January Updates

I hope your holidays were at least as enjoyable as mine, but now that the new year is underway we're not hibernating at Darq Side HQ! Here are some nifty new things for you to try out.

A High Price to Pay

As you know I'm always happy when we can rip out unnecessary things from the UI. And it's especially cool when we can improve upon a feature while also simplifying it. If you use Pricing Presets on the broker I think you're going to enjoy this update. Recently Darq Side member Naviaz noted that custom pricing presets only save values up to 10K plat (yikes!) and "large plat presets" only save up to 10 million plat. Even though the game throttles prices at 50 million per item, still both of those maximums seem a bit puny in today's game economy.

Using some tricks discovered while working on a previous feature, the Set Prices window can now save custom presets from one copper all the way up to 50 million plat, and everything in between. And better yet, it can all be done from the same place -- there is no longer a separate large plat pricing area to deal with. So now if you want a preset price of 49,999,999p 99g 99s 99c, you can do it!

Not only that, but previews now sport commas! So no more cryptic 40000000 values. And the Presets area can be resized to make room for all those big beautiful comma-enhanced prices.

But there is one downside: some older-format presets may have to be entered again. When you first open the window it evaluates each of your presets, and any slots that are not compatible with the expanded system will be cleared automatically. Thank you Naviaz for the suggestion!

Mercenary Window

Always on the lookout for ways to streamline day-to-day gameplay, Darq Side member chief wondered why we have to fiddle with the Character window whenever the mercenary dies in battle, gets dismissed, or leaves the group during an extended AFK. We put some thought into it, and here is what we came up with.

You now have two new settings for the Mercenary window. The first displays the resummon countdown timer message, so you don't need to keep opening the Character window to check on that. It's especially handy when you are dealing with the mercenary getting killed in battle. When the timer expires and you can once again summon your merc, you no longer have to go to the Character window or waste a hotbar slot -- you can re-summon right from the window:

By default the window closes whenever the mercenary leaves for any reason, but using the second new setting you can keep the more functional window up on the screen. Try it out and I think you'll agree, since the Mercenary window already occupies a spot in the game window, it may as well stay visible during sessions when you are using a merc.

Thanks to chief for several rounds of testing and feedback. This is one of those feature requests where I rolled my eyes a little bit at first, but then after playing with it I realized it's actually an excellent convenience that I'll be using from now on. Give it a try! A side benefit is that it also makes Zhugrus Blightstrike instantly 35.8% more handsome.

DarqUI Unified Notifications v1.2.0.9

The most recent utility version includes some added versatility in working with files outside of the custom UI folder, including the ability to place new file types into \fonts and other locations within the main game folder. The utility "knows" how to check for file changes in these areas but the DarqUI Notifier app was still living in 2021, constantly reporting incorrectly that you have new or updated files to download. Thanks to Darq Sider Ixoth who reminded me about the issue and has been testing the newer version successfully.

Since changes to the notifier only affect the premium UI right now, I'm making v1.2.0.9 available for you here rather than creating a new download over at EQ2Interface. If you already use the notifier, grab it below (Editor's Note: newer versions of the notifier are available at EQ2Interface so the download on this post has been removed.) and replace your old version. Play the setup video from about 14 minutes through to the end, and it will show you how to get the taskbar app into your Startup folder and also how to upgrade smoothly to the newer version.

One quick note: If the new notifier reports that you need about a jillion updates, that most likely means you need to reapply your premium key on the "About" page, just like you do with the utility. If you need your key sent to you again, message me here or in Discord.

A Hard ACT to Follow

This is not a UI update, but it's cool enough that I wanted to share it with you. Member Apau was working on a way to configure text-to-speech in ACT to speak the messages in a certain chat channel. (As if we need another avenue for sensory overload in this game!) But Apau has a specific need for this functionality, and we thought it might be something you can make use of as well. Here's what his solution looks like on the Custom Triggers tab in ACT:

If you prefer to cut-and-paste, the Regular Expression is:

(.*):(.*)\\\/a tells mychannel \(1\), "(.*)"

and the TTS slot should read:

$2 says $3

You need to replace mychannel with your own channel name including the correct capitalization. In the example above, mychannel is channel number 1 for this character, so you'll also need to make sure you replace the 1 with the correct channel number for your own character. There may be more efficient ways to accomplish this trigger (it does make liberal use of dot-star), but the above is working fine for both of us.

You can see in the screenshot I also set up a TTS for General (2) chat. No comment on how long I left that one up and running.

Turning Night Into Day

There are a few places in the UI (Experience window, Nav Bar, Start Menu) where you can drop pre-made toggle buttons for things like Night Vision, but Sephy needs it in a reliable spot on a hotbar. If you'd prefer a handy hotkey, here is the command:

show_window MainHUD.Experience.TogVision

Easy!

If your feature request doesn't appear here, never fear, it hasn't been forgotten. We've got a lot of suggestions to work through so it's lucky that going to the beach right now is out of the question. That reminds me, it's time for more cocoa....