Cearra

Darq, you're awesome! Thanks!

The targeting functionality of the pet bar in the group window is just perfect now!

About the icons fading, I wasn't aware that there was the potential for a performance hit. One of the things I adore about your UI is that it's fast. Initially, I had thought that it was just me; however, my last UI really did slow down my FPS to a bothersome degree. I just couldn't understand it. Then, I was still using their group window with your UI and saw a huge improvement. After I finally adopted your group window, I saw an even bigger performance improvement.

Which makes me wonder whether your target/implied/maintained would be faster than the ones I am using, if I were to switch to those? Do you think? As for the bag file that I use, I can't imagine that it would put a dent in anything.

Anyhow, if there is the potential for a performance hit, it's really not that big of a deal, as I'm pretty performance-minded, as I'm sure many others are. Alternately, if the ability to turn that feature off if desired would eliminate the performance hit, then adding that feature may be cool, too.

Doh, a colossal effort does not sound good! I can definitely appreciate the kind of time that could go into something that major, and wouldn't want to see anyone spend a ton of personal time on a feature that may not be used by many. If I could be of help I would do it in a heartbeat, but I'm fairly useless aside from SQL, VBA, HTML, limited XML (as in editing) and general monkey-see-monkey-do.

Edit: oops, I remembered a few more things. They are small details which aren't bothersome, and they might just be operator error, but I thought that I'd mention them anyway.

1. I can't get the pet options window to open via the button on the pet window. Interestingly, this only happens on my summoners and chanters. My BL's pet options button works fine.

2. Speaking of BLs, I'm having the converse problem on her. I can't shrink her warder from the pet window, as I get the error "this spell or ability is no longer available." If I missed something in the notes about this, feel free to smack me! My summoners' and chanters' shrink pet button works fine, though.

3. One day, my BL's merc window disappeared while he was active. So I clicked "toggle mercenary window" from the inventory screen, which worked fine. Later, I suspended him. Merc window disappeared as intended, no problems. Now, every time I log her in, the merc window is showing in spite of the fact that she does not have her merc out. However, if I recheck "toggle mercenary window" to hide it, I'm back to no merc window when the merc is actually out. It's almost comical!

What have I done?! haha. I don't have this issue on any other toons, but as it stands currently, I'm manually toggling her window on and off because it's not behaving itself. I may need to just copy another toon's ini file into hers, but I was just curious about what I did to make that happen.

mebirdos

Yeah I have been stalking forums and trying to make out what the issue actually is. Seems like all healers have their own preference for whether they prefer to watch a target castbar, an implied castbar or a single castbar, or like me, use your wonderful spelltimer window and just wait for the DOOOOONNGGG

Anyway the problem really for me is I just don't want or need to see what anyone is casting except a mob, so hopefully they will offer a disable option for that at least.

On the last two night's raiding I also had a problem where the mob cast bar would 'vanish' part way through the casting animation, or would not be visible at all sometimes, as if something else was interrupting it (probably tank cast), so it was not well implemented whatever the case.

Anyway none of this is your problem, of course, but thanks so much for staying tuned!

Darqwood

Cearra: an updated Group window with better self-pet targeting is on the updater now. Thank you for the heads-up on this!


Mebirdos and Mermut: Objections to the recent casting bar change have been noticed by the game developers, and they assure us in this thread that a fix is forthcoming.

(PS: I do have a Plan B for the Spell Monitor and Threat window, depending on how successful the SOE fix is.)


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Mermut

GU64 shows player AND mob casting bars now
With the implied target and target casting bars in the same place on the threat window, they're both displaying in the same place now, making it nearly impossible to watch the mobs casting bars. It would be awesome if you could take this into account somehow so we watch just the implied target or have them display in different places so we can 'manually' ignore our tanks casting bar while still watching for those important incoming AoEs and special attacks.

Darqwood

Cearra, thank you for your comments! Your logic for the spell icons instead of 1-2-3-4-5 buttons is the same as mine, and they were one of the reasons why I started modding the EQII interface in the first place. I do like your idea of the detriment placeholders (optionally) fading out when not in combat. My concern is how much of a performance hit this will cause. I have a couple of different ways in mind this could be done, and hopefully one of them will work cleanly without dragging down FPS.

Will also take a look at the pet targeting ASAP. I'll admit I didn't do a lot of testing this time around with group window pets, but I also don't know of anything pet-wise that would have changed recently. And I haven't forgotten that you have a ton of characters. If the UI pieces and the utility were expandable without a colossal re-programming effort, I would have done it before now.


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Cearra

I've said it before, but I love it. This UI just keeps getting more and more awesome!

Originally, I was using most of your UI, but keeping another bag/group/target/implied target/maintained. I've just switched to your group window and, I must say, it's infinitely better. The aesthetics are great. The functionality is great. I love the icons, the highlighting, the pet bar, everything.

As I play a lot of characters, the ability to actually see the quick cast icon allows me to react much faster, rather than having to mouse-over a nondescript button while trying to remember where that particular toon has what spell. I can't believe that I didn't use this window sooner. My only question would be whether it would be feasible to have the outline of the cure icons disappear when not in combat? Also, I haven't been able to target a pet via their bar on the group window. Granted, I think I've only tried to target my own. Is this PEBCAK, or is it not set up that way?

The reason that I like an alternate maintained window is because, on the one that I use, it states the target in gray text right below the spell name. It can sometimes be really handy to see that at a glance. You may not want to do that for a specific reason, but just food for thought!

The target and implied is just an aesthetic preference (I like the percentage off the bar to the right).

The bags are just aesthetic preference. I use a really compact version without much padding on the titlebar.

Overall, though, I don't know how I played without this UI, and I've tried quite a few. The config utility is priceless. But I'd still give my right arm (and maybe my left one too but, then again, that would make it really hard to play) if you could configure 12 characters from within the utility, without having to use a workaround...

I can dream, right?!

Darqwood

Hi mebirdos, thank you for the compliments. The player casting bar was an unexpected change, and I have to believe it was unintentional on the part of the game developers. I've already seen two threads started on the official forums about it, so we should know soon what's going on. In the meantime, I'm not aware of any way to separate player spells from enemy spells using code, so we're going to have to be patient.


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mebirdos

Firstly, thanks so much for this invaluable interface and all your hard work.

It keeps me enjoying this game!

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One point: With this new update I see player cast bars are in-game (?!)
(I mean other player cast bars, not our own cast bars)

This is a tragedy for the useability of the spellcast monitor in listen mode as it populates with every ability your tank/main assist etc is casting, rather than npc only (As well as being mind bogglingly distracting and mind bending).

If this is not an in-game bug, would it be possible to make some way of disabling player cast bars? Or at least not have them read into the table?


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edit for clarity

Nodor

Perfect, this is exactly what I was hoping for. Now I finally can get rid of the melee/range buttons on my hotbar, freeing up two slots again

Darqwood

Nodor, this is a very nice idea. I've been playing with it today and it's been more useful than I thought it would be for keeping track of combat mode. Download the file below and give it a try. I added colored backgrounds because the icons were getting lost on a transparent window background. NOTE: This version of the threat window uses only Robust cures instead of using the cureplayer command. I'm (still) waiting on SOE to add the Robust potions to the cureplayer list.

There is a variable near the top of the new file called CombatIcons. Set it to "false" to turn off the combat icon feature.


Download:

DarqUI Threat/Detriment Window with Combat Icons (Robust Cure Potions)

NOTE: This UI file has been consolidated with the Updater version, and so the Robust Cures Only version is obsolete. Please use the DarqUI Window Utility to download the newest version of this file, which contains all of the features from both versions.




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Nodor

I recently moved from Profit to yours and am impressed with the functionality it offers.

I changed the examine effect window to make it resizable, for me this is an absolute must so that I am able to take screenshots of detrimental effects from mobs during raids

Was also wandering if you could add an in range/melee combit indicator to the threat window, for example kinda like the in combat indicator on the left of the cures add a small sword/bow symbol on the right.

Darqwood

Zuleyus, thank you.


Orfic, I don't publish a zipped UI partly because it creates unnecessary work as Zuleyus mentioned, but also because several of the features are so complex that it doesn't make sense to customize without using the configuration utility. The utility sorts everything out and writes detailed customizations directly into the XML files rather than editing manually with Notepad.

The utility can also back up and restore your customizations, import and export spells and settings in multiple languages, automatically find your characters and set up the entire interface for them instantly, track and suggest spells and other details based upon class and level, switch between visual themes with a click (something that would take a lot of cutting and pasting if done manually), set your default UI in the eq2.ini (even if it's not DarqUI), convert all of your UI files to a European-friendly file format, and of course download and replace old files when new versions become available.

None of the other custom interfaces have an exe file, but none of the other interfaces can do all that, either. If you prefer less automation, the other authors offer some outstanding UI work that you may like better. And just to be clear: the utility does not collect or distribute any information from your computer. Its only purpose is as described above.


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Zuleyus

@Orfic:

I very much respect your wariness of possible malware, more people should take care about that. But in this case I believe you are overreacting. Have a look at the comments and the number of downloads. Sure, masses can be wrong, but wouldn't you expect a file with 10k+ downloads to get some harsh criticism if it was found to mess with your computer? An executable is not evil on principle - even your operating system is, at its base, nothing but one executable with a bunch of helper files.

What Darq offers here is an automatic update service, similar to EQ2Map (which is a UI mod with an executable as well, although optional) or even the integrated Windows update. It is very handy to use, and makes the (extensive!) configurability of the UI a breeze. Darq could certainly offer a manual version, but that requires much more effort on his AND your part. Personally, I definitely prefer this to having to set up the whole thing myself, and I'm a programmer.

About the Awesomium_process.exe - that is actually a part of EQ2. It is the integrated browser process; you run that thing every time you open the in-game help, for example (not to mention the web browser itself). If you have a look at the recent update notes on the official forum, you will see it mentioned there. If your game and the in-game browser already runs fine, there should not be any need to manually enter exceptions to the firewall.

In short: it's good of you to be careful, but in this case you're simply missing out on something great.


@Darq:

See last line in @Orfic.

orfic

I have downloaded many UIs from here and recently came back to playing. This one was listed at the most recently updated but it is an EXE file. Every other UI I downloaded was a zip file that extracted the files for the UI.

Sorry, I do not trust executables, especially when nobody else is using them for their UI. Please, make a zip file like everyone else and not the suspicious "DarqUI Window Utility.exe" file, and I will certainly give your UI a look.

And yes, I did read the instructions and the requirement to also allow something called "awesomiumprocess.exe" have a firewall exception. UIs don't require executables or additional firewall exceptions. Any UI that requires them is to be considered suspicious right off. I am not saying you are up to anything bad which is why I am sure you will have no problem putting up a UI that does not require executables to be installed.

Darqwood

Nasa, thank you for your post. I played a bit with the opacity settings on the raid/group spell buttons, and when the buttons are transparent enough (about 0.300) to see the bars behind them they are also too transparent to see the spell icons. Before changing the opacity settings, try out some of the various layout modes. The raid and group windows have several layouts that place the spell icons to the side or below the health bars. You can get to the controls on the blue pop-out options panel on both windows in-game.

It was primarily an ergonomic decision to put only four spell icons on the raid window. The earliest versions did have all 5 icons, but this made the health/power bars unnecessarily long as well as the entire raid window when the 5 spells were placed to the side. The net result was a raid window that was way too wide. I have many times considered putting a fifth spell under the archetype symbol, but so far I've resisted. Even though this would be more functional, it's not very intuitive.

On #3, there is a feature in the utility that you may want to take advantage of. If you download the optional spell suggestion file (DarqUIspells.csv), you can use Notepad to add and remove spells to your liking, and change the order of spells when you use the setup utility for all of your classes. For example, here is Dire Balm in the spell list:

Comma-separated Fields:
3-letter class abbreviation
Spell level
Spell name
Icon sheet (from the pop-up Icon Viewer in the utility)
Icon position (1 through 36)
Private tell
Group say
Raidsay
Background color (G B P R O Y X where X=black)
Macro string
Macro tooltip
Spell ID number (optional)

I am currently adding the new level 91 and 92 spells to the file, and I'll also add the ones you listed.

The DarqUI hotbars use the "frame and titlebar" settings to hide/display cooldown timers, so I would need to come up with a different way to toggle a combat visibility feature. It's an interesting idea.

The pet window mods were designed for "true" controllable pets (Conjuror, Necromancer, Illusionist and Beastlord for example), so the auto-pull feature will only work if your pet already responds to the pet control icons on the pet window. If your defiler does not already have Shrink and Pet Call spells, then those buttons won't work for that character.


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