PlaneShift 0.5.9 release!!

[Talad]

We are happy to announce a new PlaneShift release! 0.5.9 has finally arrived! This release has a graphical update for some of the main areas, better lighting, new sounds and music, better NPC day/night cycles and many new features on the PlaneShift Engine which will allow us to add new content in the next coming weeks and months.





Here is the detailed changelog:

Art

• Updated laanx temple geometry and textures
• Performance improvements to hydlaa plaza
• Updated hydlaa jayose with new houses and other new art
• Updated tutorial area with new houses
• Updated hydlaa winch with new houses and added bump maps
• Added new magic staff items, three for each magic Way!
• Updated the lighting and skybox of all levels to have a more realistic day/night effect
• Changed the speed of walk and run to be more realistic, and allow better animations
• Added blending of walk/run to smooth the transitions
• Fixed trasparency problem on all outdoor maps (terrain)
• Added harnquist shop's interior
• Added grass to all outdoor/terrain maps (experimental)

Engine - graphics:

• Added support for GLSL shaders. This should improve compatibility with intel graphic cards but could give problems with old drivers so: update your drivers!
• Added the first iteration of a new NPCUI for npc interactions
• Fixed some issues with pictures in help windows and books (they should start to appear soon)
• Added a lock/unlock function to the quickspell bar (you can enable the bar with "/show quickspell"
• Fixed texture loading order on character which fixes problems with klyros/enkidukai skin colour being wrong and disappearing armor

Engine - rules:

• Overhauled the music rules support to work by limiting the amount of notes instead of making them wrong. Additionally several problems regarding musical instruments have been fixed.
• Added information about quality when a new item is created through crafting

Engine - Artificial Intelligence:

• Merged gsoc2011 work on tribes and expanded from there by adding several functionalities to NPC which should start to show in the next months, making them more immersive and able to act as tribes.
• (for devs) several improvements to functionalities to handle npc paths in order to allow an easier change of them directly from the client
• Added support to the npcclient to handle spell casting
• Added several perceptions and scripting options in the npcclient to allow to check for more conditions and act appropriately
• (for gm/dev) added suppport for /percept to trigger perceptions on NPC and additional information about the NPC status in /info

Engine - Infrastructure:

• From now on clients will just authenticate with sha256 passwords (if you cannot login you can restore the password from the registration page or input your password from scratch in a 0.5.8.1 client and get in-game, then try logging back in 10 minutes later
• Desura clients now will ship with the updater functionalities disabled, you can still enable them by changing the pslaunch.cfg (Update.Enable option) but we suggest to use the desura client update functionalities.
• Now the linux client will run again old older distributions (GLIBC 2.7), additionally several libraries have been updated.
• Improvements to the updater which should be more stable after this release.
• (for dev) added support to restart the npcclient directly from an admin client /quitnpcclient
• Added a button in pslaunch to allow easy deletion of the shadercache
• Fixed a bug which could show the server as unreachable after logging out (for example after deleting a character)

Engine - general:

• Added some command line commands to set character descriptions (/setdesc , /setoocdec , /loaddesc , /loadoocdesc )
• (for devs) mathscripts and paths can now be reloaded from the database at runtime allowing an easier development, and restart-less fixes. (/reload path, /reload mathscript)
• (for devs) added support for buff-able variables on a character
• (for devs) several places are now more script-able: when damage is applied to a character, when a new item is created from crafting, etc. Additionally several ways to change things regarding items and inventory have been added to scripting support.
• (for gm) fixed a crash when using names of offline entities as target.
• (for gm) now it's possible to see mana in the detail windows of characters.
• Fixed dangling alliance/guild data being kept in the db even if they were effectively not existent any more.
• (for devs) Allow multiple crafting patterns to be within one book.
• Removed book xml being printed to stdout when opened.
• (for devs) Added support for restrains in the loot item modifiers (black/white list and no check mode support)
• Fixed crash when using label on target function.
• (for skinners/dev) It's now possible to show and hide windows with pawsscripting using WindowName:Show()/:Hide()
• Fixes on the quality options in pslaunch not being set correctly sometimes
• Languages are now sorted by name in pslaunch and don't show duplicates anymore
• Fixed error shown when opening books written by others
• Fixed take and stack all on action location items
• Fixed selection of skins with dots in the filename
• Fixed issues in dictionary handling with the spellchecker

Engine from crystalspace:

• Several fixes in shader management including crash fixes.
• fixed support to recent openal libraries (which have now been used)

Setting:

• updated many NPCs to have all base dialogue triggers (like greetings, how are you, tell me about you, goodbye, ...)
• Updated the cooking quest chain to allow earlier access to basic cooking books and more logical quest progression.
• Continued improvements and bug fixes to current quests.

Audio:

• New 15 minute ambient music for Hydlaa Plaza, Magic Shop
• New Battle Env Sounds
• Fixed water sound on Bronze Doors Fortress

Known Bugs:

• • Fog and rain can be rendered wrongly on certain platforms (big white areas on screen)
  • Grass is experimental for now, a bit too tall and enabled only at short distance. You can enable/disable it in pslaunch.
  • While speaking with NPCs you may get a double bubble (one from the new system, one from the old system)

[Aramara Meibi]

the new walking speed is seriously bad. My fenki looks like she's wading through waist deep water. I'm serious, it's really bad. I watched it from the side, and with every step, the distance her foot moves from the moment it touches the ground to the moment she lifts it, is noticeably more than the distance she moves forward with each step. I really can not understand why the decision to lower the walking speed was made.

also the jumping animation is really funky. the legs splay out at 90 degree angles and the model texture inverts itself or something. I can't explain it, and it happens too quickly to get a screencapture. After more experimentation, the same glitch happens when strafing.

Dermorian females seem to strafe with their arms held out wide.

Other than that, the lag in Hydlaa is almost unnoticeable (on low shaders), so good work there!
This gave me the courage to try the game again on medium shaders, but the fenki model failed to load, only her gauntlets showed up, and they were bright red. I'll try and get a screenshot tomorrow.

[novacadian]

Ran pslaunch and agreed to get the update. Ran psclient and noticed it was still showing 5.8.1. Ran pslaunch again and repair was offered. Ran repair.

Output:

Code: [Select]

Checking for updates to all files: No updates needed!
Beginning integrity check!

Using mirror http://194.116.72.94/update/ for updaterinfo.xml
Using mirror http://194.116.72.94/update/ for updateservers.xml
Downloading integrity data:

[------------------------------]   1.3MB (100%)  162.4kB/s eta 0s       

Checking file integrity:
Using mirror http://194.116.72.94/update/backup/

The following files failed the check:
win64/psclient.exe
win64/pslaunch.exe

Do you wish to download the correct copies of these files? (y/n)

On Linux, Fedora 16, my guess is that this is not likely to work. 

- Nova

[ Edit: Now my planeshift directory is trashed so that I cannot even find autogen.sh to compile 5.8.1 again. The experience has left me steamed and feeling that no developer has bothered to even test this procedure. This could well be the nail in the coffin of my PS experience.]

[Tessra]

I love some of the new textures and effects.  I'm back to being utterly in love with Blue Way!   

Aramara... Derm-boys have the same basic side-walking/strafing posture.  As Chessire pointed out in-game, they look a LOT like the statue overlooking Rio de Janiro.  and if you think think the Derm-girls look funny strafing... you should see the Ynwnn/Ylian girls.  I've got a picture I'll get around to posting in the screenshot thread, but basically... there's no torso.  Tesh's head is directly above her bum, and her arms are rotated 90 degrees on the Y axis... so that they kinda poke out one to the front, one to the back like a trunk and a tail.  Oh yeah, and her hair pokes straight up in the air like a lawn gnome's hat.  There's just, no boobs or back or stomach.  Just arms, bum, legs and head. Thankfully, it only seems to happen when side-walking or strafing, and not when set to side-running. 

[LigH]

This is a default development pose, having no animation applied.

[Bonifarzia]

This looks promising. I am curious in particular about the future evolvement of the tribe objects.
For the win64 version, I have seen no problems related to art updates or missing animations.
The only problem I have experienced for now are some broken door objects (not target-able, nor right-click-able) in East Hydlaa.

[MishkaL1138]

the new walking speed is seriously bad. My fenki looks like she's wading through waist deep water.

I see the problem now: walking speed is set to sneaking speed. Bumping so the devs see this.

[LigH]

@ Bonifarzia: All Action Locations related to house doors or staircases have to be placed at the new geometry.

@ Mishka: This belongs to the usual "It's not a bug, it's a feature" opinions, and "PlaneShift is no democracy" (© Karyuu).

[Timil Deeps]

I have to agree with Aramara and Mishka: I like the old walking speed better... The slower walking speed makes the game a tad less playable, in that it takes longer to get somewhere by strolling. And the animation seems less natural now too (Or maybe it's the same animation, but just seems different). Timil, a ylian, seems to march stiffly now instead of the natural looking stroll he had previously. Perhaps it IS a 'feature', but features are up for the same type of scrutiny as bugs, especially as they relate to player satisfaction.

Another bug for me was that after installing (and making sure my video card drivers were up to date), both cities of Hydlaa and Ojaveda had no textures showing, and I'm not sure if the shaders were working right either. Timil and NPCs looked like they were covered in TV static patterns.

I like some of the other features though, especially the waterspouts in Hydlaa fountain! Nice touch!  And it's nice to see the menu tabs/buttons have been changed so that only the selected button has that yellow line indicating that it's active. Much better! 

[Addedum 1:]
I uninstalled my client and tried downloading the 5.9 torrent. When that finished and I clicked on the installer, it just froze up without starting. So I tried downloading from one of the Redlam mirrors. Got a 404 page. So I tried downloading the installer from one of the german mirrors. However, the file extension says .run instead of .exe, and when I change it to .exe, it gives me an error saying it might be fore 32bit windows. (I had downloaded the file that said 64bit.) So...... I guess I'll keep trying. Maybe I'll reinstall my old client and let it try to auto-update again.

[Naira]

Thank you for keeping us updated with all the changes not just those that we can see. It's always awesome to see changes in anything. Progression cant be made with out testing what is liked and not liked. 

[ether]

Hmm...  My 5.8.1 client is not giving me a pop-up to update...

The changes seem interesting; I'm excited to see what happens.  We'll see what I can figure out with the update...

[Talad]

We are checking now what's the problem with strafe, should be easy to fix.

About the walking speed, the current one is much more realistic and natural, if you see wrong movement means your update didn't complete properly, and you are using the old art with the new server, which will surely produce very weird result.

[ether]

Should note that almost two hours later - still no option to update.  Wound up starting a new download of the entire game.  Stupid internet here is making sure this is going to take a while - 5 hours, 3 minutes remaining.

I really hope this apparent fix to the updater works with this version - this is the third (fourth?) time I've had to reinstall to get an update.

[bilbous]

So I tried downloading the installer from one of the german mirrors. However, the file extension says .run instead of .exe, and when I change it to .exe, it gives me an error saying it might be fore 32bit windows. (I had downloaded the file that said 64bit.) So...... I guess I'll keep trying. Maybe I'll reinstall my old client and let it try to auto-update again.

you downloaded the linux install. it has a .run extension.

[Taya]

New member to the forums, but been in the game for a while now. I just never felt I had any worthwhile feedback to offer before this. So...

As a whole this update seems really nice. I love that new things are being added into the game and tried out. I have to agree that the new walking speed is completely horrible though. Maybe it is a more realistic speed for someone taking a slow walk round town, but it's snail-painful and when realism goes too far and destroys playability it's not good. True realism would also be variable walking speeds. We previously had three counting sneak; now we're reduced to two. This gives less scope for varied movement speed and to me this actually lowers realism. I now have my character on perma-run with no intentions of walking anywhere and, as has already been pointed out, when people start doing this realism degrades even more.

I'm also getting animation issues. Both walking and when jumping. The jump looks like a glitch I noticed in the past - when you sometimes unsummoned a mount but the game thought you were still riding one. It means my character now does star jumps. It's not pretty.

I am in love with the fountains. They don't make up for how much less playable the game now feels to me though.