The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Call to Arms, a goal for the whole realm
• Three long client freezes hunted down
• A tree house learns its real footprint
• Pets finally hold a fight
• The Oracle re-checked against reality

Transcript

Hail and well met, citizens of New Britannia. It is Lord British, come with word of what thy makers were about upon Friday. The realm may now be called to arms as one, with a goal, a deadline, and a reward for all who answer. The long freezes that seized thee at every zone line have been hunted down and put to the sword. A certain tree house has at last been told how much ground it truly stands upon. And in the first quarter of the coming year there shall be pirates, and ships to sail them. But we begin with the satyrs, who have been standing very, very still.

Here is the thing about a satyr. When you knock one down, it is meant to fall over. Lie there a moment. Get up insulted. What ours did instead was stand bolt upright with both arms straight out to the sides, like a man being measured for a coat, and hold that pose for the entire knockdown. Every satyr in the game, including the Tartarus guards, who I had rather hoped were taking the job seriously. The animation for falling over existed. It had been sitting in the art set the whole time. The satyr was simply pointed at an empty slot.

And the archers were worse. A satyr archer's crossbow attack had been cut to play from frame four hundred through frame one hundred and sixty, which is backwards, so there was nothing in it at all. Every shot dropped the satyr into that same coat-fitting pose, loosed an invisible bolt, and carried on. Both are fixed. The raise, the aim, the shot and the recovery all happen now.

Right. If you have played a long session lately, you know the thing I am about to describe. You walk through a zone line and the game stops. Not for a second. For forty-five seconds, sometimes longer, and the longer you had been playing, the worse it got. Two reports came in from a laptop with eight gigabytes of memory, one after forty-six zone changes and one after twenty-six, and in both of them the game was sitting there waiting on something.

What it was waiting on was cameras that no longer exist. We have a system that draws decals, the scorch marks and the footprints and the blood, and to work out which of them are close enough to bother with, it keeps a small bookkeeping group for each camera. The trouble is that it kept one for every camera that had ever rendered anything, and it kept them forever, and a zone change destroys the old camera. So after forty zone changes you were carrying forty of these groups, each one politely aimed at a camera that had been deleted. The engine, finding a group pointed at nothing, goes and asks the asset loader about it. The asset loader is busy loading your new zone. So every frame queued up behind the entire scene load, which is why the freezes grew the longer you played. We now throw those groups away the moment their camera dies.

That was the big one. There were two more. Hovering your pointer over a place that shows a tooltip could lock the game for fifty-five seconds, standing in town, doing nothing, because the small icon that tooltip wanted was not in memory and it asked for it the blocking way. That request then got in line behind an NPC that was already loading. There are eleven of those icons. They all load at startup now, and the tooltip waits for nothing. At worst an icon shows up a frame late.

The third one is ours rather than yours, but it was the ugliest. The client can talk to a companion program over a local connection. When that companion stopped reading what we were sending it, the pipe filled up, and the game's main thread went to send one more line of chat and simply stood there holding it. Crafting chat was enough to do it. One report showed forty-five seconds. Another log from the same session showed a stall of three hundred and eighty-two seconds. That is six minutes and twenty-two seconds of frozen client because a helper program stopped listening. Chat now goes out through its own background worker with a size limit, and a companion that falls hopelessly behind gets dropped and can reconnect.

Now for the new thing, and this is the biggest piece of work on the board. It is called Call to Arms. A game master can set a goal for the whole realm with a clock on it. Slay four thousand kobolds in the next four hours. Catch this many fish. Mine this much ore. Craft this many of a thing. Every player on every server counts toward it. While it runs there is a gold line under your compass showing the realm's count and the time remaining, and clicking that opens a window with the goal, a progress bar, what is on offer, how much you personally have put in, and a list of the ten players who have contributed most, with your own rank among everyone who answered.

If the realm gets there, it can hand out a blessing for a few hours. More adventurer experience, or producer experience, or more gold from creatures and chests, or better yield from mining and logging and skinning. That can go to everybody or only to the people who actually turned up, and it shows on your buff bar. It can also mail an item to everyone who put in at least a set amount.

The interesting part is the counting, because a shard is many servers and they all have to agree on one number. The team reviewed that half of it before any of it reached the test shard, and the review found some beauties. A gather goal counted anything that landed in your bag, so you could pad it by salvaging your own gear or opening mystery boxes. A resource node marked your whole bag as countable after the roll, which meant you could fill a bag somewhere else, walk to a node, harvest nothing, and get paid for the lot. An item won on a party roll, meanwhile, never counted at all, because the winner's item goes straight into the bag and skips the hook that was doing the watching.

And then the best one. Credit earned in the last few seconds before the realm hit the goal was being thrown away. The moment the goal is reached, every other server's next write gets rejected, batch and all, including the per-player rows inside it. So the player whose kill landed in the same handful of seconds as the winning blow lost their contribution. If that kill was the one that took them over the line for the mailed item, they lost the item as well. The person who helped finish it could be the one person who got nothing. That is fixed, along with a per-player cap of thirty kills a minute so nobody can machine-gun the counter. Call to Arms reaches the test shard with the next update.

On to my favourite bug of the day. You could move your house, decorate the yard, and then find you could not move the house back to where it had been. The game said something was in the way, and it was right, in the sense that a lawyer is right. The check for yard decorations was measuring them against a rectangle drawn around everything the house draws on screen. For a Town Sized Treehouse, that rectangle is about thirty-six metres by forty-two, because it includes the canopy. Decorating happily lets you put things under a canopy. The house ignores them while it is standing over them. And then they block it from ever coming home.

So every one of the hundred and ninety-eight movable houses now carries a baked map of the ground its own walls and floors and trunk actually stand on, worked out on a half-metre grid, and only that ground can block a move. When they baked all of them, the median house filled about seventy-two percent of its old rectangle. The tree house filled six percent. Six. It is a trunk and some leaves, and it had been filing the leaves as architecture.

Tamed pets. Four separate things were wrong with them and they stacked up into one complaint we have heard a great deal, which is that your pet cannot hold a fight. Start with Pet Taunting Training. It runs in twelve-second windows, and when a window ended the pet handed every creature it was holding back to the tamer. Not only the threat from the taunt. All of it, including the threat the pet had earned honestly by standing there and being hit. So a pet held onto nothing past each window. Worse, the handoff copied the tamer's threat onto the pet instead of moving it, so you came out of every taunt with roughly twice the threat you went in with. You used a skill to make your pet take the fight, and the skill finished by making the fight more yours than before you started.

Then there is Aggro Power, which is the stat on your taming gear that is supposed to make your pet more interesting to monsters. It was reaching rune threat and healing threat only. It did nothing at all for the threat a pet builds by hitting things, which is the main thing a pet does. That now scales properly, and your own share of the pet's threat stays where it was.

Summoned elementals had a quieter version of the same insult. Every critical hit chance and critical hit damage bonus you were feeding them from gear and skills applied to physical attacks. An elemental attacks with magic. So all of it did nothing, and the spell critical rows on the Pet tab never moved, which is why they looked broken, because they were. Pets also got their pathing sorted, so one will no longer set off on a grand tour around a ledge or a stream to reach something standing four metres away, and under a taunt it now keeps its full threat anywhere inside its tether and yanks back anything that turns on you.

Here is a connection I liked. In the morning somebody built a drift check for the Oracle, who is the in-game guide that answers your questions. For each of her seventy-five knowledge pages it lists every change made to the game since that page was last verified. Seventy of the seventy-five came back with changes. So in the afternoon they re-checked all seventy-five, claim by individual claim, against the live game. Four thousand one hundred and twenty-one claims checked. Three hundred corrected. Seventeen thrown out as unverifiable.

The worst page was the one about options and settings, which was still describing the old options window and needed twenty-four fixes. The most consequential was spread across eleven skill and magic pages, which all said you can only train one specialization at a time. You can specialize in two schools. People have been planning characters around a limit we told them about by mistake. Shock Weapon, Answering Blow and Arcane Defense were missing from their school and trainer pages entirely. Her bard trainer answer was wrong as well. Oski is the only bard trainer, in Vikland and the Ruins of Utheim. The merchant and world data behind her got rebuilt from the current game files too, which took her merchant stock from one thousand eight hundred and thirty-nine items to one thousand eight hundred and eighty-seven, so asking her where to buy a thing now covers the last fortnight of additions.

The public roadmap caught up with the move, and it carries two new dates. Episode Two wraps up by the end of this year. Episode Three begins in the first quarter of next year, and it brings pirates, sailing ships, and the next chapter of the quest line. I have wanted ships in this world for a very long time. The page's fixed-bug line also went from six hundred and fifty to over a thousand, which is a strange thing to be proud of and I am proud of it anyway. There is a plan written up for replacing the official website as well, with a proper front page for newcomers and one signed-in hub for your characters, homes and deliveries.

NPCs learned to use their hands. When a conversation hands you an item or takes one from you, it asks that character to reach out. The reaching animation only ever existed for player characters. So in about forty conversations, the Tangulmyr guards, Trygve, the scribe in the Brittany graveyard and others, the NPC stood perfectly still, wrote a complaint into the log, and the item changed hands by what I can only assume was telepathy. They have a real grab now, male and female. While they were in there they also taught NPCs all sixty-seven emotes a player can learn, with props, so an NPC can hold a camera or a fan or a shovel. Tavern bartenders in player towns now clean glasses and wipe the bar. The Altruist Monks cough and ponder and meditate instead of staring into the middle distance.

Getting around got kinder. A Teleport to Zone Scroll used to drop you where you last stood in that zone, which for anybody who had walked out meant one step inside the exit, facing it, so walking forward sent you straight back where you came from. It lands at the proper entrance now. If you star exactly one destination in a zone, the scroll and the sextant stop asking and simply take you there. The rowboats between the plot islands in towns like Estercove needed two clicks to cross, because a ladder change a couple of weeks ago read the boat's return point as the far end of a ladder, and clicking it put you back on the boat you had just left. And in the vendor search, double-clicking a result in another town now offers to teleport you, drops you in front of the lot, and marks the vendor on your compass.

A few things had been lying to you about numbers. The Leaderboards were still adding in the September test period, so one player's thirty-day kill count read twenty thousand nine hundred and forty-two when the honest figure was one thousand and fifty-six. The character sheet's critical damage figure for fighting other players was showing half the real value. Mail on the test shard was expiring a few minutes after you opened the mailbox and posting your attachments off to the bank, which is a special kind of helpful. Letters now sit for fourteen days, warn you, and go five days after that. And in Search All My Stuff, the location filter was reporting a count of matches and then showing you none of them, which Gravidy reported, and which now actually filters.

For those of you who go looking for trouble. While Vitium fights, the eye on his mask now brightens for three and a half seconds every thirty, and then fires. Anyone within forty metres who has that eye on their screen when it goes off, with no wall in between, loses all of their Focus. Not health. Focus, the whole lot. Turning your camera away works. Looking at the floor works. Standing behind something works. The combat log warns you when the eye begins to open, so the information is there if you are paying attention. His stronghold is still switched off, so you have time to practise looking away.

Lightning round. Seventy-two tracker issues were closed on Friday, fifty-five of them bugs, and a good number were the sort of small indignity that is hard to make interesting on a podcast. Service NPCs have stopped wearing health bars in town, so the merchant on Mystic Isle is no longer walking about advertising her injuries. The Tab key has stopped walking your typing cursor into the chat box, which meant your next movement keys went into chat. Zombies that get back up now stay down for good if the killing blow carried Sun or Life damage. Books of Learning have stopped always paying the very top of their range. And a line of stray pixels along the top edge of grass and wildflowers got cleared off a hundred and nine textures.

On the plumbing side, the single largest object in every build was the map sheets, one file of five hundred and sixty-two megabytes, which was too big for the download cache to hold at all, so every new installation pulled the whole thing from the source. It now ships as five or six pieces of about a hundred megabytes, and a four hundred and sixty-five megabyte shared bundle got the same treatment. The launcher's Windows warning is being dealt with too. It is signed, but trust gets built per file, and we were replacing the file with every release, which reset the counter each time. The same file from now on, so its reputation can accumulate.

And one for the lore readers. The two novels, Blade of the Avatar and The Eye of Scales, are now in the team's canon library as twenty proper pages, with a concordance listing the fifteen places where the books and the game disagree. The game wins, for the record. Also, the audit of our holiday calendar found that Krampus has been absent for the whole of December for years, because two seasonal windows share his spawn and cancel each other out, leaving him to appear for the first fortnight of January. Which explains why nobody has been afraid of him.

What I am looking forward to is the first Call to Arms that really runs. Four thousand kobolds, four hours, every server counting at once, and a gold line ticking down under everyone's compass. I want to find out whether we make it. Thank you for the reports, all of them, including the ones that were embarrassing to read. It took a hundred and ninety-eight bakes and a half-metre grid to settle the matter of the tree house.

In its defence, it had simply gone out on a limb. Good night, and be well.