May Waypoints

There is magic in the old and magic in the new; the trick is to successfully combine the two.

                    ― A.D. Posey 

You'll notice that some of the items below involve future changes to the utility, even though we have a brand-new version available this week. I realize that publishing new app versions close together tends to be disruptive, but shortly after Daybreak's game platform upgrade we'll issue a new 64-bit-only utility where the forward-looking items will be addressed.

In Context

Darq Side member Naviaz had a nice idea regarding the DarqUI Chat Log search: when a word search produces matching log lines, click on a result to show a few lines before and after which will give the user a chance to see the search result in context. Doing some preliminary work on this enhancement, I realized there are no good ways to accomplish it without grabbing a big chunk of memory. So it makes the most sense to work on this in the 64-bit environment where we can throw memory around more freely.

Flash Back

One of our new members, Wonderdrug, pointed out a behavior that's present in the default UI but not in certain DarqUI configurations. In the default Player window your character name flashes red during combat, and it also works this way with the normal-size DarqUI Player window when it's not in extended mode. But that detail is not present in L and XL sizes in either display mode. Those alternatives simply display the character's name in the typical gold color.

Thinking back, I remember forum discussions complaining about the Player name getting "stuck" mid-cycle in a red or pink color. This happened (and still happens) with DarqUI and Default if you start combat in ranged attack mode and then end with melee. I think we've found a way to reduce or eliminate that bug. So this is an opportunity to improve upon and reintroduce a default behavior into DarqUI, and we'll be taking a look at it in May.

A Thorough Examination

The Examine window has given players trouble recently due to some internal game changes. When players tried to reset the location of an Item Examine window that had gotten lost off-screen, the DarqUI Locate feature was crashing their game sessions. We don't put up with game crashes, so my response was to remove the Item Examine choice from Locate, leaving Recipe and Spell Examine windows as-is since they don't appear to cause crashes.

So when your Item Examine window ends up off-screen, and it frequently does, what's the best way to restore it? You can use Options (Alt+O) to reset all windows back to their defaults, but I don't know of any player who thinks that's a good solution. A better idea would be to offer a setting, either in-game or in the utility, to reset just the Examine windows, leaving everything else intact similar to how we "clone" bags, hotbars, etc.

In Search Of...

The Inventory page in the utility offers a search box for finding a specific item, or perhaps all items that contain a phrase like "boots of" on your character. If you leave the search terms in the box, you can switch to other characters one at a time to search for the item quickly. Darq Sider chief suggested an account-wide inventory search that checks all of your characters at once for the search terms. Makes sense to me.

Social Studies

You already know the DarqUI Socials window can be converted into a reasonably useful quasi-hotbar that already has all of your socials and custom macros pre-loaded onto the icons. In a recent Discord chat with chief, he wondered if there was a way to duplicate some or all of those custom macros conveniently between characters. I wondered the same thing. There doesn't appear to be a slash command for this, but we'll poke around and see if there is anything that can be done with it.

Targets Marked

Recently Ayel asked me to investigate an idea to duplicate target tags (you know, those overhead skulls, flames, numbers etc.) onto the Enemy list. If we can get this to work, it will improve Enemy list interaction especially in cases where there are multiple enemies with the same name. This is one of those places where I don't have an instant yes-or-no answer, but it's something that we'll be exploring in May.

DarqUI 2K/4K

The 2K/4K project has come a long way since 2020. With so much of the UI already scaled up, many times I can play an entire session without bumping into a normal-sized component. Group 21 is already underway and you will be seeing some new 2K and 4K additions shortly.

Thank You

I want to offer my sincere thanks to all of our patrons for your continued support, and welcome several new Darq Side members who joined us in April. You are what keeps the wheels turning around here, which in turn improves gameplay for many EverQuest II gamers worldwide.

Thank you also for your questions and feature proposals in Discord and in email. It's never a problem to ask about a feature or setting that doesn't make sense or might benefit from changes. Discussing your UI is one of my favorite things to do because it lets me know when something needs more attention to make it work better, make it more intuitive, or to explain it a little better in help text and videos.

Nearly every good idea and UI improvement comes directly from your suggestions and feedback. So when we say our Darq Side members are part of the project, that's truth in advertising!