Been thinking about this yesterday. Not sure if I'm going a bit off topic here... but to be honest, I think this feature falls in the conflict between "realistic and clean RP" and "wanting to skill and do quests like a game". I'm not so much the RP person, and mostly like skilling and completing quests performantly. With pointers to indicate who to visit, numbers to indicate exact monster skills, etc. I'm not sure if PS only plans to be on the side of those who play it for RP, and if additional features for those who like skilling and seeing everything will have an equal side on the balance. I think my NPC indicators idea isn't (or won't be) the only thing that falls in this conflict to some people. Just to be clear, I like RP as a general thing... just that I'm rather on the side of playing and skilling and such.

I'm mostly thinking about something that many people said: "Put it on the non-RP server but not the RP one". The server side of PlaneShift could contain such options in a config file. Either a simple 'RP mode' variable that disables all such features (that brake immersion and make PS more of a scoring game like other RPs), or each setting as an individual variable. Or, this choice could be entirely client side, so the person chooses if to play in a clean RP-ish way or with all the indicators and such. Not sure if that will ever be done, but I think it would be nice to find a better balance between the two styles. So if the idea of RP servers and non-RP servers containing different features will ever be implemented, I think this is a great first feature to do it with

Yet MirceaKitsune's point was that you shouldn't have to. And we can find many reasons for that.

It is indeed wise to ask people for directions, better ways, secrets and whatnot, in a proper conversation, but not so to force people into OOC technical chat because some tools are not intuitive enough. For example, why the need to rely on the fortunate presence of an experienced crafter (or the help channel) to tell you "open your inventory and put the xxx book in your mind slot" when a system message could remind you that?

For quests, it's also fine to ask people where to find a NPC, but it doesn't make much sense if a NPC sends you to another one without telling you roughly where to find her; I would call that a simple omission or inconsistency in the dialog. Easy to correct, if only by adding proper question/answer pairs in said dialog.

I agree with this, yeah. Although for quests, I'm also considering the situation where you forget what to do, and your chat logs are the only thing you can rely on (if you still have them). I had several ideas on how to "unblock" people who are stuck in forgotten quests though.

One was my marker idea that I linked here (symbols above NPCs you need to see in a quest). A good alternative someone proposed was NPCs you need to visit in quests saying messages to you as you pass by, which I also support. Another idea would be automatically logging what a NPC tells you in the quest notes (or perhaps a new quest window area specifically for this). So when you click a quest, you see everything the NPCs said on that quest. A third idea was allowing people to cancel one time quests too so they can take them again (you can only abandon repetitive quests currently). Not sure if this would cause any issues (like allowing one to get quest items for free by re-taking the same quest), but that way if you forgot what to do you cancel the quest and take it again from who gave it to you, hearing all the instructions and all. But yeah I think a solution of sorts would be good to find.

But don't forget: It is not "sky" as we are used to. It is the look at a huge crystal's surface. There is no open atmosphere. There is no sun raising in the morning and setting in the evening (at least not inside the Stalactite called Yliakum). You won't be able to see stars in the night (at most maybe cracks in the crystal).

Aah, I understand. That's why the current sky was left to look like this. Should have read the story better... didn't know PS takes place in a large crystal

But even so, I think the current skybox can be improved and a cubemap used instead. We could draw the huge crystal surface on the sky image, with many shards and perhaps cracks through which the real sky shows. I think a giant crystal covering the sky on a high res skybox (but big enough to look very far away) would be totally awesome and surreal. Or if it still respects the theme of the game, a normal sky but full of crystal shards and floating pieces of crystal, covering more than half of it. I actually agree that would look much more surreal and amazing than a classic sky, but drawn on an high-res env-map rather than a model.

To honor the day / night cycle properly, the crystals could also change their color to reflect the time of day... just like the real sky. Light blue crystals during the day, orange during sunset / sunrise, and almost black during the night. Can already imagine how awesome that looks <3 Otherwise, the current sky I still don't agree with myself. Looks too fake and simple to me even for a crystal cover (I didn't even figure that's what it's meant to be).

Yes, I know this is something obvious that everyone likely knows by now. I just wanted to post my thoughts on it, and an alternative that I had in mind.

The main factor which I believe harms PS when it comes to good looks is the current skybox system. Everyone who tilts their camera up can notice the sky is just an inside-out sphere, which is most visible when you walk too close to the edge of an area. In many cases, it also overlaps with neighboring skyboxes in ugly ways (I took a few screenshots of it here http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/583/buggyskybox.jpg ). Now again, I know this is likely temporary and I'm not complaining or anything. Just wanted to post some of my thoughts for a good alternative.

Even if the overlapping would be fixed, I don't believe a sphere stretched over the whole area will ever do. If you look up while walking and moving the camera, you see the skybox is right above you and very close, braking the illusion of a far away sky. I also don't believe a correct day-night cycle can exist with the sky using a single texture at different brightness levels (you need stars during the night, a blue sky with white clouds during the day and so on). So on the technical side, the way I understand the engine (not a developer though I wish I was), this is my suggestion:

I'd go with completely removing the fake sphere models, so if someone looks up they see the infinite 3D space. Currently, if you look into infinity (happens in buggy situations) you only see models leaving trails over the black space. So my idea was rendering a cubemap skybox over that infinity, and letting players see it (most realistic skyboxes are done this way afaik). The cubemap itself would always be full bright and not affected by lightning, so lightning can be decided from the texture only. By making the infinite space display the sky as a cubemap, it would also look realistic when you move around. A cubemap makes the sky move with you, so you see it as far away as possible without it looking fake. If placed over a model like it is now, even if the model is large, it's obvious the sky is close and fake when you compare its movement to objects around you.

As for a the sky reflecting the time of day, I'd use multi-texturing with a fading effect for that. So for example, we could have a blue sunny sky cubemap for daytime, a red sky for sunrise / sunset, and a black starry sky for nighttime. At 12PM, the skybox only diffuses the daytime image. As the clock advances to 6PM, the red sky texture fades over the blue one, until at 6PM it replaces it completely. Then from 6PM to 12AM the red sky texture starts doing that with the black sky texture and so on. This can probably be synced with the ambient lightning system, to assure they both work properly. There could be some better alternatives here... like having the clouds as a separate layer that move across the stars / sun. But imo that's less important for the time being.

I know I'm probably pointing the obvious. Just posted this with the hope of inspiring the devs and making this happen sooner... if implementing an envmap system isn't too hard. I'd love to see a wonderful high-res sky when looking up, which I believe would make the environment much more beautiful and have a great impact Here's something I quickly photoshopped with a random sky image, to get a little taste of if: http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/183/shot143.jpg

Yes, I agree it's much better with friends. When I first joined I met a group of nice people, who guided me through the necessary quests in order to get a mount (don't think I could have otherwise). However, since I've been away from PS for the summer, they seem to be offline now. So for the last days, I need to figure everything alone or occasionally ask for help on IRC, and don't really interact with other players in-game (since there aren't many that I come across either).

So my vision about being helped can be summed up to: It's totally more awesome if you have friends to play with (and more boring otherwise). But one must never depend on that, and Plane Shift should be as reasonable to players that play alone. If it's next to impossible for someone to get something done by theirself, I personally see that as a reasonable problem. Playing together is fun, but I don't think it should ever be dependency imo.

I wouldn't compare this feature to other games, since imo it's a common feature in almost any mmo. Never played Runescape though so I dunno about that

Wasn't aware of this spell, I guess it helps and makes sense. Not sure how good this is as a spell really. I'm thinking spells and skills are mostly for affecting certain properties (doing damage, restoring health, shielding), rather than popping up info on the HUD, which is usually a default feature that anyone has. Perhaps a ring would be more useful, if it can't be default (when you wear it, it grants you the ability to see the exact skills of any being). That makes most sense to me.

That's why there are quest notes and at least in Hydlaa an NPC who can tell you the location of any other NPC in this city.  

I've only recently started using quest notes. They are indeed great, but if you forget to use them once you may get blocked (I'm prolly not the only one who has more than once ). An idea could be automatically logging quest dialogues inside quest notes, though I think that's a separate matter from marked NPCs. I didn't know about the location NPC however, although I remember coming across something like that once. That was a nice idea

But really. The only thing I believe these icons would do, is showing info on a NPC when standing near them without having to click them to see it. Pretty much an alternative to going to each town and double-clicking all NPC's one by one (which would prolly take half a day with how many there). Only to go back and do it all over again, because a NPC might have been intermediary in the quest Of course if you have several forgotten quests, that you can only do at random.