A Doctor's Online Gaming Life: New UI and Party System for Cabal

With the Radiant Hall patch about to go live in a couple of weeks, GM Viral of Cabal EU has once again released vital information regarding the changes that we can expect from the game.

The UI improvements started with the previous update, and EST has completed the UI with this update. Every single part of the UI has been redone, from the login screen, the on-screen keyboard, through the channel select screen and all the way through to the inventory and party menu. The new interface is smooth and clean and modern, and I rather like it. It suits the game, to my mind at least. I am also very sure that the members of our community active with creating new skins will have some fun re-creating the most popular skins.

As as an aside here I would recommend that you revert back to the default UI before the update goes live. We will make the default one available for download to those of you who somehow managed to misplace the default UI that I am sure you backed-up before installing a custom one. Surely it cannot be more than one or two people, at most.

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I like it, and I think it looks good. I feel that it fits better to the game than the old interface, and having a full change like this does make it feel like you are playing a new game at times. Add to this the subtle improvements to the graphical engine - it is not mentioned in the notes, but it does appear as if the shadows are being handled better, and the multi-sampling works properly now - and the update becomes more and more about ‘deep’ changes, if you understand my meaning.

The new party system, despite taking up a rather large part of the patch notes, is simply a return to the party registration. You can register a party, and give it a unique name - and people from every channel can search for parties on all channels, and request to join. This was done to improve the community playing together, according to ESTsoft. I hope it does, but I think it might take a while for the use of this system to become widely adopted.

As you can see from the screen it is fairly simple. You register a party, and all the information appears. Any player not in a party can access this menu by pressing ‘P’, and search and apply to join to the registered parties, while players already in a party will have to right-click on the party area of the UI in order to access this menu. Of course it is also still completely possible to request a party simply by clicking on a character and using the dropdown menu, if you wish.

The entire options menu has also been re-designed, partly in order to accommodate the new key-binding and macro options, and partly to align it with the new UI. The key bindings are great - you can literally assign your own keys to every single ingame function or menu, should you wish.

The macro chat option allows you to bind phrases to the ctrl+F1 to f10 keys. Since these cannot be used on the normal, trade or shout chats it should be fine, especially with regards to the spam-bots lurking in Bloody Ice these days. I am not sure how many people will use this, but I guess it can be fun.