21.04.2025 Hotfixes, buff bar improvements & map caching

nikos32 · April 21, 2025

Further improvements to buff bars:
- Added a couple of visual cues to move operations to help explain behaviour:
  
  A yellow border will be drawn around the bar you're hovering over, to indicate it will group with that bar.
  A preview of the bar will be drawn in the location the buff bar will try to move to once you let go of the mouse.
- When grouped, bars will now be fully linked with the topmost bar:
  - Moving the topmost bar will move all of the explicitly grouped bars below it.
  - Moving linked bars will unlink them.
  - The parent can link with another bar, preserving the order of its children in the new parent.
- Displayed bar order is now consistent and persists across logout.
  - Previously it would only remain consistent until a bar was closed with no more icons. Now they keep the order you set, no matter what.
- You can now change child bar order amongst grouped bars by dragging its children onto the bar you wish to move it below:
- You are now able to finish positioning a bar even after its last icon expires (so long as you were already moving it before it expired):
- Icons will now consistently right-align or left-align depending on where the bar is positioned.
  If it's positioned against the left side of the screen, the icons will align to the left:
- Added a setting to flip the buff icon order to behave as in ROFD, where the icons display from oldest to newest:
  
  MYKO (Newest -> Oldest):
  
  ROFD (Oldest -> Newest):
  - As always, this can be configured realtime via the Options Editor under "User interface" -> "Buff bars" -> "Icon order":
- The bar's lock state now persists across logout.
- Reworked it a little so that we could improve its performance in a few areas, e.g. ensuring we only ever update bar positioning once per frame.
Added configurable map caching:
- When you enter a map for the second time, it will reload the cached map from memory to considerably reduce subsequent load times of that map.
- Note that this can use a decent amount of memory, so you should configure appropriately for your system.
- These options can be found in the Options Editor under "Game" -> "Map caching":
  - As always, these settings can be configured while in-game and will update immediately upon save.
  - Note that for performance purposes, maps will only expire when either loading a new zone, or when config was updated.
Optimised out some unnecessary file I/O while walking around ingame.
- This should be especially helpful to those running the game on an HDD.
Fixed the time of day incorrectly applying after the load screen finishes.
- This was causing an unintentional visible lighting change as a result of the sun/moon shifting to different places immediately after the load screen ended.

Finally, we've also fixed a few server issues caused by the 17/04/2025 patch:

[Hotfixed live] Fixed a bug causing item sealing/unsealing requests to fail.
[Hotfixed live] Fixed a specific case causing the client to give up reconnecting when it should have simply retried.
[Fixed in the previous hotfix restart] Fixed a bug on warp causing some players in the area where you are warping to visually have incorrect positions.
[Hotfixed live] Fixed a bug causing Lupine Eyes' effect to break for all except the first party member (solo use was fine).
Fixed a bug causing name change requests to fail.
Fixed a bug causing players to be disconnected again after reconnecting, when originally disconnected by certain cases.
Fixed an official server bug causing server-side disconnections to be treated inconsistently, which was sometimes causing it to allow players to reconnect after being intentionally disconnected.
Fixed a bug causing dead players (who have somehow regained some HP since) to not be able to respawn after reconnection.
- Most likely this happened due to a delayed heal at the same time as an NPC attack, but that's a problem for another time; as far as reconnections are concerned, death prompts are now handled consistently with everything else.