[news taken from main site]
The PlaneShift Team made it again! Another PlaneShift release is out: 0.5.6 !! We are very excited about this release because it's another step toward 0.6! A full distro package will be provided in the next days, in the meantime you can just use the updater. Here is a list of the main changes:
GUI:
* A huge amount of fixes and improvements to the windowing system (paws) and mouselook management
* Improvements to weather support and fixed the option to disable weather in pslaunch.
* Fixed some issues in the char selection/creation screens which could lead to bad graphics or crashes
* Several fixes/optimizations/improvements to shaders and lights management.
* First version (BETA!) of the HotBar/quickspell bar (you can open it by typing /show quickspell and remove it with /show quickspell off ) which allows you to drag and drop spells or items in the quickbar, then click on the icons to cast the spell or use the item
* fixed a display issue which could show skills to be completely practically trained even if it wasn't so.
* added a simple animation to pterosaur transportation load screens
Optimizations:
* major rewrite of several parts of the background loader, which now should be more stable and faster.
* several optimizations, leak fixes and crash fixes
Quests and Factions:
* Major rework of the quests! In the past the quests were most likely one off and with little purpose. We decided to radically change the concept by creating chained series of quests with a purpose and where possible a story. So we looked at the quests we have in game and started to tie them together.
* After char creation a friend's letter is now guiding you to the major NPCs, which will explain the associations and factions present in Hydlaa. Players can start to follow those trails and learn more about the associations/factions. This is the foundation of a complex social system based on jobs and affiliations that we continue to develop to create a more immersive roleplay experience.
* Many new quests were added, and many reworked, reaching a grand total of 320 quests!! In particular a whole new set of Magic quests is present, allowing access to bracers, robes and wands items in the different Ways of magic! (for graphics associated to those items, see the art section)
Art:
* New Amdeneir tavern! Thanks Nikodemus and zweitholou for building it!
* Added new female ynnwn wizard robe!
* Made available all bracers through Way quests
* Fixed many sounds for game areas, including gugrontid and the road to bronze doors
* several improvements to sound management (including a startup crash when the sound system failed to init)
* Improved sounds and graphical effects of many spells, including: crystal aura, invigoration, life infusion, relaxing sleep, flaming weapon, flame spire, and many more. Work is still under going to progressively improve/fix all of them.
* Improved hydlaa grass, sky and trees
For GMs/Devs:
* expanded the scripting system in several ways for example quests can now use scripts also to give specific items, factions and money depending on variables passed to them allowing faster balancement changes in them. Additionally in mathscripts it's now possible to output messages.
* Additional scripts used in crafting, which were before hardcoded in the sources, where now converted to math scripts. Making it easier for rules developers to change them.
* complete rewrite of the adminmanager allowing a more generic targeting system and sane interface to gm and developers, also awarding anything to players uses a single functionality shared also in the manager of the events. expanded also killnpc to allow loading of new npc and runscript to allow more scripts to be run through it.
* several expansions and expansions to npcclient to allow npc to do things not possible before like sitting, do emotes, teleport...
Others:
* pets will now follow automatically
* added support to define what type of chats should be logged, in which file and with what prepended brackets (check chat - logs)
* added support for a spell checker within the chat input using hunspell. It's disabled by default and it requires to be enabled by hand for now, and the dictionaries added in a dict folder inside your ps data folder. This feature is considered experimental and unstable (and could be not available on all platforms yet)
* removed forceful removal in operating systems different than windows of the code which allowed the hardware mouse to be used
