Mouse broadcasting?

[Kaynin]

Heya! I was away for a few months, I just got into a chat on the official wow forums where a multiboxer claims to have a perfectly working mouse broadcasting tool. (Or hardware means to do so.). He wasn't very specific.

http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=5567756887&sid=1&pageNo=3

Quotes from thread:


and to the tauren above who quoted me, its nice to know there are people who actually understand how to box :)
but you said mouse was poor at best, i disagree, mine works perfectly well. perhaps your rig isnt £3k as i suggested?
and no, i dont have a 3k rig, mine comes to 1800 when new. i found out if you have a harddrive for each wow, it works fine. running off the same HD diff directories are a pain.


Earlier he said that he didn't even use follow in most situations.

Quite frankly, I think he's talking bull, but just out of curiosity, since things could have changed, there still isn't a reliable (ie. PvP situations.) way to broadcast your mouse to multiple screens/wow instances. Right? There wasn't when I left, as far as I know. :P

[Ughmahedhurtz]

I find that hard to believe. WoW isn't a synchronous game, if you'll pardon the mangled use of that word. Even if you only run two WoWs on a quad core system at 85FPS each. As soon as you start turning with the keyboard, they will begin to diverge slightly. There's just no way to prevent that on a modern PC without bannable hacks.

[TheBigBB]

Even on a top end system, my keyboard broadcasting is only I'd say 99% reliable, meaning 1 in 100 keystrokes somehow doesn't make it to one of my toons. Of course, this increases greatly as your system's specs decrease, so in theory you could keep this to a minimum with a perfect setup that never lags, but that's not reasonable at all. Even a bit of server lag would sometimes cause characters to desynch. As all multiboxers probably know, even a slight variance in anything will lead to your toons being in totally different places within a short period of time. Even one computer experiencing 1 nanosecond of lag that causes any bit of info to be different from the others will result in some kind of problem. And forget about it if any fear, knockback or slow occur. You'd be a slave to /follow even with the best broadcaster on the planet with 5 supercomputers running WoW.

[Kaynin]

Yeah, my thoughts exactly. Only with a program that exactly duplicates mouse movement within the WoW servers itself is probably near perfect enough to do anything with it. But you've nowhere near perfect control to what the wow servers register from your pc's, unless you use some packet software or hack the upload stream from your pc or something. Which would be very bannable I'd imagine. Oo

Thanks for the info anyway. It confirms my beliefs. x)

[Ughmahedhurtz]

IMO - If you want to mouse broadcast, go full hardware.I've done both. Even that won't result in perfect synchronization. :P

[Ziran]

Multicasting keys is terrible as far as keeping multiple characters in sync for turning/moving. It works if all you are doing it turning to face mob or want to take step or two forward to avoid aoe attack, but it is useless for precise navigation.

On the other hand mouse hardware broadcasting to 4 fast computers is 99.9% reliable. The only problem is initial toon direction alignment. The only way to do it currently is with /follow and that is where that 0.1% divergence comes from. Once properly aligned you can move the toons with right click, including rotating camera every way and it stays amazingly accurate.

Ziran

[Evilseed]

Mouse broadcasting is very possible. I know it is because I use it myself. I can mouse broadcast perfectly. I'll be releasing my 100% Blizzard acceptable mouse broadcaster (and key broadcaster) app pretty soon.

PS - You should see my warlocks with their rain of fire. So tight :)

[Stabface]

It is indeed possible and there are applications that do it. I'm not sure if it's 100% perfect though because the applications I know of will get you banned from WoW because they are designed for automation / botting. Needless to say I haven't tried any of them.

Looking forward to your app, Evilseed... :)

[Evilseed]

It is indeed possible and there are applications that do it. I'm not sure if it's 100% perfect though because the applications I know of will get you banned from WoW because they are designed for automation / botting. Needless to say I haven't tried any of them.

Looking forward to your app, Evilseed... :)

In all actuality, Keyclone, AHK, my app, and bot programs essentially send commands to the WoW program in the same fashion. The reason bot programs ban you is because Blizzard has specified in their Warden to seek out those signatures and notify back to Blizzard, and then they choose to blanket ban.

So it isn't an issue if it is a mouse cloning program, it is an issue of the mouse cloning program helping to bot (bad) , or is it helping people to play multiple characters w/o any automation (legit).

Mine isn't a bot :)

I have some close relationships with Blizzard so I've been working with them hand in hand. More to come later :)

[TheBigBB]

Well I guess you'd still have to use follow here and there, just not as often?

[Evilseed]

I am programming my mouse cloner to only do screen selecting. For example, I can cast an AOE spell on top my guy, or cast an AOE spell to the far right on all my guys, etc.

It is pretty powerful, but for the reason I'm doing a lot of communication with Blizzard as I will be locking down some of the power to make sure it isn't used for botting :) I can't say what features will be in it just yet as it is pretty hush hush for now.

I built up a lot of contacts with Blizzard through my Wowhead experience (I was the former CEO, sold the website).

[Carnage]

Was talking to siker yesterday, he says he has a mouse broadcaster - he was able to cast rain of fire ect.. ontop of each of his warlocks - just how it was before the minimap ping method was removed.

However he said it was still very buggy, i dont think its possible to do it perfectly - would be nice to be able to use such a thing for quests ect..

[Frosty]

I built up a lot of contacts with Blizzard through my Wowhead experience (I was the former CEO, sold the website).So this allows you to use the registered Blizzard trademark "Soon" for the release date right? :P

[Evilseed]

I built up a lot of contacts with Blizzard through my Wowhead experience (I was the former CEO, sold the website).So this allows you to use the registered Blizzard trademark "Soon" for the release date right? :P

No comment :)

[skarlot]

from a software perspective, creating a program to spin toons synched up via camera looking or whateever is possible but consider,..
a) each window would need to get exactly the same amount of mouse move messages (or same total x/y distance) say..
b) WoW may have maths that affect the camera look speed, such as, their camera look slider, the resolution, zoom, who knows what else... could be anything
c) you'd have to completely trap the foreground input some how, and fake input to the foreground window as well so it doesn't run ahead..

all it's possible, but for what it's worth, in Octopus I just said if WoW is entering mouselooking, don't give it any mouse move messages. The logistics of implementing it relative to what you gain in gameplay... and already dealing with crap like WoW moving the cursor into the DESKTOP center during mouselooking (why it doesn't go to the WINDOW center instead??, lack of foresight on Blizzards part! (lol).. sif not see multiboxing apps spawning) and windows disobeying cursor posititioning under stress... well, it's not something I'm in hurry to try. Good luck to anyone who wants to :)

Octopus makes a pretty good go at mouse injection (if your comfortable with DLL hooking!) while keeping it reasonably sane for the developer :)

[Evilseed]

from a software perspective, creating a program to spin toons synched up via camera looking or whateever is possible but consider,..
a) each window would need to get exactly the same amount of mouse move messages (or same total x/y distance) say..
b) WoW may have maths that affect the camera look speed, such as, their camera look slider, the resolution, zoom, who knows what else... could be anything
c) you'd have to completely trap the foreground input some how, and fake input to the foreground window as well so it doesn't run ahead..

all it's possible, but for what it's worth, in Octopus I just said if WoW is entering mouselooking, don't give it any mouse move messages. The logistics of implementing it relative to what you gain in gameplay... and already dealing with crap like WoW moving the cursor into the DESKTOP center during mouselooking (why it doesn't go to the WINDOW center instead??, lack of foresight on Blizzards part! (lol).. sif not see multiboxing apps spawning) and windows disobeying cursor posititioning under stress... well, it's not something I'm in hurry to try. Good luck to anyone who wants to :)

Octopus makes a pretty good go at mouse injection (if your comfortable with DLL hooking!) while keeping it reasonably sane for the developer :)

Looks like you will be quite surprised then when you see my app :)

[BobGnarly]

Are you talking about an all software (all clients on one machine) approach, or a multi-machine hardware based one?

If this is as good as you're letting on, I'm going to love it. Since the beginning I've wanted to run a mage team and a rogue team.

So can we expect this tomorrow then? :)