Hi, I'm new to EQ2 and just downloaded ACT today, but I can't see any installation instructions. I searched these forums too, but alas no joy. Please provide some guidelines so I can get it working.

D

Well, ACT sort of has a lot of functions. It really depends on what you're looking to do. If you start ACT for the first time, a startup wizard should appear which will help you find your log file to parse and give some other quick information. You may also manually show the startup wizard by using a button at the top the General Options tab.

I tried to make it painless for the size in scope of the application. You run the setup which shouldn't involve much unless you don't meet the prerequisites. Run ACT from the desktop or Start menu icon. And by then the startup wizard appears. After that, it really depends on what you want to do. I'm very certain that I use ACT differently than most people for instance.

I have the icon on my desktop, which launches the application. How does this relate to EQ2. I would like to know how much damage (dps and damage out) my Brigand does as well as other players I am grouped with. Can I view this and publish this information in game or do I have to access the desktop exe file? How does logging work?

D

I suppose you really are new to this. There's a beginners FAQ that I ran into a while back here that seems accurate enough. It's more of a general thing than how to do specific things. But really, there are a great number of things and no one uses them all.

ACT is not a UI like in WoW. No such thing exists in EQ2. EQ2 generates log files of all information that would possibly go into a chat window... whether it does visibly or not. ACT reads that text file and parses it into usable data.

That usable data primarily is viewed within ACT. There are a multitude of ways to export that data however. You can place summaries of the data into the clipboard. You can create social channel macros to display those summaries into specific chat channels instead of pasting the clipboard contents. You can display mini-parse windows that take up less space than ACT to display over a windowed screen of EQ2. You can automatically create HTML files to view in EQ2's FireFox embed. You can turn ACT into a webserver to view data in EQ2's embedded FireFox browser. You can export data to database servers, web servers etc.

You can read the logs in real-time... read them after your EQ2 session, read old logs from months ago...