EQ2Sharts — ACT Queue Plugin for EverQuest 2

EQ2Sharts is a single-file ACT (Advanced Combat Tracker) plugin that manages a player queue via in-game chat. It was designed for distributing Hearts (or any item/buff) in EQ2 raids, letting players request a spot in line and operators dequeue them as they're served.

Created by Sichi, injected with nonsense by Maergoth and Kaizar.

https://discord.gg/reverb

Installation

1. Right-Click and "Save Link As" to Download EQ2Sharts.cs
2. Go to the "plugins" tab on ACT and select the file
3. Import it, make sure the checkbox is active
4. Customize the "channels" you're watching, and set the "Enqueue" and "Dequeue" text to match
5. Activity Log can provide some hints if it's not working

Features

• Chat-driven queue — Players enqueue themselves by typing a trigger phrase in a monitored channel. An operator dequeues them by name when served.
• Overlay window — A topmost, resizable overlay displays the numbered queue over the game. Supports click-through mode, adjustable opacity, font scaling, and custom background/foreground colors.
• Multiple channels — Monitor several chat channels simultaneously (raid, group, custom channels) by listing one per line.
• Flexible chat format support — Handles both EQ2 tells and says to the syntaxes, with or without channel numbers.
• Wait time display — Optional per-player wait timer shown on the overlay, updating live every second.
• Average wait time — Logged to the activity log on each dequeue, tracking a running average across the session.
• Invert order — Checkbox to flip the overlay display from top-to-bottom to bottom-to-top.
• Priority bump — When enabled, duplicate enqueue requests bump the player up one slot instead of being ignored.
• Bump notification — Text-to-speech announces "bump" when a player is bumped (requires Priority Bump).
• Auto-hide when empty — The overlay automatically hides when the queue is empty and reappears when someone joins.
• Persistent settings — All configuration (channels, patterns, overlay position/size, colors, checkboxes) is saved to XML and restored on reload.

How It Works

Log Line Parsing

ACT fires OnLogLineRead for every line in the EQ2 log file. The plugin applies a pre-filter (checks for a " character) and then matches against a compiled regex built from the configured channel names.

EQ2 log lines use two formats for chat:

\aPC -1 PlayerName:PlayerName\/a tells ChannelName (N), "message"
\aPC -1 PlayerName:PlayerName\/a says to the raid party, "message"
You tell ChannelName (N), "message"
You say to the raid party, "message"

The channel regex is constructed at runtime as:

(?:\aPC -?\d+ [^:]+:(\w+)\\/a|(You)) (?:tells? (?:Chan1|Chan2)(?: \(\d+\))?,|says? to the (?:Chan1|Chan2)[^,]*,) "(.+?)"

• Group 1 captures the player name from the \aPC link format (the portion after the colon).
• Group 2 captures You when the speaker is the local player.
• Group 3 captures the message content inside quotes.

Enqueue / Dequeue

Once a sender and message are extracted:

1. The message is tested against each enqueue pattern (user-configurable regexes). On match, the sender is added to the tail of a LinkedList<string> and tracked in a Dictionary for O(1) duplicate detection.
2. If no enqueue pattern matches, the message is tested against each dequeue pattern. These regexes must contain a capture group for the target player name (e.g., ^HEARTS TO (\w+)$). The matched name is removed from the queue.

A timestamp (DateTime.Now) is recorded at enqueue time. On dequeue, the elapsed time is logged along with a running average across all dequeues in the session.

Overlay

QueueOverlayForm is a TopMost, SizableToolWindow form containing a single Label. The queue is rendered as numbered lines (1. Name, 2. Name, ...) joined with newlines.

• Click-through mode removes the title bar and sets WS_EX_TRANSPARENT | WS_EX_LAYERED via SetWindowLong, making the window pass mouse events to whatever is underneath.
• Invert reverses the list before display.
• Wait time appends (Xm Ys) to each entry. A 1-second Timer triggers display refreshes while enabled.
• Auto-hide hides or shows the overlay based on queue content when enabled, respecting the Show Overlay checkbox.

Settings Persistence

The plugin uses ACT's SettingsSerializer to bind UI controls to an XML config file (%APPDATA%\Advanced Combat Tracker\Config\EQ2Sharts.config.xml). All text boxes, checkboxes, trackbars, and the overlay bounds are serialized on plugin exit and restored on load.

Configuration

Setting	Description
Channel Names	One channel per line. Matches both tells <channel> and says to the <channel>.
Enqueue Patterns	Regex patterns (one per line) matched against message content. No capture group needed — the sender is enqueued.
Dequeue Patterns	Regex patterns (one per line) with a capture group () for the player name to remove from the queue.
Show Overlay	Toggle overlay visibility.
Click-Through	Makes the overlay non-interactive (no title bar, passes clicks through).
Invert	Reverses display order (bottom to top).
Show Wait Time	Displays elapsed time next to each queued name.
Priority Bump	Duplicate enqueue requests bump the player up one slot.
Bump Notification	Text-to-speech says "bump" when a player is bumped (requires Priority Bump).
Auto-Hide When Empty	Automatically hides the overlay when the queue is empty and shows it when someone joins.
Opacity	Overlay window transparency (10–100%).
Font Scale	Overlay text size multiplier (50–300%).
Background / Text	Color pickers for overlay appearance.