Boxing on a Mac- The Whats, the Hows and the Whos

[Vix]

(First post, so i'de like to start by saying Thank You to this community! I've been lurking for a long time and lately find my self 5 boxing and loving it! Without this community that would never have happened.)

As there aren't that many Mac related posts on the community i thought we could use one where the mac users of this community could talk about boxing and how we do it. Personally i refuse to use bootcamp and i'm happy with how things work.

Here is a very short summary of me, my hardware and my software i use.

Personals:

Male

Age: 36

Father of one

Work: Apple retailer

Europe


Hardware:

MacPro,

23" display,

Logitec mouse with 7 buttons


Software:

5 x World of Warcraft

Butler (for Macros)

Steermouse (for asigning keys to my mouse)


Game play:

I don't use a key press broadcaster. I chose to use Butler to write macros to broadcast a key press to the 5 instances of WoW. Then i mapped the macros to my mouse. Using modifier keys i have 21 keys hot mapped in WoW. Pressing a button on my mouse will trigger a macro that will press "1" in my current application (my main) and then switch to WoW2 press "1", switch to WoW3 press "1" and so forth and finally return me to WoW1 and my main. Butler does the switching so quickly that can't actually see the switching. It happens in the background so to say. In addition i have macros for my Function keys doing the same thing.

Note on the macros. Every macro ONLY broadcast one key press that is a hot key on WoW except one that is my stop following command. This key brodcasts "S" to all my slaves. I need to have them stand back when i gather a groop with my Paladin for some AOE fun. (I play a paladin, 3 mages and a holy priest.)

I will send a PM to Zia's to check out his Keybroadcaster. Looks interesting!



Window layout:

Not sure how to do this yet. As i only have one display i have all 5 windows on the same screen. In my current setup i have my slaves in 800x600 resolution and have made the windows as small as i can. Each window sits in its own corner and my main is in the middle slightly overlapping every window of the slaves. This looks messy and i don't like it. I haven't found a window maximizer for the mac. Anyone have a good solution for this?

Anyway lets hear who else box on a mac and do all of you actually do it under Windows or do some of you stick with X?

Vix

[TheBigBB]

What's your reasoning for not simply broadcasting your keyboard presses? I can't think of an advantage to your way. What does your left hand do?

I do multibox on a mac. I can smoothly run 5 instances per Mac Pro, and I am going to purchase a second one soon to do ten boxing. Right now my other older Macs aren't good enough to properly run 5 more instances, so I need the second one. Anyway, these two will have the same specs: 4GB RAM, dual quad core 2.8 mhz Intels, and the 512MB video card. I use the Keyclones program and a USB multicaster to send information to two Macs at once.

I think the architecture of the Mac Pro is pretty well suited for multiboxing, being that it's so overkill with the two quad cores. I actually use that power, so it's great stuff. The only time I get hardware lag is when I'm in a crowded city at prime time hours.

[Valorin]

BigBB, what do you use to broadcast keys on one machine?

I have the hardware setup, so I'm totally different. My main is a G5 Tower, 3g RAM, 128M gc (old), running 10.5. I have 4 slaves that are all Dell's because they were cheap ($550 a piece including flat screen monitors, OS's and gc upgrades, they run wow about 60fps). I bought them bulk from Dell Small Business. Anyway, I use the mac version of keybroadcasting synergy server and the keybroadcasting synergy clients for windows on the slaves. It took a little while to set up because windoze doesn't recognize mac network names, but when I reworked it all with IPs, it works fine now. So I have a single keyboard, mouse and nostromo that run all 5 boxes.

So basically, I can't really help with maximizer or Clonekey types of things since I 5-box, but I have used Butler before my dells came and it's pretty sweet, altho its got a lot of features that I didn't need. I looked at Clonekey just to see what it did (Clonekey was after my time) and it seems a lot smoother and more boxing-specific.

As for gameplay, I typically run with the keybroadcaster on all the time and I have my game macros setup with focus targeting and lots of options for the same keybind, like: attack focus target if hostile, heal focus target if friendly, attack current target if no focus target if hostile - that kind of thing. I play all druids, so class synergy is automatic and all of the toons basically have the same keybindings, the tank being the only one a little different and a few "I only need one cast of this" things like a dedicated tank-poison debuffer (because cure poison pops the tank out of moonkin form). I also Jamba in game, and it's AWESOME altho the auto follow thing I ended up turning off and I use a follow button because in instances, I like to have my tank forward as well. The "BLANK stopped following" yell in Jamba rocks. The quest and flight echos are really handy too as well as the autosell, autorepairs. Oh, and another awesome Jamba feature is the "push to slaves" where once you get the main setup and the slaves only need to add the main's name to their jambas for communication and all other settings can be pushed. Major time saver. I'll even do changes in game for slightly different setups, push it, do some stuff, change back to kill-mode and push settings back. Doesn't seem as much as hassle as it should be.

Anyway, even though "Technically" I use windows, those machines do not do anything except run WoW and they can't use any of the software that won't interface with my main mac, so it's as if I'm a sole mac user. And I'll fight anybody who says otherwise!

[antishadow]

Personals:

Male

Age: 30

Father of two (6yr & 16mo)

USA


Hardware:

Mac Pro dual quad core 3.2ghz with 10gb ram and the 512 video card

Two 26" LCDs

Typical wireless keyboard/mouse nothing special


Software:

5 x World of Warcraft

CloneKeys (I get some weird issues I only see with ClonedKeys so have to use a modified original)

Gameplay:
I've noticed that if you have adaquate ram you don't lag in cities. My processors are actually barely being used its all ram. Whenever I start to chunk though I run the following macro on all my clones and the main:

/console gxRestart

then click on each window (clonekeys loses track of them when you do this for some reason) and boom - back to top speed.

[Indestructigal]

I use ClonedKeys on my iMac to run three instances of WoW.

I have the same problem with window layout. It works okay, but I will usually switch over to Boot Camp so I can run Octopus after a while.


Indestructigal

[Feider]

I'm also a mac boxer. I'm still holding onto a cheap setup. 1 MacBook (2.16 Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2GB ram) and running Cloned Keys. I run 5 instances on the one machine. There are a few hardware lags here and there. Sometimes I lose a follower when traveling. Stormwind is impossible for me at the moment. I am going to soon try to use an older G4 iBook I have laying around to run 2 of the 5 via a wireless keyboard. We will see if that works.

I keep my windows set up the same way as you do Vix. Also, with all of the video settings turned way done I find that the smoothest play is when I can full screen the main toon. This is not always possible if I need to pick up items on the slaves but It cuts the lag for me.

yay Mac focused thread.

[TheBigBB]

I use Clonedkeys. My only problems with the broadcasting software are that if you spam too much it gets behind on the other windows. You really need to be able to relax and just hit a DPS key at a time, a heal key, a DPS, etc. Spamming a lot is bad news.

I have two widescreen monitors and each will display one tank as a large center window with one smaller window in each corner that I click on to immediately control the followers. I can only see a sliver of the windows in the back at any time, but I can control any of my characters within a mouse click. I can start the bombing run quests by clicking through the windows quickly enough to get credit all at once, for example. I wonder if this works well on Windows! I wouldn't know anything about Windows.

[Ken]

This is an interesting Mac link:
http://www.wowwiki.com/World_of_Warc...nality_on_Macs

[minty]

Mac Pro, 2x 2.8 Quads, 10GB ram, 512MB video, 2x 24" lcd, plain old two button optical mouse (sorry, Apple, but the MIghty Mouse just doesn't work for games)

I like being able to see every window without any switching, so I run on two screens. Main client full on primary display at 1920x1200, four child clients on second display at 960x600. Now there is a little bit of overlap on the four small windows because of their top bars, but it's small enough to not bother me.

I use CloneKeys for key broadcasting, and agree with TheBigBB's assessment. Slow and steady wins the race. I'll occasionally have one client not receive a keystroke if I get going too fast.

And yes, I run all on Mac OS. I don't see why anyone would possibly want to Boot Camp over for WoW. (I did Boot Camp it to run the upgraded graphics EVE client and still feel like a bitch for doing so...)

Depending how I feel once I get up through the lvl 80 instances, I might graduate up to 10 boxing. If so, I'll pop in a second video card and get two more displays. Again that's mainly because I just want to be able to see everything at once. I think the Pro will handle 10 without even blinking. I often transcode video while playing with no problems. Can't let that CPU power just sit idle!

[succulent]

I've been boxing on a Mac since May or so. Originally I was doing 5 instances on a Mac Pro (12gb RAM, 30" monitor) using CloneKeys, but I had some issues with that setup and decided to switch to all-hardware. I actually just recently posted about my setup in this thread:

Hardware 5-PC multiboxing setup questions

My follower toons are running on a 2-year old intel iMac, a one-year old Mac Book Pro, and two brand-new mac Minis. The Minis are fine for simple followers but you have to crank the graphics way down, mine are running 800x600 on 19" LCDs with minimal graphics settings. The iMac & MBP are running full resolution.

I'm a software engineer and I work at Apple, so I get a discount on the hardware -- this made the decision to go all-hardware easier

I agree the mighty mouse is poo for gaming. I use a fairly old microsoft wheel mouse with a total of two buttons, and keybind just about everything.

My issues with CloneKeys were that the modifier keys would often get stuck, where some of my followers thought the option key was down when it wasn't. Also problematic was the aforementioned key-spamming issue -- I spam sometimes, and buying more hardware was definitely easier than changing this behavior.