zanthor
08-13-2009, 04:27 PM
Greetings and Welcome to Introcution to Multiboxing 101: An Agnostic View of Multiboxing, I'm Zanthor and I'll be your instructor today. In our lesson today we will take a very high level look at what it takes to be a face pwning pack of death. The goal is not to teach you all you need to know, but rather to lead you down the path to making yourself an elitist multiboxing death machine.
The class will be broken down into the most basic components of multiboxing and will attempt to remain agnostic of any single game or set of tools. I'll warn you up front, I'm a WoW Player, so most of what I teach will work quite well with WoW and should apply to other games as well.
Hardware, Software, or Hybrid
User Input Redistribution (aka: Multi-casting)
In Game Movement
Targeting
Killing
Section 1: Hardware, Software, or Hybrid
The first decision you need to make is how do you want to multibox? Some users already have a beefy computer, it may already be able to run 2 or 3 or even 5 copies of their favorite game. Maybe they have two machines laying about, a real monster they built this year, and their old "piece of crap" that they just can't get rid of... Maybe you have the money and want the purity of running one computer per client.
Hardware: Hardware boxing is likely the most expensive option (though depending on your social connections you may be able to get up and running for much less (http://www.dual-boxing.com/showthread.php?p=219915).). You will be building 1 machine for each client you wish to run, you will have a heavy investment in equipment to allow you to multicast, and you will have a higher power consumption over the long haul. In addition to all this you need a monitor for each client you run.
Hardware is a very reliable and consistent setup, you will find very few challenges that you cannot overcome and very few limitations due to performance. It is also significantly easier to build a box to run 1 copy of a game on, because almost all games are designed to run one at a time.
Hardware multiboxing involves elaborate combinations of switchboxes and multicasters to function, this is covered in quite a lot of detail in other threads on this forum, so I'll leave it to you to find those.
Software: Software boxing is the easy way in, most users can fire up two copies of a game on their existing machine, many can run up to five without problems! Limitations of software boxing vary depending on your multiplexor and the software you are using. Generally you will have less screen real estate to use for your clients, but this is compensated for by the ability to resize and scale the instances you run.
Early in the life of software boxing it was hard to match what a hardware boxer could do, luckily for the software boxers of the world this isn't true anymore. Now it's actually possible to do anything a hardware boxer can, and many things a hardware boxer cannot.
For best performance you will find yourself building a very high end, very custom machine. Commonly running 8 or more GB of ram along with the best video card and quad core CPU you can afford running a 64 bit OS such as Vista 64 or Windows 7 64 (in order to access the memory over 4GB).
Hybrid: Hybrid boxing is exactly what you would expect it to be. It's utilizing software to connect the two worlds. For boxing more than 5 or 6 accounts this is likely the direction you need to be headed. For the massive massive efforts of players like Prepared and Samdeathwalker (More than 10+ clients really) it is the only option.
Generally hybrid boxers are just software boxers who also have more than one computer connected via that same software.
Section 2: User Input Redistribution (aka: Multi-casting)
No matter what method you chose to multibox you will have to solve the problem of redistributing your input. This act is called "Multi-casting" and many tools exist to handle this for you.
Repeaters are hardware or software devices that will repeat everything you do on one computer to the others. Examples are the Vectra multicasters (hardware), Keyclone, Innerspace with ISBoxer, AHK, GameCommanderPro, etc.
Software repeaters are commonly paired with Whitelist or Blacklist features to allow you to pass only desirable keystrokes through. This allows you to pass keys like your attack buttons but not your movement buttons (which will be discussed in Section 3.)
KeyMaps are features of many software applications which allow you to remap the function of a key. For example you can press 1 and have your KeyMap send each connected client the key "Control-1" instead of a vanilla 1. This is commonly utilized in FTL setups (Focusless Targetless Leaderless) which will be discussed in Section 4. Hardware boxers cannot accomplish the KeyMap behavior at this time.
Mouse Broadcast is commonly a major hurdle for multiboxers. Elements of your games user interface are easy to broadcast mouse input to, because they are all relative to the 0,0 coordinate of your top left corner of the game client. Hardware boxers and software can handle this relatively well. Where mouse broadcast gets sketchy is when you need to broadcast tot he 3d world of the game. Each players camera angle will be slightly off so you will always get slightly different results. Depending on your game this may be a limiting factor to mouse use or may be able to create macro's to synchronize your camera angles.
Section 3: In Game Movement
They key to in game movement is the ability to NOT move manually on all characters but the one you are "focusing" on. The reason for this is related to the issue discussed above with your camera and in game positioning. If your characters are not 100% syncronized and remain so, movement is impossible to keep aligned. Since internet latency makes the 100% syncronization impossible all movement needs to be managed either individually by character or by utilizing a /follow type macro.
if your game doesn't support some form of /follow system, then it's not a good candidate for multiboxing.
Section 4: Targeting
So now you are in game, you have the ability to move around as a group, and you want to kill something. There are several different philosophies on this but from a high level they are all the same; you need to target something, and cast spells or attacks on it.
The targeting is the key here, you need to come up with some method to "assist", this concept is as old as mankind. When we were all living in caves and had just barely discovered that you could put meat over a fire and have a really tasty snack mankind invented the "assist call". A bunch of us would sneak up on a pack of animals, and the leader would call out which one to go bludgeon to death... and we would all comply.
Just like that, you need to devise a method to tell your cave dwelling minions to smash your target with rocks.
Most games this is accomplished by /assist of some form.
More advanced concepts of /assist include party based assisting (/assist party1), focus based assisting (/assist focus), or the ever popular and highly complex "Focusless Targetless Leaderless" system known as FTL.
Section 5: Killing
Killing has got to be the easiest part... target something on your main character, hit your assist button that you created in section 4, and then nuke the living crap out of it.
So in conclusion, multiboxing really is this easy, there are many advanced topics to be discussed later but hopefully this gets the groundwork down for the new guys...
The class will be broken down into the most basic components of multiboxing and will attempt to remain agnostic of any single game or set of tools. I'll warn you up front, I'm a WoW Player, so most of what I teach will work quite well with WoW and should apply to other games as well.
Hardware, Software, or Hybrid
User Input Redistribution (aka: Multi-casting)
In Game Movement
Targeting
Killing
Section 1: Hardware, Software, or Hybrid
The first decision you need to make is how do you want to multibox? Some users already have a beefy computer, it may already be able to run 2 or 3 or even 5 copies of their favorite game. Maybe they have two machines laying about, a real monster they built this year, and their old "piece of crap" that they just can't get rid of... Maybe you have the money and want the purity of running one computer per client.
Hardware: Hardware boxing is likely the most expensive option (though depending on your social connections you may be able to get up and running for much less (http://www.dual-boxing.com/showthread.php?p=219915).). You will be building 1 machine for each client you wish to run, you will have a heavy investment in equipment to allow you to multicast, and you will have a higher power consumption over the long haul. In addition to all this you need a monitor for each client you run.
Hardware is a very reliable and consistent setup, you will find very few challenges that you cannot overcome and very few limitations due to performance. It is also significantly easier to build a box to run 1 copy of a game on, because almost all games are designed to run one at a time.
Hardware multiboxing involves elaborate combinations of switchboxes and multicasters to function, this is covered in quite a lot of detail in other threads on this forum, so I'll leave it to you to find those.
Software: Software boxing is the easy way in, most users can fire up two copies of a game on their existing machine, many can run up to five without problems! Limitations of software boxing vary depending on your multiplexor and the software you are using. Generally you will have less screen real estate to use for your clients, but this is compensated for by the ability to resize and scale the instances you run.
Early in the life of software boxing it was hard to match what a hardware boxer could do, luckily for the software boxers of the world this isn't true anymore. Now it's actually possible to do anything a hardware boxer can, and many things a hardware boxer cannot.
For best performance you will find yourself building a very high end, very custom machine. Commonly running 8 or more GB of ram along with the best video card and quad core CPU you can afford running a 64 bit OS such as Vista 64 or Windows 7 64 (in order to access the memory over 4GB).
Hybrid: Hybrid boxing is exactly what you would expect it to be. It's utilizing software to connect the two worlds. For boxing more than 5 or 6 accounts this is likely the direction you need to be headed. For the massive massive efforts of players like Prepared and Samdeathwalker (More than 10+ clients really) it is the only option.
Generally hybrid boxers are just software boxers who also have more than one computer connected via that same software.
Section 2: User Input Redistribution (aka: Multi-casting)
No matter what method you chose to multibox you will have to solve the problem of redistributing your input. This act is called "Multi-casting" and many tools exist to handle this for you.
Repeaters are hardware or software devices that will repeat everything you do on one computer to the others. Examples are the Vectra multicasters (hardware), Keyclone, Innerspace with ISBoxer, AHK, GameCommanderPro, etc.
Software repeaters are commonly paired with Whitelist or Blacklist features to allow you to pass only desirable keystrokes through. This allows you to pass keys like your attack buttons but not your movement buttons (which will be discussed in Section 3.)
KeyMaps are features of many software applications which allow you to remap the function of a key. For example you can press 1 and have your KeyMap send each connected client the key "Control-1" instead of a vanilla 1. This is commonly utilized in FTL setups (Focusless Targetless Leaderless) which will be discussed in Section 4. Hardware boxers cannot accomplish the KeyMap behavior at this time.
Mouse Broadcast is commonly a major hurdle for multiboxers. Elements of your games user interface are easy to broadcast mouse input to, because they are all relative to the 0,0 coordinate of your top left corner of the game client. Hardware boxers and software can handle this relatively well. Where mouse broadcast gets sketchy is when you need to broadcast tot he 3d world of the game. Each players camera angle will be slightly off so you will always get slightly different results. Depending on your game this may be a limiting factor to mouse use or may be able to create macro's to synchronize your camera angles.
Section 3: In Game Movement
They key to in game movement is the ability to NOT move manually on all characters but the one you are "focusing" on. The reason for this is related to the issue discussed above with your camera and in game positioning. If your characters are not 100% syncronized and remain so, movement is impossible to keep aligned. Since internet latency makes the 100% syncronization impossible all movement needs to be managed either individually by character or by utilizing a /follow type macro.
if your game doesn't support some form of /follow system, then it's not a good candidate for multiboxing.
Section 4: Targeting
So now you are in game, you have the ability to move around as a group, and you want to kill something. There are several different philosophies on this but from a high level they are all the same; you need to target something, and cast spells or attacks on it.
The targeting is the key here, you need to come up with some method to "assist", this concept is as old as mankind. When we were all living in caves and had just barely discovered that you could put meat over a fire and have a really tasty snack mankind invented the "assist call". A bunch of us would sneak up on a pack of animals, and the leader would call out which one to go bludgeon to death... and we would all comply.
Just like that, you need to devise a method to tell your cave dwelling minions to smash your target with rocks.
Most games this is accomplished by /assist of some form.
More advanced concepts of /assist include party based assisting (/assist party1), focus based assisting (/assist focus), or the ever popular and highly complex "Focusless Targetless Leaderless" system known as FTL.
Section 5: Killing
Killing has got to be the easiest part... target something on your main character, hit your assist button that you created in section 4, and then nuke the living crap out of it.
So in conclusion, multiboxing really is this easy, there are many advanced topics to be discussed later but hopefully this gets the groundwork down for the new guys...