The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Volcano Archipelago comes alive, lava included
• The Great Sea and ships that sail themselves
• Novian Word, a daily word game on the Desk
• Pets, chains and Cabalists get sorted out
• Rogue of Novia runs you can watch again

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British here, with word of what thy makers were about on Monday past. A word game has come to the Desk, a fresh word each dawn and streaks to keep. The island of fire has at last learned that molten rock ought to hurt. Ships may be sailed now with no server behind them at all, and we have begun laying out a sea wide enough to carry thee round the whole of Novia. And in the arena, an enemy's pet has been strolling up to invisible people and standing there, plainly delighted with itself. We begin elsewhere, though, with a silence that would not stay silent.

There is a small gap between the background music tracks. A few seconds of nothing, so one piece of score does not run straight into the next. You have probably never noticed it. On some machines, that gap came out as about a minute of static. Hissing. The sound of a radio that has lost its station, sitting there between two perfectly good pieces of music.

The gap was written into the file as empty space, and empty space is not the same thing as quiet. Some sound hardware read the nothing and filled it in with whatever it had to hand. So we have written real silence into that space now. Actual samples, every one of them zero. Our quiet is quiet on purpose, and I did not expect to start a Monday learning that silence has to be recorded.

Now. The volcanic island chain. We have been building this thing for about a week, and if you listened on Sunday you will remember the lava had been flowing uphill. We sorted the direction out. Monday was about everything else.

Lava now burns the people who walk on it. I want to be clear about what that sentence implies. For several days, the most dangerous feature on the island was also the most comfortable place to stand. You could wander out across a river of molten rock and admire the view. As of Monday the cracked, glowing crust does ten to twenty fire damage a second, and the molten lava proper does a hundred to two hundred and fifty. Fire resistance counts for something. A rock, a bridge or a boat over the lava keeps you safe. Everything else about it is now a very bad idea, which is what we had intended from the beginning.

The village on the island woke up as well. Forty five doors and shutters open again, which they had stopped doing because the copied houses had lost the bit that makes a door a door, so each one was a very convincing painting of a door. Thirty four lamps and ten new lanterns along the lanes light one after another through the sunset and go out at dawn. The lighthouse has a turning beam, two shafts of light sweeping the sea once every sixteen seconds from dusk until dawn, with a glow around the lamp, and gone by day. And the stiff flags that came with the building kit were replaced with the game's own pirate flagpoles, whose flags wave and turn to face the wind.

The volcano got a proper smoke plume, and this is my favourite small thing of the day. It rises straight up out of the crater, then bends downwind as it climbs, and it leans further over when the wind is strong. You can see it from the village and from out at sea. The old plume drifted north-east. Always north-east. Whatever the weather was doing, whatever the wind was doing, that smoke had made up its mind. There is also a player map now, eight K across, covering the whole four kilometre sea at half a metre to the pixel, and exploring out there clears the fog of war at twice the usual distance. The weather fog came over from Blood Bay, so by day it fades out over two and a half kilometres instead of two hundred metres, and rain no longer thickens it into soup.

Then there is the detail work, which nobody will ever notice and which is the whole job. Four flocks of seagulls circle the volcano two thirds of the way up the west and south slopes. Twelve animal spawns went onto the flat south-west side of the main island, each one picking a boar, a rabbit, a doe, a stag, a frog or a turkey at random every time it fills, and the whole map got a navigation mesh so the animals can actually walk about. In the pirate harbour the pier pieces now meet with no water showing between them, the steps face the piers and finish level with the planks, and the two quay guns stand at the sea edge with their barrels out over the water and shot stacked beside them. Also, seven hundred and twenty six branches and props that had been hanging in the air above sloped ground were put down onto it. Seven hundred and twenty six. Somebody counted.

Which brings me to the ships, because an island chain is not much use if you cannot sail to it. The first piece is that boats now work with no game server running at all. In offline play, the client reads the scene's own sea chart and sails the boats itself, so the fleet lies at its piers and every one of them can be boarded and steered.

The second piece is more embarrassing. A player standing on a boat's deck now always rides it. If you had reached the deck by a ladder, or arrived by teleport, or simply stood very still at the wheel, the game would look at you, standing on the deck, and tell you to please step aboard. You could not take the helm and you could not ride along. And then, as a parting gift, going ashore could sometimes leave you attached to the ship anyway. So you were either not on a boat you were standing on, or permanently on a boat you had left.

There is now a sea road out of Central Brittany for testing. Sail out of the harbour into open water and the helmsman is carried to the volcanic archipelago, at the wheel of the same kind of boat, arriving just outside the main island's bay with the bow pointed at the mouth. A message warns you shortly before the crossing. Passengers come too, as of Monday afternoon, which is a sentence that sounds obvious and was not. Everyone on deck when the boat sails out arrives on the deck of the same boat as their helmsman, and only one boat goes into the water for the crossing. The earlier version would have handed every passenger a boat of their own, so a party of five would have arrived as five identical vessels each containing one confused person.

And then the large one. We have begun work on the Great Sea. The idea is a single ocean, eight kilometres across, holding Novia at about three kilometres wide with Mistrendur to the north-west and the Hidden Vale to the north-east, each of them at three times its overworld size, all on one body of water at human scale. A new generator reads the three overworld maps and finds every coastal town, player town and island town the sea can reach. One hundred and eighty six places, gathered into eighty eight ports, each one somewhere a ship will stop and offer to put you ashore or carry on. I have wanted a sailable Novia since before most of you were playing it. A map is a promise about a world. A sea you can actually cross is the world keeping it.

Over on the Desk, we built and shipped a word game in a day. It is called Novian Word. You guess the day's five letter word from Shroud of the Avatar in six tries, and then there are two bonus words: a Rune Word, written out in the game's own runes, and a six letter Long Word. Guesses are checked on the server, the new words arrive at midnight Central time, and the season runs to the thirty first of January with a different theme each week.

It keeps streaks, and this is the part I like. There is your own streak, there is a streak for your guild or your town, and there is one for the whole server, which counts a day as solved when more than half the players who played it got it. So a bad Tuesday is now a shared civic failure. There is a Lexicon of every word you have solved, an Archive of the earlier days, a Hard mode, and a result you can copy out as coloured squares and inflict on your friends. Every word of the season also has its own picture: a painting in the style of our loading screens for each day's word, a woodcut after the crafting book's style for each Rune Word, and a sepia ink study for each Long Word. Two hundred and ninety four of them, each checked by hand for stray lettering, real-world symbols and anything too modern to belong.

My favourite piece of that whole build is the checker. Before the season's word list can ship, a program reads every theme, every hint, every caption and every line of lore, and refuses the lot if any of them names a word the player has not reached yet. It also refuses two answers that are forms of the same word. We wrote a program whose entire job is to stop us accidentally telling you Thursday's answer on Tuesday.

The game also reaches into Shroud of the Avatar itself, though that half is switched off for the moment. There are eighteen hidden achievements in the Games category for words solved on the day, longest streak, Lexicon pages, Rune Words and Long Words, and there is a title, Wordsmith, for a thirty day streak. A leaderboard is sitting ready in the in-game Leaderboards window. The game servers read each player's totals a minute after you log in and then every five minutes, so your word habit and your character will eventually know about each other.

Right. Combat, and the pet that could see through stealth. In player versus player, you could hide yourself with Silent Movement or Camouflage, and the enemy player could not see you. Working as designed. Their pet could. It would walk past, spot you, and go for you, which rather gave the game away. The animal had better eyes than the person holding its lead. A pet now sees what its owner sees, and its owner cannot see a hidden player, so the pet cannot either. Wild monsters still notice a partly hidden player up close, which is fair.

Chain spells were losing their jumps. Chain Lightning, in a very crowded fight, would come out as plain lightning, and the damage went with it. When the spell went looking for its next target it read off the end of the list of nearby characters, and every client watching the cast dropped the effect on the spot. The busier the battle, the more likely your chain spell was to be a single bolt and a disappointed face. That is fixed, and a chain will no longer jump to somebody who has already left the area.

Here is one I have been enjoying all day. Creatures that attack from range back away when a melee fighter closes on them. Sensible. But each step back took them nearer the edge of the ground they are allowed to defend, and once they crossed it the creature decided it had been pulled too far from home, gave up the fight, and walked back to heal. Brign, Lord of Water, and the water elementals in The Breach did this every single fight. A boss whose finishing move was going home. Now, when one more step back would take it over that edge, it plants itself and fights you at close range like an adult.

In the Lost Vale, the Cabalist wave battle has stopped reading from a script. It used to bring Indigno, Temna, Dolus and Fastus, in that order, every time, which is less a battle than a pageant. It now draws its Cabalists at random from all eight, with no repeats inside a run, and a line in chat names each one as it arrives. On Hard mode the last wave brings two at once. Corpus has also stopped taking worn gear in there, which I am told will be missed by nobody.

And Magic Warding can now be switched off for one combat deck at a time, from a button in Edit Deck, which a player asked for on the forums. A deck set to Off loses the skill's magic resistance and also its attunement penalties for as long as that deck is equipped. Until Monday, players were forgetting the skill and retraining it to move between a melee deck and a spell deck. Every deck starts with it on.

Rogue of Novia, our little dungeon crawler on the Desk, had a good day too. You can now watch a finished run again from beginning to end. The end screen offers it, the start screen lists your recent runs, and you get play, step and floor-by-floor controls over the map with every message of the run listed under its floor, which you can save out as text. Share the run gives you a link that anyone can open, naming only your character. A run of the daily dungeon opens up to everyone once that day is over. Long runs are compressed when they finish, so they are kept rather than dropped for being too big.

The dungeon also stopped imprisoning people. A rift trap, a Teleport to Zone Scroll or a Ring of Wandering could drop you into a room whose only way out was a secret door. From floor eight downward, that was happening on roughly one teleport in three. One in three. At that rate it is no longer a bug, it is a feature of the architecture. There is now always a visible route from wherever you land to the staircase.

Two more from that dungeon. A Chaos Bolt that hit the keeper of the Heart of Sorrows used to take the Heart with it, so the creature was transformed and the prize ceased to exist. A creature changed by the wand now keeps what it was carrying, and bosses resist the change entirely. And a level drain that hit you at level two used to send you to level twenty one, which is the most generous punishment in the history of dungeon crawling. Also, an item you walk over with a full pack now stays on the floor where it lay, instead of vanishing the moment you step off it and leaving you nothing to come back for.

Three things about your windows. The character sheet has been tightened up, from a mockup Rinaldi put together on the test shard: the stats box is only as tall as the lines in it, so your character and your equipment slots draw larger, with full-size slots at the default window size. The Tools button moved into the empty corner, and Titles and Achievements moved into a new More tab, which also reaches Emotes, Journal, Combat Decks, Recipe Book, Skills and Social, so every tab label fits even at the narrowest width. The compass has its marker-hiding back: hold the right mouse button on it and the markers step aside so you can read north, east, south and west in a crowded town. The old compass did that, the rebuilt one had forgotten how, and somebody asked for it on Discord. A quick right-click on the compass opens a menu to pick which kinds of marker you want at all. And the quick loot window on corpses and chests now sizes itself to what is in it, one row for a single item or a pile of gold and a row more for each extra, up to whatever size you last dragged it to, after which it scrolls.

On the housing side, there is a new home being built called the Grand Gothic Manor, Keep sized, raised out of an art kit that came into the project the same evening. Two storeys of stone, a clock tower over the street front, fourteen rooms, six chandeliers and fourteen wall sconces that switch on and off, floors and walls and ceilings that all take decorations, and pets that follow you up the stair. Its doors open, including the north wing's double doors, which the kit had helpfully built shut. It fits Keep and Castle lots. Only the tester tools can make the deed at the moment, so nobody is buying one yet. In the Viking Great Hall, meanwhile, door-style dungeon and basement entrances finally stand flush on the floor against the ground-floor walls, where the knee-high stone base used to stop them halfway up. And Decoration Layouts now work properly in basements and player dungeons, with a preview that skips anything that would land outside the room instead of placing it and then mailing it to your bank.

Your potions have been lying to you, in your favour. The Obsidian Potion of Expedience says plus eighty percent now, where it had been saying plus forty. Preservation gives fifty percent durability, where the text said twenty five. Reclamation gives a hundred to salvage and repair, where it said fifty. Precision gives twenty to Meticulous Collection, where it said ten. Every one of those descriptions had been understating the real effect by half, in nine languages. The shop packs, to be fair, had been overstating the duration, so somewhere in there is a kind of balance.

The loading screens have fifty new tips, which brings the set to four hundred and twelve, covering the newer bits of the game: the Options settings, Favorites and deck searches in your backpack, combat deck folders, Stack All at the bank, Liberated towns, green repeatable-quest markers, pet commands and Set Trap. We also retired the tip that said an Ancient dragon rises again, on the grounds that they no longer do. The Desk has a window for all of them now, searchable, downloadable as a text file, and able to show one over your wallpaper every fifteen, thirty or sixty seconds.

And one measurement, because I would rather tell you the awkward numbers than wait for a nicer set. We compared town load times for the same players on the old live servers and on the new client. In the NPC towns it is better, and clearly so: a typical repeat load came down from sixteen point nine seconds to thirteen and a half, and the first load of a session from thirty nine seconds to twenty nine. Player-owned towns improved on the first load, forty seconds to thirty two, and then went nowhere on repeat loads, which are still sitting near sixteen. The reason is that waiting for the town's decorations grew from four seconds to nearly seven, and it ate every gain made elsewhere. That decoration wait is the next thing on the bench.

Quickly through the rest. Guild voice chat was switched on for the test shard, so the Talk to Guild key now reaches your guild, and some of the player versus player smoothing work went on there with it: Blink, Night Step and Charge stay where they land on everyone else's screen, jumps show their arc, players face where they are aiming, a melee swing at someone who looked within reach lands, and your own hit number, flinch and sound arrive as the blow does. Underneath that, voice reconnects on its own after a drop, a microphone chosen in Options takes over at once, and position updates for nearby voice now fit in a single packet, so rooms with more than forty people talking stop losing it.

The Oracle learned thirty four new answers from the weekend's unanswered questions, covering everything from what drops Rings of Air to whether a Haste potion helps you gather. About four hundred and eighty lines of game text went into all nine languages. And in German, four characters including a freed prisoner in the Obsidian Panopticon had their masculine and feminine endings swapped, so they had been getting it wrong in both directions at once.

Thirty four tracker issues closed, and the shape of them is familiar. A hot pool in the caves that you could sink through and then not climb out of. Chandeliers casting a dark circle on the floor beneath them, because their own crystals were standing in the way of their own light. Arrows looted from a body somebody else had already emptied, which joined your quiver as ghosts and then jammed your bow. An NPC in Soltown who would walk off on her daily rounds carrying the hand-in window with her, and your undelivered sword. A chess rematch against the computer refused on every single click. And the page that lists who is online now lists people who are actually in the world, rather than everyone who had recently thought about logging in.

That is Monday. An island that can hurt you, a sea being drawn, a word a day, and a very good pet that has been asked to stop helping. I am looking forward to the decoration load times coming down, and to the first person who sails out of Central Brittany on purpose and keeps going.

Before I go. The crew who built that lighthouse have been working flat out for a week, around the clock, every night. I am told they are absolutely beaming. Good night, citizens of New Britannia.