Besides even a single robe taking a lot of time of the already small art department, I think the engine code at the moment prevents just implementing robes for a few races only. If you give a ylian male robe to a klyros female, it turns into a klyros female robe, which does not exist, so it crashes when it is equiped.

Thunder is the best sound in game, in my opinion. Unfortunately the /thunder command has to be given manually, and only works when it is raining, which (possibly due to sound) causes problems for many. I think it is well worth compiling your own client and server just to test the /thunder command though

In random order:
- there is a bug report about this issue. It was marked critical until very recently, but demoted to high because of a combination of not hearing complaints, the EULA stating that info may be used, and there were other critical bugs that needed to be more visible. The reason it is not quickly fixed by a using a confirmation window is that: 1) on some OSes it already lets you enter information about what you were doing. Killing this box means nothing is sent. 2) there are no devs around who can quickly fix this. 3) the reports are VERY useful, even though they have not yet enough information.
- before, people were asked to send the dmp files to me. Several did. I could only use them if I had up-to-date program database files, which I often did not. Of the files that were send me 90% were crashes in ati drivers, solved by pointing to an old forum thread. All in all, this way of getting info was not very useful
- Many os/hardware related crashes happen shortly after starting the game. We lost many new players this way. They would try a few times, then give up on the game. They would not go to any place to know where to send info.
- The bug tracker is a good place to provide bug reports, but many crashes cannot be reported there properly either. Luckily many players do report bugs, but crashes that occur very often are not recognised this way. I can tell you that with the new crash reporting, some major problems surfaced, that were then fixed by devs spending much time on them. From a situation where ATI crashes were below 20th place, we were quickly back at ATI crashes (when added up) being the number one problem again. If you own a MAC, be very glad for the automatic crash reports, or most of you would have been left out of playing the game for a while now. When at this point sending the reports would have been optional, we might have missed some important information about how often problems occurred on certain systems.

Only a small number of people have access to the reports, which include a char name, which enables us to ask people for more information, some OS and hardware info, and a comment if the player specified it. A stack trace shows where the crash happened. Example of the info:

Date	Product	Version	Build	OS	CPU	Reason	Address	Uptime	Comments
Jun 07, 2010 18:09	PlaneShift	0.5.3	Mar 11 2010 19:27:59	Windows NT 6.0.6002 Service Pack 2	x86	EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION	0x34	51	PlayerName:Lanarel Arewar Compiler: VisualC RendererVersion: 3.2.0 Renderer: GeForce 8600 GT/PCI/SSE2

ALthough the EULA does mention information may be used for debugging, I personally do not read those things either, and think it would be better to make it optional, or have people put a setting somewhere. There are more important things to fix though. I would prefer no crash reports need to be send in the first place

Shaders have to be compiled, and are then stored in a cache. First time a shader is used, it will take time to compute, after that it should no longer freeze you. Shaders may have to be re-computed after an update.
You can reduce your graphics settings in pslaunch. THat will probably cause less shaders to be used, or less complicated ones, or non at all. But the game will not look as nice.

If you are NOT having them, we need to know your system specs and other info!

Or just tell us how to get rid of them

In reply to -stf-s comment that there are over 800 bugs that should be fixed first before updating, some numbers:
- yes, there are currently 864 open reports
- 292 of those are feature requests (as in requests for not implemented features)
- The bugs (things that are implemented but not working as supposed) include everything from critical ("ps not working on fedora 12") to very low (" Rock in Cutthroats Bane may have changed texture"). Obviously we concentrate on the critical ones, when people who CAN fix them are available
- Over a 100 bugs are for quests, mostly typos that got in when the settings team spend months re-creating all quests for the menu system.
- Someone who can work on balance can not necessarily do anything about all non balance/weight/size problems. But just to tell you how happy I am that finally after 5 years someone did go through all weights and sizes to make them more realistic: I hope to close 15 bugs soon just because of this change.
- after the release of 0.5 (so in 6 weeks) 404 reports were opened, 253 closed (counted last sunday). Most of these were quest errors (many typos, severe once are fixed first), many crashes are fixed, duplicate reports were closed to make the important reports more visible. Also the test team has limited time . Still we hope all the really important problems are visible enough in the bug tracker to be noticed and fixed. And yes, feel free to make new reports if this first improvement in 5 years is not yet perfect

I am seeing many crashes in the ATI open gl driver with version 0.5.1 (which automatically sends crashs dumps). Is the problem back? Previously, almost 100% of dmp files sent to me were crashes in the ATI driver, and all of those were solved by pointing to this thread. Since now about 30% of all crashes is in this driver, it would be nice to know if this thread still has the answer