Asherons Call: AC:TD Open Preview Known Issues & Changes from Live

Now for the bad news: mouselook. The code change that I posted about yesterday, which we thought would allow us to restore previous mouselook/examination functionality to the way it worked in ACDM, has some major problems. It breaks the UI in a number of fairly subtle but important ways. We will continue to investigate ways to restore the old functionality, but in the meantime we'll have to stick with the behavior we have now.

I apologize profusely for getting your hopes up before the mouselook change was 100% tested, but given the feedback on that issue I thought it was important to let you know that were were working on it. This is the same reason we wanted to let you know about the progress on the graphics issues: We want you to know that we are aware of these issues, that they are very important to us, and that we are hard at work on resolving them.

Since I'm here, let me address a few questions ...

Bruiserk wrote:
"Glad to hear it, but it leads me to wonder why something like this was even changed? Why were so many things in the re-write changed or left out?
How much more could we have had, if all of the attention had been paid to just allowing the current client to display the higher-res textures, and not a complete rewrite of the UI?"

Unfortunately, we didn't have the option not to change the underlying UI framework. The old UI relied on very specific (and obsolete!) graphics behavior that just doesn't work with recent DirectX libraries. The graphics upgrade pretty much required a DirectX upgrade and the DirectX upgrade absolutely required a new UI framework. Luckily, we had a more modern base UI framework to work from -- I say luckily because otherwise, given our resources, we would still be working on a new UI framework and we wouldn't be launching for at least another 6 months. Unfortuantely, using the modern UI framework that we had available as a base meant that there are some old behaviors that are prohibitively difficult to preserve. We've done our best with the time and resources we had available, and in cases where our best isn't currently good enough ... well, we'll just keep trying.

Yula_the_Mighty wrote:
"The field of view is not controlled by the render command any more. You have to edit this line:
FieldOfView=90.00
in the user preference file."

Actually, there's a slider in-game, in the Options/Config panel, that allows you to adjust your field of view as well.

Here's the original post about Mouselook changes:
srand wrote: I have a small update on mouselook for you.

After hearing your concerns about this change, we investigated possibilities for restoring the old behavior. We believe that we have found a workable option. I won't go into the technical details, but we expect that we will be changing the default behavior in ToD to be:

Right-click and hold = mouselook
Right-click and release ("tap") = examination

With luck, we will be able to get this into the Preview with the next Preview update, but lacking that we do expect to have this behavior in for launch. Ibn will have more details for you as we get closer to that update.