in Options without changing your whole theme.

In the fix-the-small-indignities department: creature nameplates rise as you zoom out instead of parking the health bar on top of the creature's face, cat mounts play paw steps instead of hooves, horses stopped being soundless on wooden bridges, map fog always clears the ground directly under your feet even in tunnels too tight for the sight check to notice anything, and the Linux client learned to type accents and apostrophes, which it had been quietly refusing to do to every French speaker on the shard. A greyhound in Castle Atos now spawns when the town loads, rather than when somebody walks to the exact spot he should already be standing on. A merchant in Lamech's Bazaar was taking your gold for a key stone and then not handing it over if you had ever bought one before, which we have had words about. And a banker in Brittany Wharfs who had been saving up his one line about safe storage and then saying it a dozen times in a row has been limited to one unspoken line at a time.

Behind the scenes, a new moderation bot started watching the community Discord for harassment, threats, scams and the posting of people's private details, and it also collects the questions nobody answered so the Oracle can learn them. Its first live outing was instructive. It rated a direct insult as low severity and a posted home address as medium, while being ninety-nine percent certain of both, so it now decides by category and confidence and has stopped being asked for its opinion on how much things matter. We also cut about three thousand seven hundred lines a day of noise out of the server warning log, which makes the real problems much easier to find. And the first copy of each Songs of the Sundered Blade cylinder is now a guaranteed drop, after a player killed Xavara six times at a thirty percent chance and came away with nothing but the odds.

That is the first of October. A long day on the launcher, an elephant, and eleven towns where the walls finally exist. What I am looking forward to is the quiet that comes after a patching week, when the logs are boring and we get to spend a whole day on something that is only fun.

Before I go. We spent yesterday teaching the patcher to remember exactly where it left off, and we added an elephant. Which means that for the first time in the history of this project, our download and our largest animal have precisely the same feature. Neither one of them ever forgets. Good night, citizens of New Britannia.