May Waypoints

E for Excellence

Einstein and Emerson were both big fans of Experimentation, so we're in good company here at the Darq Side where experiments are happening all the time. We're fortunate to have creative folks making an abundance of left- and right-brain suggestions for improvements to the UI. Whether it's technical or artistic, virtually all of the ideas turn into experiments, and sometimes those turn into a cool new feature or convenience.

Dressing Room  There was a request to mount/dismount from inside the dressing room window which prompted an overall look at that component. It's not obvious, but there are multiple dressing room view modes. Broadly speaking it's a) character models and b) everything else. Mounts behave like character models unless converted into a house item.

By default when you view "everything else" in the dressing room you can use the scroll wheel to zoom in and out, which is convenient since some house items, familiars, etc need to be zoomed in or out to see the whole thing clearly. For unknown reasons, character models don't offer that same scroll wheel behavior and right now we use the +/- buttons to zoom.

Since the time the dressing room was modded I have come up with a bit of technology for using the scroll wheel in custom locations (you can see it in action on the XP bar and the countdown timer for example.) So in the interest of consistency I'll be experimenting with the behavior in a few places where it doesn't exist (including the dressing room and the pet and mount areas of the Character window.)

Housing macros  Another interesting request was an option for housing "favorites" similar to our mount and familiar presets. For members who have many houses, being able to drop a macro button onto the icon bar or a hotbar instead of scrolling through the house list is a fun idea that will get some experimentation. It's possible that using the /house command along with a clever way to get the ID number of your favorite housing zone(s) will work.

2K/4K Project  One of the components that I've been avoiding is the AA window, for good reason. Before adding some of the more complicated windows to the poll options, I'll often experiment a bit to make sure there won't be any disappointments. The overall AA window is scaling up just fine but the trees, which are the meat-and-potatoes of the window, are getting built from scratch internally depending on the character class that logs in. 

So far I can get the trees to scale up correctly once, but then when you switch to a different character they revert back to their original locations. The round AA icons stay large, but they get crammed into their smaller default tree locations. The AA window is definitely one that I want to tackle, and I have two ideas rattling around that need to be tested. So if the experiments prove successful, the AA window will be added as an option.

Login issues  A perennial annoyance is the "account in use" message when switching characters which nobody, including the developers, seems to be able to remediate. Players who have never used a custom UI have reported many times that they are plagued with this issue, but even so the custom UIs always get thrown under the bus. The problem for me is I never have this problem so it's just about impossible to experiment with solutions.

Out here in the sticks where I do most of my gaming and development, internet connection speeds are marginal at best. And I wonder if super-fast connection speeds might, perversely, be a factor. I have a suspicion that accounts with dozens of characters are also more likely to have character-switching issues. A while back I did a custom login window that put a short delay in between character logins for a player who was having a particularly bad time with the error messages. Although it seemed to help sporadically, it didn't improve things enough to publish as a solution. I think it deserves a second look, don't you?

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