Perception

Your DragonRealms perception list parked on screen and sorted by urgency, so the spell about to lapse is at the top instead of buried in a wall of output.

What it’s for

Asking the game what you’re perceiving costs a command and a screenful of text, and the reply arrives in whatever order the game feels like. The thing you actually wanted — the one entry that’s fading — is somewhere in the middle of it.

A perception window parks that list somewhere permanent and sorts it, so the entries with the most life left sit at the top and anything fading falls to the bottom. It refreshes itself when the game sends a new list, and the entries stay clickable.

This is a DragonRealms window, and it is one of two — its counterpart is the DR Experience window.

Set it up

Common setups

A DragonRealms character column

Perception earns its space beside its sibling rather than alone.

1. Add perception and experience from the catalog’s Character group — the two DR-only windows.
2. Send both to the same zone; the Right Bar works well.
3. Give perception the taller of the two — the list runs longer than the skill list does.

You’ll see: one column reading what you’re perceiving on top and what you’re training below, each refreshing on its own when the game sends a new list.

Fitting a long list into a narrow window (terminal)

The default sort buries what’s fading at the bottom, which is backwards when a narrow window means you only see the top few rows.

1. .editwindow perception.
2. Set Use short spell names on.
3. Cycle Sort direction to ascending.
4. Ctrl+S.

You’ll see: abbreviated names fitting a much narrower window, with the entry closest to expiring now sitting in the top row where you’ll notice it. Widen it back out and turn short names off to read the full names again.

Tips & gotchas

⚠️ This window is DragonRealms only, and the two ways of adding it disagree about that. Both pickers hide it from GemStone IV characters — it is absent from the GUI Windows catalog and the bare-.addwindow picker. The six-argument .addwindow form is not gated and will build the window for a GS4 character; you get an empty box, because GemStone IV never sends this feed. When no game is set at all, VellumFE assumes GemStone IV, so a Lich connection made without naming a game will hide this row — set the game if the row is missing on a DR character.

⚠️ The window’s three settings are honored in the terminal and ignored in the GUI. Sort direction, short spell names and text replacements are read by the TUI renderer only. A layout you author in the terminal and open in the GUI will look different — same entries, default order, full names. Author for the frontend you play in.

Sorting is by kind first, then by number, and it is not alphabetical. Percentage entries rank above everything, ordered by their own percentage. Below them come ongoing-magic (OM) entries, then indefinite and cyclic ones, then anything the client doesn’t recognize, then countable (roisaen) entries by their count — and anything marked (Fading) always sorts last. Descending order puts that ranking top-to-bottom; ascending inverts the whole thing.

The window fills on a prompt, not the instant text arrives. Entries accumulate as the game sends them and are parsed, sorted and painted when the next prompt lands. A window that looks briefly stale during a long burst catches up on its own.

A fresh list replaces the old one wholesale. The game clears the window before sending a new set, so there is no scrollback and nothing accumulates. Scrolling up shows nothing earlier because nothing earlier is kept.

Highlight rules apply here. Perception rows run through the same highlight engine as your text windows, on the perception stream — so you can color a specific entry, or make one bold, with an ordinary highlight rule.

A text replacement that empties a row removes it. If a replacement rule reduces a row to nothing, the row is dropped rather than drawn blank. That is a legitimate way to hide entries you never want to see — and an easy way to lose one by accident with an over-broad rule.

Right-clicking a row opens the window menu, not a menu for that entry. Left-click the entry to ask the server for its verbs.

The stream and buffer settings you may see referenced are fixed. The window reads one feed with a fixed cap, and neither editor offers them, because changing them was never wired up.

See also

• Experience (DragonRealms) — the other DR-only window; its natural neighbour
• Active Effects — the structured buff, debuff and cooldown feeds
• Text Windows — how stream-fed windows work generally
• Highlight Patterns — coloring specific perception entries
• Creating Layouts — placing and saving the window

[[windows]]
name = "perception"
widget_type = "perception"
row = 0
col = 80
rows = 20
cols = 40
show_border = true
title = "Perceptions"
sort_direction = "descending"
use_short_spell_names = false
text_replacements = []