Ravnatest

<img src="graphics/bullets/decor.gif" alt=" " style="margin-bottom: -14px;" />2011.03.20

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PlaneShift has been accepted into the <a href="http://www.google-melange.com/site/home/site">Google Summer of Code</a> (GSoC) initiative as a mentoring organization!! If you are not familiar with the program, take some time to read the GSoC web site. The next steps of the program are the following:

March 18-27 : Would-be student participants discuss application ideas with mentoring organizations. For this part of the program, we ask you to do the following:

• Review our <a href="http://www.atomicblue.org/google_soc_2011.htm">ideas list</a> here.
• Create an account on <a href="http://planeshift.ezpcusa.com/nexus/newapplicant.php">this web app</a> (nexus) so we can more easily track your profile.
• Please use "gsoc_" as prefix of your nick, example "gsoc_talad"
• Select "Programming" as department
• In the section "Previous Experiences" paste the questions present in the section "Background" in our <a href="http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/show/google/gsoc2011/atomicblue">gsoc app</a>, with your answers.
• In the section "RPG Experience" you can list what's your knoweledge of RPG games, but it's not required for GSoC.
• In the section "Portfolio" paste the questions present in the section "Google Summer Of Code" in our <a href="http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/show/google/gsoc2011/atomicblue">gsoc app</a>, with your answers.
• Connect to our IRC channel at irc.freenode.net #planeshift-prospects
• Discuss and improve the current ideas together with us.
• Participate in game to the event name "GSoC students welcome", you can find the date and time in our <a href="http://www.planeshift.it/events.php">event calendar</a>. For this event you need to download the game, create an account and create a character (it's free!!). Your presence there is not required to be part of gsoc, but can be fun and a different way to have a chat, also you will see better our current software.

March 28-April 8: Students can apply on the google web site for being a student. This part is very important and you should absolutely not miss the deadline. The registration is done on the google web site, not on our website.

<img src="graphics/bullets/decor.gif" alt=" " style="margin-bottom: -14px;" />2011.03.14

Wouldn't be nice to have a web platform where you can see your PlaneShift character, your skills, your inventory and your standings, so you could simply give a link to your fellow guild members or your friends? We think it would be very nice and so we have build a web site for it! Welcome to MyPlane!!

MyPlane is for now in its very first release, and allows you to browse your characters, see their skills, stats, description, inventory, standings and guild membership. Also a picture of your character with his traits is provided. To protect your privacy, by default your character is not visible. The nice feature is that you can decide which parts you want to show. You can enable the visibility of certain information only to your guild members, your buddies or open it to everyone.

We plan to expand MyPlane greatly in the future! The application is free and can be used by anyone with a PlaneShift account. To use it simply follow the link to the server where you have your account:
<A href=http://planeshift.zeroping.it/myplane>Roleplay server (zeroping)</a>
<A href=http://planeshift.ezpcusa.com/myplane>Non-RP server (ezpc)</a>

If you want to see an example, here is a <a href=http://planeshift.zeroping.it/myplane/profile/Erelog_Genoloe>sample character</a> we created.

So go on and show your character in your forum signature, your web sites, your email, in facebook and everywhere!!

If you want to comment this news or you have ideas on expanding MyPlane please use <a href="http://www.hydlaaplaza.com/smf/index.php?topic=39256.0">this forum thread</a>
Thanks to Niklas Bölter and others for creating this new platform!

<img src="graphics/bullets/decor.gif" alt=" " style="margin-bottom: -14px;" />2011.02.27

The full 0.5.6 distro packages are available to <a href="download.html">download</a>! The win64 launcher has been fixed as well. Enjoy!

<img src="graphics/bullets/decor.gif" alt=" " style="margin-bottom: -14px;" />2011.02.22

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

If you want to comment this news please use <a href="http://www.hydlaaplaza.com/smf/index.php?topic=39183.0">this forum thread</a>

<img src="graphics/bullets/decor.gif" alt=" " style="margin-bottom: -14px;" />2011.01.17

Happy new Year! We have some news about balancing, and in particular about trainers. It was a long time we didn't do a real balancing pass on the trainers, their location and their max skills. The current situation was a mix of history and quests and probably too many local edits. In many cases the max rank of the skills were very uneven.

For this reason we decided to have a global pass to align the trainers to the new "heat" map we are using recently. The "heat" map is nothing more than a way to identify certain areas as low/medium/high rank, and to distribute the monsters/loot/trainers accordingly, so that new players can have easier life and seniors can find challenge in new unexplored areas. Obviously this is just a general guideline and there can be exceptions to the "heat" map based on local quests, a bit of randomness and to leave some surprise the players. With the trainers we followed the heat map as well, where all basic cities are considered "low rank", the terrain outdoor areas medium, and the bronzedoor region "high rank". We hope this will allow a more natural progression.

On the same line of thought we will have soon a quests update (related to factions) where we will try to minimize the long travels between hydlaa and bronzedoors in the starting quests, so players will reach more remote areas at the right pace, when their char is more prepared for adverturing in those dangerous places. This anyway doesn't prevent players to explore (except few places which are locked by quests, like the winch). In this pass we removed all the trainers for skills which are not usable in game, and made all stats trainable up to 400 and all skills to 200, like it was supposed to be from the beginning. The trainable skills are: all armors, all weapons, all stats, the magic Ways, shields usage, repairing armors and weapons, body development, and usable crafting (cooking, smiths, mining, fishing, ...) and empathy. We hope this is a small step toward a more balanced and enjoyable game.

If you want to comment this news please use <a href="http://www.hydlaaplaza.com/smf/index.php?topic=39082.0">this forum thread</a>

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