September Waypoints

Time flies when you're multitasking.

                   -- Bert McCoy 

Well, that went by fast. August I mean. I hope you had a chance to do all of your August-y things in addition to lots of time in-game. For me, I got enough beach sun to make me glow in the dark, and I'm now even more hopelessly addicted to grilled rib-eyes. Scrubbing the grill -- not so much.

Here at DarqUI Headquarters we got everything done that we had planned on doing, and a little bit more, with the exception of the Character Favorites feature which I'll tell you more about below.

A Smarter Mercenary

If you run the solo zones with your merc (and who doesn't?) here's a new idea that I bet you'll like, especially if you use an Inquisitor. Generally I like to keep the mercenary paying attention only to me, until the last few percent of the target's health. Then when I'm pretty sure I won't need heals I'll use the red crossed-swords button to get the merc to attack, the reason being of course to encourage her to cast a Verdict.

Why not make the Inquisitor a little bit smarter by automating this step? Depending on the difficulty tier of the target enemy, the merc must already be attacking the enemy before a Verdict will fire. So there is a new control in the works that allows you to choose a target health percentage below which the mercenary will automatically begin attacking until the encounter ends or until you click the green dove icon. It's working great for me so far, and with a bit of additional testing this new premium feature should be available during September.

Souped-Up Hotkey Settings

Last month I hinted at some new ways to manage hotbars globally from in-game. Take a look at these new settings. They can't do what the profile editor in the utility does, but they can ease hotbar setup for a new or established character. If you've ever wanted to resize all your hotkeys to the same size all at once, but you didn't want to haul out the utility, you can do that now right on the game screen. Want to make all hotkeys draggable? Maybe turn off spinners all at once? Got you covered.

DarqUI 2K/4K

We already have two specialty windows upscaled for L and XL, and those will be published within the next few days. You may have noticed the Extras package also had a couple of updates this month. I try to switch between the different UI sizes frequently, and now and then one of our members (or I) will find something that needs a tweak.

Where are my Character Favorites?

Well, we almost got it published in August, but I think you'll appreciate a little bit more testing before this gets published.

I had to rewind this feature almost back to the beginning this week, since an important behavior was not working like it should. Specifically, the original design used the same Camp Next command for favorites and non-favorites, and it would branch depending on which preference you had set. So you wouldn't have to create or learn another command. But making that work was turning into a case of code chasing more code. So we now have two separate commands: Camp Next and Camp Next Favorite. You'll have plenty of options around the UI for how to access both flavors.

Also from an aesthetic angle I was really starting to get sick of all those gold stars all over everything. In the July newsletter you saw a mockup of the original concept that was pretty heavy graphically. Since then, the design has evolved into a cleaner and more subtle solution. Instead of a star for each character, there is now a single star that displays and toggles your preference. Text color now indicates whether or not you are looking at a favorite. Here is the revised design for the Login window and the Shutdown (Camp) window. Much better:

Now for the less exciting news: Setting up your Character Favorites needs to be done from the utility, which means we'll need to publish a new version. Choosing favorite characters in-game was an exercise in frustration and excessive code, but the utility can handle such things without blinking. I'll show you everything sooner than you think.

Thank You

As we get our third year cranked up here at the Darq Side, the to-do list never seems to get any shorter. I hope you are finding the premium UI, utility apps, Discord server and this website to be valuable resources. Our goal is to provide you with a first class custom product, responsive support, and continued innovation in exchange for a few pennies per day.

DarqUI continues to expand its reach, improving game time for more players worldwide. Your support makes it possible to innovate more quickly, putting new ideas into practice, the majority of which come directly from our members. When we say you're part of the project, we're not kidding!