Build 21 and the current state of the project

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Originally Posted by Freddie
I'd like to do DNP next but for technical reasons there are three pre-requisites that have to be done first. Here's the schedule for the next couple of weeks:

1. Rewrite the underlying data structures for config info.

2. Finish "launch WoW" because DNP and choosing particular output key combinations for particular WoWs is the same code, and I can't write it unless the program can identify particular WoWs, and its method for doing that will be launch.

3. Make a spreadsheet kind of control that will be used for the DNP/key-assignment screen.

4. Write the DNP/key-assignment screen.

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This is where the project currently stands.

I wrote that after asking everybody which features I should do first.

It only shows the plan for the next few builds. There's lots of other stuff that's planned, half written under the hood, etc.

My personal requirements for bare bones functionality are:

• Mute key broadcasting
• Full key broadcasting
• Limited key broadcasting (DNP list or something similar)
• Window configuration

My perspective is a single boxer perspective so I could care less about communication across machines and the synchronization issues related to it as I don't really see myself running more than 1 instance of Mojo.

Limited key broadcasting is crucial as well. If I remember correctly WoW now stores keybindings and macros server side so unbinding movement keys on alts is something I prefer not to do as I sometimes run those characters solo or switch to "driving" from another window which leads into the next point.

Window configuration: WoW allows us to set where and how the WoW windows are drawn. Being able to pre-configure a desired layout and setup folders where to launch WoW from is crucial. Swapping your main window with an alternate window via hotkeys is also a highly desirable feature.

The first 2 already exist, but I agree about the next 2 (which is what you can see there) under DNP and Maximizer names; the only difference is I also put "mouse click broadcasting" in the top 4

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Originally Posted by thinus

My personal requirements for bare bones functionality are:

• Mute key broadcasting
• Full key broadcasting
• Limited key broadcasting (DNP list or something similar)
• Window configuration

My perspective is a single boxer perspective so I could care less about communication across machines and the synchronization issues related to it as I don't really see myself running more than 1 instance of Mojo.

Limited key broadcasting is crucial as well. If I remember correctly WoW now stores keybindings and macros server side so unbinding movement keys on alts is something I prefer not to do as I sometimes run those characters solo or switch to "driving" from another window which leads into the next point.

Window configuration: WoW allows us to set where and how the WoW windows are drawn. Being able to pre-configure a desired layout and setup folders where to launch WoW from is crucial. Swapping your main window with an alternate window via hotkeys is also a highly desirable feature.

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This is the last suggestion for the entry window from the other thread. Any comments?


http://mojoware.org/art/keymap1.gif

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Originally Posted by Freddie

This is the last suggestion for the entry window from the other thread. Any comments?

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Is there any way to specify a character (as opposed to a WoW) It has always been easier for me to think in terms of what keys I'm sending which toon, not always which WoW. Maybe I'm just odd :)

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Originally Posted by Svpernova09

Is there any way to specify a character (as opposed to a WoW) It has always been easier for me to think in terms of what keys I'm sending which toon, not always which WoW. Maybe I'm just odd :)

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That's the kind of thing this thread will help decide. So please, discuss! I'm listening. :)

Things don't have to work just one way. In fact I'd like the program to be extremely flexible so people can use it however they like. The tricky thing is designing the program so it provides lots of choices but seems simple to the user and not confusing.

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Originally Posted by Freddie

That's the kind of thing this thread will help decide. So please, discuss! I'm listening. :)

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Well, I certainly don't want to steer you towards something thats totally different than your design. I don't know much about HKN, but from what I had seen, the scripts always named wow's wow1, wow2, etc. ISBoxer names the wow windows by Character name -> Character Set. IMHO, it would be easier to name the wow's by at least the character so you can see easier (again, imo) which keys are being sent to which toon and not have to worry about remember which WoW is which character. Maybe have a character based configuration and have that apply to a WoW "instance"? So you setup all your keybinds that get send to your tank, and you have a "tank" configuration that you can apply to whichever WoW instance is your tank.

Maybe individual character configurations would be overly complicated.

People can name things however they like in both programs.

This isn't designed yet so please say any ideas you want. I've been thinking tentatively of configuring WoWs, Toons, and Teams. The first two sound like your WoW and tank.

I don't think per-character configuration is too complicated, but I think people should be able to configure things in other ways if they want.

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Originally Posted by Freddie

People can name things however they like in both programs.

This isn't designed yet so please say any ideas you want. I've been thinking tentatively of configuring WoWs, Toons, and Teams. The first two sound like your WoW and tank.

I don't think per-character configuration is too complicated, but I think people should be able to configure things in other ways if they want.

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I agree completely with giving people multiple ways to configure things. I was just thinking in terms of other applications and how well / not so well they handle configuration.

One feature I love with Keyclone is the ability to round robin a keystroke, but there are several scenarios on which this could be improved greatly.

I arena with my 5 shammys by swapping them around with a dedicated healer, and keyclone has the option to mute a specific clone. Unfortunately ISBoxer doesn't have this, and I don't like the idea of one of my guys running around the arena master while doing arenas. A funny story along those lines was one of the first times I did arenas before I knew how to mute a specific clone, I was queuing up in thunderbluff. About half way through the match, one of my guys died in the heat of battle, and I couldn't tell if I was lagging or not. It turns out, that my clone sitting in thunderbluff comitted suicide by jumping off the plateau. :D

Back to topic.. this works well for doing arenas and being able to swap toons in and out. The problem is that keyclone is buggy to where I'm pressing a round robin key when one of the clones is muted, the keystroke gets entirely ignored. The end result is that I'll sometimes spam the key a few times to make sure it goes off (thunderstorm, warstomp, etc) and ending up wasting one of them.

Another scenario would save a macro slot on mixed classes. Say you have the DK/ret makeup, and you want to round robin hammer of justice. Currently, you'd have to use a /castsequence macro to do it, as a round robin keystroke would not fire for the DK.

In short, a cool feature would be to have a round robin keystroke that could be mapped to only fire to specific wow target windows.

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Originally Posted by Svpernova09

Well, I certainly don't want to steer you towards something thats totally different than your design. I don't know much about HKN, but from what I had seen, the scripts always named wow's wow1, wow2, etc. ISBoxer names the wow windows by Character name -> Character Set. IMHO, it would be easier to name the wow's by at least the character so you can see easier (again, imo) which keys are being sent to which toon and not have to worry about remember which WoW is which character. Maybe have a character based configuration and have that apply to a WoW "instance"? So you setup all your keybinds that get send to your tank, and you have a "tank" configuration that you can apply to whichever WoW instance is your tank.

Maybe individual character configurations would be overly complicated.

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I would have to agree on Svpers point as well. I don't configure based on WoW instance but rather Char/Char Set. The instance of WoW a char belongs to is not pivotal to my configuration (at least setup wise.)

the reverse argument is: use jamba for per character/team differences and setup the boxing simply so you don't have to reset up anything when the character change - for me I just need the current window to get all keys and other windows to get all but some keys (WASD) - but maybe an idea that works for everybody is after you got a setting you like; you can name that setting when you save it - and then you're free to name it by a toon name instead of "wow1" so when you reuse/recall it it means something to you ?

I tend to agree with Moorea's line of thinking here - but everyone is different in how they setup / run their teams.

So some level of flexibility would be ideal.

To get this topic rolling again...

I think things should be as generic as possible. Jamba is not a good example as 1) Blizzard could actively kill the project if they choose. And if you even try to give me a counter argument to that, i'm going to ask you why they actively break mods every patch for no obvious reason other than keeping mod authors busy. 2) WoW changes. A lot. So whatever tools we use should be so generic that they are easily adapted to whatever is thrown at us next. (IWT comes to mind - this is a great addition to WoW - but if its removed, we need to adapt).

How's the next version coming Freddie? :)

I'll give an example to support your argument;

Outfitter used to be able to swap weapons when you changed stance (for warriors who need to switch between a 2 hander or swrd + shield, or rogues who need a dagger in their main hand to use certain abilities while stealthed). 3.3 changed it so addons can't change weapons.

You can still do it with /equip macros, but it's such a PITA having to update them every time you get a new weapon, compared to just updating outfitter.

I don't know why Blizzard made that change, it just seems petty, and may have something to do with promoting their own equipment manager (which is lacking that feature at present).

Jamba is amazing, but it's an addon and therefore is far too tied into the game. I think as much potential to mess things up as is possible, should be taken out of Blizzards hands, as they don't seem to give a damn about addon makers, or even players, and seem to love making changes for change's sake just to massage their own egos (Yes after 2 years playing I'm really beginning to hate the developers, but I've rarely seen them fix anything without breaking something else that was fine in the process. Meanwhile the game is littered with the kind of bugs that take a matter of seconds to fix, many years old now).

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Originally Posted by Mukade

I'll give an example to support your argument;

Outfitter used to be able to swap weapons when you changed stance (for warriors who need to switch between a 2 hander or swrd + shield, or rogues who need a dagger in their main hand to use certain abilities while stealthed). 3.3 changed it so addons can't change weapons.

You can still do it with /equip macros, but it's such a PITA having to update them every time you get a new weapon, compared to just updating outfitter.

I don't know why Blizzard made that change, it just seems petty, and may have something to do with promoting their own equipment manager (which is lacking that feature at present).

Jamba is amazing, but it's an addon and therefore is far too tied into the game. I think as much potential to mess things up as is possible, should be taken out of Blizzards hands, as they don't seem to give a damn about addon makers, or even players, and seem to love making changes for change's sake just to massage their own egos (Yes after 2 years playing I'm really beginning to hate the developers, but I've rarely seen them fix anything without breaking something else that was fine in the process. Meanwhile the game is littered with the kind of bugs that take a matter of seconds to fix, many years old now).

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When Blizzard disables the ability to do something, it's because they don't want you doing it. Finding a way to circumvent that is a perfect way to get banned and get the utility you used to do so in trouble. ;)

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Originally Posted by TheFallenOne

When Blizzard disables the ability to do something, it's because they don't want you doing it. Finding a way to circumvent that is a perfect way to get banned and get the utility you used to do so in trouble. ;)

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I think you're missing the point. Which is, we'd rather not have the tool itself hard-coded to use in-game mechanics that may or may not exist in a future version of WoW (or any other game for that matter). Having user-created "helper" scripts that CAN account for useful in-game behavior is a different matter.

And I think we're all well aware of where the line is regarding ToS violations.

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Originally Posted by Ughmahedhurtz

I think you're missing the point. Which is, we'd rather not have the tool itself hard-coded to use in-game mechanics that may or may not exist in a future version of WoW (or any other game for that matter). Having user-created "helper" scripts that CAN account for useful in-game behavior is a different matter.

And I think we're all well aware of where the line is regarding ToS violations.

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Yeah, I got that point. :) I was just trying to say that what he was saying was somewhat implying that we should ensure that the program is removed enough from WoW to be able to use the program to do things that Blizzard has intentionally removed, which I don't like hearing.

I don't think there's any question that the tool shouldn't be hardcoded to use in-game mechanics. I haven't seen anyone say anything to the contrary, and I can see a lot of negative things coming from that. As mentioned several times previously, we have Jamba for managing in-game mechanics (as so far as Blizzard will allow).

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Originally Posted by Ughmahedhurtz

I think you're missing the point. Which is, we'd rather not have the tool itself hard-coded to use in-game mechanics that may or may not exist in a future version of WoW (or any other game for that matter). Having user-created "helper" scripts that CAN account for useful in-game behavior is a different matter.

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I've been thinking that Mojo will have different features that do different things. Right now we're talking about one of those features, Broadcast, which only sends key strokes (or maybe key combinations). Correct me if I'm wrong but I think the only way Broadcast can trigger actions in WoW is if the action is bound on the left side of WoW's key bind screen.

No matter what else gets added to Mojo, I imagine Broadcast will always work like that. It will always provide a rock-solid "low level" method of controlling WoW manually, with the user completely in control of what's going on.

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How's the next version coming Freddie? http://www.dual-boxing.com//images/smilies/smile.gif

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I gotta confess, I got derailed and haven't looked at it in over a week.

What happened is, after reading comments here, I had second thoughts about my idea of including WoWs and Toons in the config screens. It seemed to be more complicated than what some people will want. But I couldn't figure out a simpler way that will work. So I decided to think about it overnight ... then the next night ... then etc.

Meanwhile I wrote a program that changes gamma/brightness/contrast depending on which game is in the foreground, and eventually I'll put that code in Mojo, so the week wasn't a total waste, but that didn't get us closer to the next build.

I think sometimes people get so caught with what they WANT and totally forget what they NEED. I know I'm guilty of this myself.

I think they original concept of configuring your MAIN and SLAVES was golden. (left side/right side). I'd just run with that until the need for something better came about.

The gamma brightness contrast thing sounds pretty cool. Since you wrote that already, maybe just incorporate it into mojo for the next version? lol

-Fur

I Have been away for a couple months, I noticed there dosent seem to have been many Build updats for a while,

and havent noticed much chatter on the forum Any chance we can get an project update.

I haven't been boxing for a long while (still stuck in BC actually), so when I returned to boxing last week and went to the HKN website to download HKN, I was very pleasantly surprised to see HKN get open-sourced. Really nice work freddy!

Anyway, I just have a question about scripting in Mojo. Why don't you just embed Lua as scripting language? It's easy to embed, easy to learn and a lot of users probably already know it. Also, there are lot's of editors with syntax highlighting for Lua. Just my 2 cents :).