Roofs that keep the weather out, effects from the Forge, and ground that blends

A day for roofs and spell effects in the game, and a long one in the workshop for the people who build the world.

A zone can now have indoor parts. A builder can mark an area of a zone as indoors, as a box, a circle or a drawn outline, with its own light and fog. Step under that roof and the sun, the sky's light and the weather fade out over a second. Step back out and they return. The sky itself stays drawn, so a gate seen from inside still shows the day beyond it, not a black hole. Spells that only work outdoors now refuse inside such an area, just as they do in a zone that is indoors as a whole. This means a roofed city and its open harbour can be one zone instead of two. Game masters can add an indoor area from inside the game with #volume add indoors.

Effects made in the VFX Forge now play in the game. The Forge is the tool the game's visual effects are made in. An effect from it can now be installed and then used anywhere the game uses an effect. One that plays once stops after its time and fades; a looping one keeps going. One sample, a spiral made for Complete Heal, is in the game's data to try. Game masters can play any effect with #effect followed by its name and, if they like, a number of seconds. Everyone nearby sees it, on the target or on the game master. A looping effect plays for ten seconds unless told otherwise, then fades.

Ground that blends from one texture to the next. In ground made with the zone builder, textures now fade into each other at every corner instead of meeting at hard edges, and the game draws them just as Blender shows them. A whole ground is one material, which is light work for your computer. Older ground converts in one press without moving a corner. Builders also got Repaint the ground, which chooses the textures again after the land is reshaped, and a brush that levels a terrace wherever it is dragged, with a soft edge.

Turned areas now match what you see. An area set at an angle, such as a trap's or a pool with waves, was tested as if it were turned the other way from how it is drawn. The two now agree.

In the workshop. Zones built in Blender can now be put into the game with one command or one button. It runs every step, stops with a plain reason if one fails, and carries on when run again. No new zone built this way has been put in today, so there is nothing new to visit yet. The builder can also make a first draft of a zone from its plan, in six kinds: outdoors, home town, indoor city, dungeon, island and sea. Every part of the builder was tried in a real window and nineteen faults were put right, among them a Barbarian town with no houses and an indoor city with bare halls. A complete guide to the builder was written, 51 task pages with 60 pictures, with a Guide button in every section. The texture painter can now paint trims, long bands that repeat. A study measured how the classic zones lay out towns, houses, docks, props and roofed cities, and turned it into 65 rules for the builder to follow; only sizes and counts were taken, nothing copied. These are tools behind the game, not changes you will see when you log in.