August Waypoints

In local news, my neighbor got rejected for a summer job at the sunscreen company. They told him to reapply.
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Favorite summer activities? Beach, cookouts, EverQuest II. And not necessarily in that order! Hopefully your Hot Hoppers were as busy as mine getting all the new Plumes, plus checking out the new Echoes of Faydwer expansion on the Zarrakon PvP server and giving Ratscallion a hard time all over Norrath.

August promises more indoor entertainment including the Oceansful Festival and an Epic rebirth of the greatest of all EQII expansions -- Rise of Kunark on the Varsoon server. We're looking at you, Trakanon!

It's Not Easy Being Green

It's gratifying to see so many EverQuest II content creators rocking DarqUI. But I've finally seen enough videos with XP bars flashing that green Tithe alert unnecessarily. As you already know, new and unconfigured characters start out with Tithe alerts enabled. So when your character accumulates 10 Deity points the entire bar turns green and flashes continuously until you spend your points, hit the "Snooze" button or turn the feature off. One of the most frequent questions is how to stop the XP bar from flashing.

Although the Deity system no longer plays the critical role that it did some years ago, it's still a thing and so there's no reason to dump the alerts feature altogether. But soon new characters and those that have never changed the setting will need to opt-in, in order to use Tithe alerts. This will be true for standard and premium installations.

Take a Load Out

Here's an exciting idea that was discussed recently in Discord by Sephy and Darq Side member Priority: applying a list of temporary adornments to gear pieces automatically. This would be a major QoL improvement for nearly all of us, and I'd love to see it worked into the Loadouts feature either as a final step after swapping gear sets, or as dedicated Loadouts for specific sets of temps.

This is one of those places where I have to make the requisite disclaimer: it's no guarantee that this feature can be implemented given the UI tools we have to work with. But you can rest assured we will be pursuing this idea aggressively in August.

Extra Help

Looking back at the wealth of new features and updates we've made since earlier in the year, the DarqUI Help facility is once again embarrassingly deficient. A long list of Help files will be getting another pass to make sure you have all the basic and premium new feature info at your fingertips in-game and in the utility.

Size Matters

The upcoming utility version has been getting a bunch of little QoL improvements along the way, and another one was added after the Merchant window got promoted recently from the "Extras" package to a full custom component. Darq Sider AlilsTInker pointed out that the initial download of the Merchant window appeared in the smallest (Normal) size, even though his UI is at 4K (X-Large).

For the next utility, the initial download of new and promoted components will be in your preferred UI size instead of always defaulting to Normal size. If you have a mix of N, L and XL components, the largest component size in your UI will be selected. You can always pick and choose your preferred size for each component any time.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Grabbing data from Census can be a tricky process, and recently Lakame in Discord exposed a limitation that's being addressed in the new utility version. Currently, using the class-agnostic Icon Bar as an example, looking up a spell like Elemental Mastery will only give you the Druid version, even when searched from a Conjuror character.

Digging into the cause, it turns out that every quality level at every experience level of Elemental Mastery is getting returned from the query for both the Druid AA and the Conjuror Epic spell of the same name.

The current utility is equipped to handle up to 100 results, but Elemental Mastery and other similar spell lines return way more than that limit. As a failsafe in these cases, the utility displays its best guess, which in this example always turns out to be the Druid version.

The upcoming utility does two things to mitigate limited search results like these: Maximum returns per search are increased to 200, and when that limit is exceeded (as when "Elemental" is used as a partial search term) a dialog window appears directing the player to narrow the search terms. In testing so far, all cases where this is an issue are corrected.

Tile Colors

Discord user Argent recently pointed out a bug in which custom Gear Buff Macro tile color choices are not being saved in the utility. This stems from a conflict between standard and premium modules and is corrected in the upcoming utility. In the meantime, custom colors are saving properly when configured from the in-game window manager.

A Combo Order

Not too long ago member Drax suggested that complex hotkey macros should have similarly complex icons with configurable foreground and background images. With Drax's input the current utility has this feature for hotbars, but what about other places, like the Icon Bar?

Very recently Darq Side member Maris noticed the icon for the Renewal of Ro: Domination self-buff is using what appears to be a new trick: a composite icon where the background is not just a color, but a second image from the icon library. This can be accomplished in the current Icon Bar, albeit awkwardly.

If you click "Show definitions" you can manually change the background from the typical color to any of the icons in the "More icons" window. Since I have a suspicion the developers may use this trick again to get more mileage out of existing spell icons, I'm already working on a way to make composite icons easy to build with the utility.

Thank You

As you can see from this post and many more like it, virtually every new idea and feature, large and small, comes from you. And it's my pleasure to build your ideas into what is becoming a vastly improved experience over the standard version of DarqUI. I know you've heard it many times, but when we say Darq Side members are part of the project, it's a fact! My thanks to the new members who joined us this month, and to our long-time members for your continued patronage. Enjoy the summer activities, keep those ideas rolling in, and stay cool!