Experience Window

The DarqUI Experience window offers a variety of controls and conveniences beyond simply displaying experience levels. Depending on what your character is doing at the moment, the Experience window can be configured to display appropriate character stats and other useful information alongside the Experience (or "XP") progress bar display.

For example, if you are harvesting or crafting you can display the Tradeskill XP bar to show harvesting and tradeskill stats along with controls to open the Recipe book and the DarqUI Harvesting Helper including links to online harvesting guides. If you are adventuring, choose the Adventure XP bar to show buttons for your quest journal and Character window as well as pertinent combat stats depending on your class.

Basic navigation

From left to right, the Experience window has three major sections:

Configuring the Experience window

Although there are quite a few ways to customize the XP window from the Window Manager or from the DarqUI utility, there are four configuration changes that can be made directly from the window itself by entering Edit Mode.

On the far right end of the Stat Bar, click the blue Edit button. The background of the window will change to indicate that you are in Edit Mode. The Nav Bar will also switch temporarily to the configurable Command Bar. While in this mode, several persistent customizations can be done:

Command Bar icons (main and floating nav bars)  Click any of the ten icons and choose a different command from the dropdown. There are a number of system, Start menu and DarqUI custom window commands.

Nav Page associations (main nav bar only)  Choose an XP bar by clicking (or using the mouse scroll wheel over) the gold gem, then use the + and - buttons to scroll to a different nav page. When the desired nav page is displayed with this XP bar, record the association by clicking the small Save button that appears near the gold gem.

XP Bar sizeUsing the sizer handle while in Edit Mode will save the new width as a default for future logins. When the width is where you want it, mouse away from the sizer handle to raise the Save button.

StatsMouse over a slot on the Stat Bar and choose a stat (or replace an existing one) from the dropdown. You can cycle freely between XP bars while configuring stats. Each XP bar can have its own group. To remove a stat, choose BLANK from the top of the dropdown list. If you want all your XP bars to have the same stats, you can do this easily using the DarqUI utility.

Tithe Alerts

In the Window Manager you can configure a colored background to appear when you accumulate Tithe (Deity System) points. Choose flashing or non-flashing alerts. To disable alerts set the point value to zero.

Tithe Snooze featureThe alert feature may become annoying if you are busy with something else when it displays. To suspend the alert temporarily, click the "moon" icon near the right-side gem, or open the Window Manager and click the Snooze button. The flashing background will be hidden until your Deity point value changes or you log in again.

Custom option presets

The in-game Options window (Alt+O) allows you to save and load custom game setting profiles so that you can quickly optimize your game session for various purposes. For example, you might want to use very high graphics settings for taking screenshots, but a much lower spec for raiding. Use the Load and Save buttons at the bottom of the in-game Options window to create settings profiles to suit your needs.

On Page 3 of the Nav Bar you can quickly access up to three of your preconfigured profiles with the buttons marked A B and C. There are two ways to configure the presets:

Individual charactersWhen you save your profiles, you can give them meaningful names such as "Screenshots" and "Raid." To give a character access to the profiles via the quick access buttons, you will need to associate the custom names to the buttons. Use the utility or the in-game window manager to specify the profile names for the desired characters.

All charactersIf you want all of your characters to have immediate access to the preset profiles without needing the previous step, save the profiles with the default names A, B and C which correspond to the three buttons. No further setup will be needed for your characters since by default they will look for profiles named A B and C. If no profile exists by that name, the Load Preset Options pop-up window will be raised.

Advanced game option profiles

When you save a game option profile from the Options window, more than 300 settings and preferences are written to the file. Loading a full list of game options can be jarring and can take some time as the game reloads all of the various graphics settings.

You may be satisfied with your general graphics settings and only want to change a few simple preferences for certain scenarios. For example, for your raid profile you may only want to remove guild names, mounts, cloaks and shadows. If you are handy with a text editor, you can edit an existing options file and include only the settings and preferences that need changing. In this example, loading the reduced profile happens instantly without the screen flicker and other (usually unexpected) changes to your game configuration.

In your main EverQuest II folder you will find your options files in the form of <profilename>.opt. Although you can use Notepad to edit the files, a more advanced text editor such as Notepad++ or WinVi is a better choice if you have access to it. In the above example, the original file was edited down to the following lines:

show_subname false
suspend_mount_mode 2
cl_show_cloaks false
r_shadow_type 0

Most of the setting names and values in the full list can be deciphered, but you may want to experiment with different settings to see how the values change. A word of advice, save your current settings before doing any intensive experimentation so you can resume using your original preferences afterward.

Likewise, an options file that returns the example settings to their original values would look like this:

show_subname true
suspend_mount_mode 1
cl_show_cloaks true
r_shadow_type 2

Saving the options fileTechnically, .opt files do not contain a byte order mark (BOM) which is an invisible flag at the beginning of the file. Notepad disregards the absence of the BOM and adds one anyway when you save. The game will load option files saved with Notepad, but the first setting is skipped over due to the unexpected byte order mark. Therefore if you must use Notepad, add a "dummy" setting as the first line in the file.

Wordpad detects the absence of the BOM and will save the text file properly, although you may get error messages about removing formatting which you can ignore, and you must be careful to prevent Wordpad from appending the .txt filename extension.