The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Slayer of Legends could never be finished
• Stealth stops swinging and stops lighting itself up
• The war on round trips in bags, banks and towns
• A terrain budget rescues the volcano frame rate
• The first sailing boat a player can steer

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British here, with word of what thy makers were about upon Saturday. A trophy for the slaying of legends, which no living soul could ever claim, because one of the legends was never written down. Shields of every school that now hold for the same honest hour. A rogue who vanishes and stays vanished, instead of drawing her sword at the first wolf to wander past. A boat with a wheel, and a hand upon it at last. And some twenty thousand trees that had brought a volcano to its knees. Sit a while. We begin with a horse.

There is a horse pen in Desolis, and there is a house beside it. For some time now the black foal that belongs in that pen has been appearing on top of the house instead, flickering between two of its floors several times a second, which is not a thing a horse should be able to do. Here is why. That foal, along with the town foals in Aerie, Brittany Fields, Braemar and Owl's Head, the ducks in Aerie, and the cat in the Manor of Mystery, were all built out of house pets. House pets are allowed on lots and inside buildings. They are not allowed on open ground, which is precisely where we had put them. They walk on ordinary ground now, and if a town animal ever loses track of where it lives, we carry it home.

The largest single piece of work on Saturday came out of a bug report marked low priority, which I find delightful. Slayer of Legends is one of our grand titles. You go out, you kill the great named monsters of the world, the game checks that each of those kills has been recorded against your name, and when the list is complete, you are a Slayer of Legends. The trouble was that the list asked for a monster that had no record to give. Elrin Nayer was on it, and Elrin Nayer had no achievement of his own anywhere in the game, so there was no way for any player, ever, to satisfy that line. The achievement for slaying legends was itself unkillable.

The list now asks only for legends you can actually be credited with. And three legends who had been going about their business with no recognition attached to them at all, Ras'al'horag the Undead Lord, the Lich of the Mound, and Razox Dread, were each given the full set. Slain, Vanquished and Conquered, the three tiers we use for the serious monsters, and each tier pays out a framed portrait trophy you can hang on a wall. All three count toward Slayer of Legends.

That came to a hundred and nine files and about nine thousand lines, because an achievement is never only an achievement. It is three tiers, in eight languages, with trophies and their descriptions and the data that tells the game which creature satisfies which tier. So the biggest change of the day was a low priority ticket about a title nobody could finish. I think that is the correct order of priorities, and I am glad somebody ignored the label.

Next, stealth, and I will be honest with you here, because this one is funny at our expense. Suppose you have trained to hide. You slip into the shadows. You hold perfectly still. And your character, on her own initiative, reaches out and takes a swing at a skeleton that happened to shuffle into reach, which of course ends the hiding instantly. Auto-attack did not know it was supposed to be keeping a secret. There is now an option on the Controls tab called Hold Auto-Attack While Stealthed. With it ticked, a hidden character will not swing at anything until you say so, with a click or a skill. A player asked for that through the in-game Oracle, which has become one of the better sources of work we have.

The second half is better. Vanish, and the rest of the hiding skills, would happily let you cast while you were carrying a lit torch. Or with Light up. Or Shield of Air. Or, my favourite, while you were on fire from your own Immolation. The spell would take your focus, hide you, and then the torch in your hand would reveal you again in the same breath, and the game would say nothing at all about any of it. You were invisible for roughly as long as it takes to say the word.

Those skills now refuse the cast before they take anything from you, and they tell you which glowing thing you are holding or wearing is the problem. And when a hide does end early, your combat log names what ended it. The stealth was never broken. It was being out-argued by a torch.

Now the work I have been following most closely, which is a quiet war on round trips. When you open a full backpack, or walk into a crowded player town, your game does not receive all of it in one piece. It asks, and waits, and an answer comes back, and it asks again. Every one of those exchanges costs you the time it takes a message to cross the world and come back. If you live a long way from the server, you pay that toll on every single question.

So the team went and measured it properly. Seven hundred and forty-nine real item collections, bags and banks and decorated lots, run against ten different compressors to find out how much of that traffic is air. A player's own items squeeze down about seven times in the larger pages. Armed with that, the pages got about six times bigger, so a full backpack now arrives in roughly five exchanges instead of about thirty. With compression switched on, one page can carry something like six times as many items and still weigh less than one of the old pages did. The largest decorated lots in the sample needed seven hundred and seven messages.

They used to need twenty thousand two hundred and eighty-six. For one lot. For somebody's garden.

Arriving in town got the same treatment. A busy player town now fetches the doors, lights and chests for eight lots at once, nearest to you first, and those states ride along with each lot's contents instead of being a separate errand for every lot on the street. The big inventory actions travel in batches too. A multi-select destroy sends up to two hundred and fifty-six items in one request where it used to send one request per item, stack merges go a hundred at a time, and an enormous Consolidate Stacks works in blocks of fifty so your chests and doors keep answering while it runs. One player tidying a very full backpack could previously hold up doors for everyone standing near them for minutes. That was never your door's fault. That was your neighbour sorting their socks.

The last piece of it you will feel in your hands. A player wrote in from Europe, about two hundred milliseconds of distance away from us, to say that melee hits felt late, and they were. The damage number, the flinch and the sound could arrive up to a second after the swing, because the hit had to travel to the machine running that monster and come back before your client was allowed to react to it. Your client can now show the hit as the weapon connects. That one, and the batching, are turned on for our internal testers and still switched off on the public test shard until they have had a proper go at them. I would rather be a few days late than have your sword lie to you.

The Volcano Archipelago. This is the island chain being prototyped for Episode Three, and on Saturday it became playable offline with a real character, with a spawn point out on the south-western terrace, which is the first time anybody has stood on it and simply looked around. The first thing they found was that the view was being drawn twice every frame, because the scene had its own water camera pointed at the world alongside the game's camera. Two renders, one island, no extra island.

Then came the numbers, which were appalling and fascinating. Facing the volcano: eighteen to twenty-two thousand draw calls, and sixty-five to eighty-five milliseconds to put a single frame on your screen. That is not a frame rate, that is a slideshow. Nearly all of it came from twenty thousand seven hundred terrain trees being drawn as full models out to a kilometre away, in seventy-six different kinds of tree.

Here is the part worth understanding, because it explains a great deal about why game worlds look the way they do. Every distinct kind of tree is its own conversation with your graphics card. Seventy-six kinds of tree means seventy-six conversations, repeated across the ground. And a tree a kilometre away is a handful of pixels, so drawing all of its branches is pure waste. The answer is a billboard, which is a flat painted picture of the tree that always turns to face you. Past a couple of hundred metres your eye cannot tell, and your graphics card can draw thousands of them for the price of a few.

So there is now a budget for every scene in the game. At most twenty-four kinds of tree, at most sixteen terrain textures, and trees turn to billboards by two hundred and fifty metres, with a test that checks our prototype scenes and complains when they drift over it. The archipelago was brought inside the budget the same day. Seventy-six tree species down to twenty, twenty terrain textures down to sixteen, and the folded ones keep their colour through the terrain's tint map. The busiest view went from as much as twenty-two thousand seven hundred draw calls and a hundred and ten milliseconds a frame, down to between one thousand one hundred and fifty and two thousand three hundred draws, at nineteen to twenty-seven milliseconds. Variety now comes from tinting and scaling the trees we kept, which is how a real forest manages it anyway. Oh, and our interface tests had been leaving copies of a helper object behind in whatever scene happened to be open. We found forty-eight of them. In a volcano.

And then there is the boat. For the first time there is a sailing vessel in Shroud of the Avatar that a player can steer. Whoever takes the wheel is sailing her. The speed builds and falls away gradually, as it should, and there is a rudder to bring her round. Everybody else rides on the deck, and you step aboard and ashore at the mast. She is switched off on the test shard for now, because a boat is a strange and difficult object.

I want to tell you why it is difficult, because it is one of my favourite problems in making a world like this. A boat is not really a vehicle. A boat is a piece of moving ground with several people standing on it, every one of them holding their own copy of the world, and all of them have to agree about where that deck is from one moment to the next. Your own footing has to come out right at the same instant as her course, or the sea does something unforgivable to your stomach. There is a test bench now that sails her for ten solid minutes under a scripted hand at the helm, hunting for exactly that sort of disagreement.

Mine own first voyages upon these waters were made in a vessel that went where she pleased and heeded no one, so thou wilt forgive an old captain a little feeling in the matter. A wheel. With a hand upon it. Hold fast.

If you heal, there are three things for you. Party rows now carry each member's pets, summons and companions as small health bars underneath them, and a left click picks one out to heal, up to four per member with a line telling you how many more there are. There is a switch on the Interface tab if you would rather not see them. Tab will now bring a lone enemy back into your target frame after you have clicked a friend, which matters in a one boss fight, where a healer used to be stuck staring at a party member however often they hit the key. And placing a ground spell with a left click no longer hands your target over to whoever happens to be standing in the circle.

If you cast shields, every school's shield now lasts the same length of time at the same skill, specialization and attunement. Before Saturday, one school's shield could run close to two hours while another's was gone in minutes, and nobody had chosen that. It had simply accumulated over the years. Shield of Crystal picked up Earth specialization scaling, Elysian Illumination picked up Sun attunement scaling, and Chaotic Shield came onto the shared formula, so it now pays attention to how much Chaos attunement you actually carry.

If you use the bank, this is a good day. Matching stacks held in different towns are treated as one stack now, there is a Stack All button that gathers every matching stack from all of your town banks into the branch you are standing in, and each merge hands you back a slot. A full bank will also accept a deposit that only tops up a stack it already holds, which was reported years ago and fixed years ago, except the old fix had been checking the wrong container and never did a thing. And the bank can finally find items you stored inside bags and chests. One player had sixteen hundred and ninety-one gold crowns banked inside a container and could only ever find the ten loose ones.

Then a handful of things that will improve somebody's evening. The mail window has a Sent tab, keeping a read-only copy of everything your account sent in the last thirty days, gold and items included. The envelope in the corner is a quarter larger and sits lower, so unopened mail is harder to miss. You can mark a preferred mount, so the Mount key summons the one you meant and remembers it across logins. The gold readout now appears on your backpack alone, which frees the bottom row of every chest and bank window for buttons you actually want. Crown Shop sales announce themselves on the Traders channel with every item named and a five minute warning before a round closes. You can hide an event, or a whole repeating series, from your own calendar without touching anybody else's. And a party formed from a Looking For Group listing now starts on roll loot with a sensible threshold, instead of a threshold of zero, which meant nothing ever went to a roll and the first person to open the corpse kept the lot.

Quickly now, because eighty tracker issues went down on Saturday and I am not going to read you the register. Add-on authors were handed ten new abilities, every one of them straight off the Player Wishlist: the whole party in a single call, whether a member is inside a heal's reach, who applied each buff, the difficulty colour the game gives a monster, a monster's threat list so somebody can build a proper aggro meter, which of your recipes make a given item, a private folder where an add-on can keep its own files through updates, and the ability to turn and resize a decoration while you are setting it down. The Oracle learned a dozen new answers and unlearned a few wrong ones, the most useful being that Earth Magic Specialization is taught by a trainer in Jaanaford and does not simply arrive.

The creatures had a busy day. The large bats in Despair had been beating their wings about twenty times a second, which is a hummingbird, and are down to about four. Creatures that are brawling with each other will now break it off and come for any player who strolls up to watch, everywhere in the game, which closes a long and much loved trick. Brign, Lord of Water, had been returning from a chase in The Breach and settling into the sand up to his eyebrows, still at full health, still targetable, entirely out of reach, and he climbs back out now. And the Charnel Pits have stopped bleeding, which Rinaldi pointed out, on the sound grounds that they are undead and also a pit.

The rest is an honest sweep of small indignities. A phantom doorway beside the real one at the Hilt Fortress, open since July, is solid stone again. The ropes hanging in mid air by the Braemar taming pen are gone, and that entire fix was two hundred lines of deletion and nothing added. Masks now cover a mannequin's wooden face instead of letting it peer out through the eye holes. The catfish measure themselves against their own species. The giant chess lobby no longer claims to be busy when you click briskly. Twenty-two rollback switches were retired, every one of them guarding a fix that shipped weeks ago and not one ever used. And belladonnarose asked why the Wolf Ears bounties paid gold and no experience. They pay experience now.

That is Saturday. Eighty tickets closed, a grand title that can at last be finished, and a ship with somebody's hand on the wheel. What I am looking forward to is the first proper argument about whose turn it is to steer. My thanks to everyone who writes these things up for us, and to the players who turned a question for the Oracle into an option on the Controls tab.

And one last word about those trees. Seventy-six species of them, twenty thousand strong, and a frame rate flat on its back. The performance, I am sorry to tell you, was absolutely stumped. Good night from New Britannia.