Unrelated to Boxing, but could prove useful...(Remote Management)

[roguetide]

I've only been dual boxing for a few days, and i've got two 19 mages (I found though, that it's easier to level them both solo, until about 16..might just be me, though). But now, i'm missing wow during my full time 9 - 5 job. Since i'm in IT, i get to use a computer here regularly, and I'm wondering if anyone has a way of 'Remote Playing'.

I've thought about setting up VNC, and trying to play WoW through the slightly laggy connection, but i'm wondering if there's another way. It would probably be a b**ch to set up through this network to connect through a router to my computer at home...Urgh, just the idea of it hurts lol.

I'd rather not install WoW on this computer, but I might end up doing it...

Any ideas?

Ooh, i'm only talking about running one instance of WoW and playing 'normally'.

[Majestic_Clown]

thinks like VNC cant transmit the graphics quick enough to make it playable,

What you might find as a solution is using a USB harddrive and install wow onto that :D plug and play baby works a treat :D

[elo]

I've worked with half a dozen different remote control packages and non of them can really do this well. The reason is that they all work off the same premise when displaying graphics, and that is basically very fast screenshots which causes pathetic framerates compared to graphics card rendering. Now like RDP actually sends window drawing instructions for windows, etc. but not for 3D rendering so again no help there.

That being said I'd heavily warn about gaming at work. Back when EQ launched there were a great many people that actually lost jobs over the game and that's just not worth it. On the other hand I know many people, and have myself, who work for a company where this activity isn't questioned. Just make sure you're evaluating your situation appropriately.

Another angle is... dude just take a break. There is such a thing as too much and I think it's healthy from a lot of angles to use your 9-5 focused on your work and let the game go. Obsessive forum trolling is bad enough :). I personally, now that I multibox, have pretty much relegated my playing to the weekends. Aside from the forums I spend just about all my waking hours during the week working, then when the weekend comes it's all mine and seems to be a better balance. Just a thought.

[roguetide]

Haha, well you've got a point... Thing is, I rarely get time to play at home with general day to day stuff, mainly seeing family and friends after a shitty day of doing nothing. Which brings me to my next point; You'd be surprised how little work I get, sitting in my office with two other techies in a University. One of us is trained with networking, which doesn't matter since theres a large 'overwatch' LAN team. So we rarely get any work that lasts longer than 30 minutes. Kinda a 'call out' sort of work. Which is why i get SO much time to do anything I want. I mean, I often find time to bring in a movie, and watch it here (Today I have The Departed) Sounds like a good job, right? Not with two hour commute eitherway...

Though, it would lag like buggery, and to be honest, i'd never use WoW here for anything other than AH checking, or mapping out my future in PvP / honor etc. ready for some nice epix. I might try VNC anyway. Just to trawl around Orgrimmar. Isn't there a setting to only show a certain amount of colours, change quality etc? It's not VNC we use in the Uni, we use some generic RM tool, which is near live framerate.

I have an idea! The computer at home is a pretty beefy gaming machine, and with the 8800, I had some GamerOSD software, which comes with a broadcasting tool. Perhaps, I could broadcast WoW through that, view the streaming broadcast here, and control the computer using RM -viewer...

Heh.

[Binaryzero]

Here is mine way... 17" laptop and Samsung Blackjack cell phone with 3G, I tether the cell to the laptop using Windows Mobile Internet Connection sharing and I can play as near DSL speeds... If I wish. NOTE:NEVER USE FREE OPEN WiFi to play! you never know what kind of losers are sniffing the wifi traffic.

All Kidding aside I really do not play wow that often like this, just when I need to update the MOTD or post a run.

[Nisch]

I used to play DAoC at work when I was a sysadmin and there was nothing else to do. However, through a remote admin, it trasmits screenshots through vnc, which is why your remote admin idea would be terrible becuase you'd constantly see the scroll from the top of the screen to the bottom of downloading the screenshots to your PC. I should know this because that's how I ran my slave comps until my monitors arrived.........even on a local LAN, it was brutally painful.

[aetherg]

I use VNC to do hardware 5-boxing on 2 monitors. The four minion boxes have split-screen VNC sessions running over gigabit ethernet. The framerates are pretty lousy, but enough to be playable; when necessary, I can switch over to one of the minions and control it just fine. The important thing to realize is that even though the visuals look choppy in heavy action, you are still getting the full framerate of the machine behind it, so there is no delay in how your character responds.

I initially set it up as a temporary solution to see whether I liked multiboxing, before buying 3-4 more monitors, monitor stands, a new desk, etc. It's not ideal but it works well enough that I haven't felt any need to move away from it.

I'm (very slowly) working on a VNC-like program optimized specifically for multiboxing. I should be able to get significantly higher framerates than the regular VNC clients. I just spend too much time running instances to work on it ;)

Edit: in terms of actual numbers, I'd estimate I get roughly 10 FPS on each of the four VNC sessions. However, the machines behind them are running at ~40FPS, so there is a huge difference between that and something that's actually running at 10FPS. I tried several VNC packages, and using TightVNC I was actually able to get almost 20FPS on each of the sessions. Unfortunately TightVNC's viewer app takes up a lot of CPU, which was bringing my main WoW instance down to 20FPS as well, which is not acceptable for me :P