==================================================

THINGS I WISH I'D KNOWN EARLIER - User Interface (UI) and Chatting

==================================================

* You can create macros for common things like incoming messages, assisting the main tank, etc... To do this, click on the EQII button, then choose "Socials>Macros". These macros you create can be dragged to your hotkeys.

* You can have multiple hotbars for your hotkeys. To do so, right click on your main hotkey bar and choose the appropriate option. You only get keyboard shortcuts to the first three hotbars.

* You can place links to items in text such as /ooc, /auction, or /g. To do so, open your inventory and find the actual item (note this means you must accept your quest rewards before you can link them to show off to all your friends). Click on the item and drag the icon to the line of text you are writing, and the item name will insert itself. Other people can then click on the name to get a description of the item as if they had examined it.

* Many things in the game (from UI windows to mobs) have right click contextual menus. If you are not sure what something is, or want more information/options, try right clicking on it. Note that some things may not be activatable via a double click -- in this case, right click and use them through the menus.

* If you place your cursor over something (like a piece of furniture, or a barrel) and it glows, you should right click and examine it. There are MANY quests started this way, particularily in dungeons and outside of the cities, so make sure you cursor over everything you see at least once to see if it glows.

* When you see a person's name in your chat box, you can right click on their name to select options such as send them a tell. This can save having to spell complicated names if you want to respond to someone.

* For those of you who are keyboard averse, you can run by holding down both mouse buttons at the same time.

* Be careful what you double left click on. When using the broker, double clicking on an item will buy it, not examine it. Right click and choose examine from the menu to examine an item, or click the examine button provided at the bottom of the dialog. Also be wary that the default double click action for many guards and sentries outside of the cities is attack, not talk. When you mouse cursor over these guards, the cursor will change to crossed swords instead of the usual chat caption. If you wish to talk to them, right click and choose hail from the menu. If you double click on them, you will attack them and they will probably serve you up your butt on a platter. 

* If you play in 3rd person mode and would like to be able to select yourself by clicking on your character, you can do this in the options menu under "interface>picking" and choose "allow picking self in third person".

* Consider creating multiple chat windows and filtering the content of each. You can do this by right clicking on your primary chat window and selecting "create new window". You can right click on each of the windows created and filter the content that the window will display. Personally, I use 3 windows. The one on the right displays tells, groupchat, and guildchat. The one in the center displays spells, combat, and considers. The one on the left displays everything else. This makes it really easy to focus on communication or combat as necessary.

* You can use alt-enter to switch between full screen and windowed mode.

* You can lock UI windows to prevent them from being inadvertently moved or closed. To do this, right click on the window, select "window options", and check the "locked" box. I highly advise locking your chat windows, as it's easy to inadvertently close them. If you need to move them around later, you can always unlock them temporarily.

* You may occasionally hit a weird key combination that hides a window on your screen (such as your maintained effects window, your exp bar, the quest journal helper, etc...). To get it back, click the EQII button, choose options, and look under windows. You will see a list of all the keystrokes to hide/unhide the various windows on the UI.

* If the game is too dark for you, you can turn up the gamma on your video card, or buy a torch. You can actually carry two torches, and the light they produce stacks! Torches are not consumed.

* There are specialized chat channels that you can join. Right click on the chat window, go to "chat options", and you will see pre-set channels for your home city. The traders channel is particularily useful if you are looking to exchange crafted goods or find new commissions from other players.

* It is sometimes difficult to tell the difference between a white (even) con and a grey (trivial) con because the colors are so close, and this can be a deadly mistake. Fortunately, you can change them! Go to EQII > Options > User Interface, and you should see a list of the various con colors. Consider changing either the white or gray to brown, purple, pink, light blue, or tan.

* If your play server is down, the game will try to make a best-guess at what your character looks like to show you at the login screen. This guess does not get updated very often, so do not panic if your level is wrong!

* The game's user interface is highly customizable. While it is not trivial to hand-modify your own interface, it is quite easy to utilize modifications that other people have made publically available. Some of the mods I have found to be the most useful: an inventory screen that displays your attributes, a compass that displays the name of the zone you are in, an exp bar that shows both your adventure and tradeskill exp at the same time and has a decimal readout, a larger quest window, and a font that is more easy to read than the default one. See the end of this guide under "Other Great Resources" to find more information about modding your UI.

==================================================
