- the Terrain Distance slider is back on Options → Graphics, in its 1.12 seat and range (177–777, live, no Apply) — and it now drives how much world is resident, not just how far you see: the streamer derives its resident and prefetch windows from farclip in the reference's own chunk units, pulling the ring in as you drag left and streaming it back one tile per frame as you drag right; the `WOW_TILE_RADIUS` env var, the debug panel's farclip slider and a dressed-up fog constant all retire into it
- ask a city guard for directions and the destination lands on your maps: `SMSG_GOSSIP_POI` becomes a red flag drawn through the same landmark path as towns and inns — an icon in place when near, competing for a rim arrow when off the edge — and the world map's landmark enumeration answers now, so the flag renders there too and names itself on hover
- the flag is one slot (new directions replace the last), drops itself within 10 yards of the destination, expires after the reference's own 480 seconds, and clears on any world entry; the rim-arrow rank rides the packet's own field, not a guessed constant
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- The voidwalker's eye glow vanished whenever the camera rose above eye level.
Three investigations said depth; measuring the depth buffer inside the live
quads said otherwise — the fragments reached the framebuffer every frame, and
the body's own transparent batches painted over them. The real client draws a
model's particles after that model's batches, always. Ours now does: every
effect carries a draw-order rung sized to clear exactly its own model.
- Widened to every effect family after asking "what else does this fix": ribbon
trails (a wisp's streamers wove six batches deep into its own body and
flickered as the head whipped) and 3-D model particles (Cone of Cold's
shards). A census over all 9,691 models found 967 whose own body could paint
over their effects; all take the rung now.
- The skinning lane is ours end to end: every rig's joint matrices live in our
shared GPU buffer, written only when a rig actually moved, and our shader
reads them. The engine's lane rewrote the entire joint buffer every frame and
swept every entity in the world for changed transforms — that machinery now
runs against empty sets. Another 6.7 CPU ms off the worst reported dungeon
spot, which now holds a flat 60 fps with p99 under 19 ms.
- Getting around while developing: Ctrl+Cmd+G lands your character where the
free-fly camera is, and Alt-clicking the world map teleports you there (both
ride the server's own teleport, GM-gated). The frozen-body coordinates the
panel used to copy while flying now follow the camera.
- A stuck main thread now diagnoses itself: a watchdog samples our own stacks
and prints where the time went, and a hung teardown names its last system
instead of hanging the window.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
