The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• A stuck purple cloud haunting every dungeon foyer
• The spider pass, from webs to the Spider Queen
• Experience that was never being paid
• Typing on Linux freezing the whole game
• Grusk harbour stops drawing invisible railings

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British before thee, with an account of what thy makers were about upon Saturday. The spiders of this realm have learned their craft at last, and a queen who in all her years has stood nowhere at all now keeps a nest in Spindelskog. The greatest adventurers among thee were rewarded with a number below nothing, and ranked dead last for their trouble. The dragons in thine own cellars have been working for free. And one citizen was followed from dungeon to dungeon, all evening, by a purple cloud. That last one first, because it is the best story of the lot.

Picture it. You walk into the foyer of a player dungeon. Hanging in the middle of the room, roughly where you would like to stand, is a dark purple cloud. It is a Cloud of Wasting, the thing an enraged zombie or lich throws at you, and there is no zombie here. You leave. You go to a different town, a different dungeon, and there it is again. Same cloud, same place, middle of the room. One of our players spent a whole long session being quietly haunted by a spell that had finished casting hours earlier.

Here is how that happens. We do not build spell effects fresh every time one is cast. There is a pool of them, and an effect gets checked out, played, and checked back in. While it waits to be used, it sits parked at the origin of the world, position zero, zero, zero. Nothing is supposed to be there.

And the part I love is this. Player dungeon foyers are small scenes, and they are built around the origin too. So the parking space and the middle of your dungeon foyer are the same piece of ground.

That alone would be harmless, because the cloud is supposed to check itself back in when it fades. The reason it never did is lovely and awful. That particular cloud carries a distance switch on its own body, the thing that stops an effect doing expensive work when no player is nearby. The switch turned the cloud off partway through its own fade, which killed the tidy-up step before it ever ran, so the effect was never returned to the pool. And the message we send at a zone change to release everything is a broadcast, and a switched-off object cannot hear a broadcast. So it stayed checked out for the rest of the session, standing at the origin, and every time the player walked within range of it, the distance switch turned it back on. Emitter and all.

Fifty-eight of our nine hundred-odd effects carry that switch in the same place and could have done the same thing. Death Shield, Gust, Life, several of the bard songs.

The fireworks are on that list. Somewhere out there is a timeline where a player carries a permanent firework display from town to town and nobody can explain it. Now a switch on an effect's own body only dims it and never turns it off, and at every zone change we sweep the pool for anything the broadcast cannot reach and release it by hand.

Right. The spiders. Thirteen separate pieces of work landed on them yesterday, and I want to start with the arithmetic, because it explains a complaint I have heard for years.

A spider web held you for a length of time worked out by subtracting your Strength. If your Strength was high enough, that subtraction came out at zero, and the web held you for no time whatsoever. You simply walked out of it. If your Strength was low, a tier fifteen spider could hold you for fifty seconds, and one of the queens somewhere between two and four minutes.

Two to four minutes. Standing still. While a spider eats you. Nobody designed that. It is what the formula did at the edges, and for years a strong character told you webs were nothing and a weak one told you webs were the worst thing in the game, and both were right. Every web now holds any character for three to five seconds. The same spider can web you about once every twelve seconds, and jumping still breaks you free. Warp spiders have also stopped teleporting you at random with their poison, and the poison now plays a spitting animation, so it no longer looks like a web that failed.

On top of that, each spider family got its own way of fighting from level eighty up. The brown ones are weavers: they leave a patch of web that slows your feet and your casting, they yank a player hanging back in the rear line right up into their faces, and they bite considerably harder at anything already stuck. The red ones are the venom line: a wedge of spray with a warning painted on the ground a second before it lands, less healing for anyone caught in it, an acid spit behind a cast bar that strips your armour, and, when one dies, a ring of poison that bursts out of the corpse a second later. The wolf spiders and the Black Arachnids have stopped weaving entirely and turned into hunters. They pounce on whoever is standing back, their bites slow you, and while that slow is on you a Black Arachnid can follow with a bite that paralyses. They also cast Mark the Prey on somebody they are not even fighting, and every spider in the area goes after that player until it wears off.

My favourite of the new tricks is the Silk Shroud. The big arachnids wrap themselves in web behind a cast bar and take thirty percent less damage for twenty seconds. The first fire or sun damage that lands burns it off, and a singed spider cannot weave another for ten seconds. Bring a torch. Bring a flame. There is now a spider fight in this game where the correct answer is arson.

Then there are the queens, and the queens had a secret. Xen Trohop and her sister carried a hidden rule, inherited from some very old data, that raised their Strength by up to fifteen hundred and their movement speed by up to double, based on how few animals happened to be standing near them.

Based on how few animals were nearby. Not a mechanic anybody could see, and not a thing the fight ever explained, and the practical effect was that a lonely queen was a monster and a popular queen was a pushover. That is gone. In its place, Xen grows stronger in plain sight: every one of her Chosen Young that dies near her while she is fighting makes her stronger for thirty seconds, and it stacks up to twelve times. Kill the escorts away from her, or kill them after her. She also lays egg clutches now, roughly every forty-five seconds, and a sac left standing for fifteen seconds hatches more spiders. Fire burns them fastest, which is becoming a theme.

And the Spider Queen herself. She has existed in our files for years. She has never, not once, been placed anywhere in the world. Players have never fought her because there was nowhere to go and do it. She now has a nest in a flat clearing in the low valley of Spindelskog, ringed with webbed dead trees, present in the Normal, Hard and Extreme versions of the zone.

The first clearing we tried sat directly under a ficus canopy, which hid her completely. We spent years not placing the Spider Queen anywhere, and then placed her in a shrub.

The hardest spiders also pay properly now. A Ferocious Black Arachnid goes from forty thousand experience to eighty-four and a half thousand. Xen Trohop goes from fifty thousand to a hundred and twenty-three thousand. Their corpses hold gold, a chance at artifacts, Crowns of the Obsidians and reagents, all of it before you field dress them. We also found a player dungeon spider sitting on fifteen hundred health where it should have had fifteen thousand. A dropped zero. The toughest spider in the room was made of paper.

Which brings me to the real theme of the day, and it is a theme I did not expect. Yesterday was about experience we were not paying.

Start with the dragons. If you own a player dungeon and you raise a dragon with a Dragon Totem, and you kill it, you got nothing. No adventurer experience at all. Every totem dragon, at every totem level, in both of the rooms that can hold one. The trolls paid. The elves paid. The dragons paid nothing, and here is why. A creature that a dungeon room places has to carry its own identity, because those rooms are assembled while you play and the seat numbers repeat from room to room. Every other totem creature carries one. The six totem dragons live in a different folder and their identity was left at zero, so when one died the server was handed a seat number it could not match to anything and refused the kill outright. Fifty-two refused kills in the last thirty days. The loot half of this gap was closed a while back, which is exactly why nobody chased the rest: a dragon that drops loot reads like a dragon that worked.

Gathering had the same shape of problem. From tier six upwards, a cotton plant, a maple, a pine, a gold vein and a silver vein all paid half what an iron or copper vein of the same tier paid for the same bonus pull. The nodes are otherwise identical. Somebody typing numbers into a table years ago raised two of the seven gathering types and stopped. A pine tree or a cotton plant in The Breach now lists three thousand producer experience per bonus pull, where it listed fifteen hundred.

And one went the other way, which I will say plainly rather than bury. A doe, a young stag, a small grey wolf, a red fox, the reindeer and the small wolf spider were each paying three hundred experience per meticulous pass, where a rabbit or a squirrel pays sixty. They now pay sixty. Five times a rabbit for a fawn was never anybody's intent, and it is a reduction, and I am not going to dress it up as anything else.

Then the leaderboards, which are my favourite thing on this list. The Leaderboards window was reading every whole-number column as the smaller kind of number, the kind that stops at about two point one billion. Go past that and it wraps around to the most negative value it can hold. So the All Time Experience board was showing negative two point one billion in every single Producer column, for everybody, and ranking those characters dead last. Thirty years of making these games and the bugs I love most are still the ones that punish you for being good at the game. Experience, Gold Found, Vendor Sales and every other whole-number board now read at their full size.

Now, a story for anyone who plays on Linux, which is also a story about reading your own old code. Typing could freeze the entire game for one to four seconds, now and then, in chat, in the backpack search, in the teleport search, talking to the Oracle. A tester reported it, we fixed something, the tester reported it again. The earlier fix had moved all of the window system work off the game's main thread, which was correct and insufficient.

The answer was in the launcher we retired. One line, with a comment next to it calling it a workaround for a Linux input buffering problem, that started the game with the desktop's input method setting emptied out. The new launcher dropped that line during the rewrite. Without it, the game politely routed every single keystroke through the desktop's input method and waited for an answer, and when the answer was slow, that was your freeze. The line is back, with a way to keep the desktop's setting for anyone who needs an input method to type Chinese, Japanese or Korean.

Two more things came out of that hunt. We had been asking the window system two hundred times a second whether you had pressed an accent key. The answer was almost always no. It now asks about sixty-six times a second, which is still a great many times to ask a question with a known answer, but an accent key and the letter after it are always further apart than fifteen milliseconds. And our own stall detector had a floor of five seconds, while these freezes ran one to four. So they were invisible to us and extremely visible to the person typing. Anything over a second now leaves a line behind.

One performance story, because the numbers are good. A player reported twenty-eight frames a second standing on the dock in Grusk, and our own measurements agreed with them: nine of that zone's top twenty draw-call peaks were on that one dock. Grusk is built out of about thirty-two thousand separate pieces, mostly small kit parts. Steam pipes. Railings. Ornaments. Sconces. Interior pillars. The steam pipes only stopped drawing once they were smaller than six tenths of one percent of the screen, and about fifty-eight hundred pieces had no rule at all, so they drew at full detail from any distance whatsoever.

Which means we were rendering, in complete detail, the individual wrought-iron railings on the far side of a harbour. Four pixels tall. Behind a fog bank. The wrought iron by itself accounted for half of the ten million triangles on screen. Grusk now has a floor, and anything only a few pixels tall stops drawing. Standing on the dock, that is about twenty-one hundred draw passes down to about fifteen hundred, twelve million triangles down to ten, and GPU time from twenty-nine milliseconds a frame down to twenty-one. Screenshots from the same spot before and after look the same, because of the haze. Cliffs, mountains and the sea are never touched.

Smaller things, and I will group them the way you would actually feel them. First, the frames and bars around your screen. The party list now has two size settings of its own: one for each member's health, focus and Vigor bars with their numbers, from seventy-five to two hundred percent, and a separate one for the names, titles, guilds and the location line, from seventy-five to a hundred and fifty. The pet and summon frame got its own bar slider. All of them apply as you drag, and none of them touch UI Scale or your own frame. The minimap ring that carries the compass letters now takes its colour from your interface theme, so a light theme gets a light ring with readable dark letters instead of dark letters on black. And the Guild and Town Prestige leaderboards have a size picker, so you can look at large, medium or small towns on their own, ranked from one within the group. That one was requested by Ceal Astra.

Second, your own property. Player dungeons now hold six lights per dungeon point rather than one, which takes a dungeon under a Row lot from fifty lights to three hundred, and a castle dungeon to eighteen hundred. A lamp's start state, lit or dark when the area loads, moved out of a right-click entry and into the Light Settings window as a simple On and Off picker. A placed storage container can be renamed where it stands. Round clay planting pots accept seeds again, after a pot that had settled a centimetre into a floor spent its life reading its own base as an obstruction and refusing to be sown. And governors of player-owned towns can now set a PvP level cap, from ten to one hundred and ninety-nine, in a new tab of the Town Console. While a flagged player is inside that town, their adventure level and adventuring skills read no higher than the cap. Crafting and gathering are untouched, and dropping the flag lifts it immediately.

Third, the animals, who had an embarrassing week. Ophelia, the cow by the fishmonger in Owl's Head, had been slowly tipping nose-down into the cobbles. Every time she settled onto the ground, the code added the slope of the ground to the tilt she already had, so a three degree slope became fifteen degrees of pitch over a few minutes of grazing. Walking would have corrected it, and she never walks. The cave bats in nine zones were squeaking away with completely motionless wings, because their flight animation played once and then held its final pose while the sound ran on its own timer. Sir Patrick, who is meant to sit in a locked cage until you free him, had been strolling out through the bars the moment the camp loaded. And pets sent at Brign, Lord of Water, at the waterline in The Breach, kept deciding the boss was unreachable and walking home in the middle of the fight.

The lightning round. Eighty-one tracker issues closed yesterday, fifty-two of them bugs, most of them reported by you. A whole cluster of footsteps got sorted: rope bridges, plank walkways, a wooden spiral staircase, snowy stone stairs and ruin floor tiles were all playing dirt, and now play what they are actually made of. A cluster of ground, too. A stone stair in Estgard that floated above the soil now sits on it. The approach to the ravine bridge there used to end in a two and a half metre dirt wall and is now a ramp. Swimmers at the Battle of Solace Bridge were either half a metre underwater or standing on top of a river, depending on which river, and now float at the surface in both. And a leftover pillar that had been parked in front of the one working door of the Hilt Fortress is gone.

Another cluster of lists and labels misbehaving in ways I would rather not describe in detail on a family podcast. The crafting recipe list no longer jumps to the top every time a batch places its ingredients. Player vendor nameplates no longer spread their letters one and a half times too far apart. Clicking one row inside a multi-selection now leaves only that row selected. The Journal's help moved to the question mark in its title bar, where the other windows keep theirs. And the first click back into the game window, after you have been off in another program, now actually counts. There is also a new option, off by default, that writes every enemy skill use into your combat log, heals and buffs included.

And the rest, fast. Subscribers can download every NPC voice line ahead of time, a hundred and sixty-four thousand of them, about five gigabytes, so dialogue never waits on the network. Forty-six more buffs got spoken names in the expiring-buff warning. Several groups of guards and elves were recast with the right sex of voice for the bodies they stand in. Only a book's author can press copies of its wax cylinder recording now. Taming a creature onto a collar that already held a pet finally counts toward your taming achievements. The Oracle learned several new answers and now keeps your own words in a bug report instead of boiling them down to four lines. And the first working version of the new official website is standing up on our own machines.

What I am looking forward to is a real group walking into that valley in Spindelskog and finding out what the Spider Queen does with eight people. Part of her fight, and the cocoon the queens can wrap you in, are still switched off until two of us have tested them properly. I would rather be careful with a boss nobody has ever met.

One last thing. We spent all of Saturday finding the Spider Queen somewhere to live, after years of her having nowhere at all. Do you know why she settled on Spindelskog? Excellent web access. Good night, friends.