DevlogArmour that does something, and creatures that cannot see through walls

A day of finding out that things which looked finished were not, and fixing them.

Armour did nothing. Your armour class was worked out from your gear, stored, sent to the client and printed on your sheet — and no part of the fighting code ever read it. A naked character and one in full plate were the same character in a fight. Armour now helps you avoid blows and takes something off the ones that land, worth most against things near your own level and never enough to make anyone untouchable. Plate roughly halves what a camp of level 24s does to a level 49. Naked is as bad as it always was.

Every creature fought like a warrior, double-attacking on a warrior's curve, because nothing had ever given creatures a class and the default was Warrior. That is now something a creature has to be given.

Creatures can no longer see through walls. There was no line of sight anywhere in the server: a creature noticed you through a wall, through a floor and through a closed door, and its call for help went through them too. That is most of the reason pulling one creature out of a room full of them never worked. Creatures now have to actually see you, and a camp cannot hide behind its own front rank.

Fairhaven, rebuilt as a city you can walk through.

Fairhaven and Dreadhaven are cities again, rebuilt as empty, walkable starting places rather than the placeholder they had become.

Feign death works like it should. Standing up used to hand every creature a free swing, five landing together in the same instant. A camp could not be split, because feigning wiped you from every list at once. Now a body that has gone down stays known but is not a target, each creature gives up in its own moment — longest for whoever it hates most — and each walks home at its own pace. Stand up before one has let go and you stand up into it, which is the point. And feigning is no longer a free win: you cannot fight from the floor.

Four ways a bag could eat what was in it. A bag put inside another bag vanished with everything in it, silently, when the save was read back. A full bag dropped or put on a trade table arrived empty. A bazaar listing counted what you were wearing, came up short, and threw away what it had already taken. All of it is fixed, and nothing is quietly dropped any more. Item loss matters more than jank.

What is on you survives a zone line. Buffs used to end at the border, spell cooldowns were wiped by it — a free reset of every spell — and hunger never happened at all, because the food and drink were sent somewhere with nowhere to put them.

A special move finishes now. A flying kick, a tiger claw, a bash: the move you pressed the button for was a fifth of a move, cut short by the next ordinary swing or by the flinch of being hit. Moves are ranked, and a lesser one no longer interrupts a greater one. A spell you are casting survives a blow too — you flinch and go straight back to casting, as the old games did — unless the cast was really interrupted.

Legs that stop when the body stops. A character who stopped walking kept running on the spot for up to a second, and your own legs waited for the server before they started. Animation is now read from where a body actually is, every frame. Your jump comes from your own feet rather than word from the server, and the camera is drawn at the frame rate, which is what was making mouse look stutter.

Right-click stopped swinging the camera when you meant to consider something, shallow water no longer makes you swim through a stream on your toes, floating at the surface no longer shivers, and targeting cycles through what is near instead of handing you the same creature over and over.

Four hundred items, and only forty pictures. Nothing had ever counted them: not one item named an icon, so every one drew a procedural shape while forty rendered pictures sat unused. Items now draw under their own picture where they have one, and spell scrolls — which are 212 of the 400 — under the written rune of the school they teach, instead of a shelf of identical rectangles. Coverage went from one in ten to nearly two in three.

Changes reach the game without a restart. Editing an item, a fitting, a model or a spell used to mean restarting the client to see it. Now the change arrives on its own within a few seconds, and everyone is re-dressed so a changed model actually shows.

A refused login says which refusal it is. Logging in without a password used to leave you staring at an empty character list with a line of small grey type above it, which reads as "my characters are gone". You get the login screen back, with the reason on it, your account still filled in and the cursor in the password box. An empty list now means an empty list.

And one door was quietly shut. The service that holds accounts, characters and the whole world was listening on every network interface behind a single shared token. It now answers only on this machine.