Patch Notes: Player fights, online saves, yards and a faster start

Player fights

• In the open zone in Cyrodiil, in a duel and in a siege, a hit from a player now removes your own health. Your health bar shows it.
• Damage from a player is a part of your health. A strong character and a weak character take the same part from the same hit.
• You cannot heal for 30 seconds after a player hits you. You cannot heal during a duel or a siege. Health that you get from a potion or a spell in that time does not stay.
• After a monster fight in the zone, potions and heal spells work as before.
• Health that a player removes does not return by itself after 30 seconds.
• If you lose a duel, you have 1 health at the end. The duel does not heal you.
• In a siege, you return with full health at your wave.

Remains in the Cyrodiil zone

• A death in the zone could remove the items from your pack and show no remains. Now the remains stay in the world after your death, where you fell.
• Your killer can put your remains on the ground after you go. These remains now show your name, not "Traveller". Your screen and the map show them as your remains. Your killer's screen does not show them as Your remains.
• If your game lost its link to the social service, a death in the zone did not take items from your pack. Your killer took them into your remains, but you kept them too. Now your pack loses the items that go into your remains.

Online saves

• When you closed or reloaded the game online, your character did not save. Progress since the last automatic save was lost, and an item you equipped could go from its slot. The game now keeps that save, and you get it back when you join again.
• If the realm did not get your guild reputation from a session, the next device now keeps that reputation. Before, it was lost.
• If the realm does not get your guild reputation during a session, the game tells you.
• If the realm does not take a save for 5 minutes, the game tells you. It also tells you when the game cannot save, for example during a duel.
• When another device takes your online seat, the game saves your character immediately.
• You can recover progress that a device kept but the realm did not get. Use the character's tile at the Online door. The progress becomes a new offline character.
• When you change devices and leave the app open, the game no longer sets a save aside.

Homes and yards

• A town's yards no longer fill up. Every home can put 60 decorations in its yard, also in a busy town.
• Yard decorations near you appear first. The game now gets only the changes near you, not the full town each minute.
• When a player changes a yard, other players near it see the change in a few seconds.
• The game asks for yard decorations less often when nothing changes nearby.
• The game now draws the decorations in other players' yards in groups. This gives a higher frame rate in large cities with many decorated homes.
• On October 25, items could go from a chest in your online home after you made a shared chest private again. They now come back into that chest when you next go into your home. The game tells you how many came back.
• A chest that you shared and then made private again no longer loses items that went from it before.
• An older version of the game shows no yard decorations of other players. Reload the page, or start the desktop app again, to update.

Fixes

• A tutorial page or a message can open over a window. This is true for the spellbook, the inventory, the chronicle, the shop windows and the tavern. It is also true for a player trade, the pause menu, the character sheet and the level-up screen. Now the page or the message gets your Enter and Escape. Before, Escape closed the window under it, and Enter could push a button of that window. On the level-up screen, Enter confirmed your points.
• With Morrowind's data attached, the Face step of a new character said that the portraits "could not be loaded" while the game drew them. Now the note shows only when the game cannot draw a portrait. The game starts to draw the faces when you choose your name.

Performance

• The first launch after an update no longer freezes for half a minute while the game prepares its graphics. The work now runs in the background while the world loads.
• The first seconds of play no longer stop while effects such as weapon glows and foe warnings get ready.
• On a slower or busy computer, the volumetric clouds no longer stop the first launch. The sky shows its simpler clouds for those seconds, and the full clouds replace them when they are ready.
• The game now keeps some results from your first launch. These are the town ground, the ship models and pictures, the shipyard and lighthouse sites, and the map of Tamriel. On later launches, the pauses when you start in Daggerfall are shorter.
• The pictures of your character's body now load in the background. The game does not stop for them.
• The first launch is a little slower, because the game saves these results. They use approximately 9 MB of storage.
• The game now prepares the snow around you in the background. When you ride or fly fast over winter ground, the frame rate is more stable.
• Foes use a map of the trees, crates and other objects that they hide behind. This map now uses approximately one third of its old memory, and foes find their line of sight faster. The objects that stop sight and missiles do not change.

Desktop app

• The Windows desktop app has a new setting in Settings > Graphics > Display: Graphics backend, Direct3D 11 (the default) or Vulkan. The new setting starts to work the next time the app starts.
• On many graphics cards, Vulkan prepares the graphics of the game much faster. With Vulkan, the first launch after an update does not freeze for a long time. In play it is a little slower than Direct3D 11.
• Wait For Screen Refresh stays on while Vulkan is your choice. When it was off, the game froze when you changed the size of the window.
• If Vulkan cannot start on your graphics card, the app tells you and starts again on Direct3D 11. It tries Vulkan again after a graphics driver update, or after an app update that has a new graphics engine.
• The Windows desktop app now continues to load the world when you minimize its window or put another window over it. Before, the load stopped until you looked at the game again.
• The desktop app now keeps the compiled game scripts between launches, as a web browser does.

Patch Notes: More ways to pay in the shop

Shop

You can pay in the currency of your country. When it can, Stripe shows the price in your currency.

You can pay with more methods, for example iDEAL. Stripe shows the methods for your country.

The prices in the shop are in US dollars. A credit card is not necessary.

What's Changed

• SHOP-LOCAL: the buyer's own currency and local ways to pay (iDEAL and others) by @Lattymoy in #1367
• TRAVIS-ALL: Travis's 20 open pull requests in one (relay world277, account acct208) by @Lattymoy in #1366
• REAL-GPU: the headed-Edge probe with per-frame attribution, in tools/realGpu by @travddm in #1299
• COVER-COMPACT: the cover index as typed columns; CACHE-BOUNDS measured by @travddm in #1328
• SHARED-HEALTH: one health pool under the referee - the zone, duels and sieges referee the player's own health by @travddm in #1335
• CLOSE-SAVE: an online close or reload keeps its last save by @travddm in #1338
• CODE-CACHE / BOOT-HIDDEN: the desktop app keeps compiled scripts, and loads behind other windows by @travddm in #1339
• POI-KEPT: the desktop app keeps the POI feed in IndexedDB, where Cache Storage does not open by @travddm in #1340
• YARD-CELL YC5: strangers' yards merged and drawn a block at a time by @travddm in #1361
• Enhanced windows leave their keys to a box standing over them by @travddm in #1290
• FIRST-VISIT: keep a warm launch's first-visit work across launches by @travddm in #1292
• BOOT-COMPILE: start the boot's shader programs together; warm steps never wait by @travddm in #1293
• CLOUD-COMPILE: the volumetric clouds built once their programs are done (stacked on #1293) by @travddm in #1295
• YARD-CELL plan: a town's yards kept, synced and stood by block by @travddm in #1297
• Realm saves: the Roll keeps a silent page's standing; save at seat loss; SAVES-SAID widened; STRANDED's way back by @travddm in #1298
• FACE-NOTE: the Face step says portraits failed only when nothing was drawn; house signs pinned under the town mods by @travddm in #1301
• WILD-REMAINS-LOSS: a fall's remains laid after the room wakes, named for the fallen by @travddm in #1302
• YARD-CELL YC1: a town's yards kept, read and stood a block at a time by @travddm in #1304
• GPU-BACKEND: Vulkan as an opt-in for the Windows desktop app, with a fallback guard by @travddm in #1311
• SNOW-THREAD: the snow's ring and window builds on a worker by @travddm in #1312
• HOME-STRANDED: chest goods lost to the old pour come back into the chest by @travddm in #1337
• YARD-CELL YC2: a yard that moved, pushed to every page online; the poll a slow safety net by @travddm in #1341
• AUDIT SHOP-LOCAL: the ways-to-pay step reads its tool's exit; no key text in the log by @Lattymoy in #1368
• Unblock main's deploys: SHARED-HEALTH's relay test waits out ZONE-GRACE's safe passage by @Lattymoy in #1369

Full Changelog: app-v0.1.12621...app-v0.1.12919