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The New Interfaces

September 11th, 2006 by Eva

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New Interfaces

As you might have guessed by now, RuneScape has graphically improved interfaces. These are certainly much nicer to look at, but there have been a few other tweaks that you should know about before leaping into the TzHaar Fight Cave to take down TzTok-Jad.

The first thing you’ll notice is that all of the main icons have been significantly improved. Although they’re all based on the icons that existed before, they now look much nicer. The only icon that has completely changed is the ‘Log Out’ button, which is now a door; it’s still in the same place, though, so that shouldn’t cause you any difficulties.

What may cause you some difficulty is the movement of some of the buttons. You’ll notice in the combat interfaces above that the attack style buttons are now tiled within the interface, and that the button to toggle auto-retaliate on and off has been moved here. To find out whether a particular style is accurate, aggressive, crushing and so on, simply move your mouse over the button. This will also tell you which skill will receive the experience for fighting in each style.

Aside from the Combat, Equipped, Game Options and Player Options interfaces, there have been very few alterations to the interfaces that are at all likely to hinder your playing.

Game Options

The most obvious change is to the Game Options interface.

In the old interface, you would find a number of buttons relating to the way you prefer to interact with the RuneScape world (’Mouse Options’, for example). The problem with this was that some of the options also related to how you played the game (’Accept Aid’, for instance).

To tidy this up we have combined this interface with what was the Player Options interface. We’re able to fit all of these in - along with the new Area Sounds volume control - because the simplified image buttons allow us to create more streamlined and intuitive interfaces. You’ll notice that the ‘Run’ and ‘House Options’ buttons are now located here.

You can click these icons to toggle them on or off, and the run button has been moved closer to the Game Options tab to reduce the time it takes you to switch run on.

Emotes Interface

All of this has freed up the Player Options interface to become the new and fabulous Emotes Interface.

This features lovely images displaying all of the emotes available. If you can use them, they will be rendered in full colour, while those you have not yet unlocked will be ghostly figures.

Equipment Interface

The changes to the equipment interface will probably be the most popular among players.

Instead of having a little box with all of your bonuses shown, you will instead find a button labelled ‘Show Equipment Stats’. While you might expect to simply be taken to a list of your bonuses, you will instead be greeted by a window showing not only your stats, but also a model of your in-game character wearing and wielding the equipment, as well as the equipment interface. While this window is open the interface panel will show your inventory, so you can more quickly change your gear around and see the benefits or penalties associated.