A couple of questions

[Lanky]

Hi all,

First post, but I have been reading your website for quite some time. Finally decided to set up a 5 man team and I am going along ok (dinged 10 or 11 last night) mainly thanks to the guides and notes on this site, so thanks. I have a couple of questions and I'm hoping you can help me out.

The first one is probably fairly simple. I noticed a lot of the macros (the Cata ones are the ones I have been looking at) always have a second cast line. for example

/castsequence a,b,c,d
/cast Fireball

I was experimenting with this last night and I can't get it to fall through the cast sequence and use the bottom cast so what is the point of it?

The second question. When I originally set this up and started (4.0.1) I was happily getting frame rates between 40-60 on my main screen and it was all running smoothly. I logged on last night (my first run on 4.0.3a) and for some reason my framerate was between 5 and 10.

I'm running Win7 x64
Nvidia 8800GTS
8G ram
Dual Core 2.5ish Ghz machine

I am thinking I might need to replace the video card to run 5 instances on this. What do you guys think?

Thanks
Lanky

[Ughmahedhurtz]

/castsequence a,b,c,d
/cast Fireball

I was experimenting with this last night and I can't get it to fall through the cast sequence and use the bottom cast so what is the point of it?The only time that macro will fall through to Fireball is if a, b, c and d are all on cooldown, I believe.

[Ualaa]

Actually, a castsequence has to execute in order.
So, if whatever the next spell is happens to be on cooldown, then Fireball casts.

As soon as it refreshes, Fireball cannot cast as something with a higher priority (listed earlier) will cast.



Quite a few proc type abilities are listed, in the same place as the Fireball in your example.

Not really sure why, but at the moment proc abilities fire off when they're available.
They shouldn't, and chances are it is a bug that they are, but Lava Burst would fire off at every opportunity with this macro:

/castsequence Flame Shock, Lightning Bolt (x8)
/cast Lava Burst

[Lanky]

They shouldn't, and chances are it is a bug that they are, but Lava Burst would fire off at every opportunity with this macro:

/castsequence Flame Shock, Lightning Bolt (x8)
/cast Lava Burst

Ok, thats completely counter intuitive. You would think the proc based ability would go above, not below. The particular example I was playing with last night was something like this

/cast Arcane Missiles
/cast Fireball

I thought the Missiles would fire whenever they were up, otherwise the Fireball would cast, but it would always get stuck on the missiles saying they weren't ready and never fire the fireball. I will have to try it the other way around over the weekend.

Also, thanks for your ISBoxer guide Ualaa, it has been very helpful in getting my environment set up.

[Lanky]

Also something I probably should have mentioned about getting 5 instances to run at a nice frame rate. I am using ISBoxer (which I would happily recommend). I am currently running a 5 instances at the recommended resolution (which is 1600x900 - the res of my primary monitor). I tried reducing the resolution setting in ISBoxer to increase the frame rate but it made the pictures all look really blocky. I have run the game single instance at those lower resolutions before without it looking like that so I am guessing its something to do with ISBoxer.

[MiRai]

Also something I probably should have mentioned about getting 5 instances to run at a nice frame rate. I am using ISBoxer (which I would happily recommend). I am currently running a 5 instances at the recommended resolution (which is 1600x900 - the res of my primary monitor). I tried reducing the resolution setting in ISBoxer to increase the frame rate but it made the pictures all look really blocky. I have run the game single instance at those lower resolutions before without it looking like that so I am guessing its something to do with ISBoxer.
First thing that comes to mind would be to try limiting your slaves' FPS, by default it is set to 30FPS in the background which
may be too much for your system to handle [it was for my quad core]. You can alter this setting by going into your character
set in ISBoxer, clicking on each slot, and manually changing the background FPS number. I found 20 FPS in the background
was good, 15 is great. I would not recommend going lower than 10 FPS in the background as WoW gets flakey at that point.
You can even turn the foreground FPS down to 50 if you don't mind losing out on that solid 60 FPS on your main screen.

You can also play with the CPU affinity listed in each of those slots. It is usually best to just make sure that all the cores are
selected which then lets Windows figure out which screen needs more CPU.

[Lanky]

First thing that comes to mind would be to try limiting your slaves' FPS, by default it is set to 30FPS in the background which
may be too much for your system to handle [it was for my quad core]. You can alter this setting by going into your character
set in ISBoxer, clicking on each slot, and manually changing the background FPS number. I found 20 FPS in the background
was good, 15 is great. I would not recommend going lower than 10 FPS in the background as WoW gets flakey at that point.
You can even turn the foreground FPS down to 50 if you don't mind losing out on that solid 60 FPS on your main screen.

You can also play with the CPU affinity listed in each of those slots. It is usually best to just make sure that all the cores are
selected which then lets Windows figure out which screen needs more CPU.


I updated the FPS to 50 on the foreground and 15 on the background. I'm have been playing around with the CPU affinity. I can get to a happily playable state now....but I'm thinking if I get right into multi-boxing, a fairly substantial pc upgrade might be around the corner :)

[Ualaa]

Not sure what your system is like now.
Or what your budget would be for upgrading, if you decide to.

I'd suggest posting on the forums at www.isboxer.com (http://www.isboxer.com)
Lax would have the best chance at figuring out your issue.

I've got my slave windows limited to 20 FPS and the main to 60 FPS.
Fef had a post within the last few weeks, where IS Boxer would lower the settings on a slave toon and raise them on the master toon.
So, my video settings are very low for all of the slaves (4 toons, on each team), but are at moderate levels for everything else except maximum on view distance for the master of each team; and when I switch characters, the high/low settings are applied.
Low settings on the slaves, especially shadows and view distance can help out a lot too.

I'm running with each of the physical cores, on all game clients.
And none of my logical cores assigned anywhere.
Not assigning the logical cores, was a very slight performance boost for me.

[Lanky]

Not sure what your system is like now.
Or what your budget would be for upgrading, if you decide to.

I mentioned a rough hardware in the first post, I can get a more detailed one when I get home.

Nvidia 8800GTS
8G ram
Dual Core 2.5ish Ghz machine

I currently have all the graphics turned down except for the view distance on my main character. I put my main on 1 cpu and the other 4 characters on the other cpu. Might put all my characters back on both cpus and see what that does. When I changed the cpu affinity originally I was tweaking a few things....should probably see if that 1 change is making it better or worse.

As for budget, I normally spend ages convincing myself to spend the money on an upgrade, but once I do it I am normally happy to spend a bit of money and do it right, so I would probably get a nice i7 950 with a ATI 6870....

[Ualaa]

The 8GB of ram, should be plenty for 5-boxing.
Not sure how fast the ram is, DDR3 was a huge gain over DDR2 when I upgraded the processor, motherboard and ram a while back.

The 8800 is not a particularly strong video card, but most of warcrafts challenging features strain the processor more than the video card. Shadows, water effects, weather effects and spell effects push the video card. Almost everything else is more of a drain on the processor.

A dual core, not sure how well that would run five accounts. I was using a Q6600 up until two years back, and that would run five toons fine in most areas, but I was not happy with performance when flying on epic mounts, in alterac valley or in the cities.

[Lanky]

Yeah, I was hoping it was the graphics card and not the processor. Realistically if I swap over the processor, motherboard and ram....I may as well buy a new graphics card as well, and then I have effectively replaced the whole pc (well the expensive parts anyway)......Ah well, something to save towards. I will probably leave it till next year before I actually upgrade anything, but now I know what I'm up for. :)

Its not to bad in areas that aren't full of people (since the team is only about level 22 atm, thats most of the places I'm going). I flew into Ogg and everything dropped to about 5 fps......So I will be steering clear of there atm lol

[Ualaa]

You can run the Performance Monitor tool.

And then play warcraft, with five clients open.
Also have any background applications that are typically open, opened.
Or if you play with everything closed, then go that route.

After 10-15 minutes of playing.
Check the performance tool, and see which elements have reached 100% or close to it.
Anything that does, is a bottleneck for your performance.
And upgrading those, would improve you play.

[alcattle]

Yeah, I was hoping it was the graphics card and not the processor. Realistically if I swap over the processor, motherboard and ram....I may as well buy a new graphics card as well, and then I have effectively replaced the whole pc (well the expensive parts anyway)......Ah well, something to save towards. I will probably leave it till next year before I actually upgrade anything, but now I know what I'm up for. :)

Its not to bad in areas that aren't full of people (since the team is only about level 22 atm, thats most of the places I'm going). I flew into Ogg and everything dropped to about 5 fps......So I will be steering clear of there atm lol
you can try turning down some graphics settings in the game. some of the new effects suck up FPS

[Lanky]

Ualaa, thanks for the tip. I tried that out and the CPU graph was bouncing around a fair bit but its always over 80%ish so I think it has a lot to do with it. Is there an easy Performance counter to check the graphics card?

Alcattle, thanks for the tip. I have already dropped all the graphics settings to low on all 5 clients, then increased the view distance on the main screen (trying to play with the minimum view distance is annoying :) ) The only thing I can do now to increase the speed would be to drop the resolution I think. To be honest, its playable the way it is at the moment. I'm planing to build myself a new computer for christmas so that should make things a lot smoother :D

[Ualaa]

I'm told... with any Nvidia card, you can download EVGA Precision and measure the card usage.
Have not tried the tool myself.

And not sure on an equivalent for ATI cards.