Waypoints: June

Testing... 1... 2... 3...

When May rolled around I was a little bit concerned that UI improvements were going to be slim, but as usual our amazing community of creative gamers have come up with a slew of ideas that are a) possible b) useful and c) keep me very busy with the ones and zeroes. So May ended up putting more on my plate than I could get to. Grab a cool beverage and let me show you where we're at:

Dressing Room

Last month I mentioned a player request to modify the Dressing Room window to show/hide the character's mount. Well, I took that as an opportunity to revisit the Dressing Room in its entirety. As a result there are some new improvements that are all finished and ready to publish. The script for a tutorial video is done, which I just need to shoot and edit. If the schedule stays crazy I may do a post instead. Either way, the new and improved Dressing Room is incoming.

Huge Broker Prices

This was kind of an emergency update for one of our members who needed to price an item in the hundreds of millions. Sound familiar?  What has happened to the game economy?! Prior to the change it would have taken more than 100 clicks to get to a price of that size. But an order of magnitude has been added to the large plat pricing mechanism, so you can raise or lower a price by 10 million with one click. This feature is also ready to roll.

Housing Shortcuts

This is another feature request that is finished development for the most part, and is being tested by a couple of our members. It takes the form of a row of configurable buttons in the Transport window. As long as the player is aware of the rules for zoning into houses, the buttons work just fine. There's no way to break the rather stringent housing rules, but you can set up shortcuts to your own houses and the houses of friends/alts where you have been granted access. You still have to be in city zones to use the shortcuts, but you can zone remotely into alt housing, prestige housing, houses from your other accounts, and friends' houses without having to approach the door and pick through all the menus.

Audible StatMon Overcap

The recent addition of Stat Monitor overcap indicators has been well-received, and right on cue we had a request to add an audible alert. This is another feature that's ready to roll, but I need one more block of time for one last logic test and UX evaluation. As a bonus, the normal stat logic warnings and new overcap alerts both have a new Command field that lets you perform a simple macro or send a line of text into a private channel. So for example you can tell ACT to speak a text-to-speech alert when either condition triggers.

2K/4K

The last 2K/4K poll resulted in a tie, so we've got about eight components on the boards to get upsized before the next poll. As usual, some of them are a piece of cake (relatively speaking) to scale up, and others need to be handled line-by-line with kid gloves. L/XL files will be filtering onto the server as they get completed. See Group 13 post for details.

And just a quick reminder, Large component versions are about 30% larger than Normal, so even if your screen resolution is 1920x1080 or 1680x1050 or less, you can still benefit from sizing-up to Large.  Fonts in Large components are one notch above Normal which makes everything more readable if the UI is hard to read in places.  Try it out!  Worst case, you switch back to Normal which takes about two clicks of the mouse.

Merc Favorites

This one has been on the radar for quite a while, and in between everything else I've made some good progress on the feature. The beta pic below looks awful but it's functioning pretty well. As long as a few more data points can get resolved we should see this feature becoming available (and looking more on-brand).

By now, most of us have dozens of mercenaries that we never use cluttering up the list. And since we can't unlist a mercenary, or even move them back down into the Restricted group, we can benefit from a "favorites" list for the half-dozen or so mercs that we switch to all the time. The full list will still be toggleable of course.

Auto-Inventory

This is my favorite kind of request: straightforward, useful, and doable with tools already at our disposal. For players who use the inventory/search feature in the utility, the idea is to keep character inventories fresh by automatically running an inventory whenever you log out or switch characters. So any changes you've made during this session get updated without lifting a finger. There's plenty of time during the 20-second logout timer to run an inventory, even for characters that are packrats. The auto-inventory option is finished and being tested, so you should see it hit the Patron server soon.

Thank You

See what I mean? If you looked through May's posts on the Darq Side, it seemed fairly quiet. But that's because a ton of very neat and nifty new features have been making their way onto the boards or getting ready to launch. The vast majority of ideas presented here came directly from Darq Side members. Your membership really does make it possible to develop new features, and you're also the ones inspiring many of them. All these innovations and refinements to the members-only DarqUI project are turning it into a vastly improved experience over the free version. So when you hear me say thank you for being part of the project, it's no exaggeration!