Hello everyone!
I have been playing through the game myself from scratch in an effort to try and experience things fresh and the last update included a whole bunch of changes (such as the PC hotkeys refresh, inventory sorting and monster spell cooldowns) to things that really annoyed me. That trend continues here, and one of the things that has really annoyed me has been communication on the PC client.
A redesigned interface for PC players
I thought it was about time I set some time aside to really take a look at the PC experience. One of the major issues I have with playing on the PC is how hard it is to communicate with people, having to open and close a fullscreen chat designed for mobile users was really frustrating. In addition, the scaling and readability of fonts has been really quite bad. With this in mind, I gave myself 3 days to have a go at rewriting the desktop in-game screen.
One of the big things I did not want to do was take away the ability for people to play the game fullscreen with very little UI over the top. I think when you are playing in a small window and just training or hunting the maximum view is really good so this is something I didn’t want to change. At this point the changes look really minimal and you can still recognise the client, however the chat button as moved down to the bottom right…
Opening the chat by either pressing the button or the space-bar reveals a new split-pane style chat interface for the PC client. It is still recognisable but has been made so you can chat and play without any disruption. In small windowed mode it looks potentially intrusive, but in fullscreen it really shines. You can resize the chat to whatever height you wish and your character will stay in the middle of the remaining space, if you run to the south edge of an area it will snap to the top of the chat rather than the bottom of the screen so you won’t find yourself ever running behind the chat – and of course if at any point you wish to hide the chat, you can just press space-bar again 🙂
If you have the chat hidden and press enter, your messages will always go to the local chat. There is a little local-chat icon indicator next to the text-entry box that appears so you won’t forget this is the case. If you press enter with the chat UI open, the text entry box will appear in the same place but your messages will instead go to the chatroom you have open as you would expect.
Party Search channel
Something else that has greatly annoyed me while playing through is how difficult it is to find players to hunt with. In future once the party system is live it would be great to have a system in place to make this really easy, but for now I thought a really quick and easy way to give people a way of finding others to hunt with would be a chatroom dedicated to this purpose.
This chat is slightly different to others that have came before it, in that if your message starts with LFP or LFM it will appear a certain colour to make it easier to find what you are looking for, and messages that do not start with these prefixes will be shown as a dark grey.
Full change list
- Blood splats will no longer show on safe zones if the player is lagging and they are hit after their character is shown to them as being in a safe area
- Space bar now acts as enter on screens without textboxes
- Scrolls are now sorted at the end of the inventory to prevent missclicks
- Enter no longer submits on the punishment or revoke punishment windows
- NPC base crit chance reduced by 50%
- Version mismatches between client and server are much mroe informative now (notification of patches etc)
- Disconnected players are booted after 5 minutes
- AFK players are booted after 15 minutes
- Monster spawn times adjusted accross the board
- Imps stopped going to the gym and are now all weaker
- Players can now face a direction by:
- Walking against things
- Using a command
- Pressing CTRL + a direction
- Anvil is now blocked
- Monsters will not hit players with scatter abilities while retreating
- In-game font scaling is now more readable on PC and Android
- Preferences reset due to above change
- PC client in-game UI rewritten
- Monsters and Players are un-targeted if they leave the bounds of the screen
- Target range limit removed from the PC client, no longer necessary after above change
- Party Search chat added with some special rules for making messages pretty colours
- Cyclopses have dug through their caves and joined them together, it is now possible to reach imps through the old cyclops cave again
Hotkeys
Main Game Screen:
- Enter – Type a new chat message
- Tab – cycle through open chatrooms
- Spacebar – Show / Hide the chat UI
- Ctrl + WASD / Arrow Keys – Face a direction
Hopefully nomatter who you are there is a change in here for you that will make your experience playing Mirage that little bit better. I think the new PC experience is really great when fullscreen, and I hope you guys like it too.
All the best,
Foxish