Patch Notes: The Living World

The people of the Bay live their own lives

Townsfolk are no longer strangers who appear and vanish. Every town's people are residents with a name, a face, a home and a trade - the baker, the smith, the innkeeper, the priests, the watch - and they keep them for good.
Each has a day: they get up (early birds and night owls), go to work, run errands at the shops, meet friends in the square, spend the evening at the tavern or the temple, and go home to bed. The watch walks its beat in shifts.
Online, everyone sees the same people in the same places at the same time.
They stop and talk among themselves, and greet you as you pass - by name, once they count you a friend.
Doors open: step into a tavern in the evening, a shop or a temple, or a house, and the people whose day has them there are inside - talking at the tables, and now and then getting up to cross the room. Nobody walks into your own home.

Merchants, pilgrims, couriers, pedlars and adventurers travel between towns by day and camp by night. Merchants hire sellswords and travel in caravans; anyone armed puts on their gear before they leave town.
Travellers meet the land's monsters. Come upon a party under attack and you can fight beside them - save them and they will remember it; arrive too late and the fallen stay dead, and a newcomer takes their place in time. The towns talk about what happened on their roads.
In port towns, sailors crew the ships that call there, and travellers sail across the Bay - now and then one is lost at sea.
On the Overworld, parties on the road are marked, and a party in trouble shows in red.

Adventurers dive the dungeons near their towns. Meet a company down there and they fight at your side.
Some never come up. Their remains lie where they fell for three days, with what they carried and a keepsake - bring it home to their family, and the town will talk of it.

What you do changes how each person feels about you: a kind word, help in a fight, a life saved - or a blow, a theft, a crime they saw.
A friend greets you by name and comes to your aid on the road. An enemy will not speak to you, and an armed one will draw on you beyond the town walls.
Striking down a resident is permanent: their household turns against you, and every witness counts the crime.
The chronicle (L) has a new People page: your friends, your enemies, the people who know you, and the dead.

The Travel Options speed dials are gone: a journey runs at x100 on a road or track, and x60 off it.
Wilderness enemies only come for a fast traveller who fails a Stealth check. An enemy that has noticed you wears a "!" and slows the journey; one that has not leaves you be.
Online, the ship's time dial is gone - time at sea keeps the world's pace.

Living world is on by default, on its tile under Features (World); a change takes effect when a town next loads. Off - or on the Classic UI - towns keep Daggerfall's own wandering townsfolk.
Tuned for big cities: the living world's work in the largest city was cut from up to 120 ms a frame to a few milliseconds, and arriving in a town no longer hitches.

THE LIVING WORLD (LW1-LW8c, LW-FIX1-6, LW-PERF) + RATE-LAW, HELM-TIME-ONLINE, WILD-ALERT: townsfolk with names, homes and days, travellers on the roads and in the deep - merged up to main by @Lattymoy in #628

Full Changelog: app-v0.1.6410...app-v0.1.6444