PlaneShift

It would be nice if it was possible to zoom sketches when looking at them. This would also be useful when you get a sketch/map which is too big for your screen and allows you to have the entire image on screen by reducing zoom.

The included patch allows the user to zoom from 1/10 to 10x the map increasing the size of every element on screen.
The buttons used for this are > and < if someone has a better suggestion about them or thinks that having the increase/decrease zoom on screen would be useful i could add them.

http://pastebin.ca/1189613

While the quest system has greatly improved in the years I’ve been gone, there are still things one needs to type to an NPC.

Currently NPCs are still dumb as bricks when it comes to understand what players “write” to them.

As the “writing” is supposed to be “speaking” one would assume that an a person would understand a word even if it’s spelled incorrectly.

For example - in a certain quest you have to tell a certain NPC the words “diamond and opal”.

If you spell the words wrong (e.g. opale) the npc refuses to help and you have no chance of repeating that step and thus are forced to finish the quest in another way.

With regexp in the engine the settings department could make the answer look like this: (?i).*diamond.*opal.*

This would match case insensitive on “it are diamonds and opals” as well as “diamondsopals” or “diamond opale” as well as many other possible phrases that include the words “diamond” and “opal”.

With wordlists settings could define a couple of spellings of certain words to match on in-word typos even. for example: (?i).*$quest_stepX_wordlist1.*$quest_stepX_wordlist2.*
In the wordlist the settings dept could then, for example, define spellings like diamond, daimond, diamant and the like. That’s just an example though, I’m sure there are many more examples in game currently where a npc refuses to answer or you break a step in a quest only because you cnat type

As for the regexp, the PCRE library from Apache could be used, maybe. http://www.pcre.org/

Having to use the Working with Stock book simply to heat steel/ingots for forging makes for a silly amount of swapping back and forth between Working with Stock and Book of Blades. It’d be simple enough to add the steps for heating stock and ingots to the Book of Blades…

guard throw out of city polymorphed players, why not add the same when player wield weapon in city and guard see that?

When I jump near an NPC my character tries to climb on top of it and then falls thru the NPC. I’m guessing it should not be possible to climb on NPCs.. although it would be fun :D

At the moment Weapon enchantment is being executed with any attack, also from another weapon.

I have a dagger “of Creation” that is triggering a blinding magical effect.

As soon as I have this item equipped, any attack I do, even with the other hand is triggering the blinding effect.

Note from Talad: at the moment the equip_script associated to the weapon, is attaching an “on attack” effect on the character. There is no way at the moment to know which weapon generated that. We could change ApsCharacter::AttachScript() to also store the information of which weapon had the effect, and then in ApsCharacter::InvokeAttackScripts() check if the current weapon used is the same that generated the effect.

When a player character is within the interaction range of an NPC, a mark (label) of some sort should appear above that NPC if they are offering some new or repeatable quests (! not some information for those already running !) for that particular character at that particular moment.

Should be optional as a turn-off or turn-on, depending on the default chosen by designers. In any case, and as with any other label, players should retain the option of not seeing it, if it spoils their fun or ruins their immersion somehow.

The reason for this request: drastically increased amount of questing chains ingame, and the absolutely unhealthy and immersion-breaking amount of mouse-clicking on the same NPCs the game now requires.

Noticing a sign above someone's head is OOC, of course, but clicking a mouse button on someone's model, or getting an aggressive red "…has no quest information for you" line floating in mid-air is equally OOC'ish.
On the other hand, seeing no mark above someone's head would cause neither irritation nor disappointment (while futile mouse-targeting and mouse-clicking, when done repeatedly, invariably produces both of those negative effects).
The marks would also provoke reasonable curiousity about available quests, hopefully enticing new players into doing more of them.

I know this request is somewhat of a long shot, but assuming that the engine is going to be considerably revisited this summer, I decided to submit it anyway.

[Edited for clarity, and also to separate it more from PS#4798. That older one would 'make the game easier' indeed, while what I suggest would only eliminate excessive mouse actions.]

Since the quest chains were introduced, and many indirect prerequisites for the availability of a quest, I now waste a lot of time scanning each NPC for the very few which have a quest available at the moment, regarding my current list of completed quests, over and over again.

The additional vague hints which are being added to the end of quests are not sufficient because on one hand they may fail, and on the other hand they help better when I just started a new character, not when my experienced character is already in the middle of many quest chains.

I don’t expect a big fat rotating question mark above an NPC’s head; it can well be a less remarkable change – like a different color, outline, or font style for the label, or a slight translucent highlight effect.

It could be useful to have a visual feedback to signal to other players when someone is AFK or is typing into the chat (maybe in main chat tab).
I ran a poll into the “whishlist” section of the forum.
Since I had some good suggestions/opinions from other players I put a link to the thread so it can be used as a reference and to understand how the proposed visual feedback is:
Do you think bubbles showing when someone is AFK or someone is typing into the chat are useful?

Could it be possible to add server version info (and possibly aso recommended/required minimal client version) to the server status page, i.e. to http://planeshift.zeroping.it/index.php?page=about_page for zeroping server? It could help to determine easily whether the update is required/recommended without need to start pslaunch when you don't use it to load the client.

I think it would be more realistic and quite useful for looted items to have a random current quality. Finding enough damaged equipment to practice repair is always tough, this idea would go a long way to making it a more usable skill.

This idea, if properly implemented, could also balance out the values of looted items. A sub-routine could be devised to cause the highest value items suffer the greatest pre-loot damage. So a standard unmodified item could have a flat chance of being anywhere from 1 to 50 out of 50 quality. A one modifier item could roll 2 50-sided dice taking the lower result or average, and so on for 2 modifier and three modifier items. Specific implementation could be subject to testing to determine appropriate rates.

This would result in less of a lottery effect.

I would like to suggest an additional widget in the trade window that gives the total (NPC-trade) value of the goods offered, similar to the one for total tria offered. With the quality based pricing system, this could help to lower confusion and make trade and economy flourish. The obvious but neglectable downside is that players could abuse this to identify an enchanted items value without finding an NPC merchant. A solution to that problem could be found when thinking about a feature to identify such items (based on intelligence, dweomer detection, factions with merchants or whatever).

Mugs are a staple of RP for many people, but their use is currently quite unrealistic – you “drink” away a solid glass object.

What I proprose to fix this may not be purely realistic, but at least makes sense.

When an object is consumed, it should leave behind an “empty” (mug, potion bottle, jar, etc.) which will appear in the inventory. The cost of items which come in containers should be increased, as “deposit” or sorts, like when people buy pop or beer in real life. People would be able to sell the empty back to reclaim their deposit.

In the case of mugs of alcohol, they could be strewn about on the table as the drinking goes on, so people know who’s been drinking too much. There wouldn’t be any worry about “littering”, as there would always be someone willing to pick up after and return them to Allelia or Brado for the deposit money.

If this is implemented, it would also allow for future features like being able to return to Allelia or Brado for a “refill” without needing to pay the deposit. Same for potions and other items that are sold in containers.

Also the possibility of putting other liquids into the containers. It would be neat for example to be able to stop by the secret garden and fill up a bottle, mug or bucket with fresh water from the pool (it could be done by the usual right-click method on an object).

I feel these sorts of things would help improve the RP and realism a great deal.

A UI improvement: This would make things much more convenient for spells like Dweomer Detection, but generally in cases where an action is performed on an object such as repairing weapons and armor. It would be great if the object of the action was (first choice) an external object that you have in focus. If there is no such object, use the one in the sword hand.

Right now, there is a mix of both of these things implemented. This would make it consistent and convenient. Right now it's quite awkward to have to drop an item, and then focus on it before casting a spell on it.

It would be nice to use alias names from buddy list for /tell command.
e.g name: full_char_name, alias: Loyni.
/tell Loyni [text] could be translated itnernally to
/tell full_char_name [taxt].

Items that are picked up should go into the upper-left most container in our inventory that it can fit into. This will allow players to choose the order they want their inventory to fill up. When my main inventory is full, items start going into my glyph sack instead of the four empty small cloth sacks available. Thank you for your time :)

An "Undo" button on the new music writer that could go back at least one step would be very helpful. Thanks!!

How about making it visible in Main if Players exchange items?
A system message appears to the ones trading anyways at this moment.
the message to others should however have some less precision, like:

 "<PlayerA> gave <PlayerB> Weapons and some coinage in exchange for raw materials"
 for someone trading a crafted longsword, a dagger, 2 hexa and a tria against 45 platinum ore and a silver ingot.

this in order to keep realism (can all see how many circles and tria he pushed into the other persons hand?)
the message could use the item_category, and eliminate doubles, so it could be done without giant changes to the database.

the advantages I would see in this:

 1.) there will be visible interaction between players. no more pure tell-based sales that (imho) are pretty ooc.
     Noone IRL (and especially not in the middle ages) would go into a shop and whisper in the cashiers ear what he whishes to sell or buy.
     Instead people going into a shop (not a supermarket) usually say good day followed by a statement on what they seek to buy (maybe even some smalltalk).
     Neither would such item exchange go unnoticed by other people in the shop or near the exchange.
     So I think it would add to realism. Unless the character you play would be blind.
 2.) Stealthy and sneaky exchanges of goods would have to take place in dark alleys, like sneaky things should be done.
 3.) Hopefully the messages in main would encurage Players to take the general and casual trade-talk into main as well,
     instead of hiding it in tells in order to not 'disturb' other players. 
     If IRL there are others talking near you, you step away a little to give and have more privacy as well.
 4.) It also would surely add some spying capabilities into the game, as it then could indeed be seen to all around who trades with who.
     This will make it possible to IC-ly spy on others trade behaviours. This without the need of having to be telling or grouping with the ones spied on. 

disadvantages:

 1.) Anyone could see who would trade with who, people who use quest runners would have to find a reason why they would get items for free.. 
     (or take the trade to a dark alley).
 2.) Someone could 'spam' the main-channel with trade messages. (but that's easier by sitting and standing up, or by dropping items and pick them up)
 3.) some things I probably didn't thik about yet. feel free to add..

Overall I think it would rather add to RP then desturb it.
For slipping items to others unnoticed, there could/should be a ‘/givesecret’ option that would use the numbers behind the pickpocket/sneaking skills.

Suggestion

Add low base damage and fire damage to the torch.

Currently. you get an error message when trying to attack with the torch.

The quest objective is to help a certain NPC find a missing object, that's what my char agreed to do. After finding the object and proceeding to final steps I suddenly receive a ready-made line "X listens to your story" and find my char spilling its friend and ally's whereabouts to X, with me having absolutely no means to prevent or stop it. Honest, it feels like being godmodded by the quest system and is awfully disappointing, to say the least. It also clashes with the general idea of quests being done ICly.

Dear Devs, please add a "not squealing" option, something like "I've just found it somewhere" and let the player deal with one of the main ingame alignments (Law) according to that player's RP. The way it is done now, it's not C&C, it's M&C, having to bear with consequences of the game mechanics, and somehow it doesn't feel right… at all.

PS Ver: 0.5.3

(Edited for clarity.)

The list of guild members is not sortable by online status.

Expected result:

Sort them by a different field by clicking one of the columns.

I hope it is technically possible to programmatically request a further execution of the launcher as administrator to be able to exchange binaries in UAC protected directories (%ProgramFiles% or %ProgramFiles(x86)% under Windows Vista/7/8…); and may it just be by the launcher calling itself as a new instance executed under the Administrator account.

Other platforms than Windows may require a similar solution.

Possible addition of the ability to teleport all PC’s enrolled in an event at once to avoid accidentally grabbing a passer by with the area option.

PlaneShift Loyal Fan achievements regarding previous versions from “Played Atomic Blue” to “Played Arcane Chrysalis” I reckon should be account wide.

I created my account during Crystal Blue, but felt like playing a different character later meaning my main has none of these achievements.

It’s like a veteran status, but only applies if you kept your first character.

On getting teleported while sprinting almost fell off a steep abyss. Could have brought my char into death realm.

Might be a good idea to have a teleport freeze the char for a second or two so as I player have a good chance to react to the location change.

It would be nice if I could target a player with clicking his name in the group list

When looting a monster, there is a system message in main chat saying “<mob> has no money to be looted” when you click “loot all” even if the monster does have money to be looted instead of the correct system message which should tell you how much money you looted (the amount of money looted could also be added to the loot window as a quality of life improvement).

If the monster doesn’t have any money, then there are two system messages in main chat saying “<mob> has no money to be looted”. One appears when you open the loot window, and once when you click “loot all”.

Currently when an NPC doesn't have a quest for player, they essentially ignore the player. This can be bad because:

1) Sometimes (e.g. the circle way quests) this comes across as a bug since the player has been directed to talk to the NPC by another.

2) It's not always (in fact generally not) a realistic behaviour from a charactization PoV.

3) The chain quests are now very long and not obvious, so players have no idea what to do next.

4) It may be something else besides more quests that is necessary. How are players to know?

I think this should be changed, and propose the following dynamic as a possibility:

A "sociability" metric would be calculated for each interaction between player and NPC based on:
factions, prerequisites required for quests, and a base number assigned to each NPC. This metric will indicate how well-disposed the NPC is towards giving quest info the player at this time. Depending on this metric (lets say a number from 0-5) the NPC could say something (or ignore the player if the number is 0). The higher the number, the more useful and specific is the response.

Some characters are grumpy by nature and will almost always ignore people or give gruff responses (like now). Many are just typical and will offer canned default responses, expect that for the higher metrics these will hint that they will have something for you later. Ideally the highest metric will look up who gives the pre-requisite quest and direct you there.

Each quest could specify overrides for any of the responses.

I would be nice to have the option to set the filter string to “item names” or “processes”. Such that you could search for an item “battle axe” and only see the steps under the heading “battle axe*” or search processes for things like “apple” and see every step that uses an apple.

I would like to request that saved quest notes be moved from client side into the book database. currently the quest notes are saved locally and are very vulnerable frequently getting deleted during client repair or re installs. additionally for players who have more than one computer these notes do not properly persist between clients.

considering that players are already allowed to write books and that text data takes up very little space there is really no reason NOT to move this feature server side.

another major issue with the current implementation is that the quest’s description is missing a lot of key information provided by the npc conversation such as names and locations.

a perfect example is the quest Masked Mistress where the description tells you the summary however does not include her brothers name which is given in the npc dialogue.

the lost of quest notes can easily render a quest impossible to complete without asking a person for spoilers or searching through game logs for the missing conversation.

Sometimes I whish to have the ability to store my alchemy sack, or my crafting sack in storage with its content. So I can easily gab it when I want to work on it so naming the sacks (PS#457) would be ideal.

Many Skills are NOT yet implemented, which is perfectly understandable.

Please kindly HIGHLIGHT with another color (representing NOT YET IMPLEMENTED) which skills have NOT been worked on yet.

This will greatly help ALL players know which ones are full completed and which ones are not, especially NEW PLAYERS who won't waste time trying to figure out what has not been worked on yet.

Recommended Color: Bright Purple (easy to see and readable)

musicians trying to sync up to play as a band/group is difficult.
to fix this i suggest commands /groupplay and /groupstop be made
the musicians would form a group and each one would put the song they are to play in their left hand (that way one person can play a flute piece and another plays a lira piece, another drums, etc)
the group leader would issue the commands for starting and stopping
the system would broadcast the command to each client to start playing (like the way group chat is sent to the members of the group).
the piece would play at the default speed for the music score
if the group is disbanded while playing everyone would have to automatically stop playing
if a player leaves the group they would have to automatically stop playing too.

only difficulty I would see is if one of the players is unable to play the selected piece at the default speed, the system would either have to have that person not play with an error of not talented enough or play at the fastest they can play (which would sound bad but be realistic)

System tab: Could the information there be split up further, like for the logs, into something like combat, crafting, soul commands (emotes and interaction commands like /greet), so you can have more control what is shown in Main tab?

This was briefly discussed in the Dev meeting (22/02/2015), and should be assigned to Eredin.

Thank you.

At the moment, there is no way to get a players attention if (s)he is not watching PS. I think there should be an extra sound (settable via options) that is played whenever somebody receives a tell and/or whenever somebody’s name is mentioned. Maybe these should even be two different settings in options.

Sometimes I would which i could sort the storage list in a different way. Would it be possible to add bi-directional sort options in the storage/buy window?

Not all shortcuts from shortcuts window are in "Options→Controls→Shortcuts"
If you set/change a key in shortcuts window the key does not get set/changed in options window until you relog.

The following is not really a bug but more feature request
If you set a key you can set
LShift - RShift
LCtrl - RCtrl
LAlt - RAlt

But if you make key combos it will just turn to
Shift+key
Ctrl+key
Alt+key

Would it be possible to set
LShift+key
LCtrl+key
LAlt+key
RShift+key
RCtrl+key
RAlt+key

That will open up allot more possible key combinations.

/put [amount] item
Into a opened container even when non selected for like sacks that are in your inventory.

/take [amount|all] [stack] [item]
Out of a opened container even when non selected for like sacks that are in your inventory.

/loot [group] [item|all|trias]
Loot a specific item or all items without opening the loot window.

Currently, all crafting requires a full setup of equipment (fixed-in-the-world crafting containers) for that craft. This makes sense for some crafting skills such as blacksmithing and to an extent alchemy; however, basic cooking and herbalism (and other crafts TBD) should be possible with only portable crafting containers (such as a campfire and pan or a simple, portable mortar and pestle). This would also require new crafting books: “Campfire Recipes” anyone?

In the old version, there was a small inventory without the character part. It could be useful for trading etc.

Most quests start with an intro and a confirmation for the player to accept the quest. For those that have skill requirements and/or time locks, instead of hiding the quest completely, perhaps it would be better to expose such quests when the character is otherwise qualified (e.g completed other quests in the chain) and do the skill / time check in the intro steps and have the NPC inform the character that they need to practice more before they can continue, or say something along the lines of "too busy right now, come back tomorrow". This way the player will know the quest is there, and get a hint of what they need to do. Going around and touching all the NPC's and finding nothing just feels like a bug when one knows there should be quests out there someplace.

Names of signs appear at the bottom.

It happened to me twice already that I bought a good weapon for tens of thousands of tria, to then find out I need a lot of stats to equip it. And not only can’t I equip it, I don’t know whether it’s worth training for it either because nothing tells me how many more levels I need.

The game shows the effects (damage, speed) and the stats increases/decreases can be looked up in a book in the museum by analyzing the name. Could a way be implemented to know what stats and skills you need to use an item before buying it too? Either as part of identification, as a new separate identification spell for requirements or through some book?

Without that I’m very reluctant to buy anything at all as I spent too much money already on things that are useless to me.

An newbie in the tutorial brought up this idea, and I like it a lot:
It would be nice if the char creation provided a clickable link or a pop-up window to the naming policy.

Log in with main char.
create shortcut
log out
log in with another char.
shortcut created with main character shows on all alternates.

Log in with separate account
shortcuts from main account are also transferred to here

Now we have space for 200 shortcuts/Macros it would be useful if one could group sets of shortcuts into their own subwindow so one could have a window for combat shortcuts, a window for crafting, a window for RP shortcuts etc.

It could be fixed 4×20 8×10 or user selectable

Moving of a short cut overwrites the old one – likely to cause problems with people randomly deleting SCs they want. [FEAT]

(moved from defect # 6066)

There should be a way for players in groups to share quests they are doing. So they could talk with others about them and do them together. All will get the quest complete when they complete the task given by the npc (and maybe a copy of the reward for each one): this could make quest allow players to socialize more.
The biggest problems in implementation could be the case in which quests might overlap, the fact players might want to chose the quest they want to share and the variations which could be in dialogs when talking with a group of people versus a single one.
The players will get the shared quests added automatically even if they didn’t have them provided they have the correct prerequisites

Hi! As reported in "bug" (bug #5867) spell effects performance is pretty slow on Intel Sandybridge HD 3000 graphics. I understand that this may well be a driver / hardware limitation. Due to the extreme slowness its not easy to roleplay on events when other players cast effects, cause then basically I can not do anything anymore. Except for that the performance is quite nice for onboard gfx, enough for me at least, even at 1680x1050.

Cause of this I would like a way to reduce the quality of *just* the spell effects a bit. I found that I can disable them alltogether by setting shaders to "lowest". But any other settings for shaders doesn´t have any visible effect on performance. Also shaders to "lowest" worsens the other gfx as well.

I also learned I can disable spell effects altogether, by removing the *.eff files from effects directory.

What I would like now is a way to configure spell effects to reduced quality and (hopefully) improved performance. This may also be good for other users of old hardware.

Thanks,
Martin

It would be nice to bea able to make a bag in your inventory the default collection bag.

I think sorting things after that should be manual thou.