December Updates

Here are some feature updates, improvements and bug fixes that we've been working on for you during December.

Playing Favorites

Although I've only spent a modest amount of time on the housing side of EverQuest II, our favorite game has a substantial community of talented furnishing and decorating artists. And for good reason: by all accounts the EverQuest II player housing system is among the most robust and detailed in the large-scale MMO world. Check the Housing and Leaderboards window on any server and you'll see what I mean.

The official EQII game site has a forum dedicated to all things housing; there are also several associated fan sites such as EQ2 Furniture, and Denmum's EQ2 Traders Corner. And for building those extravagant housing zones that win all the awards, you can use layout editors by Jesdyr and Sennen. But I digress.

Recently Darq Side member and EQII housing pro Kattster was discussing the state of item listings on the broker, and remarked that a few more Favorite slots would be a big help when checking daily for a specific wish list of items. I immediately followed up with a custom Broker window that had 10 more slots. But as it turns out, Kattster was hoping for something more like 50 slots. Yikes!

So it seemed like a perfect opportunity to take another look at the DarqUI Favorites lists (and there are a bunch of them scattered all over the UI) to see if we could make some improvements. The result is several premium Favorites lists that have been retooled into an expanded multi-page "book."

Breaking up a long list into pages has two advantages: there's no mile-long scrollbar to fiddle with, but more importantly you can use the pages to organize the things you commonly search for.

In this example the character has potions and poisons on page 1, food and drink on page 2, and ammo on page 3. That's pretty efficient. Notice the page numbers light up blue when there is at least one favorite stored on the page. Nice!

Two other components that got a Favorites upgrade are the Tradeskills and Tracking windows. Thanks go to Kattster for testing and for several detailed design discussions about the feature!

And speaking of the Tradeskills window, Darq Sider Aequilibrium, who prefers to use the single-pane Tradeskills window, discovered a bug: With the single-pane option selected, the window was moving to unexpected locations on the screen. Aequilibrium has tested and approved some code changes, and the single-pane Tradeskills window is now behaving itself.

Big Help

The DarqUI utility has some new smarts baked in, including the ability to rescale text in the Help window to match your preferred UI size. So we no longer have one-size-fits-all help text. When you download the Normal, Large or X-Large premium Help window with the utility, it will select the correct text sizes for you automatically.

And speaking of text...

Fine Font Found

Back in August, new Darq Side member Baratan brought with him a handsome new font -- Cadman Roman. It was designed for clarity and legibility, and it has a more friendly, informal feel than most of the other font choices. (The first two screenshots in this post use Cadman.) I promised Baratan I would rework the utility to distribute the files, and now if you are using v3.1.3.5 you can try Cadman Roman for yourself. Choose it from the font dropdown on the Themes page.

Bag Lag

One of our long-time Linux members, Arderath (zerodogg.org, EverQuest II: A Reference, URL Helper for Linux) was having a devil of a time with the new Bag Color feature, which was bogging down EQ2 on his Linux system to an unplayable state. This didn't seem right, since the newly updated feature is so lightweight on Windows systems.

So we went to work and figured out where the problem was, and with modest revisions to the code the feature is now just fine on Arderath's system, and it has an even smaller footprint on Windows systems. A side benefit of the adjusted code is that color changes now appear immediately on open bags without having to close and reopen them. Thank you, Arderath!

Chat Tabs

Darq Side member chief was having trouble fitting all of his chat tabs into one window, and in the process of making him a custom file with extra-small tabs I realized that an intended code change had not been made yet. Long ago, when you changed your chat tab size it was for all of your characters at once. But now both the utility and the window manager save this setting for each character separately.

A Good Problem To Have

There are limits to how large things can be in the UI, and we ran up against that limit last year with the very long patron credit scroll in the Help window. So instead of one scrolling panel we now have two maxed-out panels stacked on top of each other. And we'll soon be adding a third panel of patron credits to the stack! Wow, thank you Darq Side members!

Up to now, navigating the credits has been a bit clunky. But while retooling for the expanded list I added some controls to make it easier to get around. You can make the scroll go forward and backward from a slow crawl to hypersonic speed, and you can even stop it cold in its tracks. Give it a try!

And speaking of long lists, we'll be here for much of the rest of the year working through your many feature requests and hanging out in Discord. But this is a chance to wish you and your family all the best for this holiday season, and to express our sincere appreciation for your support and great ideas, which have turned DarqUI Premium into a first-class community driven project. Thank you!