Patch Notes: A lighter load on the account server

Online

• Signing in, joining a room and loading a town's house layouts now cost the account server far less work, so busy evenings are less likely to slow it down or leave decorations missing.

Project Legacy

• An online family that hasn't changed since the last checkpoint is no longer uploaded again at every checkpoint.

Patch Notes: Living world - people back in the cities, and room to move

Towns

• With the living world on, 407 of the game's 410 cities (Ripmarket among them) had nobody walking their streets at any hour. A city's walls and closed gates cut its streets off from the fields around it, and the townspeople were being laid out on the fields' side, where none of their doors are, so every one of them stayed indoors all day. The streets now fill again by day, travellers leave by the gates, and the watch keeps its posts there. Daggerfall, Wayrest and Sentinel were not affected.
• In 14 cities whose palace stands in its own walled grounds (Sentinel among them), the whole city watch lived at the palace and never came out. The watch now lives where its door opens onto the streets, so it walks its patrols and keeps its posts.
• Townspeople no longer stand or walk inside each other:
  • People waiting at the same spot keep a little room from one another and from the groups talking there.
  • Two who leave a shop or a tavern at the same moment walk out in single file.
  • A walker steps aside, keeping right, for anyone standing or coming the other way.
  • In the towns measured, between a tenth and over half of the people in view at midday or in the evening were standing inside someone else; now almost nobody is.
• Townspeople no longer all crowd into one place:
  • The town square now has several gathering points across it, and each townsperson keeps to their own.
  • Every neighbourhood has a corner where its people meet, and people's favourite places are the ones near their homes.
  • Stall-keepers set up either at the square or at their own market.
  • People head out for the evening, and to the morning market, at their own time instead of all on the hour.
  • In the towns measured, the busiest spot in the evening went from 30-64 people (all around one point of the square) to 6-17.
• A townsperson who stops for you now stays exactly where they stopped.
• Townspeople now go into the guild halls and shops on their own business:
  • They belong to the guild of their trade or class: scholars, booksellers' and alchemists' people and mages to the Mages Guild; smiths and fighters to the Fighters Guild; courtiers and knights to the town's knightly order. Each spends an evening at their guild hall twice a week.
  • Sellswords and adventurers now go to their own guild's hall instead of whichever hall is nearest.
  • Errands go into a shop more often, and to a shop the person has business at: shopkeepers bank their takings, scholars visit the library and the bookseller, households the general store and the clothier.
  • The people you find inside a guild hall are now its own guild's members. Daggerfall's guild halls now see 18 visitors a day instead of 12, and its banks 7 instead of 2.
• Lodgers have rooms at the inn:
  • Travellers staying at a tavern, sailors ashore and adventurers who live there each have a room by one of its beds.
  • You'll find them up in their room in the morning and again before bed. They come down to the common room for breakfast and supper, and sleep out of sight.
  • A room you rent is never given to a lodger.
• Townspeople now look like who they are:
  • Guild members walk the streets in their guild's classes: Mages Guild members in a mage's hooded robes, Fighters Guild members in a warrior's arms and armour, the knights of an order as knights. Priests wear the healer's robes. Adventurers, sellswords and couriers wear their own class all day, not only on their way out of town.
  • Someone keeping their place on their own appears as one of Daggerfall's own pictures of their kind: an old beggar at their pitch, a merchant, a blacksmith or a porter at their stall, a monk at the temple door in the morning, a lord or a lady at home in the palace. Each kind has several pictures, and the animated ones move as they do in the game.
  • They become themselves again the moment they walk on or join a conversation. A look never changes while you are watching.
  • In Daggerfall city, 24 of its 317 people now walk in a class, and 17-28 stand as still pictures by day.

What's Changed

• Living world: walled cities' streets (LW-WALLS), nobody inside another (LW-SPACE), the town gathers in many places (LW-SPREAD), guild halls and shops (LW-ERRANDS), tavern rooms (LW-LODGE), class looks and still pictures (LW-LOOKS) by @Lattymoy in #646
• LW-WALLS: walled cities' people back on their streets, and the watch with them by @Lattymoy in #638
• STORM-SHED 2: the account database's measured follow-ups - the arena's per-token reads, the towns' layouts, idle Legacy saves by @Lattymoy in #650

Full Changelog: app-v0.1.6625...app-v0.1.6640