DynamicBoxer for ISBoxer: Dynamic Teams - alpha/beta tester needed/welcome !

Hi,

I've got a first rough working version of an idea I had a while ago:

I don't want to have to go back to ISBoxer Suite each time I create a new team (just my personal preference, if you love making new teams in ISBoxer + export any change, continue and move on) so I made a prototype addon modifying the behavior of ISBoxer in game addon so it doesn't have to be:

The way ISBoxer works currently is you need to create a new team for each and every combination of characters you may be multi-boxing with
This addon allows you to create only 1 team per layout and dynamically load any characters you wish into it
Likewise it lets you create new characters and teams without having to go back to isboxer suite and export to innerspace
This is quite important for instance in classic when you can't create your teams ahead of time and want to get going asap with your teams

The current release as of this writing is
https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/dynamicboxer
but check https://github.com/mooreatv/DynamicBoxer/releases in case (likely) I made a new one since

Please give it a shot and give me feedback here (and/or on https://github.com/mooreatv/DynamicBoxer/issues) !

If you use multiple bnet accounts in your team, please turn on broadcasting and do
/dbox c Foo1234
(replace Foo1234 by your main bnet handle or any other unique to you id)

And while you are at it
/dbox s someuniquesecret
(I'll add some UI for that later, or hopefully, once the kind folks at innerspace/isboxer adopt the idea, they'll generate a unique password and channel for you at export time)

Edit: the UI is there now so just log in and broadcast set channel/password in all windows, only needed once per account (it's saved) - see this update


you can get it from here as well: https://www.wowinterface.com/downloa...amicBoxer.html
and curse/twitch client

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Moorea

The way ISBoxer works currently is you need to create a new team for each and every combination of characters you may be multi-boxing with
This addon allows you to create only 1 team per layout and dynamically load any characters you wish into it

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I'm not here to detract from your effort to improve multiboxing, but the way that you describe ISBoxer is inaccurate.

In ISBoxer, you only ever need one Character Set, and you are not required to create X amount of Character Sets (or Window Layouts) for the number of possible combinations of Characters you wish to run together, at any given time. However, additional Character Sets can be created if you're changing what's assigned to it—Key Maps, Virtualization, Click Bars, Menus, etc.—but even then, those non-Character assignments can be adjusted with ISBoxer Actions, and still do not require the creation of a new Character Set.

You and I previously discussed some of this in the ISBoxer Discord when you were coming up with this idea, and I outlined the process of swapping out Characters in the Slots of your Character Set, exporting, performing a /reload in game to refresh the macros, and then playing—all of which should take approximately sixty seconds or less.

I still believe there are going to be deeper underlying issues with this add-on when it comes to custom changes in an ISBoxer profile, as well as more advanced setups, but I'll save them for another time, so as to not drown out the thread.

Also, this is an add-on, and so I've moved it to the add-on forum category.

New release ! With bug fix and code cleanup:

0.1.4 June 10th 2019
- Fix /reload on one character needing to rebroadcast from others (Issue #1)
- Better color scheme
- Only show isboxer warnings about bindings the first time
- Split into 3 files for clarity and keeping ISBoxer code changes in one place
- Refactor hooking to be cleaner and more generic and not conflict with our own functions
- Globe lint fixes

get it on https://github.com/mooreatv/DynamicBoxer/releases

until it shows up on curse

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MiRai

I'm not here to detract from your effort to improve multiboxing, but [...]

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Whether it's creating new teams or just creating new characters or changing your one pro team manually and then having to re-export, and in game reload; what my addon tries to demonstrate is that all those steps are unnecessary, even if a pro can do them in less than a minute (I can't)

By the way even the Pro system could also benefit from automatically switching class or spec without having to alt-tab out of game to isboxer suite, changing things there, exporting, reloading all windows; when you can just logout the 1 character you want to change (or change spec for pro)

But I'm mostly trying to make the most simple cases work for now (as I didn't know about "pro" until today!), my use case is I have a lot of teams, I create new teams (which means I create new characters) all the time, and I don't want to have to create in game, then exit, go to isboxer, do the setup etc etc... I just want to reuse the existing working setup with whichever toon are logged in or just created.

Again that's just an option, anyone is free to continue using what they want, the way they want, but for folks who want a bit (or a lot) more dynamic and faster setup, maybe give it a shot. If I get around maybe a short video would help demonstrate the value?

I'd like to keep this thread about feedback about the addon rather than nitpicking terminology or fight about philosophy of boxing, I think there is room for more than 1 way of doing things, and the more should be hopefully the merrier

sound interesting. will give it a go this week... i got a gazzillion of teams (23)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Moorea

Whether it's creating new teams or just creating new characters or changing your one pro team manually and then having to re-export, and in game reload; what my addon tries to demonstrate is that all those steps are unnecessary, even if a pro can do them in less than a minute (I can't)

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Moorea, in the grand scheme of things, those steps aren't unnecessary. Don't you think that improvements to the process would've been made had they been possible? After all this time, it seems odd to think that they wouldn't have, if they could have, at least for something so minor.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Moorea

I'd like to keep this thread about feedback about the addon rather than nitpicking terminology or fight about philosophy of boxing, I think there is room for more than 1 way of doing things, and the more should be hopefully the merrier

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That's fine, but it's only fair that people understand what they're getting into when using your add-on, and what they're losing by doing so. Anything configured, in ISBoxer, that relies on a custom Target, like Action Target Groups, or virtualization, are, most likely, going to break if ISBoxer doesn't know which characters are actually in the Slots of the Character Set.

When you move beyond using 10% of what ISBoxer offers, then your add-on will cease to handle things properly, unless people want to dump tens of man-hours (or more) into their profile to work around everything your add-on "breaks," simply because an add-on, by design, cannot communicate with an external program.

Mirai instead of using FUD about new things, why not think it through and say what fundamentally is required to happen outside that can’t possibly happen inside the turing complete game lua engine.

isboxer suite export only exports a partial subset of what is configured by the user, it doesn’t have to be that limited by a static binding. The current way is indeed simpler for the isboxer addon implementation until mine but as I demonstrate it doesn’t have to be.

How about you try it and tell me what doesn’t work and I (or others, hopefully too, it’s open source) can add/fix it (if it requires change to the generator of isboxer suite, which is likely, as I already would need some to avoid some ugly workaround, I think Lax indicated that’d have to be in isboxer2, which it seems I have to learn :) )

And yes I do think going from static to dynamic is potentially a game changing innovation, not something so minor :)


And to get back on topic: 0.1.5 is out, and is now available directly from curse client !

changes since 0.1.4:

- Fix for lua error when not running in multiboxing setup (Issue #3)
- Fix duplicate join event/messages
- Debug output now has multiple verbosity level, use /dbox debug 9 for most verbose (new MoLib support for it)
- Cleanup retries
- Handle message send failure

So, how do I use this? I see an explanation of what the overall intent is, but I didn't see a mention of what to do when you swap characters. If I have the Pro config set up, do I need to export all characters at once or does it just "know" which character is in the "CC" group so when I press "z" to counter a spellcast it round-robins that among the spell-counter characters and not the tanks? Any notable caveats or recommendations on how to set up details? Demo video?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ughmahedhurtz

So, how do I use this? I see an explanation of what the overall intent is, but I didn't see a mention of what to do when you swap characters. If I have the Pro config set up, do I need to export all characters at once or does it just "know" which character is in the "CC" group so when I press "z" to counter a spellcast it round-robins that among the spell-counter characters and not the tanks? Any notable caveats or recommendations on how to set up details? Demo video?

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First, thanks for looking into it/considering it !

But if you have a very customized pro system where every character is unique, it probably won't work very well (until we change isboxer to export the full config instead of the just the substituted current one), this is meant for "basic" switching and on the fly new character/team creation. Say you want to swap a dps for another, then it should work (or if you're like me and content with simple 1 through = broadcasting with the occasional vfx and round robin key and where the work happens on the character side - then it always works)

Oh and to answer "What to do when you swap character", the answer is nothing, which is the beauty of it :) [it takes about 1 sec after login for the new team composition to sync]

And yes I should make a video

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Moorea

First, thanks for looking into it/considering it !

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I'm always open to something that might make repetitive tasks easier. :P

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Moorea

But if you have a very customized pro system where every character is unique, it probably won't work very well (until we change isboxer to export the full config instead of the just the substituted current one), this is meant for "basic" switching and on the fly new character/team creation. Say you want to swap a dps for another, then it should work (or if you're like me and content with simple 1 through = broadcasting with the occasional vfx and round robin key and where the work happens on the character side - then it always works)

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Gotcha. Now if I could just get the blues to let more of my accounts into the beta...

Very happy to announce I added the last piece (replaced the hardcoded demo secret by a short 2 step channel/secret user prompting UI, that you only need to run once (using keybroadcast)) and I can now call this work 1.0.0 ! (after 6 alpha/beta releases and a lot of learning, work and testing)

1.0.0 June 11th 2019 - 1.0 After 6 alpha/beta releases
- Added UI (2 step dialog boxes, ran only once per account) to set channel/secret pair
- Also re runnable using `/dbox init` later
- Limit maximum number of times we'll try sending/syncing (to 20 times/20s after channel join or /dbox m command)
- DynBoxer.enabled boolean to turn off dynboxer even if loaded/running (used when user cancels out of the setup UI)
- Luacheck'ed and some reformatting to 120 columns
- Ensure `/dbox j` always sends the sync message
- With all the above and testing showing things working, we are I believe feature complete for 1.0 and out of prototype mode!

Now I hope folks can give it a try and give me feedback/bug reports, feature requests etc

ps: forgot to mention earlier but it also updates your EMA team for you so you can immediately push from any toon after login/character creation

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ughmahedhurtz

I'm always open to something that might make repetitive tasks easier. :P


Gotcha. Now if I could just get the blues to let more of my accounts into the beta...

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I wish I had even 1 beta access to test things :-)

But yes I did this also with classic in mind where getting going fast is important and it would be nice if someone has 2+ beta access that they would test it - TIA !