June Waypoints

Son: Nice beard, Dad. I thought you didn't like them?
Dad: It grew on me.

Here's to all our dads and their brilliant, enlightening jokes. Happy Father's Day!

An Ounce of Announcement

The Chat window has been getting some attention in May with a new improvement to the recent Timed Channel Announcement feature. It's now Channel Announcements, with three more timed message slots that you can pre-configure and deploy one at a time, or more than one at a time.

Darq Side member chief made the request back in March, and he's been testing the feature tirelessly as widgets and behaviors get ironed out. It's 99% finished, and a short tutorial video will get published along with the new feature over the next few days. It looks like this:

In the Buff

Raiders and groupers know it's not always easy to keep track of which buffs have been applied to which allies. You can pick through the effect icons in the Target window, but they are usually scattered around with everyone else's buffs with no rhyme or reason for how they are ordered. Member Nell wondered in Discord recently if those spell effects could be filtered temporarily to show or highlight only the caster's own buffs.

No guarantees yet on whether this is doable, but it would certainly be a nice QoL improvement. I don't think there's a built-in way to filter target effects in this way, but I do have a couple of sneaky ideas to try this month. Fingers crossed!

Bar Chain

No, I'm not talking about Buffalo Wild Wings. But there was a recent Discord discussion about the maximum number of commands in a macro, and I realized that the Icon Bar's offering of only four commands is comparatively anemic. That limit is pretty much set in stone without a complete rewrite of the Icon Bar.

But I couldn't help but wonder, what if we could chain together multiple Icon Bar buttons to deploy a longer list of commands with just one click? I've poked around a bit and I think I've got a new trick to fire off 7, 10, or more macro commands from a single Icon Bar icon. Stay tuned for that.

A Toon By Any Other Name

Darq Sider chief has developed a habit of frequently renaming his characters, so he's had more experience dealing with the renaming process in the DarqUI utility than most of us. One easy-to-miss detail is that character lists in the Login and Camp windows need to be rebuilt from the Shutdown page in order to swap out the new name there.

Discussing the options, we both concluded that instead of always rebuilding those lists automatically after a rename, it's less disruptive to display a pop-up dialog reminding players who manually rebuild to do so at their leisure. We'll be adding said dialog in June.

DarqUI 2K/4K

Believe it or not, there is yet another group of components slated for upscaling in June. The hits just keep on coming! But we should also be able to squeeze in an enlargement option for a popular ProfitUI CE component. Which one? I'll give you three guesses.

Not My Bag

How 'bout that Overseer bag, eh? After enduring the painful, profanity-laden daily mission slog, the EverQuest II gods finally took pity and handed out the special bags and Level 40 to all us delinquents. At this point I'm not sure whether to love this bag or hate it, but it seems it would benefit from a closer look.

For example, right now there's no apparent way to make it stay closed after you've opened it for the first time, if that's your wish. And it's not included in any of the custom container automations for icon size, etc. So we'll be looking this month to see what can be done. If I can figure out how to give it, say 150 slots, you'll be the first to know. (j/k)

Thank You

Everything we do here at the Darq Side is possible because of you. I want to welcome a bunch of brand new Darq Side members and express my sincere appreciation to our established members for your continued patronage. An extra thank you goes to those members who have mentioned the project to your guildmates and fellow players.

This is just a reminder that you're always welcome to discuss your own ideas for what you'd like to see, either privately with Rosyposy or me, or in our Discord channels. It's always my pleasure to listen and turn your ideas into smarter, more efficient, more entertaining gameplay for our members, and for thousands of other EverQuest II players around the world.