February Waypoints

And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been

                       ― Rainer Maria Rilke 

It looks like 2022 is starting out great in EverQuest II with a new expansion that's getting good reviews from players, and a new annual roadmap with several interesting bits that will involve the UI. If you've been over to the Test server lately, you may have noticed the developers have already started setting up some things. Pretty exciting!

We had a couple of unplanned updates this month: one that removed a framerate hiccup that was happening under certain conditions, and a welcome change from the developers that gave us a rare opportunity to reduce complexity.

Concentration Frustration

I had promised a while back that Concentration slots, if possible, would be added to the Extended Player window so it could more accurately mirror the regular Player window. That was a bust, because the original Concentration slots in the Player window stop responding when a duplicate set is added elsewhere.

But on the plus side, coincidentally, I did learn something about Concentration slots from Darq Side member Bluen. He reported seeing the slots behave erratically when casting spells: sometimes the filled slots would show up correctly, while other times casting or cancelling spells that require Concentration would not update the slots at all.

As it turns out, the same 30-icon maximum issue that plagues the Maintained Spell Monitor also affects Concentration slots. If all of your visible spell slots are filled, casting a Concentration spell apparently ignores the slots as well. Who knew? So that's another good reason to be familiar with the Spell Filtering mechanism for hiding unimportant Maintained icons. We have a daily tip focusing on this game feature (it's up on the site today and tomorrow, in fact!) and there is a short mention of it in the Character window tutorial.

Utility Possibilities

Even though we purposely publish utility updates on an infrequent schedule, the code is always being evaluated for improvements between releases. Several interesting items will be addressed during February, including:

• Restore specific files from a previous backup. Currently the basic backup and restore routines handle total wipeouts pretty well, but not so much if a player wants to restore just one or two files from a specific backup without disturbing anything else.
  

• Add Titlebar Mode settings to Bag setup page. Bags, boxes and other containers have gotten some very cool customizations, and the most recent improvements to the Disappearing Titlebars version will be configurable in the utility.
  

• Remove <include> line when deleting a custom UI file. This is more of a housekeeping change: When you download one of about a dozen custom DarqUI files, the utility automatically adds the required <include> line to eq2ui_custom.xml. But currently it doesn't work the other way around. There is no harm in leaving those lines without the accompanying file, but the utility should be smart enough to keep things tidy when you are adding and removing custom UI files.
  

• Clone chat channels independent of chat windows. Right now you can use the utility to duplicate your chat windows, chat tabs, and optionally chat channels from another character. Darq Side member Aidbringer wanted to duplicate only the channels between characters, but the way it works now you have to also copy the chat windows in order to do that. I'm pretty sure we can do something about that.
  

• Aidbringer also mentioned the avalanche of recipes in the last couple of expansions and was wondering if there is a way to enumerate them, probably on the Inventory page, to be able to search all characters for this or that recipe (not just the books in inventory, but spells that have been scribed).
  
  Feldon made it possible to see all of a character's scribed recipes now on EQ2U, so there may be a way to consolidate them and search for a specific one across all of your characters. That's a heavier lift than it may seem to be at first, but it definitely warrants taking a look.

1337-Speak

I think it's safe to conclude that we are all big fans of EverQuest II, and fortunately it looks like our favorite game is going to be around for a while. I want to thank you for trusting DarqUI with that complicated 2D layer floating between you and the even more complicated 3D game world. The simple goal: improve your game time by making it more efficient, personal, informative and entertaining.

It was in January of 2020 that the Darq Side site was started, even though it took until mid-summer to get things developed enough to publish. I am honored that you've chosen to support our community-driven project, and because of that support it's possible to set aside more time to make continued improvements and explore new ideas, the vast majority of which come directly from you.

If you've taken a look at the Darq Side credits scroll lately, either in the utility or in-game, you'll see that we are fortunate to have quite a few New Patrons and also Veteran Patrons who have been with us for one year.

But we have a member who has been around since the very beginning in 2020. You know her as our eminently knowledgeable Discord admin, but she has also been my lead tester, sounding-board, vetoer of dumb ideas, and everything in-between. And now at the two-year mark Rosyposy is our very first Elite Veteran Patron. Thank you, Rosy!