April Waypoints

    
If it ain't broke...

           ...it doesn't have enough features yet.

I'm pretty sure this is attributable to Scott Adams, and ironically it's one of our guiding principles here at the Darq Side. Even though the patron-enabled UI and utility have improved by leaps and bounds since we started the project last year -- almost all of the great new ideas coming from you I might add -- there's still plenty of room for innovation.

I can't let the April news post go by without mentioning another membership milestone. As we grow our little community, a greater share of my time can go to working on the UI, the utility apps and the 2K/4K project. Which are a lot more fun than the other stuff. So thank you.

It's time to go another round with the help system, so I'll be adding text-based guidance for some recently added (mostly patron-only) features.

For 2K/4K, we'll continue upscaling file groups based on your poll selections. I try not to create any new L/XL entities (checkboxes, buttons, etc.) if they can be scaled up from existing assets, but working on the Housing group I finally had to create larger definitions for the point-of-need (DBC) icons which don't scale properly in their native format. I know a good portion of players don't exactly love microtransactions and would just as soon see the PON icons go away entirely. But to be fair to Daybreak I'll be going back and sizing those correctly where they appear in other modded/scaled-up components.

There is another truly geek-worthy technical item that will probably interest you only because you will see quite a few files being updated on the same day. In a number of scaled windows there are parameters that don't need to go above certain maximums regardless of their dimensions, and so I'll be standardizing those parameters on less stratospheric values. In practice you will see no change (unless somehow you've managed to stretch a window beyond 16,000 pixels wide) but adjustments like this keep things healthy under the hood.

On the UI itself, I'm testing the cross-load ("impostor") feature on another window so stay tuned for that. In the utility, as the list of "extra" components grows it's possible you'll want to manage that list beyond just seeing a tooltip. So on the boards right now is a pop-up dialog for that (see pic). It should make its way into the next utility upgrade along with several other small but nice tweaks (and one bug fix) suggested by Darq Side members.

Happy April!  Get outside and repurpose those face masks as pollen filters!
(I live on a pine tree farm -- /sneeze)