The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• The vanishing prisoner of South Longfall Wetland
• Bandages, bleeding, and skeletons that bled
• The verification board stops asking for passwords
• Deck Building goes live with a deck simulator
• Dressed islands, prototype ships, a bent horizon

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British speaks, with word of what thy makers were about on Friday. There was a prisoner in a cage who could not be found, though she had never once left it. There are bandages now, so that no Avatar need bleed out for want of clean cloth. The verification board will never ask thee for a password again, which is just as well, for many of thee had none that would ever work. And in the yards, the first timbers of ships, with a horizon bent on purpose to swallow them. We begin with the prisoner. The tale is the finest of the lot, and the fault was entirely ours.

Picture the scene. You are in the pirate camp out in South Longfall Wetland. There are four cages here with elves in them, and you have been doing the decent thing. You open the first cage. You open the second. You open the third. And then you come to the fourth, which is where Patrator is meant to be, and the cage is empty. So you search the camp. You check the cage again, because of course you do. Your journal insists she is right there. And she was right there. For about three seconds. Before you arrived.

Here is what was happening to her, and it reads more like a short story than a bug. Patrator's only working appearance in that scene was attached to a wave of the big cage fight at the fourth cage. That fight's entrance trigger had been switched off at some point in the distant past, so something else had to wake it. A switch laid over all four cages, in a box about a hundred and eighty meters across, turned the fight on for three seconds as you walked into the camp.

Three seconds was long enough to put Patrator in her cage. It was not long enough for anything else. The fight then went looking for players, and the way it counts players is to look inside that entrance trigger, which by then had gone dark again. So it looked, and it found nobody at all. It waited a hundred and fifty seconds for a fight that was never going to start. Then it reset, and it took her with it.

So the rescue was being run by a timer that waited two and a half minutes, concluded that nobody had come to the rescue, and tidied the prisoner away. And that switch only fires when you enter its box. You were already standing in it. So she never came back while you stayed in the camp. The players this hurt most were the ones who freed the other three elves first. The kind, methodical ones. We punished thoroughness.

The fix puts a standalone spawn in the same cage, one that checks every half second and simply puts her back, with no fight, no counting, and no timer with opinions. Her gate now also admits a character who already holds the task but never got the flag, because the quest giver cannot hand that out a second time. The rival switch is off, so the cage fight can never produce a second Patrator. And there is a test in the suite now that fails loudly if she ever goes missing again. It was the highest priority bug on the board on Friday morning, and it is closed.

Next, something new to carry. Bandages. Bleeding has been one of those effects you simply had to sit through. Something opens you up, you lose health over time, and if it was a Rend wound it also cut how much healing you could take, which is a cruel combination when your healer is standing right there doing their best.

One bandage stops up to five bleeds on the character using it, clears the reduced healing a Rend wound leaves behind, and heals you a little over the next few seconds. You can use it in the middle of a fight, out of your bags or from a slot in your combat deck, with twenty seconds before the next one. And every tailor in the world already knows how to make them. Two cloth straps make three bandages at tailoring ten. That is deliberate. A thing that saves your life in a bad fight should not also be an economy.

Making bandages work meant walking through every attack in the game and asking whether it was truly a bleed. Some of the answers were awkward. The Rend attacks from cats, from ravens, and from clockwork automatons were not counted as bleeds at all, so your bandage would have ignored them. They count now. And in the other direction, undead, elementals and plants will no longer bleed from them. We had bleeding skeletons. Out of what, I could not tell you. Nobody asked at the time, and the skeletons never complained.

Now one that was our fault twice over. There is a verification board inside the game where testers claim tasks and post what they found. Until Friday it asked for an account name and a password. For a great many people no password on earth was going to work. The board was checking against a copy of the account list taken back in August, so anything newer failed, and any password changed since failed. And players who sign in through Steam never had a game password in the first place.

So for weeks we had a window politely asking some of our most helpful players to type in a thing that does not exist, and then informing them they had got it wrong.

It asks the game now. The board requests a one use ticket for your live session, trades that at the tracker for your own key, and signs you in. Nothing is typed anywhere. The session belongs to the character you signed in from, so if you log back in on another account it signs in afresh instead of posting under the first one. Open in Browser hands you a one use link, good for a minute, that lands you on the task already signed in. Accounts with two factor sign-in get the normal sign-in page, as they should.

And one more thing went out with it. The login screen used to hold on to the password you typed, so the board could use it later. That should never have shipped. The code that kept it is gone, along with every field that asked for it. If you are on Steam, or you made your account last week, the board simply works now.

Friday's largest piece of work was a school. Deck Building went live on the Desk, which is the companion site for guilds and players, and it is thirteen narrated lessons on the thing our combat system is most often accused of being impossible to learn. Locked slots and open slots and what their cooldowns truly cost. Drawing. Deck size and dilution. Stacking, charging, combos, casting on yourself and on your pet, Focus and reagents and fizzles, and what you give up when you swap decks in a fight. Most lessons come with a working combat bar, set up for that lesson, with a task to do on it.

Beside the lessons there is a deck builder that behaves like the Edit Deck window in the game and reads and writes the game's own share codes, so you can lift a deck out of the game, work on it in a browser, and paste it straight back. There is a practice bar against a training dummy. And none of the underlying numbers are hand written. The catalogue is built out of the game's own data: a hundred and sixty player runes across twenty schools, twenty-six combo runes, the thirty combos they form, and for every rune its Focus cost, both cooldowns, its cast time and its lock time, read from the same place the game reads them. If one of those changes, the page refuses to build until somebody rebuilds it, which is the only way a teaching tool stays honest.

Then there is the deck test, which I cannot stop playing with. Pick a deck. Pick a second deck to sit beside it. Choose two, five or ten minutes of fighting, and it plays the whole fight in a moment, both decks on the same shuffle, and charts how often each rune actually reached your hand.

The first version of that chart measured how much of the fight each rune spent sitting in your hand, and it gave an answer that was obviously wrong. By that measure, adding ten more runes to a fire deck made one of its key runes twenty-five percent more available. Anyone who has played a bloated deck knows that is nonsense. The reason is lovely. A lone copy sits in your hand longer because it is waiting for a scarce partner to turn up. It looks like availability. It is loneliness. So the chart counts draws a minute instead, and now the dilution shows plainly. The tight deck drew Flame Fist about twenty and a half times a minute. The same deck with ten more runes in it managed fourteen and a half.

The little robot that plays those test fights got smarter too, because its first draft was poor. It spent its locked runes in slot order and let drawn cards expire in hand, wasting eighty percent of its draws in one sample while sitting on plenty of Focus. Teach it to cast whatever is closest to running out of time and the waste falls to forty-two percent, which is about what three open slots and a fast draw should give you.

Arabella does the teaching. The chapter openings are in my voice, and they are recorded and sitting in a folder, listed nowhere, because the rule is that nothing in my voice goes up until a living person has sat and listened to it first. I have met me. The rule is sound.

Three other pieces from Friday all point out to sea, so let me take them together. The volcano archipelago prototype got its dressing pass. Every island now has its own terrain detail, erosion gullies, rock strata, wave cut platforms and beach berms, and one of six texture palettes, so no two of them read the same from the water. Twenty-one thousand trees and plants went in, with grass and fern layers beneath them, and about six thousand rocks, cliff pieces, driftwood, shells, corals, and one shipwreck. Then fog, ambient occlusion and a color grade over all of it. It is still a prototype, a place to stand and look rather than a shore you can sail to. It also, for the first time, looks like somewhere.

Which raises the question of what you would sail there in. There is research now, and a working prototype of how Episode 3's ships should handle, and I want to be clear that nothing in the game calls that code yet. A rowboat, a sloop and a galleon, each tuned until it hit the feel the designers asked for: top speed, how long it takes to reach nine tenths of it, how far it coasts with the sails in, how far a crash stop runs on, how fast it will go astern, its turning circle, and how quickly the rudder answers the helm.

The details are where you can tell somebody cared. Every scene would get a sea chart with depth, bottom material, waterline walls and overhead clearance, so a mast can be too tall for a bridge. Anchors drag when the bottom will not hold them. You can tie off at a mooring slip or raft up alongside another ship, and hulls shove one another when you misjudge it. And your crew is knocked off its feet by how hard the deck changes speed over a quarter of a second, which is both the correct way to model that and the funniest. Three hundred boats cost about three and a half microseconds each per tick and allocate nothing once warm. There is also a browser sandbox where a designer can feel a tenth of a second of lag at the helm against a quarter of a second, with prediction and without, and it checks itself against the real model to within a millimeter over a minute of steering.

And then the horizon, which was my favorite problem of the week. We want distant ships and islands to sink under the curve of the world instead of dissolving into fog. The first idea was a screen effect. A screen effect can only bend pixels that have already been drawn, so it can hide precisely nothing. The second idea was to lower far objects one at a time, which collapses the moment you remember that terrain is an object too, with trees and ruins standing on top of it. So the plan is to bend the world. A vertex shader drops everything by the square of its distance from the camera, around a radius of ten to fifteen kilometers, and the drawing and the streaming stop at the horizon line, so the client stops paying for what it cannot see. Physics stays flat. The server stays flat.

The world will not be round. It will only look round. Do not tell the cartographers.

Some smaller things now, grouped by when you would notice them. The new traps had a busy day. A trap kit dragged onto your hotbar used to refuse every press, complaining that you could not do that with this trap right now, once the original stack it came from ran out. The slot was still pointing at a pile of kits that no longer existed. It now uses any stack of that kit you are carrying, so crafting or buying more keeps it working. The trap minigame panel was throwing an error every frame at startup until the language data finished loading, and leaving invisible copies of itself behind while it tried again. Any window that fails halfway through building itself now clears up after itself. The Shrieking Gargoyle has a new setting in its decoration menu, so it shrieks on its own when somebody comes within five meters, once per approach, off by default. And the Oracle has learned where trap kit recipes come from and who a trap can actually hurt.

Then your bags. Moving a few hundred items at once and immediately changing zones used to disconnect you after a minute and undo every move that had not been sent yet. It waits for the moves to land now, and a lot chest stays open until the last one does. Take All on a container whose bag had already gone used to throw an error. The window just closes. And birthday candles bought before the candles came in eight colors load again, as white ones.

Three waits got shorter. Pressing Play on the title screen no longer freezes for about a second while the game reads its shader list. A character's learned recipes load in the background now, so a large recipe book no longer holds the screen hostage. And the first vendor search after you change zones used to sit there for twenty seconds before showing anything. It answers in a few seconds, while the town is still arriving around you.

Crafting got some honesty. The masterwork and enchanting tooltips now name the items each skill actually covers, so you can stop guessing. Fishing rods go under Masterwork Ranged Weapon. Heavy belts count as plate armor, cloaks and wings as cloth, and rings, necklaces and shields fall under Weapon Enchantment. Ten descriptions, in all nine languages. That was requested by Rinaldi, and it was a good request. The Oracle has also stopped insisting that pickaxes, harvesting axes, sickles and skinning knives cannot be masterworked, which they can. And the payout mail went out for the nineteen crafting molds that a change caught and collapsed into a single mold each: a hundred new molds for every one a character held on the twentieth of October. The letters land through the day. That one was on us, and the mail is the apology.

The rest went down fast. Seventy-nine items came off the tracker on Friday, forty-four of them bugs and the rest player requests read, sorted and sent on their way. A good many were things that said no when the answer was yes. Tipping a jar set to show visitors deposits only told you in red that it did not work, while your gold went in and the chat window cheerfully confirmed it. The first click on the minimap was being swallowed while the game brought that window to the front. The Theme Editor would refuse a background picture without a word, and now tells you it is too large, or over eight megabytes, or the wrong kind of file.

Elsewhere: a cluster of music boxes sharing one window between them, one of which could be heard from any distance whatsoever, a couple of boats delivering people somewhere other than where the boat said, town residents patrolling along below the pavement, and a practice dummy in Westend buried up to its neck that looked different depending on who was watching. Lasting buff effects such as Strength of Earth and Shield of Air stopped switching themselves off after a zone change, which had been hiding them on everyone else. Bodies with loot still on them stopped vanishing the instant the next control point wave arrived. Refusing a seat at a table no longer prints developer notes into chat in red. And somebody fixed the capitalization on a handful of conversation buttons in Ardoris, which I notice every single time.

One quiet entry I liked. Somebody wrote up the Order of the New Britannian Empire, every recipient from twenty fourteen to twenty twenty-three, the title, the medal and the plaque each of them receives, and a note at the bottom that there is still no memorial to them anywhere in the world itself. That is a thing we ought to fix in stone rather than in text.

That is Friday. I am looking forward to standing on one of those new islands at dusk, and rather more to the first poor soul who attempts a crash stop in a galleon with a full crew on deck. Thank you for playing, and thank you for reporting the things that are broken. The best stories in this show always begin with somebody saying, that cage is empty.

One last thing before I let you go. Our new bandages stop up to five bleeds at once, which makes them, I am told, the most absorbing feature we have shipped all year. Good night from New Britannia, and mind the horizon.