Meviin's Macros: Purple Links When Pulling

You've seen your friends pull mobs, but rather than just putting the mob's name in brackets, they made the mob's name purple like a link! Or, maybe, it even was a link, and you could click on it and see some item! This not only allows you to show off your favorite item, but it makes it easier for your group or guild mates to see what you're pulling, which makes you a better puller. This guide explains how to make purple links when pulling.

Step 1: Install Notepad++. You might be able to get away with using regular Notepad, but something might break. If you already have an advanced text editor (like Vim or Sublime), you can skip this step. Note that a word processor like MS Word or Libre Office will NOT work.

Step 2: Make a dummy macro in game. You can skip this step if you already have a pulling macro that you're comfortable with. The %T will use the name of your target. If you use something like brackets around your target, you probably need to include spaces, like in the below example. A simple pulling macro might look like:

/g Incoming < %T >.  One per message.

Step 3: Completely quit out of EQ. This is because we're soon going to be manually modifying the text files that EQ uses for its configuration, and if you do that when EQ is running, EQ will ignore and overwrite your changes.

Step 4: Open up your macros config file in Notepad++. It will be in your EQ directory, and it will be named Yourcharactername_project1999.ini. For instance, if your character is named Meviin, this file would be called Meviin_project1999.ini.

Step 5: Find your macro. You should be able to Ctrl+F for your message (eg, "/g Incoming").

Step 6: Find the ID of the item you want. The easiest way to do this is to search on mqemulator.net. Eg, for a foraged root, see this page: mqemulator.net/item.php?id=13047. Note the ID. You can see it in the URL and also in parentheses on that page. In this case, the ID is 13047. Note that you can use any item available in the Titanium client since links are parsed client side. Since the Titanium client includes the first 10 expansions, that means that you can even include links to items that aren't in game!

Step 7: Convert the ID into hexadecimal. You can use a site like binaryhexconverter.com/decimal-to-hex-converter to do this. In this case, the hexadecimal equivalent of 13047 is 32F7.

Step 8: Pad the hexadecimal ID with 0s. The number should have two 0s before it and should be padded with 0s at the end so that it's 45 characters total. In this case, the number would be 0032F7000000000000000000000000000000000000000.

Step 9: Put the ID into your macro. This part can get a little tricky. First, go to the left of your %T. Then, go to Edit > Character Panel, and then click on the line that says "18 12 DC2". This inserts the DC2 non-printing character, which Everquest uses to say that a link has started or ended. Now, you should see a black DC2 character. Now, paste your long padded ID. Now, add 6 spaces. Then, your %T. Then, one space. Then, insert another DC2 character. If you used the incoming message suggested above, your line would now look like:

/g Incoming <DC20032F7000000000000000000000000000000000000000      %T DC2>.  One per message.

Note that the DC2 in the above message isn't the literal characters DC2, but rather the non-printing character described above, so copy pasting what you see above won't work.

Alternative to Step 9: Don't want to deal with inserting DC2 characters yourself? Download purple-links.txt. Then, open it up in Notepad++. Copy the incoming message and paste it over your own (you probably don't want to copy the whole file into your file since that might overwrite one of your macros). You should see the DC2 characters inserted already. Now, the only thing you need to do is customize the message as you see fit and change the item ID to the one you want in your links. For instance, if you prefer vegetables to roots, you would change 32F7 to 346B.

Step 10: Save your file

Step 11: Try it out!

New Alternative to Steps #6-9

The wiki now has a new tool that can make it much easier to create links for all of the items in your character's possession. See Item ID Generator for further details.