How to: Keep logs

It wouldn't be long among the Vigiles before you started hearing about "logs" in the ooc channels. What the heck are logs, you might ask, and why do we use them? What are they for? Why do we bother?

I've been using and teaching people about logs for years, and it wasn't until I sat down to write this up for the blog that I realized this is actually a pretty broad topic. In the interest of brevity and clarity, I've broken it up over three separate posts. It seems to me the most sensible beginning is the what, and the how of their existence, and we'll get to the whys and what-fors in a little bit.

The Everquest2 game comes with the ability to log your chat history built-in. It's as simple as typing /log or selecting Menu --> Options --> User Interface --> Chat Window --> Log Chat text .
This means that whenever logs are active, the game will be writing ALL your chat to a separate .txt file under Sony Online Entertainment --> Installed Games --> Everquest2 --> logs --> [servername] with a name like  eq2log_charactername.txt .

But what goes in the log?

The game considers all text you encounter as "chat", but even at default settings you are presented with some visual distinctions, which reflect the kinds of text which are coded differently in the engine.

You can change the visual settings in EQ2 Menu --> Options --> User Interface. Once you have a setup you like on one character, you can easily copy the same settings to all your characters by typing the command /load_uisettings , which will pull up a dialog box with the names of all your characters. Select the one you've tweaked, and everything will adjust as you've designed it already.

You can also change what chat shows up in your log and on your screen by right-clicking your chat tab and selecting chat options.

You can also find these UI settings in the file system of your computer under Sony Online Entertainment --> Installed Games --> Everquest2 .
The file-name will be in this format: Server_Character_eq2_UIsettings.xml. Backing this small file up to an external or cloud storage system will make switching computers much easier, because tweaking your settings to suit your playstyle is always an investment of time.

The default settings for the chat which is "on" in each tab seem to be:

1. Main chat
1. Game Text
1. Default
2. Error
3. Status
4. MOTD
2. Chat Text
1. Nearby
1. Say
2. Shout
3. Emote
4. Yell
5. Narrative
6. NPCSay
2. Group
1. Group say
2. Raid say
3. Arena say
3. Guild
1. Guild say
2. Guild officer
3. Guild MOTD
4. Guild member online
5. Guild Event
6. Guild recruiting page
7. Guild recruiting page (other)
4. Private
1. Tell
2. Customer Service
5. Chat channel
1. Out of Character
2. Auction
3. Tradeskills
1. Harvesting
2. Harvesting Warnings
4. Voice Chat
2. Combat
1. Spells
1. (many kinds of combat)
2. Combat
1. (many kinds of spells)
3. Tab 1
1. Chat text
1. Non-Player Tell
2. Object Tell
3. Spam
2. Character Text
1. Reward
2. Death
3. Pet
4. Skill
5. Faction
3. Other
1. Money split
2. Loot
3. Loot rolls
4. Command 
1. Broadcast
2. Who
3. Commands
5. Merchant
1. Merchant Buy/Sell
6. Consider
1. Con -2
2. Con -1
3. Con 0
4. Con 1
5. Con 2
4. Tab 2
1. Any chat channels you have selected

A screenshot of the chat and menu windows,
with the Status/Narrative tab selected.

By default, you are subscribed to General, Auction, and your class channel. You may also be subscribed to any other default channels you may have chosen before, such as Crafting, or LFG, or any user-created chat channels which you've been in before, such as rplfg or homeshow.

Sometimes, on fresh installations of the game, everything in Tab 1 is also open in Main chat. As you can tell, it very quickly gets crowded, and difficult to follow.

In the Main User Interface settings, you can color code all these different kinds of text so they display

Another screenshot of the options and menu windows,
with the combat tab selected.

distinctly - by default most channels are dark green, chat text is white and/or yellow, group chatter is light blue, and so on. You can code each possible chat channel number to a different color, so that it's possible to follow conversations in multiple channels more easily... but even so, your chat window will fill up very quickly.

I recommend the following settings as a starting place for your chat windows:

1. Main chat
1. Game Text
1. MOTD
2. Chat Text
1. Nearby
1. Say
2. Shout
3. Emote
4. Yell
2. Group
1. Group say
2. Raid say
3. Arena say
3. Guild
1. Guild say
2. Guild officer
3. Guild MOTD
4. Guild member online
5. Guild Event
6. Guild recruiting page
7. Guild recruiting page (other)
4. Private
1. Tell
2. Customer Service
5. Chat channel
1. Very important User-created channels, turned off when in intense RP or combat
2. Combat
1. Spells
1. (many kinds of spells)
2. Combat
1. (many kinds of combat
3. Status or Narrative 
1. Game Text
1. Error
2. Status
3. Default
2. Chat text
1. Non-Player Tell
2. Object Tell
3. Spam
4. Narrative
5. NPCSay
3. Character Text
1. Reward
2. Death
3. Pet
4. Skill
5. Faction
4. Other
1. Money split
2. Loot
3. Loot rolls
5. Command 
1. Broadcast
2. Who
3. Commands
6. Merchant
1. Merchant Buy/sell
7. Tradeskills
1. Harvesting
2. Harvesting warnings
8. Consider
1. Con -2
2. Con -1
3. Con 0
4. Con 1
5. Con 2
6. Voice Chat
4. Channels
1. Any default channels you've selected, color coded in shades of green
2. Any user-created channels you've selected, coded in warm colors, bright for the main chat, and dark for the echo of what you said to them

Now, any and all chat you have selected to show in ANY tab is going to be written to your log file, without any of the helpful color-coding we use in the game window, and with a great deal of hidden code. As you might imagine, log files get very big, very fast, no matter your settings. Even simple .txt files tend to get corrupted and difficult to open at large sizes. 

So how do you organize all those piles of information?

It is recommended, therefore, that if you run logs, you regularly rename and/or move old logs to a new folder. Ideally, back these text files up in an external or cloud based storage system, as you would any other writing - both in their raw and their cleaned form. (I'll write about cleaning logs in the next article.)

For example, on the first of every month you might add the name of the previous month to the end of the log file names. For example: eq2log_charactername_month_year.txt , or you could rename the file entirely: Month_Bob_the_SK.The next time you load into the game, the program will be looking for the old filename - and since it doesn't exist, it will write a new one in the default format.

You might also start a special log when you know you're going into a long RP scene or intense combat, by typing /log filename such as "councilmeeting_march". You might consider turning your logs off when heading into a raid, or again, starting a different log such as "venekor_raid", simply because combat logs are enormous.

Don't forget to turn your logs back on, or back to default when you're done, by typing /log and watching your status test for the confirmation, which will look like:

Logging to 'logs/Server/eq2log_charactername.txt' is now *OFF*

or

Logging to 'logs/Server/eq2log_charactername.txt' is now *ON*

If you've ever played a PnP RPG, and spent several sessions on rolling your way through a single fight, you can imagine how much data is in a combat log. All that data makes the end log result almost impossible to read... so why do it?

I'll explain more in later articles, but the short answer is: to have your old RP's to look back on fondly, and to support a just and safe environment with the records of what you experience in the world.