Installation guide

This is an expanded guide for installing and patching the game, understanding our patcher, and making good use of the additional software our patcher includes.

Installation

There are a few ways you can obtain the Everquest client. The client Shards of Dalaya is currently based on is the Seeds of Destruction expansion (October 21, 2008). While any install source will play the game, older sources will often be missing zone, model, and other resource files. The recommended install sources are:

1. Daybreak Games - the client is free to download (you will need to make an account with Daybreak Games).
2. Steam - the client is free to download (you will need to make an account with Steam).
3. Any other install source Seeds of Destruction or later (listed below) should have the correct files (not all have been tested):

• Seeds of Destruction (October 2008)
• Underfoot (December 2009)
• House of Thule (October 2010)
• Veil of Alaris (November 2011)
• Rain of Fear (November 2012)
• Call of the Forsaken (October 2013)
• The Darkened Sea (November 2014)
• The Broken Mirror (November 2015)
• Empires of Kunark (November 2016)

Whatever source you choose to install from, you will need to make note of the path it installed to. We're going to call this your game directory (catchy name, eh?!) and we'll need to know it later.

Once patched for SoD, this installation will not work with other servers. You may wish to make a copy of the installed folder for other servers if that's something you care about!

If you get to character select and you aren't able to create a character or enter world, it could be a bug involving overclocking. Try running SoD without overclocking and see if that fixes your problem.

Patching

Download the Shards of Dalaya (2.5) patcher  and register a game/forum account on the official site . You can register as many accounts as you want, and most players suggest one played character per account.

Put the SoD patcher somewhere you can access it easily - it should be your launcher for the game. Personally, I shove it into my game directory and create a shortcut to it there. Not necessary though, just a suggestion - you can run the SoD patcher from anywhere you want! If you're running in Windows Vista or 7, you may need to give the program permission to access your computer.

In the patcher window, click [Browse] and select the game directory. If your computer has a dual or quad-core processor, click the checkmark next to "Bind Affinity to Processor" and select either 1 or 2 for best performance.

Hit [Patch and Run] and wait for a while. The patcher downloads Mumble first (it takes forever for me!), EQW and updates the files in your game directory. The patcher window has a lot of little buttons and boxes, but leave them be for now.

As soon as patching finishes the patcher itself will close a window for EQW will pop open. Click the [Browse] button in this window as well, find the game directory again, and select eqgame.exe. Again, leave the little checkboxes alone - shouldn't ever even need to consider changing these. Only Fix eqclient.ini should be checked.

From here, you can click Start EQ and the game client should open to the EULA. Yay the game is running!

Mumble

Mumble is downloaded first thing when patching and, if you don't already have it installed, there will be an [Install Mumble] button on the patcher. Once you've installed it (or if you already have it installed!) A checkbox for Start Mumble and an input box for Handle will be added to the patcher. You can mark the checkbox and add the handle you want to use to the input box to join our public server. Use it up!

Boxing and EQW

Every living, breathing player may have a maximum number of two accounts online. LD characters count, and you can be jailed or banned for having more than two characters logged in even if you're "just buffing."

Boxing basics

This part shouldn't be very confusing. You do not need to do anything to two box that you don't need to single box.

Run the patcher application twice. If you have a multi-core processor, tick the Bind Affinity to Processor option and set each client to it's own processor. Going to highly suggest using 1 and 2 even if you have 3 and 4 available.

Now, you do not need to do anything but run click [Patch and Run], then Start EQ through EQW.

Be sure you are using different accounts with each client - you can create as many accounts as you want, so if you only have one just make a second one. (Otherwise you're breaking a rule and that is extrabad!)

Advanced boxxing

Now, the rest of this is a little advanced (just a little, I promise) and NOT necessary. However, it will make 2-boxxing easier!

EQW hotkeys Having EQW enabled is important for easy two-boxing, since it will allow you to switch between the windows without using alt+tab. It will also allow you to release your mouse and browse outside the client. Using alt+tab in either case tends to cause keyboard bugs or mouse freezing on character select.

You can modify (or at least view) the keyboard settings by browsing to %AppData%\Shards of Dalaya\eqw. There are FOUR files in that folder. Right click on the one named eqw.ini and Open with... Notepad. If you don't have extensions visible, the file type is "Configuration settings" and is the only non-application file that isn't a DLL. That should help you determine which one you are looking for!

This file is divided into three parts, but the part you will want to modify looks like this:

ReleaseMouse=Ctrl Alt R
ReloadIni=Ctrl Alt I
EQWSwitch=Ctrl Alt S
It is highly suggested you change that section to read:

ReleaseMouse=Ctrl Alt R
ReloadIni=Ctrl Alt I
EQWSwitch=`

You can then use the ~ key (left of the 1 key on standard keyboards) to switch between your client windows quickly. I can't provide much assistance on other usable key combinations here, so if you want something else there I suggest experimenting with it yourself.

Fullscreen

EQW can be disabled in the patcher if you wish to run fullscreen. However, boxing is obviously much easier with EQW turned on. An alternative to "true" fullscreen is to still use EQW but in the Options menu (Alt + O), in the Display tab, to click Video Modes (left side, 5th button down) and select a resolution near or matching your native resolution.

If the border of the window is troublesome to you, the position of the window can be adjusted in the EQW.ini. For example, in Windows 7 you change the offset values under the [Positions] section to be -3 X and -25 Y. So if you have a 1440 x 900 resolution monitor, under that section you'd have:

]1440by900X=-3
1440by900Y=-25

Troubles

The last two options in the patcher usually come up when you're having trouble.

• If you're having a problem with the game itself not running properly, consider checking Repatch All before patching.
• View Log will spit out a notepad file that can copy-pasted from if you're having connection issues.

EQ Playnice

Consider this an "honorable mention" of sorts. EQPlaynice exercises cpu, framerate and rendering limitations on the client in an attempt to make EQ "play nice" with other programs on your computer while you're multi-tasking. The more modern you OS, the less likely you are to need this program. If you are using Windows 7, you do not need this and will likely have more issues if you use it than not. EQ Playnice can be downloaded here . Not saying you should, but you should know it exists.

In general most players shouldn't need or even use EQPlaynice. Most people don't use it and they are just fine. Some people run it and have more troubles than not. However, if you experience lots of graphical lag on your computer while running the client, you might want to just grab this. This isn't the most-glowy recommendation , but results vary. Please note the version of EQ Playniceare providing a special version meant for our aged client; other distributions probably will NOT work here.