3.8

Today's patch focuses on delivering two heavy refactors changing a lot client and server side to result in a much smoother user interface and game experience.

These two tasks are a big step forward and are the results of multiple weeks of work.

Skill interaction refactor:

The first is altering the way skill triggers and the interface are interacting. You have most likely heard us mention a lot since the start of InDev and is one of the first refactors we wanted to make.

We've been poking around the UI for a few months now, noting the needs and creating proof of concept features, and now we have done the underlying foundations and re-implemented most of our UI under the new system.

Many of the bugs and issues with skill triggering should now be fixed or should be much easier to fix, and our interface should now be much more consistent/reliable.

Multi slot now offer multiple levels of statefulness at the discretion of the player:

* Statefull selection: by default, you can now cycle through a multi-slot. Once a skill has been activated, the index of the multi-slot will be reset. The state is only kept during selection until activation.
* Statefull: what we call combo mode, after casting an ability, the index of the multi-slot is reset only when another multi-slot is activated.
* stateless: when using auto-cast on a skill in a multi slot, it will require to use the multi-tap method of access. This way will always trigger the same action for the same sequence of key presses.

You can now open a new hotbar slot options menu by clicking the button at the bottom right of a slot:

* Auto cast: The ability will be selected then activated automatically after a short delay (Multi-slot activating delay in gui options)
* Auto revert: After this ability is completed, the previous weapon will be equipped, including its default ability.
* Switch to this hotbar: selecting this skill will switch to the hotbar where the multi-slot is located.
* Switch to weapons bar hotbar: selecting this skill will look up the hotbar switching option of its weapon and switch to the configured hotbar. mutually exclusive with the above option.
* Combo mode: Prevents the reset of a multi-slot index after activating one of its abilities. (only on the first slot of a multi-slot)

* Actions are now atomic, which means that pressing a key with auto equip, auto cast and auto revert will no longer have its sequence interrupted by pressing another key.
* Many delays have been reduced or outright removed by the refactor, making the interface much smoother to use.
* Queuing is still in, but we would like feedback about it now that it won't mess with sequences. We want it as an option, but we'd like to determine which should be by default for new players.

Map marker and full text search:
The second large feature to come with this patch is a refactor of how map marker work and the addition of many more markers on the map.
The server can now pushes dynamically markers to the client and it will be shown immediately. This will open up to add many features, from territory control to migrating monsters.

For now, we are stress testing this feature to see how it impacts client and server performances, each player will get a random subset of all possible markers, and if there are no issues, we'll push all markers to everyone.

Both dynamic and static objects will be seen on the worldmap and minimap:

* Banks and crafting stations can now be seen on the map.
* Spawn points can now be found on the map, and are colored based on the tier system we are using for the tier based xp system.
* All of the above will be automatically shown in the 9 tiles around you.
* For the rest of the world, you can use the text box at the bottom left of the worldmap to search for them.
* When the worldmap is showing a search result, clicking once on a marker will keep it displayed during the play session, clicking it again will remove it from the current result set.

We've been working on this for a few weeks, and we're happy for it to be delivered this early in the process.
This is of course the first step of this system, as we'll expand the information that can be displayed, add new features and generally make the map smoother to use.

It is more importantly the start of our efforts on the New Player Experience.
Combined with a company hosted wiki about the game, additional tooltips, help screens and a completely reworked tutorial, it will form what we call our "in game university".
Our end goal is that a new player never has to alt-tab out of the game or require to ask questions about a feature, no matter how complex the mechanics are.

Miscellaneous changes:

* Stackable items can now be sorted too.
* Lay on hands has been given to all new characters by default. Its reagent cost has been removed to encourage learning how to heal early on.
* Default hotbar setup has been adapted to latest changes, including the power hour and lay on hands.
* Made some changes to the login server which should improve login condition for large families.
* Rest bug should be fixed.
* Pray's cooldown shouldn't be consumed if interrupted.