The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• The volcano island moves onto the game's own ocean
• A castle kit becomes twelve player homes
• Adopting the decorations friends left on your lot
• Pets keep their stance and obey a new target
• Six house ships become real sailing vessels

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British here, with word of what thy makers were about on Sunday. A castle kit arrived at breakfast and left as twelve houses, each with stairs to its roof. The lava on our volcano island has been taught which way is downhill. Thy pet will remember what thou told it to do when thou passest through a gate. And where a friend has decorated thy lot, those treasures may at last be made thine own, from the sign at thy gate. Six of the great ships that stand as houses now have working wheels, though we keep them lashed to the dock a little longer. Let us begin where the ground was wrong.

The lava was flowing uphill. I want to sit with that for a second, because I did not expect to say it this year. We have an island prototype with a volcano on it, two lava flows running down to the sea, and a freshwater stream. All three were moving the wrong way. Up the slope. The stream looked like the ocean was being poured into the mountain. And the reason is wonderfully dull. The texture that makes lava look like it is moving scrolls along a direction stored in the shape of the flow, and nobody had ever stored a direction, so it took the default. The default was wrong for every flow on the island.

The stream had its own version of the same joke. The water we were using scrolls its ripples along one fixed compass heading, east, forever, and our stream runs to the south west. So we wrote the island its own stream water that scrolls along the ribbon itself, whichever way the ribbon happens to go, and now both lava flows and the stream run downhill, which is where I have always understood lava to be going. The ends got attention too. The stream used to stop at a hard white edge, a sort of foam cliff, and now it fades in below its spring and fades out into the sea. The lava used to end in a flat tongue hanging over the drop, and now it runs down the shore and into the water.

And all of that was the small part of the island's day. That prototype was built on a third party ocean, because it was a prototype and that is what you grab. It drew a stair stepped shoreline, because its shore foam reads a depth picture that is too coarse for a real coast. It drew dark streaks across the distant water. Its waves had been cut to half height to stop them looking silly. On Sunday it moved onto the game's own ocean, the one Novia and the player town islands use, and the whole thing changed character. The shoreline is smooth. The open sea is deep blue at the real wave scale. Looking across the water at the volcano, the busiest view we had went from about two thousand three hundred draw calls to about one thousand seven hundred, and from twenty four milliseconds a frame to seventeen. The graphics card side nearly halved.

The sky followed the water. The island now carries the same day cycle dome that close to three hundred of our shipped scenes already use, so its sun, moon, clouds and fog match the rest of New Britannia, and the ocean takes its colour from that sky instead of from a stand in tint somebody picked by eye. Though for a few minutes there the island had two suns, because the old one was still sitting in the scene, and the sea could not decide which of them to reflect. That is the sort of thing one normally has to ask a god for. The lagoons and the stream used to glow at night, bright turquoise under a black sky, like something had gone wrong at a reactor. They take their light from the sun and moon now, so they go dark blue after sunset.

Two more pieces and then I will let the island go. The cove floor sits within about a third of a meter of sea level across large patches, so the wave troughs were dropping below the sand and you could see the seabed poking through the water. There is now a calm map baked from the terrain itself, so the sea flattens where it is under a meter and a half deep and comes back to full waves by six meters, which quiets about a tenth of the map and only where it should be quiet. And where the two lava flows reach the sea there is proper steam, a boiling cloud at the waterline and a tall plume that drifts off on the volcano's prevailing wind. The first attempt at that steam put every frame of the smoke animation on screen at once, on every single puff, so instead of a plume you got a drifting wall of postage stamps. The island is also in the build now as a team test scene, so we can walk it in a real client, and you can swim anywhere in that sea.

Now the houses, and this is my favourite kind of work. A castle art kit came in on Sunday morning, bought for scenery. One of its buildings, a two storey sandstone thing, is ninety two separate modular pieces with no original source file. Scenery does not have to be generous. It does not have to let you upstairs, and this one did not. It had a steep stair bolted to the outside and no way onto its roof at all.

So we wrote something that reads that kit building without touching it and builds a player house out of it, which means when an artist changes the kit, the house is one re run away. It turns the building so the front door faces the street. It swaps two floor boards for the kit's own stair pieces, ground floor to upper floor, upper floor to the roof deck, and puts a rain lid over the roof stairwell so the weather stays outside. It marks both stairs as walkable for pets, so your animals follow you up. It bakes the three decorative door leaves into doors that actually swing. It samples the collision shapes to work out where decorations may sit, on every floor, every wall, every ceiling, the roof and the outside walls. And it collapses ninety two separate level of detail groups into one, which also kept the porch and stair collision out of the navigation bake.

Then it got greedy. The same builder learned to take a material look, so the sandstone house has a grey cut stone twin. Then the other five buildings in the kit went through it, each in both looks, which is ten more homes. A courtyard house wrapped around a walled yard under a striped awning, a brick terrace house, a cottage, a house with a wooden gallery along both floors, and a large one with a terrace over its front wing. Stairs added where the kit had none. Real doors fitted into the open archways. Gates that swing toward the middle of the house rather than into your shins. Three hundred and twelve checks across every house and every look, all passing. Twelve homes in a day, out of a pack of scenery. The kit's own vases and crates were taken out, on the grounds that we already give you vases and crates.

Twenty eight of the kit's props became rare drop decorations alongside that: engraved metal tableware, clay jars and amphorae, rugs, floor cushions, a bale, a barrel, a low inlaid table. Three of them hold things. The iron banded storage chest takes three hundred items and borrowed the treasure chest's hinge rig, so its lid swings up when you open it, and the wicker hamper and the lidded wicker chest take a hundred and fifty each. They share a rare pool that rolls at one percent, split thirty ways, so any particular piece is about one roll in three thousand. I should be honest that none of the twelve houses can be bought, dropped, or found yet. For now the only source is a tester with the tools open. They are built, they are tested, and they are standing in a room waiting for a door.

Here is one that has been costing people real things. When a friend decorates your lot, those decorations are not yours. They live in your friend's own store, and they stay your friend's. Which sounds like good manners until you sell the lot, at which point every item your friends ever placed is banked straight back to them and your house empties out. Or your friend quits the game and their work sits on your land, untouchable by you. The only way to adopt a single item was to pick it up and put it back down yourself, one at a time, which for a decorated castle is an evening you are never getting back.

The lot sign has a new entry under lot access now, for the deed holder only, to take ownership of other people's decorations. It covers the house, the basement and the dungeon, and it tells you how many items are about to change hands before you agree to anything. It only moves what you could already pick up with your own hands, so items set to private stay put, items that cannot be traded stay put, and vendors, tip jars, prize chests and game tables stay with whoever placed them. Sell the lot afterwards and the adopted pieces stay on it, which was the whole point.

The part I like is the order of operations. Moving an item between two players' stores is two writes, and a server can fall over between them. So it writes the item into your store first, and only then takes it out of your friend's. If the lights go out in the middle, you end up with two copies and the next run notices and removes one. We would rather hand you a chair twice than lose it once.

Pets. Pets were the one high priority bug on the board, and it is embarrassing in the specific way that only pet bugs are. You set your pet to aggressive. You walk through a gate. Your pet arrives on defensive and stands there, with excellent posture, watching you get hit. What was happening is that a pet's state gets set several times while it spawns, and every one of those passes began by queueing up defensive. If a later pass could not yet read which pet belonged to you, it left defensive in place, cheerfully overwriting the aggressive stance an earlier pass had already restored. A pet that has been properly identified now keeps its stance, its movement, its follow distance and its choice about stuns through the whole spawn.

The second half was worse and funnier. Order a pet onto a new target in the middle of a fight. The game cleared the pet's current target while the new order waited its turn, and with no target it decided the pet was not in combat, which shrank the pet's leash to standing range, which yanked it home. Then the leash let go of the order but left it pending, so the pet dropped everything, walked back, picked its own target, stuttered, and started again. You point at the bear. The pet looks at the bear. The pet goes home. A held order counts as combat now, and starting a leash consumes the pending order instead of leaving it to rot.

And the boats. We have had one steerable sloop for a few days. On Sunday, six of the ships that players already own as houses became real vessels at their full size. The pirate galleon, the haunted galleon, the shogun galleon, the baron's frigate, the baron's galleon and the lord's houseboat. Measured off the house models, the big five run fifty two to fifty six meters long, draw four to five and a half meters of water, and weigh somewhere between five hundred and twenty and six hundred and twenty tons. They make six to seven and a half meters a second and take around half a minute to get there. Their turning circles are a hundred and twenty to a hundred and sixty meters. At that size a turn stops being a maneuver and becomes a travel plan.

The decks and the cabins come across from the house, which means the ship's wheel that has been standing on your deck as decoration for years is now the helm, with the steering built on its hub. The piers, the teleporters and the rigging collision stayed behind, for reasons I hope are obvious. A rowboat joined the sloop for short trips. And there are two new charts for them to sail on: the whole island of Blood Bay, with mooring berths at each of its five piers and a boat tied up at the north east one, and the volcano archipelago mapped right out to the edges of its four kilometer map, with a sailboat waiting off the south west terrace. All of it is still switched off for players. I am told this is wise. I am also told I ask about it every day.

A handful of smaller things that will improve somebody's evening. Your fish tanks have stopped turning yellow. The glass and the water were picking up the full colour of any warm light nearby, so a tank next to a lamp or a fireplace looked like it was full of chicken broth, and all four tanks now stay clear with the faint blue green tint they were supposed to have. The floating candles got their wax back, having lost their material entirely when the birthday candle textures were renamed underneath them. Two of their three flames were also burning off to one side and more than a meter above the wick, which is a haunting if you think about it, and the whole set never stopped drawing no matter how far away you stood.

Three things about your inventory and your bench. Items you locked to your inventory years ago, that now sit inside a bag, can be unlocked again. The lock was only ever offered in the main backpack, and so was the unlock, so a locked item that drifted into a side bag became permanently stuck, refusing to be used or moved. Somebody had whiskey in there. Crafting stations now tell you by name which legacy item on the table has to be salvaged first, instead of saying no recipe found and leaving you to guess. And quick craft batches, including salvage runs, show the progress bar, the item count and a cancel button for the whole run, rather than running blind until you panic and hit escape.

An audio one that I enjoy more than I should. If you dragged your effects volume to zero, the kobold grenadier's grenades kept going off at full volume. So did fireballs, ice fields, rings of fire, dragon bolts, spider spit and about twenty other impacts. All of those sounds had been given no volume group at all, and the fallback they land in was moved under the ambient slider a while back, so for a long time our loudest explosions have been filed under ambience. Forty six sound sources across twenty one effects now name the group their neighbours use. One fireball ending alone serves fourteen different runes. There is a new test that fails if any effect sound ever goes out without a volume group again.

Your character sheet has a tools button under the right hand slot column, which opens a grid of all sixteen gathering and crafting tool slots, so you can equip and swap tools without leaving the sheet. Empty slots show a faded picture of the tool that belongs there. It remembers whether you left it open. And on the website, the Desk gained a leaderboards window and an achievements window. Both were built switched off early Sunday morning and were on for everyone by mid morning, which is the shortest distance between dark and live that I have seen in a while.

Now, the markers that pointed at nothing. Raymond in the Soltown refugee camp has been wearing a gold exclamation mark for a quest we took out of the game two weeks ago, which during a fire investigation reads as a thrilling new clue and is in fact a dead link. Gone. The dragon wrasses have been displaying their names and health bars under their feet, usually under the ground, because the whole wrasse family was cloned from a crocodile and inherited an offset built for a crocodile's shape. Names above the back now, on all eight of them. And in the Obsidian Keep under Desolis there is a spider egg clutch on a library wall whose trigger was sitting in mid air above a cupboard, about two meters over any floor a person could stand on, so in all this time nobody has ever hatched it. The trigger is on the floor now, in front of the cupboard, where feet are.

Traveller13 reported that the kobolds standing guard in the expeditionary camp let you walk right up beside them without a flicker, and they were right. Sixty of those guards had been set to notice a player at only twelve or fourteen meters, against a default of thirty two, and since most of them hold a post and never turn around, you could stroll in from the side and tap one on the shoulder. They notice you at twenty four meters now, and their leash was stretched to match so they can actually do something about it. The pit battle waves are untouched. Thank you for that one.

Sixty two tracker issues went down on Sunday. Twenty eight were bugs, and the shape of them was about what you would expect on a Sunday: a leaderboard that was cutting every creature name at its first comma, so Wrauk, Lord of Earth appeared as a stray quote mark and then nothing, with his kills now folded back into his full name. Trap kits selling to merchants for a tenth of what they did. A healing card that was reading half of its own maths and promising less than it delivered. Chat log files carrying one timestamp per line again. Decorations that wear a pattern, your vendors especially, loading in the background instead of freezing the game for half a second each when they first appear, and a purchase order list that was blocking everything for four or five seconds the first time you opened it. The other thirty four were player requests and suggestions, read, sorted and answered. The Oracle learned about thirty five new things people actually asked her this week, from lute strings to where a plesiosaurus bites. Add-ons can now count what you own in your bank and your house storage, so somebody can finally build a proper crafting shopping list. And our internal test shard, which spent part of the morning refusing entry to anyone who was not a tester, is open to everybody again with every experiment still switched on.

Two new things for your head, by the way, both from the tester tools for now. A closed horned helm made from a beast's skull with a hide hood down the back, and a black horned mask whose cracks glow. Both can also be put on a shelf, which I suspect is where most of them will end up. There is a wrought iron brazier that lights itself with a click, flame and crackle and smoke together, and a pale stone cherub with spread wings under a pair of curling horns, which is either charming or a warning depending on your lighting.

What I am looking forward to is the day those twelve Crusader houses leave the tester tools and start appearing on real lots, with real people arguing about where the stairs should go. And the day we untie the galleons.

But I will leave you with this. We spent Sunday teaching the lava on that island which way is downhill, and we got it right. Which means that after months of work on that island, the whole project is finally going downhill. Good night, friends. Keep your candles on their wicks.