A Second Helping

You may remember that we had some browser drama back in December of 2021 when the development team kicked the aging Awesomium browser to the curb but didn't replace it with anything. The default help system suffered quite a bit during that time. When you tried to view help you'd get an awkward pop-up asking if it was okay to open the external browser, and then a separate external browser window would appear for each page viewed -- the definition of a mess.

Our own browser-based DarqUI documentation suffered as well, and in response up to now I've been maintaining two separate copies of the help files: one for the utility and another in-game version written in the language of the UI, not the browser. With everything else going on at DarqUI HQ, keeping this dual-help package up to date has been hit-and-miss. Documenting new features and improvements ends up being the last thing to get done, if ever.

An alternative end goal might be to have video tutorials for every little aspect of DarqUI, but that's not realistic. Cool features are getting published and tweaked all the time, and in many cases text-based documentation is the most convenient way to get anything from a quick answer to an entire walk-through of a feature.

In the spring of last year the browser was finally replaced with a more modern, if not exactly industry-standard, browser client. We've had a while to kick the tires on the Chrome CEF mini-browser, and although it's not perfect I think we can safely expect it to be around for a while.

So I've invested a few days and taken another look at the Help window. Like we did last July with the DarqUI Internet browser, I've made a maintenance pass on the code to strip out any outdated cruft, as well as making the DarqUI parts as compatible as possible with the default.

The result is lighter weight and it should coexist politely with the new browser client long-term. Now we can go back to just one reference shared between the utility and the in-game Help window. The HTML version is better-looking and quite a bit easier to maintain.