[Neus]

I will be hosting a testing server over the next few days in order to test out a new movement system, to see how it works in an online environment, what impact it has on the game, to find areas that I forgot to address, etc.

What's pixel movement?
Currently the game uses tile based movement, meaning when you move, you are moving an entire tile. With pixel movement, it's possible to make subtler movements. Note that battle movement is still a full tile; nothing in the battle system will be changing as a result of this.

Why bother?
The main reason, I suppose, is because it is more elegant to do speed adjustments for movement in this fashion. It's possible to just make the game add a longer delay between steps, or make steps 'seem' longer, but you lose some fluidity. If you decide you want to move in a different direction mid-step, you can't do that. Pixel movement allows speed adjustments while maintaining control of motion.

It's not really a big deal in towns, but for overworld movement, I have some things I would like to do that pixel movement would be good for.

What am I looking for exactly?
Mainly, I want you to be looking out for things that don't move correctly in this system. Does something that normally moves fine not really move well? Walking monsters, bargoing NPCs, Shael, and so on.

Known Differences / Issues

• Party members are now represented by a sword icon above the leader. The reason being that I couldn't find or come up with a good solution for the previous 'trailing party' in a pixel movement environment.
  
• Mouse movement does not work on the overworld. I would like to get this working, at some point, but it was giving me issues, and it wasn't important enough to delay a test over.
  
• Overworld speed is much slower than you are used to. No more speeding from one shore to the other in two seconds.
  
• There is a jammer on the overworld who will wander around and probably chase you if you get too close. He won't actually do anything, but was one part of the future plans that I was messing around with. He should stay on the overworld, follow you when you get close, stop following you when you get far enough away (or if you lead him on too long).

Any discussion can go in this thread. If you find a bug with the new system, please post it in the Beta Bugs forum (not the normal bug report forum). Note that until testing is completed, the game will continue to use tile-based movement, so future updates won't include these changes if they turn out to be unexpectedly unstable.