Devlog ·
Fairhaven and Dreadhaven rebuilt, two hunting grounds, and a login that says no
52 commits that day. Written up from the work itself.
The two starting cities were rebuilt from the ground up, each with a hunting ground outside its gate, and a few long-standing looks and annoyances were put right.
Fairhaven and Dreadhaven are rebuilt as real cities. They replace the old box cities. Fairhaven is now The Starwheel, in the newer look: flat, wide avenues under an open sky, its main gate opening south onto the Downs. Dreadhaven is The Great Vault, a city deep underground with no sky and no weather, joined to the Moor above by two lifts. Both have people at their posts, a guildmaster outside every guild hall, doors, lamps, water and workbenches. Where a way out leads nowhere yet, an invisible wall stops you.
Two hunting grounds for levels 1 to 10. The Fairhaven Downs and the Dreadhaven Moor have 14 camps each. Eight creatures came with them: fire beetles, carrion rats, moor shades, blight crawlers, hollow ghouls, footpads, bandit lookouts and the Fen Hag. On the Moor the carrion bat and the blight weaver have proper bat and spider bodies. Each ground has its own foraging, and the Moor's includes water. The Fen Hag now drops the Fen Hag's knucklebone, a caster's charm, one time in four.
Dressed guards, horses in the barns, light in the dark. The cities' people wear the same fitted armour players wear, in their city's colours, and are of the races of their quarters. Each barn has a stablemaster, two stable hands and a horse in each of its fifteen stalls. Fairhaven's north, east and west gates are shut, with their guards inside. Dreadhaven's walls no longer turn black a few steps from a lamp: the cavern is brighter, and 72 lamps line the walks from the Landing to every place on the map.
Nobody walks off a lift or gets stuck under the world. Anyone still running when a Dreadhaven lift set off could step off the car's edge and fall; each shaft now has invisible walls round the car's way up. The guards who stood right in front of each lift on the Moor now stand to one side. Anyone who ends up beneath a zone, through a gap or by logging in where the old cities stood, is brought back instead of standing there for ever.
A wrong password is told to you at once. You could reach the server list before the game checked your password. Now your name and password are checked first, and a mistake shows a box on the login screen saying "Wrong name or password." Your name stays and the password is cleared for another try. If no server can be reached to check, it says so and lets nothing through. Logging in was made safer too.
Iksar helms that fit, and ogre and troll robes that hang. Helms tore open at the front on Iksar. A helm now follows the skull, with one clean opening for the horns or the crown and a slot for the mane, and Iksar get a collar of their own. Ogre and troll robes hang from the belly in one bell with a level hem, the wizard's hat clears the hump, and a robe no longer splits into slices as you move.
Names of our own. Spells, creatures and items that still carried the original game's names were given new ones. Only the names and text changed.
In the workshop. The world's content is moving into a database of its own, where every change is logged and can be undone, and the building tool has a first page that works from it. A nightly backup of the world, with a weekly practice restore, was built and tried. The game doesn't read any of this yet.