New multibox tool; Ideal functions?

Hi guys,

I'm going to write my own multiboxing tool (as a free alternative to Keyclone and such), and was wondering what type of functions people think it should have.

Local key sharing
Network key sharing
Maximizer
Automatic window detection
Key ignore list

They seem like the obvious ones for me; anyone else got ideas? Could make a function for scripting but think this may cross the "bot" line (i.e. If you press "1", the program presses "1, 2, 3, 4, 5" with intervals between each).

Any ideas would be much appreciated.

mouse click coordination (for those annoying "click on ground" AoE's)

Profile setup for people with multiple teams with different settings.
Some games require a 'lock to foreground' ability in order to broadcast keys, someth9ing to look into.

This weekend I started work on a little tool called JFBI (just f*cking broadcast it).

I'm a busy bee though, with spare time to code only at weekends, so if somebody else comes up with the following before I do then I won't even bother:

- Single host broadcasting of ALL keys, including extended keys to designated windows.
- Open source (and therefore no "call home" nonsense).
- Maximiser type functionality.
- Open source.
- Configurable "override" key to shut off broadcasting
- Open source.

No ideas there, obviously, because I've always kept my boxing really, really, simple but if you manage to push an early version with that sort of functionality in (one I can build myself) then I'd be a happy beta tester!

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Originally Posted by Spunktank

Could make a function for scripting but think this may cross the "bot" line (i.e. If you press "1", the program presses "1, 2, 3, 4, 5" with intervals between each)

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yep. botting, dont do it.

otherwise, something to clicking in a certain area with a particular mouse button translates to a keypress on another screen.
ie. left-mouse in this-square-of-screen-space (10,10 to 20,20 on main) is the same as Shift-Q on toon2.

mouse broadcasting with on/off setting
click through function (click on main, reacts on alt)

If you can make it so my shamans fire gnomes instead of LBs it would be awesome. Just imagine the outcry... "OMG, That multiboxer is firing gnomes at me!"

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Originally Posted by Spunktank

Any ideas would be much appreciated.

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I would try and support the other tools where they are weak versus making a new multiplexer. If the multiplexers were open a bit with the net protocol you could feed to them or if they were hookable you could do the same.

Anyways, what I have been toying with:

* Button mash throttle, reduce same repeated keys on a key by key basis. So if you spaz out and hit backspace for your 'all nuke key 3 times per second, it will 'absorb' 2 of them if your throttle was at 1 per second.

* Log key events to hires timestamp log (timestamp, keybind, keyevent, flag/comment) for crazy people to look at with a separate tool. Flags might be throttled to dev null, keystroke underbuffered, etc.

* Load /wtf/account/${acct}/bindings-cache.wtf into the tool for planning your maps (you want to map 'G' to something in your Windows tool, the tool will already tell you that G is target previous noob, shift-B is OpenAllBags, etc. Useful for planning keys. Pick a addon like BindPad and allow some further planning such as "bind ALT-G CLICK BindPadMacro:gnf" and possibly laying that out a bit.

* Detect end user lag to a degree to smartly tell the user they are boned for video or similar. So the time it takes to shuffle a window and the cpu spike occurs (see above log). So comment 'max cpu' or 'disk trash' or 'virtual memory cap hit'

So a multiplexer and a service that monitors the system a bit as well as the multiplexer and its targets.

EDIT: And reads mail and does twitter.

To be a serious contender in the software area here's a list of absolute minimums

Easy to use
Easy to setup
Instant PiP swap
Networkable
Keymap / Hotkey configuration
Easy drop in macro creation

Sit in IRC all day and answer questions about your product.
Sit on a forum all day and answer questions about your product.

It would be nice to see all this in a free product, GL.

The one thing I would love to see is the ability to edit keybinds, macro's, interface, and video for multiple toons.

@Zal: Quite confused as to how I could impliment this. The problem lies with the fact that multiboxers like myself who use the same computer only have one mouse and multiple screens, therefore my mouse can only be in one place at any one time.. I'll have a think on that one.

@Redbeard: What type of options would you like to be saved? Are we talking just screen position and blacklisted keys, or something more?

@Otletcs: What language would you be coding it in? I'm comfortable in asm/c++, so could maybe even work on one together..

@confusedtx5: Very easy to impliment that, but firstly it'd be an arse for the user to set up screen regions and which keys that'd equate to on each slave, and also I don't really see a purpose for it? I suppose I could include that certain keys get translated (button '1' on main could be 'shift+q' on slave 1), but again, I don't really see how this is useful?

@alcattle: As said before, across networks this would be fine, but on split screen I don't see many ways I can do it. One option is to only qualify clicks, so that if I click on say action bar button 1, the mouse quickly after jumps to action bar 1 on a slave, clicks it, and then returns to it's original location.

@powerwar: I'll look into that...maybe...probably not though.

@HPVAC: Well my programming comes from game hacking and reverse engineering, so this is actually right down my street, but problems here lie with how much of that is entirely legal. Going around patching other peoples programs, especially commercial ones is a bit of a dodgy area. Also, with coding from scratch I'd have alot more control and efficiency with adding new functions and such. I don't quite get the purpose of point 1, maybe you could elabirate on the usefulness of that? What if I was mashing and ended up buffering 2 of my keypresses straight after the GCD? I'd be a second later than I could have been on casting my spell.. I quite like the idea of some of your points though :)

@Svpernova09: Well, the fact that it will be most likely open source + free will surely put it as a contender somewhere. And the rest is exactly why I'm here asking before I make it, as easy for me might not be easy for others. Easy to use and setup are two of my main priorities, without letting functionality split at the same time. Maybe I could make seperate Basic (Load and go) and Advanced (More control) options, so the user can decide the compromise between the two.

@Fizzler: You posted while I was replying :) I'll have a look into the way blizzard stores these options, I can't imagine it's too hard to do.

I have to second the idea of macro duplication. I put some thought into how this would look just last week. Integration of this into Jamba would be ideal though, as the platform is already there.

Your team is toons 1,2,3,4,5, but you would setup a "sub team" of toons 2,3,4,5. Toons 3,4,5 would be "macro slaves", toon 2 would be the "macro host".

Something like that...

I'm bored at work...

File Virtualization would be nice - IS does it for WOW
Barring that - capability to disable sound on specific instances of the software
Departure of focus on just WOW. - LOTRO and DAOC, for instance, would be within what's acceptable to have the scripting you described above.

Yes, different setups for screens and keys is what i meant.

For example, maybe sometimes i 3 box with 2 friends and want a particular layout at that point. Other times i play all 5 chars, etc etc.

In RE: to super, those are all nice ideals but, for example, keyclone doesnt have instant PiP switching.

You might ask yourself what you can provide that a free program like HKN doesnt already provide to save yourself some time.

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@Otletcs: What language would you be coding it in? I'm comfortable in asm/c++, so could maybe even work on one together..

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For this I'm using straight C. I'm equally comfortable with C++ and fairly comfortable with any number of other languages (including a few assembly languages, although I wouldn't want to try my hand at cutting a program from scratch using any of those these days!).

I'm not a Windows programmer though - I make my living from real-time systems under Unix and VMS so it's all a learning experience for me.

Although I appreciated the offer, working with somebody else is too much commitment for me.

I'll stick the code into a public repository (probably Google Code) and people can use it for whatever they want then, but by the time I deliver my baby project I expect you will have leap-frogged me - I really will be spending very little time on it.

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Originally Posted by Powerwar

If you can make it so my shamans fire gnomes instead of LBs it would be awesome. Just imagine the outcry... "OMG, That multiboxer is firing gnomes at me!"

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God damn it that is funny.

Focus on WoW is because WoW has 15 Million Subscribers while the others ... well has anyone else broken a million? 5 million? Etc.

If you guys want a working, Open Source codebase to start from.. it would be nice to get more developers involved with Mubox. So far it's just been me, and I only have so much time on my hands and there are so many great suggestions on this thread I'd be busy for the next year, if you're interested check http://mubox.codeplex.com. So far working well, and based on web-stats it gets run on a little over 1200 unique machines a week. I can provide OS stats if you're interested.

Source code is available for download @ http://mubox.codeplex.com/SourceControl/ListDownloadableCommits.aspx

CodePlex also has support for SVN and TFS clients.

If not, good luck, I'd like to see some fresh alternatives that don't cost a dime.

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Originally Posted by Zal

mouse click coordination (for those annoying "click on ground" AoE's)

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Originally Posted by alcattle

mouse broadcasting with on/off setting click through function (click on main, reacts on alt)

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Similar to this? http://mubox.codeplex.com/Wiki/View....=Mouse%20Clone

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Originally Posted by Otlecs

This weekend I started work on a little tool called JFBI (just f*cking broadcast it).

I'm a busy bee though, with spare time to code only at weekends, so if somebody else comes up with the following before I do then I won't even bother:

- Single host broadcasting of ALL keys, including extended keys to designated windows.
- Open source (and therefore no "call home" nonsense).
- Maximiser type functionality.
- Open source.
- Configurable "override" key to shut off broadcasting
- Open source.

No ideas there, obviously, because I've always kept my boxing really, really, simple but if you manage to push an early version with that sort of functionality in (one I can build myself) then I'd be a happy beta tester!

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Mubox is OpenSource but doesn't current implement "Maximizer" behavior, partially because I've never used any other multiboxing tools and have no idea what "Maximizer" is. Could someone explain in layman's terms? The work on Version 1.4 will begin later this month as most known-issues within Mubox have been resolved, and thus I'm scratching together a feature list. I hear this term often, but have no idea how it should be implemented.

All other points I believe are covered, except that the "override" key is not currently configurable ("Hot Key Configuration" is slated for 1.4, among a few other keyboard-related items, such as a "no broadcast" config (per-client), a "desktop only" config (to support 3rd party tools such as Ventrillo which are activated by global hotkeys), and "FTL" modification of keys (to support simplified FTL macro setup, something I've been burning to implement for over a month now, but can't really bother until I call Version 1.3 "final".)

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Originally Posted by Spunktank

@alcattle: As said before, across networks this would be fine, but on split screen I don't see many ways I can do it. One option is to only qualify clicks, so that if I click on say action bar button 1, the mouse quickly after jumps to action bar 1 on a slave, clicks it, and then returns to it's original location.

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It's possible for the most part, one problem is that WoW actually uses the mouse position and disregards coordinate info you feed it, this is the only reason you need to relocate the mouse. Other games may not have this problem, I only play WoW.

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Originally Posted by Mubox

It's possible for the most part, one problem is that WoW actually uses the mouse position and disregards coordinate info you feed it, this is the only reason you need to relocate the mouse. Other games may not have this problem, I only play WoW.

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Odd, IS doesn't suffer any issues with this.

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Originally Posted by zanthor

Odd, IS doesn't suffer any issues with this.

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Doesn't InnerSpace sandbox WoW? I wouldn't know for sure, as I've never used InnerSpace, but that was my belief. It's one thing to fool an application, it's another entirely to use strict Win32 APIs to acheive similar results.

I do plan on revisiting this with the next version of Mubox in the hopes of adding a new feature to the mix, and (hopefully) correcting a known-issue with the mouse "glitching" when I target the terrain to lay down AoEs. I assume the glitching is specific to the order of Mouse Events and will likely require significant reworking of the Mouse Handling code at the client-side. As far as the mouse positioning, once I had a "working" solution I caved in and left it as is.

It would be interesting to understand better how InnerSpace works, one reason I've never used InnerSpace is because historically Blizz has banned users who use InnerSpace under the auspices of it being considered a "Cheat Program".. Also, I'm not talking smack, mind you, just ask Lax. It's unfortunate but has happened. Personally I never wanted to take a chance and get burned, fact is there are botting bolt-ons for IS, which is probably why Blizz blindly earmarked all IS users as botters at one point.

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Originally Posted by Mubox

It would be interesting to understand better how InnerSpace works, one reason I've never used InnerSpace is because historically Blizz has banned users who use InnerSpace under the auspices of it being considered a "Cheat Program".. Also, I'm not talking smack, mind you, just ask Lax. It's unfortunate but has happened. Personally I never wanted to take a chance and get burned, fact is there are botting bolt-ons for IS, which is probably why Blizz blindly earmarked all IS users as botters at one point.

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Blizzard has not classified Inner Space as a cheat program for quite some time, if at all. We had these discussions about a year ago when I first started posting on dual-boxing.com, so if you really want you can probably find the discussion threads by looking at my oldest posts.

It is significant to note that the software they were concerned about with relation to Inner Space has not been available for over a year, and no Inner Space users have been banned in that time either. Inner Space has no, and needs no, protection from Warden because the right people at Blizzard know better than to classify Inner Space itself a cheat.

I'd like free as in open source free as opposed to free as in free beer (hotkeynet) as for free beer hotkeynet is already perfect - minus the phone home, etc... - it seems Mubox's is what I want ?

Mubox - can one svn sync that codepex thing and type "make" and obtain a working executable from your sources ? what dev env you need ? (VC++? something free ?)

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Originally Posted by Moorea

hotkeynet is already perfect - minus the phone home, etc..

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Thanks for the kind words! :)

Starting with today's build (200):

-- HotkeyNet no longer calls home.

-- HotkeyNet no longer requires an Internet connection.

-- HotkeyNet no longer expires.

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Originally Posted by Freddie

Thanks for the kind words! :)

Starting with today's build (200):

-- HotkeyNet no longer calls home.

-- HotkeyNet no longer requires an Internet connection.

-- HotkeyNet no longer expires.

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Why did you make those changes, Freddie?

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Originally Posted by Owltoid

Why did you make those changes, Freddie?

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Originally I put those things in the program in case one day I began selling it. The idea was to prevent free old versions of the program from getting passed around and competing with future for-sale versions.

But HotkeyNet has been free for two years and its user numbers haven't grown high enough for me to want to bother charging for it. If it hasn't happened by now, I don't think it's ever going to happen.

The authorization scheme has always been a nuisance. It prevented people who lack an Internet connection from using it. It often prevented people from using the program in corporations. (HotkeyNet gets used in companies. It's not just a multiboxing program.) It scared some people off because they worried that the program contained malware.

If the call-home code isn't ever going to be of benefit to me, and if it annoys users, what's the point? There isn't any. So I removed it today.

Also, today's build was number 200. That's a nice round number, and I wanted to do something special to celebrate. Over the last two years there have been some special people (including you) who contributed tremendously to the program by testing and reporting bugs and making suggestions. The best way to celebrate is to do something tangible to show my appreciation for you folks, and this is what I thought of.

Freddie you rock !!!!

Hehe thanks. :)

:):):)

<Bows to Freddie in respect>

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Originally Posted by Freddie

Thanks for the kind words! :)

Starting with today's build (200):

-- HotkeyNet no longer calls home.

-- HotkeyNet no longer requires an Internet connection.

-- HotkeyNet no longer expires.

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ALL HAIL THE FREDDIE! :D
(and thanks for an awesome program)

These are a few of my favorite things:

• Separate login configurations (for single battle net account support)
• Configurable window locations and sizes for multiple sessions on the same machine
• Fast swapping of windows
• Three broadcast modes: Full, Configured and None that controls which keypresses or mouse operations are broadcast
• *Macro export, import, cloning (probably better as a WoW addon)
• *Keybind export, import, cloning (probably better as a WoW addon)
• Network broadcasting

* Not sure if this is possible since the macros and keybinds went server side. Can you still load configuration files?

Mubox looks interesting. I'll try and get it building locally and play with it a bit over the weekend.

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Originally Posted by Moorea

I'd like free as in open source free as opposed to free as in free beer (hotkeynet) as for free beer hotkeynet is already perfect - minus the phone home, etc... - it seems Mubox's is what I want ?

Mubox - can one svn sync that codepex thing and type "make" and obtain a working executable from your sources ? what dev env you need ? (VC++? something free ?)

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CodePlex offers SVN access, but there is no makefile. Mubox was written using Visual Studio 2008, .NET Framework 3.5 sp1 and, thus, can be built from a command line using MSBuild.exe (standard build tool, ships with the SDK or VStudio editions.) You should be able to download the source via SVN, as a ZIP from the codeplex website, or other means, load the solution file using Visual C# Express (a free IDE) or similar, and run directly under a debugger. Mubox is a C# application that utilizes WPF for the UI.

"MSBuild" will eventually replace 'make' according to Microsoft, I haven't seen 'make' since probably 1997 on a Unix-variant OS.

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Originally Posted by Mubox

"MSBuild" will eventually replace 'make' according to Microsoft, I haven't seen 'make' since probably 1997 on a Unix-variant OS.

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According to microsoft linux doesn't exist, neither does firefox or ipods :-)

Did anyone happen to grab the source code for MuBox a while back when it was still available from the source repository at CodePlex, still have it, and would be willing to forward on to me?

On trying to track it down I see it no longer exists on CodePlex, I am assuming because Shaun (the author) now works as of April this year, as a developer for Blizzard.

A two-step key, like interact with target and then walk backwards, so that casters can face their targets.

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Originally Posted by Mystic

Did anyone happen to grab the source code for MuBox a while back when it was still available from the source repository at CodePlex, still have it, and would be willing to forward on to me?

On trying to track it down I see it no longer exists on CodePlex, I am assuming because Shaun (the author) now works as of April this year, as a developer for Blizzard.

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If you are interrested in continuing the nice work Shaun started why not contact him? =)
I'd love to see someone taking care of Mubox as I really liked it. Even a complete noob like me was able to use it, hehe.

What needs to be done is:

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Originally Posted by Shaun

e.g. development and coordination, updates to the add-on for new WoW releases, etc

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If that's not what you wanted to do perhaps there's someone else who'd like to?

*casts L5 thread resurrection from the beyondness*

When I went to work for Blizzard I was prohibited from working on Mubox as a conflict of interest. Their legal department danced around the issue, but made it clear that it was a conflict of interest being an employee *and* releasing multiboxing tools.

How, I don't know. A cease and desist was issued to CodePlex operators and the source was taken offline. I remained employed with Blizzard for approximately two years. Mubox is currently stored to CodePlex in its original form (up to the point development stopped in 2010.)

However, I've resurrected the project since and the latest version is hosted on github (http://github.com/wilson0x4d/Mubox) While I don't spend nearly as much time on it as I used to I've added support for Guild Wars 2 and User Extensions. it may not do what you need, it may not work for you at all, but it works for what I need it to do. I no longer play WoW (Blizzard killed that interest for me) and so the add-in support languished and died as a result.

As I have time I will continue with development. I still check the coordinator mailbox (mubox - @ - mrshaunwilson.com), just don't expect an immediate response (I only check 2-3 times a year, like on holidays.)

Enjoy.

Interesting. I think the price of ISboxer has gone up since 2010 so there might be a greater demand for a free multi-featured program than there was several years ago.