Dual Box Issues

[bigeasysac]

I've been Dual boxing without any software for almost a year.

I have a 60 Resto Druid (now 68) that I put on follow on the character that I am leveling. I have a series of simple macros for targeting, healing, decurse, and curing poisons.

My setup is My desktop, and an dell xps laptop. I have just recently added a dual monitor setup so I can see both characters on the screen at the same time. I've recently tried a couple of things to get down to using 1 keyboard and 1 mouse.

I installed Synergy and I believe that I have that working fine. With the exception of a crazy spinning when I try to use the mouse in WOW, I don't really have any complaints with Synergy.

I then heard some nice things about keycone so I installed it on each machine. I followed the tutorial and initially had some issues with everything key being broadcast. I only use the numeric keypad to control the macros for the Druid, so I went through and added almost every key to the do-not-pass list. That seemed to work, except that at some point I would hit something on the main machine and the client character would start running, and no matter what I did, I could not get it to stop running until I killed keyclone.

I think I resolved this issue last night. In the setup area of the do-not-pass list there is a check box that is labeled white list, with that checked it blocks all keys being broadcast except the ones that are on the list. That seems to have fixed the running issue. and now keyclone is doing it's job correctly.

Now my last few issues:
I tried to run two instances of wow on my desktop last night and while I have plenty of system resources, the 2nd windows keeps getting kicked off and logged out. I am using 2 separate Warcraft accounts so that shouldn't cause me to be kicked out. Am I having some sort of IP address issue with the warcraft servers? Can this still be done?

I was reading the message boards and I saw a possible solution to the quick spinning when trying to use the mouse look on the 2nd machine so I will try this tonight when I get back home.

When I configure remote systems in Keyclone, I give each connection a name, but when I close keyclone that name and configuration is lost, is there any way to save that?

Well that's it, for a simple 2 box system it's pretty easy, just a couple of annoyances. If I can get these figured out, I will look to add some more complicated macros and additional clients.

[kadaan]

I tried to run two instances of wow on my desktop last night and while I have plenty of system resources, the 2nd windows keeps getting kicked off and logged out. I am using 2 separate Warcraft accounts so that shouldn't cause me to be kicked out. Am I having some sort of IP address issue with the warcraft servers? Can this still be done?

I signed up for a test account to try running 3 on one computer over the weekend and ran into this issue. I can run 2 instances at 1680x1050 with max settings and get ~50fps on both. Opening the third instance did what you describe, random disconnects. I tried running the second and third instance minimized at minimum settings and 800x600 resolution but still ran into the same problem.

Running a Core2Duo (assuming that's why I can do 2 instances of WoW flawlessly) with a GF7800GT and 2g dual-channel ram.

Never got it resolved, so I gave up on trying to do more than 2-boxing for now .

[mann42]

I run 2-5 clients on the same computer, and I was running into the same problem with apparently random disconnects. After hunting around the official WoW boards, I found a known bug with /follow.

A few players were reporting that characters /following a non-mobile avatar will disconnect. Basically, if Character #2 is /following Character #1, and #1 stops moving to fight, loot, etc, there is a chance that #2 will disconnect if it is left on /follow. That's why your primary box will never disconnect this way.

It also seemed more common to disconnect if I tried to use a skill from a stationary position while on /follow.

To circumvent the bug, I make a point to move and spread out my characters once my main has stopped moving, and only resume /follow when I'm on the move again. Once I started doing this, the disconnects stopped.

When the WoW forums are back up I'll link to the Bug Report. The QA rep said they found the problem and were working on a fix, but I haven't checked to see if it was fixed in 2.2. Hopefully it's now a non-issue.

[Zaelar]

I've been 3-boxing just fine while staying on follow the whole time. I did get occasional random disconnects, but they were the rarity and not the norm.

I read it has to do with your computer getting spammed when someone uses follow, which simply turns the bug into a hardware limitation.

[mann42]

Well, I know I wasn't spamming /follow. From the way the bug thread described it, there was a problem in the code that spammed other computers for "leader requests". It happened to multi-boxing and multi-instancing players, but inconsistently. I couldn't really figure out a hardware link between the reported systems, but it wasn't happening to everyone. I just know that it happened to me every 5 minutes on my 2.4 Quad 8800 GTS 4mb system.

Sufficed to say, I haven't had the problem all day, so it looks like 2.2 fixed it. For me, at least.