November Waypoints

Maintained Spell Monitor

If you've noticed in Discord as well as here on the Darq Side, there's been a lot of work and a lot of progress made toward getting the full feature set of the standard Maintained Spell Monitor back into action.  A week or so ago I had a brainstorm about how to stop the jitters when using it, and even though the first iteration produced some marginal improvements, it still needed a lot more work.  Four of our fellow patrons have stepped in and agreed to help with testing.  (Translated: bang on it without mercy until they break something.) 

So far it's looking very good.  If all continues as expected, framerate and performance with the standard monitor will be nearly indistinguishable from that of the "lite" version.  I have one more fairly aggressive change to work on this week, but either way the new and improved full-feature monitor should be on the server within the next few days.

I want to thank the folks who have been patiently testing and offering feedback through several re-writes.  All of our patrons will benefit from having more than one choice again for this popular piece of the UI.  I've got a good idea for how to recognize players who help with testing, and I'll bet you can guess what it is.

Gear Buff Macros

Also recently we made two very cool improvements to Gear Buff Macros that have been merged into the utility, both inspired by suggestions from members:  buff color groups and auto-assigning current gear.  Code for both of these features is nearing completion and will appear in the next patron-enabled utility version.  Setting up buff groups in the window manager is pretty straightforward, but you'll be surprised how much easier it is with the utility.

Next Utility Version

News from Darkpaw about the next expansion is not exactly clear.  So instead of trying to schedule around that, utility version 3.1.2.4 (which includes the above improvements and one bug fix) will most likely be published during the first week of November.

Bonus L and XL Component

We are inching toward our membership goal to begin writing the XL version of DarqUI, so don't forget to mention to your fellow gamers how much extra material they're missing out on for around 10 cents a day!  While we're on the road to fifty-plus members, there is another bonus L and XL piece that I've been working on for you.

And in fact, it's for a part of the UI that isn't even in DarqUI yet.  So you'll be able to choose between Normal, Large and X-Large sizes of this interesting and unexpected part of EverQuest II gameplay.  And by the way, this was yet another instance of a feature inspired by a conversation with one of our new patrons.  It's more evidence that when you join the Darq Side, you really are part of the project.

Help System

While working on instructional resources for some new UI pieces, I noticed several minor spots in the help files that have been rendered out of date by new features or other changes to the UI over time.  November seems like a good month to make an update pass over the whole thing.  Even though we have lots of videos and other articles here, the in-game help facility is still an important part of the overall "user experience" as they say in the biz.