After a lot of sleepless nights we are proud to present the 0.5.8 release of PlaneShift!! This is another major milestone in making the game more fun and graphically appealing. The best way to support us is to join our development team!

Art

• The main section of hydlaa has been remade! We remodeled all the houses to look better, and we updated all the textures to be higher resolution. You should see a big difference compared to the tutorial.
• Thanks to his popularity, Harnquist's shack has been replaced with a new larger blacksmith building. Looks like he is having good business!
• Some of the wall textures in Hydlaa have been updated to higher resolution.
• The Laanx temple has been remade, with higher detail. We still don't like too much the textures applied, and we are going to improve that soon.
• Hydlaa main now has bump mapping applied for more realistic surfaces.
• Improved the position of the musical instruments when wielded by adding a rotation. This is still not optimal, and will require an engine change to fix it completely (planned).
• Many new spells effects including: Healing Rain, Rinse, Icy Ground, Mephitic Haze, Water Barrier, Icy Blast, Phantasmal Voice, Hand of Doom, Mind Drain.
• Updated enviromental sounds of : Tutorial Map, Laanx Temple, Tavern de Kadel, Sewers, BlackFlame temple, Ojaveda Road, Gugrontid, Hydlaa Arena, Death Realm, Magic Shop, Hydlaa Winch, all 3 caves levels.
• Added sounds for musical instruments: lira, lure, drums.
• Improved icons for natural resources, like ores (gold, iron, ...).

New Features

• Added the ability to play musical instruments. You can actually compose a musical score in game and then play it with your musical instrument skills. Try to play with other people, and create a band for special events!
• Merged a new, heavily refactored and improved, sound system which is now entirely plugin based (adds a dummy soundmanager and a normal soundmanager)
• Added support for pictures in setting books and help pages
• Added support to individually enable/disable each tab of the chat window from the options panel.
• Made the spell checking based on hunspell a plugin too and made it configurable on supported platforms (linux/macosx). Additionally it can now spell check more text fields in game
• GM events: It's now possible to change the npc AI plan at runtime on the npcclient
• GM events: Improved support for morphing, which now actually changes the race and not only the mesh. This way also the speed of the actor might be affect from it.
• GM events: /impersonate now supports triggering an animation
• GM events: Expanded area commands to support a whole sector and regular expressions for name based search (area:type:map:mapname/here)
• GM events: Added a new flag which allows certain items to have the "no pickup" setting only applicable for GMs. This will allow easier setup of events.
• Added support to lock/unlock the quickspell bar
• Added a /version command to print the client version
• Added mute and freeze script support (could be used for spells later on)

• Fixed quest menu not being shown when items are given
• Fixed problems from attempts to add invalid buddies in the buddy list
• Fixed alliance text ending up in main even if disabled
• Fixed truncated map names in map list shown through admin manager
• Added support to spawn creative items from /item instead of having to use an npc to do it
• Added support to show entity labels only when an entity is targeted
• Fixed gm/dev login when the server is full
• Improved the quest menu to avoid to cut out parts of entries
• Started migration to sha256 for password storage. md5 is still used for client login, sha256 is already used for npcclients login.
• Fixed combat music continuing to be played after combat is ended
• Added warnings on group join in case the group is under a group challenge (see the wedding assassination problem)
• About 15 others fixes and improvements on the server side

Setting and background

• Published the prize quest for the guild quest contest: "Right on the mine"
• Roleplay info: enhanced the race pages with background information, history, culture, religion, main characters, architecture, ...
• History of the world: added new major events in the planeshift time line.
• Major change: Xacha removed and merged with the lemurs
• Major change: Diaboli removed from playable races
• Major change: Stonebreaker and Hammerwielder became two clans of one race: the Stonehammers
• Update: Magic way quests have been polished
• Update: Guards chain quest have been polished
• Update: Science chain quest have been polished
• General fixing: 43 quest bugs fixed confirmed from bug tracker reports

Rules

• Added musical instrument skill, added trainers and rules on how to progress. The more skill you have the less errors will be done while playing.

Installer

• Added OpenAL (sound) installer to the standard PlaneShift installer on Windows to ensure all clients have the right dlls.