- timed quests get their countdown — a Quest Timers box under the minimap and a Time Remaining line in the quest log, kept against the server's own clock
- interiors go honest: footsteps stop crunching the terrain's snow through a building's floor, and tavern voices are authored dry, so the fake cave echo is gone
- snow is the reference's again — point-sprite flakes at the era's pixel size, and a spawn slab that leans into your run so a runner no longer outruns the field
- Stormwind stops drawing Elwynn through its walls, a looted quest crate's lid settles, cold zones puff visible breath, and the collect-quest toast fires only on a real advance
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Entering the world used to show an uncovered, movable world before the screen
came up — seconds of it on a slower machine ("like the Stormwind intro
video", as one report with video put it). The screen also cleared onto bare
terrain with the buildings still streaming in, and could hang forever if you
arrived swimming or flying. It has a real lifecycle now: it rises at the
entry edges (character pick, transfer, teleport), clears only when the scene
is actually presentable — terrain, buildings, props and their collision all
resident — and its physics hold releases in every movement mode, not just
walking. The progress bar counts buildings too.
- A far teleport flashed a frame of the destination before the screen rose.
The "swap never flashes" guarantee existed only in comments — a streamer
rework had silently dropped the scheduling constraint that enforced it; it
is structural now. And logout got its missing cover: the original's plain
black cut, not a frame of torn-down world.
- Animation parking now governs everything with a rig. ~350 animated objects
(braziers, doors, chests) were sampling their loops off-screen forever, and
a patrolling parked mob kept writing pose data nothing could read — ~620 rig
refreshes a frame became 7, and creatures in rooms the camera can't reach
through any portal park too.
- The engine's own tax got measured: bare Bevy spends ~3.9 CPU ms a frame on
this machine drawing nothing at all, which resets what "fast enough"
honestly means for everything built on top of it. A shipping build profile
(fat LTO) landed alongside — worth about −1 ms at the pin, kept out of
everyday builds.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
