Feature Ponderance - Don't even know if this is possible...

So we've got PIP... this is great.
We've got BOOBS... this is better.
We've got BOOBSJOB... this is even better...

Now... my layout is a pretty standard one, one big gnarly screen @ 1680x1050 and 3 or 4 smaller ones on my second display...

My only issue is that the PIP swaps are slow to respond. They cause a latency issue as things get resized, and in heavy pvp losing my main is still a problem. The cause of this is of course the fact that I'm switching a 560x350 window with a 1680x1050 window and the wow client has tor edraw all it's pixels at the right size... this takes time.

So my option, download the alpha, run all 4 or 5 at 1680x1050 in overlayed regions. My downside here is I have a hard time verifying all 4 are following, and i've grown used to using the smaller windows as a sanity check for that... they are also useful for keeping an eye out around you.

So I was kicking around this idea...

Wouldn't it be great to have the best of both worlds? Small "status" thumbnails and full out full resolution windows at the same time? All it would take is a second type of maximizer region that would be "view only" and would be bonded to a parent region... Show a read only low framerate snapshot (5fps) on the thumbnails, and have the actual game client at it's full resolution. Unless I'm mistaken this would give you the ability to PIP Swap 5 clients with the same speed as alt tab, and still have the ability to "watch" them on the fly...

Possible? I'd assume that the data is rendered somewhere even if it's not displayed, so I'd assume it could be done... well beyond my scope of experience though!

It occurs to me that for vista this functionality already exists in the desktop manager... the thumbnails you see when you mouse over the taskbar or windows tab are realtime...

one thing you can try to improve your pip swap performance... sam & i found this one... try upping your maxfpsbk a bit. it would seem the lower your maxfpsbk, the slower it is to render on the pip swap. i believe this is due to wow re-rendering on the new res but only as the frame rate allows... higher frame rate would mean it gets more re-rendering done within a sec (speculation)

try it and let me know what you find out

I run at 15fps for the background and unfortunately if I crank this up at all I start to suffer framerate issues on the primary window. Even if it cut the transition by 75% it wouldnt' be as fast as alt-tab currently is (which is the same as PIP with same sized regions)...

Like I said, this is pipedream material here, but I think would be a huge benefit for PVP @ 70.

Definitely doable in vista, even looks pretty easy... My dev tools are installed on my work laptop, which I may be busting out to try making a tool for this...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa969541(VS.85).aspx

Curious, are you running vista or xp?

Reason I ask...I just upgraded to vista, and I have a similar situation to yours. In fact, mine is worse because I'm running 25x16 on one monitor and the slaves at 8x6, so it's a big change. Anyway, when I moved to vista, the PiP swap speed increased TONS. I honestly had no idea this would happen, and was floored at the amount it improved. I'd always figured I would just never able to rely on this for serious pvp, but I think, even with these wacked out disparities, I could live with it as is.

Just thought I'd mention it in case you're running xp atm.

BTW, one thing you can do to ensure your followers are following is use Jamba on dual-boxing.com. This will give you a visual and audio alert whenever a toon isn't following you. IT IS AMAZING! Before this addon I lost a toon about every hour or so and didn't even know it until I was far away. No more!

Running Vista here, and yea, tools like Jamba are solid, I haven't integrated it into my UI yet as the first time I tried it had big problems, I'll probably try again once he releases a new version.