I've been logged into EQ tons for the last few weeks. First off I soloed my way through most of level 35 in the Warsliks Woods. I killed many hundreds of forest giants along the way. I literally got every single piece of loot they could have other than a lumberjack's cap. Well, I probably didn't get all of the gems but I did get all the weapons and the day before I left there I got a coveted forest loop earring. One of my goals there was to get a forest loop for my druid.

The reason I finally left Warsliks Woods is that I went to visit my buddy Greg and play a bit of EQ with him. We returned to the Eastern Wastes and slaughtered ulthorks, walruses, and rhinos galore. I got around 6 yellows of experience to level me just into level 37. Greg went from 38 up to 39. I was leveling a bit faster since I was lower level. We made a decent amount of money for the time we played too. I think we each ended up with 175pp or so. Not bad considering we didn't actually play all that long. Other stuff was going on, and Greg kind of burned himself out leveling up his druid and powerleveling a host of other characters.

A couple of days before I went over to Greg's place the new xml-based customizable user interface went live. Also a new zone, Jaggedpines, was patched in. Lastly, the long-promised functionality of the Bazaar went live. That's a pretty big pile of cool stuff to get all at once.

Simply put, the new interface rocks. The default design isn't too bad. The only real negative is that windows fade out most of the way a couple of seconds after you move your mouse off of them. That got irritating in a hurry. The true coolness though is that everything in each window is a separate xml object which can be moved, changed around, replaced, whatever. That means each player can now have a totally customized interface. You can define your own border and background graphics also. I'm fine with the current graphics but I definitely feel the need to tweak some of the layout and information displayed in various UI windows. So far I've redone the inventory window so that it is laid out in a pattern more to my liking. I've also downloaded a couple of other people's tweaked group, self, and target window xml files to take a look at in the near future and possibly use some of their ideas. I can't say enough about how cool this feature is.

There are negatives to it though. The first and worst is that you edit the xml, then have to fire up EQ to test it out. Logging into EQ is a non-trivial process. It checksums all the EQ files when you launch. Then it shows a number of splash screens. Next you log in with your user/pass. Pick a server, pick a character, and finally you are logged in. Next you have to screenshot the interface so that you can remember what changes you want to make. Log out of Everquest. Open up an image viewer to see the screenshot. Finally, edit the xml making what changes you desire. Now you are ready to go back to step 1 and relog into EQ to see if you made your changes properly. I did recently find out there is a way to skip the checksum/patch process but haven't tested it yet. What would be really nice is if you could fire up an editor inside of EQ. Either that or alt-tab out of the game and reload your custom UI after saving your changes. I may eventually get sshd running on the windows box and edit the xml files via an ssh connection from another machine while logged into EQ on the win box. That depends on how much I feel like fighting windows though.

Another negative is that you have to have some sort of mechanism for diffing your custom skins compared to Verant's default skin. Just today they added a couple of sections to various xml files which are absolutely necessary or the game crashes when you open that particular window. Having to keep track of this isn't exactly the end of the world but it does require at least some effort.

In addition to the new interface is the Bazaar. As much ass as the new UI kicks, the Bazaar kicks even more. Finally people have a way to conveniently buy/sell gear from other players. I don't have time to spend hour after hour in E Commons hoping to see a particular piece of gear I need at a low price. That's what you used to have to do. Thanks to the Bazaar you just run a search of everyone who's selling and look up whatever you want. I managed to finally upgrade most of my crappy armor and picked up an insanely good piercing weapon. No way would I have ever been able to even find some of this stuff the old way. With the Bazaar I not only found it, I found it for totally cheap. I think I spent less than 1000 platinum total to upgrade my rogue's armor and weapon. The difference in my abilities due to the new gear is substantial.

There's even more to the coolness of the Bazaar. I've got 4 or 5 characters who have been collecting random stuff in the bank for a year+ (since I moved to this server.) Some of that stuff has just sat there because I knew it was worth something but I didn't have the time to spend a day or three in E Commons waiting for a buyer looking for rare stuff to come along. The last three days I've logged my druid on in the Bazaar before I went to work. She stands there all day as a merchant selling my goods for me. I ported around the world before this visiting each of my characters collecting my various extra trinkets. I think I've sold like 600 platinum worth of stuff so far. Most of this stuff I never would have been able to sell to anyone other than an NPC vendor the old way. It's almost like free money. Not only has it helped finance my rogue's upgrade, it also helped me clear tons of space up in the bank. Another side effect is that my ranger also benefits due to hand-me-down gear that the rogue no longer needs. It's like a win, win, win situation.

I thought NPC binders for melee characters in the cities was the greatest thing added to EQ. I have had to revise that because the Bazaar is just great. The only negatives about the bazaar are some bugs in the search and the massive amount of lag. Actually I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the lag. It appears the EQ graphics engine doesn't do a very good job of calculating level of detail. Characters in the distance are drawn with as many polygons as characters in the foreground. This leads to massive problems when there are 200+ people in your view. Needless to say the framerate in the Bazaar sucks. Even on my Athlon 1.33Ghz with a GeForce3 Ti500 I'm only getting like a frame or two per second if I'm looking at a large group of other people. The only way to navigate here is to look at the ground so you can't see anyone else. I suppose my framerate would be better if I turned on the old, low-poly models, turned down the graphics clipping plain, and other random tweaks. However, I don't want to look at a crappy looking game when I'm not in the Bazaar. It just isn't worth it to try and toggle the settings back and forth for when I'm in the Bazaar as compared to not in the Bazaar. Actually with my laptop I can even still be in the Bazaar as long as I leave the graphics models on old (like I have to anyway) and turn the clipping plane all the way down so that it looks like fog at 50 feet. Then it is about as smooth as the desktop box is.

Lastly there's the new zone Jaggedpines. I don't have anything to say about it since I haven't even visited it yet. I'll check it out when I'm a bit higher in level.

My interest in Everquest has been renewed by all of the new cool stuff lately. Let's see how much I accomplish before I get distracted by something else.