Having gotten a lot of nice feedback from my previous post, I’m inspired to post about other features that are too small to merit a whole dev diary and yet cool enough imho to deserve a special mention.

Please note - for some of the things I’ll post about, including today’s entry, I have had nothing to do with actually developing them.

Anyway - enough rambling - the feature I want to highlight today is something I’m super excited about: Mail Recipient Autocompletion.

Once you download SoM, when you start typing in the “To:” field when composing mail, you will get an auto-complete box, which contains a filtered list of people whose names start with the characters you’ve typed in the box. These people are pulled from your friends list, your kinship list, and the alts on your current account.

While I’m sure that I’ll be mailing my alts a lot less with the introduction of the Shared Storage system, I still think that this feature will simplify my life almost every day I play the game :).

I wanted to write about a cool feature in Mounts 2.0 which was added after the Mounts Dev Diary was written.

One of the unexpected consequences of changing your mounts from items to skills was the following bug that was discovered by our Beta Testers: In Mounts 1.0, you could use any of your mount items (or shortcuts to them) to dismount, no matter which one you are actually on. For example, you might be riding a goat, but you could use your quickslotted horse and you’ll dismount the goat.

One of the things that players have done with this is to assign a shortcut to a quickslotted mount and then consistently use that shortcut to dismount. For example, they might assign the middle mouse button to this action.

With Mounts 2.0, instead of items, you have toggle skills, and in order to toggle the skill off (dismount), you have to use exactly the skill that you used to mount up.

While thinking about how to give players a way to still have a dismount command, we came up with the following idea: Why not make a “Dismount” action that you can explicitly bind a keyboard shortcut to in the Options panel.

This was not very hard to do - but it started us thinking: wouldn’t it be awesome if this shortcut would do something useful if you weren’t already mounted, like for example mount you up :). The only problem: which of your mounts should be used to mount up?

In an ideal world, I can imagine lots of different things it could do - ranging from the ability to pick your favorite horse, to maybe a set of favorites that the game would pick between randomly. However, any of the heavier options could not possibly be implemented this late in the development cycle for Mounts 2.0. So, we went with simply mounting on the last-used mount.

To summarize, the feature is:
There’s a new Keyboard Shortcut called “Dismount/Remount”. When used by a mounted player, that player will be dismounted. When used by an unmounted player, that player will attempt to mount up on the last successfully-used mount.

I’m very happy with this, because it will mean that I will no longer have to have any quickslots taken up with my mounts - if I want to switch mounts, I’ll open up my Mounts panel, and mount up straight from there. From then on, I can keep using my keyboard shortcut to dismount/remount as needed.

Hopefully you all will like it too :).

A screenshot:

Dismount/Remount Keyboard Option

Hi everyone, Ransroth here. I’m a Game Systems Engineer at Turbine, working on LOTRO. I plan to use this blog for any random things that I want to let people know about :).