Waiting on the model

Before the model can write a word, it has to be ready, and getting it ready takes a while. We had arranged for the player to pay that wait at the worst possible moment, and sometimes twice. None of what follows made the model any faster. All of it changed when, and how often, a player sits watching it get ready.

It started too late

Getting the model ready used to begin when the player pressed New Game or Load. The minutes spent on the title screen and the setup page did nothing useful.

Now it starts as soon as the title appears. If the player sits in the menus for five minutes without starting a run, the game lets go of it again. Pressing New Game cancels that, and backing out starts it again. The tutorial never asks the model for anything, so starting it lets go of the model too.

Then it went cold

Left idle for about five minutes, the model was put away, and nothing had told it otherwise. So any five quiet minutes of play, walking to a dungeon, a long fight, reading the map, sent it cold. The next line of dialogue then paid for the whole warm-up again in the middle of a session, inside that line’s own time limit. A tester had reported the model refusing to answer until they restarted the game. This was very likely why.

Now it stays ready for the whole session, and a run sitting idle keeps it that way.

One setup’s patience

Every request had a time limit, and those limits were one fast setup’s numbers, shipped to everybody. On a fast setup the game waited five minutes to learn that a call had failed. On a slower one it gave up while the answer was still being written, and a tester lost work that would have finished.

Now the game times itself. It measures how long the model takes to get ready and how quickly it writes during real play, and sizes each wait from that. Until it has measured, it keeps the old limits.

Asking before failing

A first launch used to find out what would work by trying it and failing. Onboarding now checks first, and a setup only counts as finished once the model has actually answered.

The prologue as cover

The longest wait is the first: the world being written. Since August that wait has been a prologue in six chapters, each held on screen until the next is ready. But the jobs that fill in the rest of the opening only began after the player pressed to begin, so the first conversation queued behind all of them, on a model that does one thing at a time.

On 15 September those jobs moved under the prologue. The door into the world now opens when the last chapter is shown and they are done, with a quiet count of how many things are “still taking shape”. The first version waited on every unvisited place in the world, so a slow setup held the door for frontiers three roads off. By the end of the day it waited only for where the player stands and the places beside it.

Before the first chapter there is only the screen above. Its step count appears there and nowhere else: inside the story it would be machinery showing through.