So, I thought a lot had happened when we released 1.11.0 and I mentioned that there were 5,227 lines of changes. 1.13.0 has been an intense build and comes in at nearly 7 times larger. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to hearing all about the bugs that months of testing didn’t find.
Chat
The first thing that most people are going to notice first is that chat has had a major upgrade.
On top of being prettier and flaunting sexy curves, the chat window is now completely integrated into the movement page meaning that you don’t get a flash when the messages are loaded. You also will not get a page reload when you post a chat message; everything should be seamless.
During times of mass excitement, you no longer need to refresh your page in eager anticipation of the next post. When discussion is taking place, the messages are automatically refreshed faster.
Accessibility
One of the most important benefits of integrating the chat window is the improvement in experience for those using assistive devices. It should now be much easier to access the chat messages and new messages should be automatically spoken by screen readers and similar devices. At this stage, after posting a new message, your message will be read out to you however it is intended for this to be replaced with a simpler form of feedback.
The main content area of the movement page, including chat, has done away with the old tabular style of layout to provide a more semantically correct representation of the page. There is still a long way to go in modernising the layouts but hopefully this helps a little.
The movement navigation has had empty alt tags added to presentational images and alt tags have been added to all navigational images, including the movement buttons.
To allow faster parsing of your environment, people and objects in an area are now placed under headings and all items under those headings are in unordered lists — the chat window also has a heading.
There is still a lot more we can do to help those using assistive devices and we intending to keep working at this until the experience is superb.
Miscellaneous
We are transitioning to a new form of caching that has so far proven to be significantly faster. Given that our statistics show that most of the delay people encounter is in network latency and browser rendering, this won’t be heavily noticed by many, but it should help keep the server load down.
Lots of bug fixes and spelling corrections.
When looking at an item on the ground, if you can’t pick it up, no option is shown.
Many Frost Fall additions