Trying out 5 boxing

[oogally]

Just wanted to introduce myself and say thanks for all the info posted here. I've been reading up on it for a few days and just started the pretty common Pally + 4 Shaman team. I'm starting out running all off of one machine: E6750 Core 2 Duo, 4 GB ram, GeForce 8600 GTS. I'm using HotkeyNet to set up and change window layout in addition to cloning keystoke. I've also got an X-keys pro on the way and 8 GB ram (max for vista home premium =/ ).

My setup seems to be doing pretty much everything I need so far apart from running out of keyboard buttons to macro. I've been really impressed with all that HotkeyNet can do: rearrange winodws on the fly, sending keystrokes and mouseclicks to specifc windows, etc. From the sound of it though, I'm thinking I ought to try out Keyclone once I get the memory added to my machine(might as well wait since my system configuration will change). It appears to have some features that are hard to come by otherwise and is a little safer from the 1 button, 1 action sort of rule.

I do have a couple questions:

I haven't been able to find out all that much about keyclone; does is also clone mouse movements/clicks? I've got HKN to clone mouse clicks, but it's a little slow, taking around 1 sec to click all 5 screens. Still, its pretty useful for opening and accepting 5 quest dialogs. If there was a good solution to this it seems that you could do just about everything with one or two beefy computers as you could by actually running 5 machines.

Also, I was thinking it would make sense to get another video card to run a second monitor. I'm using 2 monitors from the 1 card now, but I'll probably need to upgrade a lot of things by the time I'm multiboxing more BC, lich king content. From a post I read, however, it seemed as though people were having problems using more than one video card (or was this a winXP only issue?).

It's a bit of a longwinded post, but after 4 years, I'm pretty excited to have some more life breathed into WoW. Anyways, thanks for all the guides, tips and advice here. Seems like a really good community.

[Ualaa]

Welcome to Multiboxing, its a lot of fun.

A pally plus 4x shammy team is a good team to start with. The more classes which are the same, the easier it is to set up your macro's and hotkeys. The pally is a capable tank, and probably the easiest to use as a boxer. The shammies have good synergy both with a pally and with each other.

I have no experience with HotKeyNet, but really like Keyclone. From what I've heard, there are a lot of programs for software and hardware boxing which players really like. In the end, it becomes whatever your preference is. The biggest advantage, from an exclusive features point of view, for Keyclone over competitors is Hotstrings for the Leaderless, Focusfree, Targetfree assist system. Keyclone can broadcast mouseclicks, but I've found it easier to just click each window for those few effects which require mouse targeting AoE's.

An addon by Jafula, called Jamba, can be found in the Macro/Addon forum. It is amazing for boxing; I cannot recommend it strongly enough. Once you open the quest window with each toon, the slaves will follow the active toon's selections, which includes going through dialog or accepting quests. If the leader takes an escort quest, the slaves can be configured to auto accept the quest too. You can have the slaves auto select the same loot as the master for quest rewards or to not follow the leader's selection in the case of different classes. It can strobe follow every second, which greatly reduces your chance of losing a toon. If the flightmaster is open on all toons, the slaves will choose the same destination as the leader. A very useful addon with a ton of features. Jafula gives excellent support and incorporates suggestions into future builds. Highly recommended.

I'm running five clients on one screen, but a ton of players on these forums run two, three or more monitors. I'm not really aware of issues for running warcraft on more then one screen at once, but then I haven't personally attempted to set this up either. I know Keyclone has a very nice "Picture in Picture" feature. Basically you will usually have a central window for the active toon, and peripheral windows for the others. Each of the windows can be given a hotkey, which when clicked will swap their window for the large central active window.

8 gigs of ram will definitely help your computer a lot, towards running five clients smoothly. Generally speaking, ram is the biggest bang if you don't have enough. Hard disk access time can really help too; look into Solid State Drives (SSD's) if you have a fair bit of money for upgrades. With or without an SSD, SymLinking your wow folders can greatly improve your performance especially in cities. Essentially a SymLink is a sharing of information between the folders; you have a main folder with everything (generally don't run any clients from this one, and only patch this folder) then a copy per toon which contains everything except Cache, Data and Screenshots. Then symbolically link those folders from the full install to each of the ~10mb wow copies. Warcraft will load the information into memory once, and then the other copies will use it from memory rather then from storage. There is a script for SymLink on these forums, but honestly I found this to be much easier: http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardlinkshellext.html.

Quite a few people have pointed out, you can often build a second computer capable of running a couple copies of warcraft... for less then it will cost to upgrade your main machine to run five copies smoothly. Depending on what you want, its worth checking out. There are people with a lot of good advice on this site, and the technical forum is a good place for these kind of questions.

I've found for macro's, you can set up a lot of them to be something like this:

#show Lightning Bolt
/cast [help] Lesser Healing Wave; [harm] Lightning Bolt

Your one macro will now perform two functions, on a single click, depending on if your target is a hostile or a friendly. You still have all your modifier keys (Alt, Ctrl, Shift) available and never need to make a conscious choice of which spell to cast for the default click. You can double up a lot of offense abilities with support/healing abilities. This basically doubles your number of macro's.

[oogally]

Thanks for the reply Ualaa.

I had seen something on Symlinking in the forum earlier, but it looked way too technical to jump into. I heeded your advice this time though, and was pleasantly surprised at the noticeable improvement when running through Origrimmar. It also answers a question I had posed to myself when browsing Newegg: How large a SSD would I need?

The Jamba addon looks amazing! I was previously under the impression it was only for quest turn ins. Incidentally I had been hoping to find an addon which could relay tells from secondary characters to my main, and a targeting system would just be the icing on the cake. I'm anxious to try it out tomorrow.

It looks like I'm gradually getting the technical kinks worked out. By the time I get to macros and x-keys it ought to just be the fun stuff left. Thanks again for the help!

[Ticks]

Jamba is amazing, download it, use it.

If you have 7200 RPM drives or faster, you should be fine. But if you're hell bent on spending money, I'd go with the Intel 80GB SSD drives. Also, if you're running all 5 clients on one box (this is my setup), you only need one video card. Just make sure it's VERY high end. I use Radeon but Nvidia is just as good. I personally feel the most optimal setup is having two monitors. One for your main and another for the 4 slaves. It works great.

As far as Keyclone goes, I can atest to the ease of use and reliability of it. You don't have to create scripts or anything. However, if you go with the focusless/leaderless setup, you're gonna have to create keymap files that can be a headache if you're not used to it. Mouse clicks can be passed to your wow windows using Keyclone and it works reasonably well. No matter what tool you use, passing mouse clicks will always be tricky when you have different size windows for your clients. A WiFi mouse works okay if hardware boxing. Either way, mouse click passing is usually reserved for using some AoE ability, not interacting with the environment on all toons.