(Almost) full-featured slave bars on main

I haven't seen this technique mentioned/discussed before, so please let me know if this is old news.

Using a combination of ISBoxer video feeds, repeater regions and placement of UI elements it is possible to have almost fully-featured clickable UI elements (bars, etc.) from your slaves visible and usable from your main.

First a couple of pics and then the explanation:

http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c2...SlaveBars1.jpg

http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c2...BarsDetail.jpg

In the first shot you can see I am dual-boxing EQ. My main is a Shadowknight and my slave is a Shaman.

I have my main's spell cast window in the default spot on the left of the screen near the bottom. Next to it is the topic of this post - that is my slave's spell cast window. In the first screenshot I have just clicked where my slave's Light Healing gem appears. As you can see, the window has darkened, indicating a spell cast in progress.

On the next shot you can see more detail of that region of the first shot. I have placed a video feed of my slave next to the spell cast windows. In it you should be able to make out that on my slave, the cursor is over the same spell gem (the tooltip is visible) and that my slave is in the process of casting (casting window in top left quadrant). You may also notice that on my slave, the spell cast window is not on the left edge of the screen but indented by the width of the spell cast window.

Here is how to achieve this effect:

The placement of the two spell cast windows adjacent to each other (rather than in identical positions) but on different screens is the key to this technique. Once that is done, place a video feed source over the slave's spell cast window and a video feed viewer (output) in the same location on the main character's window. Then, on your main, create a repeater region with a Target of 2 and ensure you use KVM mode (block local clicks). Now size and place the repeater region exactly over the video feed output. Voila, when you click on the video feed the click falls through to the repeater region and is passed to your slave, resulting in a click in the slave's window. Unlike the standard use of a repeater region you also get visual feedback of the click.

Drawbacks? 1) The main one is that you will use more screen real estate if you use this technique. I'll probably create some custom UI elements for use in EQ that combine everything I want from my slaves on my main. I'm also working on doing this in WoW with 5-boxing (and managing as much as possible through key maps) but it is quite a bit of work to set up. 2) Additionally, I lose most of the tooltips from my slaves and some of the tooltips on my main are covered up by the video feed. Partly transparent feeds may partly alleviate these issues.

Anyway, this is just the basic idea. I'm sure there are some clever variations or other uses for this technique. I'd love to hear them.

Alge

EDIT: Proppa Grammer n speling n some of them little curly things.

Very nice Alge,

I hadn't really looked into the video feed capabilities of the latest ISBoxer. There are still a number of specialized spells I use on my WoW alts that I try to click on during specialized fights by actually moving the mouse onto their screens and clicking (like innervate, healing rain, multi-shot). With this layout, it would make use of at least some of these much easier. I could even use things like Kill Shot for my hunter since I could just easily spam click it while continuing to DPS when the boss is under 20% health.

Anyway, thanks for showing us how you've played around with it!