Xaelion Additions 2.8.0-beta.10: Alystia, The Sovereign's Frostway (Stage 2)

She now skates on her road. Glide and Waltz have their crystal path, the hover sigil and their own sounds. Alystia is now version
0.7.2, and her 40 powers are unchanged. The speeds still aren't proven on the real server. Stage 2 was started before that test at your request. It only added visuals
and sounds, so the checklist in changelog_2.8.0-beta.9.md still applies to this build, and it should be flown on this one.

The road

It's drawn on the screens of players who can see her and is never placed in the world, so it can't change terrain.

• It forms ahead of her, growing to a bright point and bending toward where she's looking.
• It's built in layers: a clear sheet of faceted ice with shifting blue, silver, violet and white, a second layer of ice below
  it, snowflakes and her script cut into the surface, and crystal fins along the edges.
• Hanging crystals run along its underside at uneven lengths, so it looks like broken ice from below.
• It breaks up behind her: the surface fades, plates of the road turn and sink away, and it dissolves into shards, snow and
  frost mist.
• It reacts to flying: it banks into turns, holds together in loops and straight climbs, and rights itself afterwards.

Each mode

• Rest: she stands over a slowly turning snowflake sigil, with script turning the other way around it, a star of cut ice under
  her heels and shards hanging beneath it. It has a body of colour so it still shows against bright daytime ground.
• Sovereign's Glide: a narrow road, a small crystal star under her heels, fragments circling low around her feet, and a snowflake
  that rings out with each push.
• Glacial Waltz: the road draws out into a long ribbon of light, with glowing heel trails, three ribbons curling around the road,
  rings of script she skates through, streaming snow, faint rings of parting air and a blue-white aura.
• Going up a mode: a ring of script bursts around her with a scatter of streaks and snow.
• Braking: ice sprays forward from her heels.

Comet and the Descent use the Waltz road for now. Their own effects come in Stage 4.

Sounds

Eight new original sounds, all made for this:

• Two that loop the whole way and follow her speed: a blade singing on ice for Glide, and rushing air with ringing ice for Waltz
• A skate push, speeding up, braking, coming to rest, taking off and landing

Other players can hear them too, and all of them have subtitles.

What's been tested

Tested offline only. Nothing here has run in the game yet.

• All 1,894 automated checks pass, 96 of them new. They cover 6,000 ticks of wild steering, full loops, straight climbs and dives,
  teleports, flights ending, and fliers going out of range.
• Previews ran the real road code on flights flown with the real flight maths, with 0 stale buffers and 0 missing vertex elements.
  I also checked the renders against a daytime sky.
• The two looping sounds were decoded and measured, and their joins are clean. I can't listen to them, so their sound and balance
  are unconfirmed.
• The jar is installed in both instances and matches the build.

Not yet tested: how it looks and sounds moving in the real game, how it performs, how it looks with a shader pack, and how it
looks to other players. Her flying pose is still the placeholder until Stage 3, so she doesn't skate yet.

Coming next

Stage 3: her 14 animations (skating, turns, climbs, dives and landing), hair and clothes reacting, and using Frostfall in flight.

⚠ Flashback

The road is drawn from flight messages and each player's position, so it should show in replays. That's untested, and a recording
started mid-flight may take up to 2 seconds to pick the road up.