Base/Root Macro editor for multiple accounts?

[Vènkman]

Just started multi-boxing with 5 accounts and every time I seem to refine my methods, I am forced to go back and rewrite my entire macro listing for all 5 clients.

Is there an addon that would allow me to import macros from a file I can edit in windows?

Didnt see anything in the FAQ that covered this, I am hoping its not a stupid question.

[Wulfos]

Look at the file World of Warcraft\WTF\Account\-accountname-\macros-cache.txt. Perhaps you can use this file for editing them ... didn't test it

[Boylston]

I edit a master copy of the macros-cache.txt file mentioned in the previous reply in Notepad, then copy it out to all the proper account locations. At some point I'll make a batch file to do this, I suppose.

[Lost Ninja]

Rather hoping that one of the code wizards who frequent these forums would make a proper offline macro editor. That will do this, save it in the right locations check syntax etc. Its definitely IMO a missing program that would make multi-boxing (and all other WoW play) much easier.

If it then plugged into an in game addon, like SuperMacro thus giving extra LUA functions and or binding to macros (beating the 18+18 macro limit) it would be even more cool. :)

[Vènkman]

Rather hoping that one of the code wizards who frequent these forums would make a proper offline macro editor. That will do this, save it in the right locations check syntax etc. Its definitely IMO a missing program that would make multi-boxing (and all other WoW play) much easier.

If it then plugged into an in game addon, like SuperMacro thus giving extra LUA functions and or binding to macros (beating the 18+18 macro limit) it would be even more cool. :)

I think what Wulfos has posted will save you plenty of time. I really do hate editing through the game UI.

Thanks Wulfos.

[opt]

wow thanks for this!
rather than recreating all my UIs and customising it for each char i can just copy the settings for all the mods from one account and paste it in the respective directory. This has just saved me a heap of time:) ty!!

[Los]

There is a way of doing this through ingame api's, making/editting macro's i mean. Was putting a mod together to pull it off, but got distracted with levelling. Might have a look again later this week, and try and see if i can put something crude together to complement my mod thingy.

[Lost Ninja]

I already use the method above, mainly so I can keep my macros synced between accounts. What I'm really after is the syntax checking so often when I write a macro I get it wrong in some minor detail which only lets me down when I really really need it. :shock: So having an offline macro editor with syntax checking would be awesome...

I did look at coding it myself but my only coding experience other than poor PHP skills and HTML etc is with Turbo Pascal... which I haven't used in ten years and wasn't particularly good then. Though it might be a good project to learn on...

*goes to look at it again...*

[thinus]

I already use the method above, mainly so I can keep my macros synced between accounts. What I'm really after is the syntax checking so often when I write a macro I get it wrong in some minor detail which only lets me down when I really really need it. :shock: So having an offline macro editor with syntax checking would be awesome...

I did look at coding it myself but my only coding experience other than poor PHP skills and HTML etc is with Turbo Pascal... which I haven't used in ten years and wasn't particularly good then. Though it might be a good project to learn on...

*goes to look at it again...*

A syntax checking app might not be the easiest thing to get your feet wet with. Most development tools these days are aimed at visual design and RAD and you will find very little to help you do what you need to do.

Take a look at the free copy of Visual Studio .NET / C# you can get from Microsoft though. .NET has some good string handling routines and all types are treated as classes which makes code completion very intuitive and helpful, especially when learning the language.

A good starting point will be to come up with a set of syntax rules for macros. Once you have a list of rules the coding should be straightforward.

Another good thing about .NET / C# is the multitude of example code you can get. Particular interest to you will be "parsing" examples. There is a very good clean code example of parsing HTML tags which should be easy enough to modify to parse a macro instead.

[junx]

I use Edit Plus. You can get syntax libraries for WoW LUA and more. And it's free.

I keep a master copy of the general macros and then master copies of the class macros. then I place where I need them.

I don't think an off line editor would work for making macros while you play. The macros get written to memory and WoW will overwrite changes you made when you log out. That has been my experience anyway. I think you would have to inject the macros somehow and that could get you in trouble with Warden.

[Lost Ninja]

I use Edit Plus. You can get syntax libraries for WoW LUA and more. And it's free.

I keep a master copy of the general macros and then master copies of the class macros. then I place where I need them.

I don't think an off line editor would work for making macros while you play. The macros get written to memory and WoW will overwrite changes you made when you log out. That has been my experience anyway. I think you would have to inject the macros somehow and that could get you in trouble with Warden.

Idea I'm thinking about would be like a LUA editor, its external and has no connection with WoW except they read/write the same output file. And just like if you make a change to an addon at the moment you'd need to reload the UI or game (depending on the change), thats what I'm looking at.

I have now got VB .Net and have had a little play, I then had a good look at the macro API section of the wowwiki... then after recovering in hospital from the convulsions I decided that error checking might not be in there for a while. :D

Still it seems like a good project to learn on so I will keep working at it. :)

[sorrowharvester]

When you drop a new macro file into the appropraite WoW location, do you need to restart WoW to have it "read" the changes?

I'm assuming yes, but just wanted confirmation. :)

And is there a list somewhere of macro icon codes...?

As someone said above, WoW will overwrite your macros when you log out, so you would definitely have to at least go back to login screen.

Bookmark these :)
http://www.wowwiki.com/WoWWiki:WoW_Icons/Icon_List
http://www.wowwiki.com/WoWWiki:WoW_Icons/Icon_List/Images

[Lost Ninja]

I have yet to test it but do you need to actually quit the game and restart like you do if you're adding a file to an addon. Or would a reload UI command give the same result. So edit the macro outside of the game with syntax highlighting (possibly though looking at a macro builder more than that), save the macro and hit reload ui in game. If thats the case then it could be used to switch out macros for instance between PvE/PvP world and instances.

Something I also have on my feature list is a macro backup system, so that when it reads in macros from in game it stores them locally making it easier to have loads of macros.

This is pie in the sky, I'm not a coder (would like to be), and I seldom do the things I'm good at (like writing) due to being a lazy sod at heart. I will keep looking at this but when and if I ever actually release any working code is an entirely different matter.

[marvein]

I have yet to test it but do you need to actually quit the game and restart like you do if you're adding a file to an addon. Or would a reload UI command give the same result. So edit the macro outside of the game with syntax highlighting (possibly though looking at a macro builder more than that), save the macro and hit reload ui in game. If thats the case then it could be used to switch out macros for instance between PvE/PvP world and instances.

Something I also have on my feature list is a macro backup system, so that when it reads in macros from in game it stores them locally making it easier to have loads of macros.

This is pie in the sky, I'm not a coder (would like to be), and I seldom do the things I'm good at (like writing) due to being a lazy sod at heart. I will keep looking at this but when and if I ever actually release any working code is an entirely different matter.

just tested this. made a macro in the text file and logged in. teste the macro.. changed the macro in wow folder with the game running then did /console reloadui and WoW overwrote the macro with what I had before. So for changes to the txt to take effect you must make changes with the game closed.

[Chorizotarian]

just tested this. made a macro in the text file and logged in. teste the macro.. changed the macro in wow folder with the game running then did /console reloadui and WoW overwrote the macro with what I had before. So for changes to the txt to take effect you must make changes with the game closed.

I think you can keep it from stomping your external changes like this:





Edit WTF\Account\ACCOUNTNAME\bindings-cache.wtf
/run LoadBindings(1) (link ('http://www.wowwiki.com/API_LoadBindings'))
/rlIf you're sharing the ACCOUNTNAME directory across all of your accounts using mklink (Vista) you'll need to do 2 & 3 on all WoW copies.

[Drakkun]

Just wanted to add this, not many people know, but...

You can copy and paste text from outside WoW into the WoW macro window. I write all my macros in PSPAD ('http://www.pspad.com') and then copy them into the WoW macro window.

[Draku]

Ihave my macros/bindings and HotkeyNet Configs all managed in a spreadsheet (Excel) using vba. I then generate a batch file that copies them to the slave machines (need network shares). I click a single icon (ie the batch file) on each slave. I can also distribute new files/addons

Would anyone be interested? Do most of you have excel?

I would need to tidy up a little, but I would do this if people are interested I could probably arrange so you can configure to do a subset of the functions

[Wilbur]

I'm interested in seeing it :-D

[Molt]

Like Draku I'm using my own strange method of generating macro files for my characters and would be willing to spend the time to tidy it for general use if people're interested.

For my version I'm editing a single macro template file based on the Perl Template Toolkit (although any text template language'd work, for a while I was using the C Preprocessor..) and using that to generate the five different custom macro files for each of my characters. At the moment it's pretty much hard-coded for my characters but if people're interested I'll take a bit of time next week to try and break it into a template file, a config file (Character names, directory paths etc) and then a file to merge the two into the final config.

To give a quick and simple demo of the level of control this gives me consider the following snippet of my macro file (summarised from memory so excuse any errors, on work machine at the moment) which gives me a macro for each character which heals the next character using the class-appropriate healing spell along with the end character healing the first, with the order reversed if shift is held down. I use this for my four Shammy one Pala party when things get hectic and I'm not really sure who's being hit.. the idea is that I can easily make sure everyone's at least getting some decent healing before taking control of the situation properly when cooldowns have recovered.


MACRO [% unique_macro_id %] "Party Healing" INV_QuestionMark
#show [% quick_heal %]
/cast [modifier:shift,target=[% character_before(name) %]] [% quick_heal %]
/stopmacro [modifier:shift]
/cast [target=[% character_following(name) %]] [% quick_heal %]
END

All the [% ... %] bits are Template Toolkit instructions, and so far fairly simple ones which can easily be explained in a short document, hopefully the ones above are pretty clear given the context.

The advantages of this method is that I can have a macro which behaves differently for each character, as the one above does, but only have one place to edit it. Makes adding new features a lot simpler in my opinion.

This would involve people having a fairly decent version of Perl on their machines or me getting the tuits to write a webapp version of the processor where people can upload their own templates and download the result but in general are people interested in this kind of macro generation?

[Draku]

ok...ill try and post mine somewhere

My solution does not attempt to generate the macro code, it just keeps all macros for characters together in one place in a spreadsheet , writes the macrofile and creates the batch file to copy it into the correct place.

[Chorizotarian]

I have been using Cogwheel's MacroSequence mod for offline macro editing.
Macro Sequencing Mod - Amazing for multiboxing ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&postID=27416')

You edit the macros offline in a lua file, which is shared between all of your chars if they use the same AddOnns directory. To load changes onto a WoW client you just have to do a "/console reloadui". Each client just needs a short macro that calls the Cogwheel sequence via a "/click" command. For example:

Sequences.lua:

EarthShock = { [[
/stopcasting
/click [dead][noexists][noharm] BongosActionButton61
/cast Earth Shock
]] },

FlameShock = { [[
/stopcasting
/click [dead][noexists][noharm] BongosActionButton61
/cast Flame Shock
]] },

macros-cache.txt:

MACRO 7 "SyncSh" INV_Misc_QuestionMark
#show [modifier:ctrl] Frost Shock; Flame Shock
/click [modifier:ctrl] FrostShock; FlameShock
END

(BongosActionButton61 points to my assist macro. I use action bar page swapping to change which assist macro the button calls and therefore which char is my main.)
Using action bar pages to free focus. ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&postID=39052&highlight=page+switching#post39052')

Good points about this system:
I hardly ever need to edit the in-game macros. The part that I tweak a lot is in the lua file that I edit offline in my prefered text editor.
Keeps all of the macros in a single file, which helps me get my head around what my various toons are doing.
MacroSequence lets you sequence any slash command, so you can do some stuff that would be impossible with just in-game macros. For example, I have a "sequenced shock" macro that will sequence Earth Shock / Frost Shock between my 4 shamans, interrupting casting on *just* the one that is due up to shock.