The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Resurrect stopped standing pets back up
• Right-click Preview shows any item in three dimensions
• Kill experience follows whoever did the killing
• A tavern's radio plays for the whole lot
• A snow tiger mount and a flying carpet

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British, bringing word of what thy makers were about on Wednesday. Thy pets would not rise when bidden, and necklaces were emptied before we caught it. Every item in thy pack may now be turned about and looked upon properly. The reward for a kill goes at last to whoever did the killing. A tavern's music plays for the whole room, as a tavern's music ought. And somewhere in the keep there is a carpet that flies. We begin with the pets, for nothing in this world should stay down once a healer has said rise.

So. Wednesday morning. Your bear is dead on the floor of a dungeon. You have the spell. You have done this a hundred times. You cast it, and the game tells you it worked. The bear does not move. You cast it again, and the game tells you again that it worked, and the bear is still dead. Then the window for standing a creature back up runs out, the game tidies up after a death that was never undone, and your Taming Necklace is empty. The bear you raised over a month is not anywhere at all.

That one is ours, start to finish, and it arrived in a build we shipped.

Here is what happened underneath, and it is small enough to be insulting. There is a label in our code that marks a message the game expects to receive from the server. The label sits on the line directly above the thing it marks, and when a build is made, the whole list of messages the game listens for is written out from those labels. Somebody adding an unrelated improvement slipped a new piece of code in between one of those labels and the message it was labelling. The label did what labels do. It attached itself to the newcomer. And the message that tells your client a creature can get back up fell straight off the list.

So the spell was fine. The spell was perfect. The server was calling out that the bear could rise, every single time, and there was nothing left on your machine listening for it. The whole thing compiled without a murmur of complaint, which is the part I find hard to forgive.

We can see the size of it in the logs. On the build before, a hundred and four pets died and a hundred and one of them were stood back up. On the new build, five died, none were resurrected, and five necklaces went empty. And while the team was in there, they found a second one, over in the equipment code, where a different change on a different day had slid something underneath a label in exactly the same way. Two people, two weeks apart, the same mistake.

Three things came out of it. The labels are back where they belong, so Resurrect stands a dead creature up again. There is now a check that refuses to let a build leave the building if a label has drifted off its message, or if anything in the game sends a message that nobody is listening for. And every pet lost in that window is being brought back. At the next deploy, each emptied Taming Necklace gets its creature back out of the hourly snapshots we keep.

If one of those was yours, you do not have to do anything, and I am sorry about your afternoon.

Now the piece of Wednesday I am most pleased about, and it begins with a confession.

For years there has been exactly one window in this game that will show you an item as a model, turning slowly, that you can look at from any side. It lives in the Crown Store. And the only way to reach it was from a store bundle.

So the one category of object in all of New Britannia you could inspect properly was the category we were trying to sell you. The sword in your own hand, no. The boots in your own bank, no. The thing with a price tag on it, by all means, take your time.

As of Wednesday, item right-click menus have a Preview entry. Your backpack, your bank, containers, your equip slots, the crafting station, the decoration palette, your deed list, a town merchant's shelf, a player vendor's listing, and both sides of a trade. Armour shows on your own character, dyed the way you have it. Weapons, decorations, dungeon pieces, mounts and house deeds show as their own model. About nine thousand six hundred item definitions have a model worth looking at this way, and until Wednesday very nearly none of them could be looked at at all.

The part I like best is the trade window. You are standing in a bank in Brittany, somebody has put a helm on the table, and you can turn it over before you agree to anything. Same at a player vendor. Buying furniture for a house out of a list of names and icons has always been a small act of faith, and it need not be.

A few smaller cruelties went with it. A recipe scroll now shows the thing it makes rather than a scroll. A named variant shows the item it is a version of. About thirty three garments with no decoration model, and fourteen weapons with only a held model, were either hidden from the preview or opened an empty window, and all of them show now. One honest warning. This ships switched off. It is sitting in the build, and the team turns it on with a live setting, so no patch is needed at your end. If you right-click a sword tonight and there is no Preview, nothing is broken. We simply have not pulled the lever yet.

On to a number that had stopped meaning anything.

When something dies in this world, the game works out who earned it by looking at who hurt it. And it only ever wrote down damage done by players and their pets. Damage that monsters did to each other was not recorded anywhere at all. Which means that if the local wildlife was busy killing something large, and you walked up and poked it once, you were the only damager on the books. The whole award, yours.

Somebody found this. One character was taking about twenty three million experience an hour. A big dangerous creature with a hundred and forty thousand points of health was being killed over and over by the animals around it, every six minutes or so, and a summon plus a few arrows, call it five percent of the work, collected roughly a million experience each time while the bears did the rest.

The repair keeps a quiet tally of what hostile creatures do to one another, held on your own machine and separate from the party record the game already shares. A kill now pays the leading party only if that party did at least as much damage as any single hostile creature on it. A tie pays. If the monsters did more of the work, the kill reports nothing to anybody, exactly as a kill no player touched always has. Your pets still count for you. Town guards and every other friendly creature never count against you, so a siege fought shoulder to shoulder with the guard pays precisely as it did last week. Loot ownership and boss credit are untouched, and there is a switch to put the old rule back if this proves wrong in some corner we have not thought about.

There is an old idea in this world, older than the game, that the reward ought to follow the labour. The bears were doing the labour. Somebody else was collecting. Strictly speaking, that is a wage dispute, and it has now been settled in favour of the bears.

Now. Taverns.

Tavern keeping in New Britannia is a real pursuit. People build a bar, lay a stage, set out chairs, and put a phonograph in the corner with an Aether Vibration Device on it, which plays a radio station of their choosing. Until Wednesday, that device played to precisely one person. The one who pressed Play. Everyone else stood about in a well-appointed silence.

A tavern keeper could spend a fortune on a room with music in it and be the only person in New Britannia who ever heard the music.

So. When the owner of a lot, or a co-owner, or a tenant presses Play, that station becomes part of the lot. Everybody there hears it, and that includes the people who walk in twenty minutes later. Stop silences the room. For those who would rather make their own arrangements, Options has a Hear Shared Radio Stations setting you can switch off. Only plain web stream addresses are passed along, and they are checked at both ends. And a visitor already listening to their own music through a worn amp does not get cut off when the owner presses Play.

Two old nuisances went with it. The device's current station was shared across every such device on your machine, which is why walking from one phonograph to another kept the first one's music playing. Each device keeps its own station now. The list has Up and Down buttons, so you can put your favourite at the top, and clicking a column header actually sorts the list and remembers the order. Before, the little arrow in the header would flip over very obligingly while the rows sat exactly where they were. In the same pass, phonographs and jukeboxes now fade with distance the way a played instrument does, so a gramophone is no longer drowned out by everything else when your sliders are level.

A tavern with music in it is a different room from a tavern without. It took us a long time to get there.

And then Wednesday went down to the stables, which was by far the largest piece of work of the day.

First, a Snow Tiger mount, suggested by a player through the Oracle. Snow tigers have been in the game for years as wild creatures, as tamed pets and as a cub, and there was never a way to ride one. There is now, and the craft in it is the part worth hearing. Rather than invent new animations, the team took every gait from the snow leopard mount and fitted it onto the tiger's skeleton, because the tiger's own walk carries its body several inches lower, which would have left you riding along a few inches above your own saddle. Paws that pushed through the ground on the longer legs were lifted back out of it. The lion's saddle was re-bound to the tiger's bones by hand. And there is a test that checks the saddle sits within about an inch of where the rider actually sits, on every frame, of all nine animations. It is not in the Crown Store yet. Testers can make one.

Second, a Magic Carpet, held back for staff testing, so this is a look behind the curtain rather than an announcement. You sit down on a purple floral rug that lifts about eighteen inches off the ground. It banks over into its turns. It plays a quiet mystical note while it moves, and it stirs up a faint trail of dust behind it with gold and lavender sparkles drifting across the rug. It needed no new animation whatsoever. The rider uses the free Sit emote that everybody already owns, legs out in front, one knee up, sitting toward the back of the rug.

The rug you would see today is a stand-in borrowed from a decoration, and the finished carpet will not look like it.

The team was so firm on that point they wrote a test whose entire job is to walk every shelf in the store and make certain the carpet we eventually release is not a rug you have already bought from us.

While they were in there, the Supernatural Umbrella grew a small patch of dust under the rider's feet, and gold and aqua motes that fall out of the inside of the canopy like light snow, both of them trailing behind as you travel. Its wind is a little louder at speed, and its inventory icon is at last its own umbrella.

And one bug, which is my favourite kind. A new mount would drop onto your utility hotbar and draw an empty slot. No icon, no label, nothing. It worked perfectly, if you clicked the void. A summon needs a row in a table of skills, and that row is where the hotbar fetches its picture, and the carpet had never been given one. Neither, it emerged, had the Chicken Mount, which has been riding about behind an invisible button for longer than anybody wants to say out loud. Both have one now, and a new check covers every mount in the game so the next one cannot ship with the hole. The developer chest that holds one of every mount for testing was also missing the chicken, which is a good part of why nobody noticed.

Right. The things that will quietly improve somebody's evening.

Coming back. An account that logs in after ninety days or more away now gets a welcome back. A line in chat straight away, then a short notice once the world has finished loading, telling you how long you were gone, warning you that skills and systems have moved under your feet, and offering a What Changed button that opens the patch notes. For the next seven days, any town Oracle will lower or remove a skill for you at no cost. Instant Unlearn stays free for the whole week instead of ten minutes, it survives logging out, and it applies to every character on the account. That was asked for through the in-game Oracle, by somebody who came back and found their own character unrecognisable.

Your own ground. Grass and Tree Removers now work on your own housing lot, where before they were refused anywhere outside a player-owned town. A remover reaches up to half its own width past the lot line, which is the whole point, because the water lot owners in Estercove could never clear the palms and bushes growing around their islands. Picking the remover back up brings the trees back. A related oddity went with it. Several of those islands share the same island shape, and the game was keeping a single ledger of removed trees for the entire scene, filed by position. So clearing your island cut the very same trees out of a neighbour's matching island, and giving a lot up could restore the trees on the wrong one. Each island keeps its own books now.

Pets, of the decorative sort. A lot owned by a subscriber now holds twice as many residents, and the extra room is for decoration pets only. Sixteen animals on a City lot, basements included, so a barn can look like a barn. Vendors and conversationalists still stop at eight, and you now get a plain refusal that says so. The team measured the cost before raising anything, using crowd tests from earlier this year. A pet runs on your machine alone, at something like a tenth to three tenths of a millisecond of frame time, which is why the extra room is pets and why it is limited for the moment. On the test shard we also stopped handing every account subscriber status, so those perks follow a real subscription.

And two things that had been describing themselves wrongly. A player reported Aetheric Feedback broken, because its focus regeneration never seemed to happen. The skill was working exactly as written. Its tooltip was not. That regeneration only applies if you cast within about four seconds of landing a spell critical hit, and the card read as though every cast gave it. Reaction skills now state their conditions, with the number taken from your own specialization, and Riposte, Answering Blow and Opportunity Strike spell out their parry, block and dodge windows the same way. Combat behaviour is unchanged. We stopped describing a different skill. Over in the same area, casting a bard song in the middle of a fight dropped you out of combat about ten seconds later, so you would draw again, which added heat and cost you a charge on any locked rune still cooling down. An instrument now holds the combat bar up the way a drawn weapon does, until you put it away. And the crafting station will ask before a reshape or a Pattern Remover destroys a plain pattern, since only Eternal patterns have ever come back, which the game had never thought to mention.

The lightning round. A new build reached the test shard and Steam on Wednesday carrying about seventy fixes, twenty six tracker issues closed, and I am not about to read you twenty six of anything.

A good number of them were things hanging in the air. Giant nameplate pieces with no text in them. A party leader mark several times its proper size up in the night sky, and by daylight an enormous red and black health bar floating over a red glow. A nameplate holds whatever size it was last given, and a party member's plate is the one kind that never fades with distance, so a plate that stopped being updated while its owner was far away kept that far-away size and hung over the scene like a billboard. A plate that nobody has positioned this frame now draws nothing at all. And an Ancient dragon that got back up after its first fall could rise underneath the sand, out of reach, and the fish it swatted loose afterwards turned up down there with it. Everybody stands on top of the sand now, where the fighting is.

Elsewhere, volumes and numbers. Ghosts are about a third quieter, whispering included. Spiders were paying six hundred producer experience for a meticulous field dressing pull while a massive crocodile sunning itself ten feet away paid fifteen hundred, so spiders now pay by tier, from five hundred up to five thousand, and the queens are at last worth more than a wolf spider. Pet regeneration gear can stop a summoned skeleton or Lich from losing health at all, where before it only slowed the loss down to a floor that a fully trained summoner was already standing on. Storehouse containers no longer lock themselves until you relog. And a Teleport to Friend Scroll will list party members who keep their location hidden, since they are, after all, standing right next to you.

Words and windows. Full channel names typed on their own now switch the chat channel, as the short forms always did. Characters with an accented letter show their real names on the leaderboards instead of a dash. The Grandmaster badge tooltip wraps into extra columns rather than running off the bottom of your screen. The location readout is a small box you can drag anywhere, and it remembers where you put it. Two player towns on the test shard grew a size, which gives their governors more ground to hand out. The Call to Arms contributors table was brought back from the dead by moving a single parenthesis, which is the best value for money all week.

And with thanks to Rinaldi for two of them: named boss achievements now end with the creature type, so searching your journal for troll or undead actually finds them, and the slow that a giant frog puts on you with its tongue has its own icon at last, a tongue with green goo running off it, in place of the one for Ice Field, which had players convinced they were being frozen solid by an amphibian.

That is Wednesday. A build out the door, a spell that was shouting into an empty room, nine thousand items that can finally be looked at, and a tiger with a saddle on it.

I am looking forward to walking into somebody's tavern and hearing music the owner chose, and to the first time a player right-clicks a helm in a trade window and knows exactly what they are agreeing to.

And as for that flying carpet. I did ask when we might expect it.

They tell me there are still a few loose threads. Good night from Britannia.