Starr Long has posted the instructions and notes for Shroud of the Avatar’s fifth pre-alpha test release on the game’s website. Here are some of the features that players can look forward to when they log in the the game beginning tomorrow:

• Combat and Magic Skills: Finally you will no longer be confined to auto attack now that a wide array of combat and magic skills will be at your disposal. To let you test out a wide variety of these skills we will give you a bunch of skill points to allocate up and down as you wish.
  • 35 (of 171) Skills will be present in Release 5. A list of these can be found here.
• Linear Lighting Model: As part of an ongoing effort to improve our visuals we have have switched from gamma lighting to linear lighting. This makes a lot of the details in our textures more visible but it has required us to touch every shader, texture, lighting setting, etc. in the game. Note that this is still a work in progress.
• Journal: Results of conversations with the characters in our world will now appear in your Journal. This should aid questing tremendously without going as far as exclamation points overhead.
• Compass: Navigating through our scenes can be quite challenging so we have added an on screen compass to help guide you around
• Overland Map Polish: We continued iterating on the overland map. We added panning and zooming, animating objects (waves, windmills, etc.) and visibility of your party members
• AFK Mode: When you type /afk or you are idle for a while your character will sit on the ground and [AFK] will be appended to the character name
• New Vale Scenes: We shifted focus to more Vale scenes so we could create a more complete area of the game (replacing placeholder maps) versus proceeding to the main map. Player Housing: We have added 12 new player houses (4 Rustic, 6 Wood & Plaster, 2 Duke Castles) and as mentioned above we increased the number of locations that players can place houses to a total of 13. That raises the number of lots to around 600. With that change we have decided that for R5 we will no longer impose a time limit on ownership.

Sadly, not everything originally planned for Release 5 made the cut; the following features, among others, have been postponed for now:

• Death System: OooOoooOOOOooo! Death will now turn you into a ghost. Current thinking about the death system will be shared at a later date.
• Main Continent Scenes: Finally players will get to see their first maps on the main continent including a city that is part of the story, adventuring areas, and a player town.
• Interactive Areas: Don’t you wish you could move that chair in the tavern to have a better view of the front door? Public areas like taverns will now be flagged as interactive areas. This will allow more freedom in those spaces by allowing the moving but not taking of items.
• AI Behaviors: NPCs will now start to have schedules and change behavior according to the time. This will include things like going around turning on the lights around town as the sun goes down. NPCs will also now react to players taking and breaking stuff so watch out when you try to steal that loaf of bread!
• Books: Books will no longer just be decorative objects! Read lovely poems and stories written by our very own community in the game. Try to collect them all!

Complete instructions can be found here.

The Shroud of the Avatar installers can be found at the links below:

• PC: http://goo.gl/KVYzpF
• Mac: https://d2sx9mrt4zumaq.cloudfront.net/Launchers/latestPatcherOSX.zip
• Linux: https://d2sx9mrt4zumaq.cloudfront.net/Launchers/latestPatcherLinux.tar.gz

If you already have the game client installed — at least for Windows; I’m actually not sure about the other operating systems — you don’t need to reinstall Shroud of the Avatar (unless, of course, you’ve deleted it since Release 4). Simply opening the game client and letting its automatic updates do their thing will be enough to get you ready for Release 5.