DarqUI 2K/4K: Group 33

Surprise, you thought we were done with the 2K/4K Project? Not so fast! I've been rummaging around this summer and discovered another batch of components worthy of scaling up. Some small and simple, some more complex. I also took the opportunity to make a few 2K/4K-adjacent tweaks. Everything you see here is on the premium update server now.

New L and XL sizes:

Lotto -- Every now and then I'll stop on the Antonica dock and line the goblin's pockets with a few extra silvers. Okay, a lot of silvers. But I can stop any time! I swear! (Image #1)

Downloading -- Everyone's favorite animated baby dragon. (Image #1)

Instructions -- This window appears mid-screen and pulsates to attract your attention. This is another one I remember seeing, but not recently. (Image #1)

Restart Trial -- is subscription trial still a thing now that we have free-to-play? Or does it refer to a different sort of trial? (Image #1)

Tutorials -- I remember seeing some of these pages pop up here and there in the past. There's about a dozen tutorial pages with a variety of basic information that's still useful and should be helpful especially to new players. Using lots of graphics, the topics include leveling up, inventory, grouping, using the mouse, taming Warders for Beastlords, etc.

I couldn't find a way to display any of it on-demand, so two new widgets have been added to the UI: On the Help window there is a new button to open the Pop-up Tutorials, and then on the window itself are Forward and Back controls to flip through the various pages. Hopefully this basic information will be discoverable and will prove useful to EverQuest II newbies -- they do still exist! (Image #2)

Gear Reset -- I remember this window from past expansions, and there's no reason why another gear reset could not happen in the future. So when that time arrives we'll be able to reset gear pieces without benefit of a magnifying glass. (Image #3)

Contest -- This window makes me think of the pig race on the Isle of Mara, although it currently seems to use a different interface. Have you found another place in the game that has a contest? This is another case where I'd rather be safe than sorry. (Image #3)

Knowledge (Spell) Book -- If you've been using DarqUI for very long, you already know I'm hesitant to make gratuitous tweaks that vary from the Default UI. Even if I don't exactly love a default widget, if it works then generally speaking I try to play along and make sure our modified windows maintain the same basic look and feel. A perfect example of this is the recent change to the default Chat window input line. Not my favorite change, and not exactly handsome although it works and it's an improvement for many players. So I didn't try to second-guess the game designers.

But every now and then a change gets made that slowly nibbles away at my soul and I have no choice but to do something about it. An example is the horizontal and vertical splitters that appear here and there, and are still broken in the default UI. Your custom windows all have splitters that split properly.

When the Research tab was added to the Knowledge window, some changes were made to how the row of buttons along the top of the window operates. By default we get something like you see in Image #4 (red arrow). This visual imbalance finally got the best of me, so now it's resolved once and for all (green arrow). No change in functionality, but my left eye has stopped twitching.

Player-made and game-related Books -- There are hundreds of books strewn across every corner of Norrath, and you no doubt have more than your share of them in your house. If you get tired of adventuring and crafting and decorating, you can always relax with a few tomes about orcs and golems or perhaps the history of the Ironforge Exchange.

EverQuest II is also blessed with very creative players on all servers who write books on many subjects, and it's nice to have a feature that allows us to create and share information between players within the game.

Custom Large and X-Large book templates have a control for enlarging the text page-by-page, with the larger text spread continuously across left and right sides. A change was recently made to remove the dark "gutter" between the pages when in this mode, which makes for much easier reading. (see Image #5)