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Things you didn't know you wanted to know! |
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Screen Clutter / Increasing your field of vision This process will take you a short while, so be patient, it is well worth the effort. - Step 1) First thing we need to do is get all that useless crap off your screen. Most of the can be turned on and off easily. Hit Alt D to get rid of that useless compass. This thing is a lag maker, and this only works as well as your sense heading allows anyways, more on this in the Social Keys section below. Hit Alt W to close the tool bar, and Alt M closes your actions menu. You will rarely use your actions menu once your keys are made and set up. Alt F1 opens and closes your Pet Info screen, obvciouly Casters will leave this up, but melee classes will want to close it. All of these can be re-opened by hitting the same keys you used to close it. Next we will hit Alt O, this opens your Options Menu, and we will be in here several times through this process. For now, choose the second tab named Display. On the right side of this box, onthe lower half are 4 sliders. The top two are self explanitory, the third sets how "see through" your windows will be when your mouse is over them (refered to as Normal level) and the last slider on the right side determines how "see thought" your windows will be when your mouse is NOT over them (refered to as Faded level). For now, lets set the third slider (window transparency) to 80%, and the fourth slider (Fade-to Transparency) to about 60%. We will be modivying this later, but on individual windows. - Step 2) Have you ever been in battle, or in the Bazaar or PoK, and a friend sends a tell that is whisked right up and off your text box? well no more my friends! We are going to solve that right now. I can't even imagine or remember what it was like only having that one tiny little text box for the thousands of things that occur rapidly in this game. Lets make more text boxes to help clear the confusion. I put two on the top of my screen side by side, and two on the bottom of my screen side by side, as you can see inthe screen shot to the left. To make a new text box, right click on the title bar fo you main one, and choose New Chat Window. Repeat this until you have 4 windows, and size and move them, 2 top, and 2 bottom. Now, alot of this part is preference, but after i explain it, you can customize yours more. Ok, in the second bottom text box (assuming you left the original on the bottom also) name this box Info. To name a chat box, right click on the title and choose Rename Window. Now, for your Info window, right click on the title bar, go down to Filters, and choose "skills" and "other". OK, now on text box 3, right click on the title bar, name this one Zone Chat, and for the filters choose OOC, Shout, and Auction. And finally on box 4, choose the filters Say, Tell, GRoup, Raid, Guild, and Emote. * I also set this box to recive all the chat channels I am in. **Just an FYI : in the text box menu where we chose filter, there is another option called "channel" what this does is cause your typing in THAT text box to go to where the channel is set, no matter where you intended it to go. Example, on box 3 i set the channel to group. Now when ever i type in THAT window, no matter if i put a /shout, or a /gu (for guildsay) the text i type here will go to GROUP. Personally, i think this feature is a waste of time, as i would think it to be faster to just type the /g, /gu, /ooc, or /shout rather than be trying to target certain boxes to speak. At any rate, you are now able to be in a battle, do a zone check ( / enter ), see all the zone spam, AND talk to friends and guildies ALL AT ONCE, and see all of them clearly! Now, you are thinking "I thought we were clearing the screen, not cluttering up more!?!" right? - read on my friend. . . . - Step 3) On all the text boxes, group window, target window, self info window ( hit points, mana, stamina), your hotkey bank, spell stone bar, and Pet Info window if you have it: right click, choose Window, choose Background, choose Tint Color, and for all winodws mentioned above choose Black - this will make more sense in a minute. All these windows oreviously had a "texture" to them, making them non-see through. You will notice they are some what transparent now, but we are not done yet. Now, for all the windows mentioned above go through again, this time choosing: Window, Alpha, Faded Level - and set this to zero ( i oftern leave my spell stone bar and hotkey bank at about 25 faded level). Now, all your text windows, and other stuff should be completely transparent EXCEPT when your mouse is over them. We did it this way rather than in the Options menu, so that your Bank, Bags, and Inventory screen are still at Faded Level of 60% - as when they are open, you usually need to see them without having your mouse over them. |
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Making your Keyboard more efficient! This section is almost all personal preference, but I am going to help you learn how to customize a few handy things that will make targeting more accurate, and allow you to perform several tasks at once. - Step 1) Your spells - I utilize the F keys for these, making F1 through F8 all my spells, far faster than clicking on the screen. Hit Alt O to open your Options menu, and choose Keyboard. Now click on the key you want to change, and hit the key you desire to perform that action. - Step 2) Hotkeys (macros) - I have them to numbers 1 to 0 on the keyboard, not to be confused with the numbers on the Number Pad whixch is generaslly to the right side of the keyboard. - Step 3) Targeting - You will defeinately want to choose at least one key to target the "nearest NPC" ths will allow you to targer about 100 times faster, and not accidentally target peoples pets or group members. * this can back fire occasionally if you use alternat camera angles, as it does the nearest NPC from your view, not closest to the charcter. You will also want to have a key for the Neasts Person, and another 3 to 5 keys designated to target Group Members - this speeds up buffing and healing fantastially. So if you hear people saying i can not heal a moving target, it is because they are trying to target usding the mouse. To me that is like trying to catch a fish in an aquarium with your bare hands. - Step 4) Steering, attack, use item/open doors - The standard arrows are nice, but have you ever been eating, drinking, smoking, or just need the other hand? Set the alternate keys so you have a left and right steering setup. Each side should have a USE key, an Auto Run key, and a Fight key - **I use F for my left handed attack, and the 0 on the number pad as my right handed attack. - Step 5) Camera Angles - recently they added the ability to set keys for specific camera angles, as opposed to the old method where we had to hit F9 a few times to flip through ALL the camera angles. I myself use mainly 2 cmaera angles: FPS = first person shooter (out of your eyes) and the 3rd person persective (behind your back view), and every once in a while, like when trading in the bazaar i use the Overhead view. The other two are movable camera angles, mostly useful for good screen shots and ewhat not as it is hard to steer from the last two angles. I recommend having a hotkey for the FPS and the 3rd person views. ** The third person view is almost a must when fighting a rogue or short race, as you can see when they run behind you to backstab or hide. You can now cast and use hotkeys at the same time, and even spam language during battle if you choose. Which brings us to the next section: Language and Social Macros. |
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Social Macros and Language - Social Macros or player made hotkeys are a great tool we have. You can perform almost anything you can think of. To make a Macro, open your Actions menu (alt M) and choose the fourth icon (looks like a cartoon talk bubble). Now flip to the second page, and right click on an empty one. This opens the Macro box. You can name them what ever you wish obviously. Under the name space, are 5 command lines. To view all the commands availabel type /help normal OR hit Alt W to open your tool bar, and choose Help. For this tutorial I will use two Macros I made and use frequently. The first one is my Sales Spam which I use in the bazaar. I have three /shout or /ooc messages, and I put pauses between them so there is about a 3 minute delay between messages. Command Line 1 reads: /shout The Language spam keys are similar. There are a few ways to do language too. You can spam alot of one single language, or you can do up to two languages per hotkey. For a single language have line one read /language <#> (to find out the number of the language tpye /language help ), then ines 2, 3, & 4 will be /say There are many many other uses for hotkeys, and hopefully this will get you going enough to understand how to make more of your own Social Macros. After making a Social Macros, simply click and hold on it until it appears on your cursor, and drop it in your hotkey bank on the lower left. Now the Social Macros will go off when you hit the coresponding number. You have 10 banks of hotkeys, to change banks hit Shift and the number of the bank you wish to go to. I hve all my languages on banks 9 and 0 |