8in1 SingleBoxing

[frozen]

Yea the title makes no sense, I'm not that creative. Basically it's this, 8 clients on one box. Quad core with 8g mem, and a 8800GT Vid card in Ubuntu Linux using dual-head monitors. Using pip,dnp and so on. Runs flawlessly except for the fact that Keyclone "falls asleep" after about 15 min or so.. this doesn't affect game play it only keeps you from using setup/add/remove buttons. You can still pass keys use the dnp/rr and override hotkeys. I wanted to do a full 10 on one box but 8 is flawless and 9 will only work if you disable all addons(even then the clients crash alot). 9 pegs all 4 cores of my processor to 100% causing one or more clients to crash unexpectedly. Sometimes at loadup. Anyway just thought I'd share since this seems to be the place to do so. :)

http://img398.imageshack.us/img398/1563/allxu0.th.jpg ('http://img398.imageshack.us/my.php?image=allxu0.jpg')

[Syro]

That's cool!

I'm more curious as to how you got WoW working so well in Ubuntu :D

[frozen]

I have no idea if the repo's that are in this are current for wine but the part to pay attention to is the registry entry.

Ubuntu Forums - World of Warcraft Howto ('https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WorldofWarcraft')

After you have made the reg mod by going to a gnome-terminal and typing regedit, I also created 9 copies of wow. 8 of which were "incomplete." Meaning I symlinked the "data", "interface", and "Accounts" folders back to the main unused wow folder.

Also one thing I learned is that using pip is necessary. It increases performance a lot. Having several clients open without them in "pip mode" slows the system down quite a bit.

Also I set <shift>-F1 thru <shift>-F8 to change which client is full screen. I also made 8 macro's that are controlled by the same <shift>-?? keys. This means when I change a client to main screen by typing <shift>-?? it also changes the leader of the group to that character. As well as changing "Grapevine" (addon it rocks) to forward tells to that char as well. It also changes focus of all characters to the main. This allows for universal macro that when clicked follows and assists focus. So basically I hit <shift>-F1 and 1 all characters change focus, follow, change leader and change "grapevine" settings. Making the need for one character to "lead" the others irrelevant. Any character can lead. Also if one dies simply press <shift>-F2 and your "second" client becomes leader simply press 1 and everyone will assist and follow. :)

If anyone wants macro's I use or keyclone.ini for 5 or 8 chars let me know, I'd be happy to help. :)

[bsdll]

Just on a side note, from my experience with running 7 clients on a Windows XP machine with 2Gb RAM and a dual core T9400 (I think), the killer is not the actual time spent processing the game itself, it's the loading and caching on the disk.

Make sure you let your first copy of WoW completely load and wait for the hard disk activity to come to a stop. Then start loading the other clients. By the time each one has gone to the loading screen I am logging in on the next one. Then, once the are all loaded, I wait a good minute for the hard disk to die down again.

Travelling to a city is the same. I used totally avoid them. Now, I put one into the city and wait for the hard disk to completely come to a stop. Then I enter the chars one at a time, with a little pause in between. I went from avoidance to walking 5 chars through a city no probem.

Logging out is a similar process. Make sure each one gets a clean exit and has completely closed before closing the next one. If I go too fast, they tend to crash instead of exit properly.

With my fairly crappy specs, I can run 5 clients no problem at all and 7 when I need to swap stuff around or trade to my banks. It just takes a bit of extra patience to let the operating system cache WoW's data fully before WoW starts thrashing the hard disk.

[Qlimax]

This looks great, I would like to see if there is a difference in processing power of x86 ubuntu or windows, on the same machine. Also, have you tried KDE instead of gnome? Thanks for doing this, now you make me excited ^^. Keyclone, do you support cross-platform linkage or is it buggy?

[frozen]

I have a friend who has the exact system I do and he tries to run 5 clients & keyclone. It will run on occasion but the difference between my system and his is that he runs KDE and I run GNOME. He has intermittent lockups which affect the entire system when running Wow. Even when he runs only one client this happens. So, what I gather from this is that KDE not a good mix with Wow. I use Nvidia/Gnome. Of course I will also say that if you an ATI video card don't bother. It's really more work than it's worth. That doesn't mean it can't work. I got it to work on my Compaq laptop with an ATI 200M. But it could not be run on display :0 it had to be on display :1 or up. In case you want to know how to do that it's actually quite simple.

For ATI:
Boot, do not log into linux.
Press <ctrl><alt>+F2 (or F3-F6) then log in.
Type "xinit -- :2 (this will start a terminal session on <ctrl><alt>+F9)
Press <ctrl><alt>+F9
Then move the cursor to the little terminal window and change to the Wow folder.
Type wine wow.exe (-opengl if you don't have that set already in your Config.WTF)

I don't remember all the reasons ATI will not properly do OpenGL on display :0 but anyway this works.

Also I've noticed (with my system) that if you make sure you have "[X]Use Hardware" checked in the sound section of Wow that this does improve performance.

[keyclone]

@frozen
that seems odd... please PM me your email address so i can check to see if i can figure out what's wrong

talk to you soon,

Rob

[ChaoticMonk]

Is symlinking WoW in windows vista possible? If so, anyone know a good guide?

[Chrysanthe]

It actually is possible, not sure, if you need the Ultimate edition though, but you can try to symlink by using the mklink command on the command prompt.
For example:

mklink /d Data \\Server\GameData\WoW\Data\
mklink /d Interface \\Server\GameData\WoW\Interface\
.
.
mklink /d WTF D:\GameData\WoW\WTF

If you need additional help, just ask away. I'm running my five WoW instances (on three computers) symlinked from my local file server :D
And that looks like this:

Directory of D:\Games\WoW1

09/26/2008 10:13 PM <DIR> ..
05/04/2008 06:40 PM <DIR> Cache
06/09/2008 11:40 PM <SYMLINKD> Data [\\Server\sda\Games\WoWData\Data\]
09/23/2008 01:30 PM <DIR> Errors
06/09/2008 11:41 PM <SYMLINKD> Interface [\\Server\sda\Games\WoWData\Interface\]
09/23/2008 01:30 PM <DIR> Logs
06/09/2008 11:41 PM <SYMLINKD> Screenshots [\\Server\sda\Games\WoWData\Screenshots\]
06/17/2008 01:52 PM <DIR> WDB
05/31/2008 10:46 PM <SYMLINKD> WTF [D:\Games\WoWData\WoW1\]
.
.

[southeastbeast]

Sick! I just got Ubuntu 8.10 installed.... glad I didn't get Kubuntu after hearing what you said about KDE. hehe. I just read on the wiki about simlinking or whatever it is called, going to give that a try... How do you setup pip? and what is dnp?

I think I may need an upgrade... AMD5000+black@3.0ghz, 2ghz corsair DDR 800mhz ram (2 dead slots on board, I have 2x more sticks) and a 9600gt card. I only plan on running 4 clients... right now rocking a Samsung syncmaster 2220wm (22"1680x1050)

Any suggestions on upgrades? I want a new proc, board, monitor, and ram... should be sufficient? AMD Phenom or Intel quad core (I am getting a new board anyways >;])

And does outputting on both dvi's on one video card kill fps like in Windows?

Thanks for info! The linux dual-boxing wiki needs a link to a more detailed guide.... or maybe you could write one up?? <3

[phara]

With my fairly crappy specs, I can run 5 clients no problem at all and 7 when I need to swap stuff around or trade to my banks. It just takes a bit of extra patience to let the operating system cache WoW's data fully before WoW starts thrashing the hard disk.@bsdll - How do have your game folders set up (single, multiple copies, symlinks)? Sounds like you may have full game folder copies. I normally run 5 but have run 6 before and it' still blazing fast using symlinks for the data folder. I had multiple full copies at one time on a single disk and that killed performance when loading, entering a city, or opening the map.

@frozen - This is pretty sweet. I think I'll set up Ubuntu for my 5box system =p

[twigboy2000]

Hmm, I'm not so sure the lockups are KDE related but I intend to find out when I get home tonight. I've experienced the same thing on one of my systems running kubuntu 8.04. It happens with any 3D game and sometimes when watching DVD's. From what I had read, the issues stem from my XFX 790i ultra board. My older system has an ASUS M2N32-SLI and it runs just fine.

It's been my understanding that there are issues with the firmware in the nforce 7x0i series boards and some combination of geforce driver and kernel 2.6.24 and older. I'm upgrading the newer system to Kubuntu 8.10 beta this week to see if the newer kernel doesn't resolve the lockups. That system is stable when running XP. I'll give gnome a try tonight to see if that makes a difference.

-twig

[frozen]

As for my maximizer setup and so on.. Pastbin link ('http://pastebin.com/f3ffa2477') As for writing a guide.. I'll try to do so in my spare time. :)

I run
Wine 1.1.6~winehq0~ubuntu~8.04-0ubuntu1 (hardy)
Nvidia 169.12 (Geforce 8800GT-512)
Ubuntu Linux-x86_64 (quad) (8 wow's peg all four cores at approx 97%-99%)
8gig memory (unnecessary overkill 4g is plenty 8 wow's barely uses 64% mem with 4g)
When I get together some relevant information in say... guide format I will post. :)

Oh and on a fun note. I let the smoke out of the system yesterday. heh Seems that doing all this with a 420w power supply is not the best idea. Even though I believe that to be the min req for my setup.
Needless to say I picked up a 650w ps from Frys for $54 and my system seems to be happy with that. Yes I got lucky only the ps caught fire. hehe

Oh and as for KDE random lockups.. My friend has an identical system to mine except he runs KDE instead of gnome. His has random lockups all the time.