April Waypoints

April showers bring... 

        ...more reasons to stay inside and explore Vetrovia!

As March comes to a close, all of the utility improvements proposed in last month's newsletter have been finalized and tested. Some new requests and tweaks have found their way onto the boards since then, and the chances that we will be publishing a new version of the utility in April have increased considerably. That keeps us on track for a roughly four-month upgrade schedule.

Crowning Achievement

The Achievements system has been getting some extra attention from the developers lately, and you may have noticed a new entry at the top of the ever-growing Start menu for that. Since we already have display controls for the other menu items, a new one for Achievements will be added to the window manager and the utility.

Housing Crunch

Recently a player in Discord asked about displaying the contents of more than nine houses/guild hall/dungeons on the Inventory page. Since each of your characters can own as many as 25 houses (can you imagine those decorator bills) it's a reasonable question.

This is one of those cases where the internals are relatively easy to adapt, but adjusting the Inventory UI to accommodate such a change is not immediately clear. I'll admit I'm not yet 100% sure how to handle this one, but it will definitely get looked at before publishing utility v3.1.3.1. Do you have characters with more than nine houses?

Thinking Inside the Box

Merging the DarqUI apps into your day-to-day gaming experience is always a focus, and that includes the feature that checks for updates, closes the utility, and then starts the game all from a single interaction. Players who run multiple clients on the same machine (a.k.a. multi-boxing) know they can use the blue EverQuest2 icon along with the custom DarqUI Login window to get logged in efficiently on multiple accounts, rather than using the slower LaunchPad.

Lhaffinatu, one of our Darq Side members who frequently multi-boxes, wished for a more convenient way to launch multiple copies of the game without automatically closing the utility. To that end, we are testing a couple of new options for starting EverQuest II. You can add an optional control on the top bar that opens a new copy of the game client each time you click it, leaving the utility open until you're ready to close it.

On the Notifier along with the usual right-click menu choices to open the DarqUI utility and the LaunchPad, there is a new choice to open the game client directly. Even if you don't multi-box, this gives you a quick new way to bypass the LaunchPad on days when there are no game updates from Daybreak.

Are You Ready?

Our Darq Side members are always coming up with new ideas, and we have two more that you haven't seen yet. Clintsat suggested a nice convenience specifically for raid leaders that's being tested right now, and lhaffinatu is testing an enhancement to one of his recent ideas for tradeskillers. Stay tuned for details as these cool new tweaks become available within the next few days.

DarqUI 2K/4K

2K/4K Group 20 is already underway and we have another mixed bag of components scheduled for upsizing in April. Which ones? I don't want to give too much away, but if I can catch my breath I'll commit to an answer.

Thank You...

...to all of our members -- new, returning, and long-time Darq Siders -- for your continued support. I hope you are finding the premium UI, the utility apps and this website to be valuable resources. You should know that your ideas and your participation in our community-driven project are improving gameplay for quite a few gamers, literally around the world.