GameCommanderPro

[Caspian]

Hi and welcome to the community. Thanks for taking the time to answer all of the questions.

Since your product contains a WoW add-on that uses parts of "Blizzards UI that provide some handy features". If you are not aware of Blizzard's Add-on developer policy you might want to review it. I am not a lawyer - nor did I sleep at a Holiday Inn express last night - but, selling your add-on as part of GCP may run afoul of it. I'm not sure how the rules work on it exactly but you may be able to provide the add-on for free and charge for the external program part of your product. I will leave it to you to find the loop holes.

My second concern is that you push updates to the addon portion. Whether it happens automatically or manually, I am not sure it falls within "legal" bounds, especially if the game is running and the player is in combat.

Have you made any efforts to be vetted by Blizzard? I know they are VERY heistant to say anything is ok and fall back to the mantra of 1 keypress 1 action per account. With all of your fancy hocus pocus and macro creation going on it seems like it might be hard for the user to know for sure if that rule is really being adhered to. I am also concerened with Warden. I don't know how it works but, if it sees a process writing to WoW directories it might be less then pleased.

[zanthor]

Hi and welcome to the community. Thanks for taking the time to answer all of the questions.

Since your product contains a WoW add-on that uses parts of "Blizzards UI that provide some handy features". If you are not aware of Blizzard's Add-on developer policy you might want to review it. I am not a lawyer - nor did I sleep at a Holiday Inn express last night - but, selling your add-on as part of GCP may run afoul of it. I'm not sure how the rules work on it exactly but you may be able to provide the add-on for free and charge for the external program part of your product. I will leave it to you to find the loop holes.

Easy enough, release the addon base separately for free. Doesn't do anyone any good without the tool to configure it.

My second concern is that you push updates to the addon portion. Whether it happens automatically or manually, I am not sure it falls within "legal" bounds, especially if the game is running and the player is in combat.

By push I would assume that he means "write a text file to your addons folder, or update a saved variable in a wtf file" which means wow only reads it at reloadui or startup. Anything other than this and it would be a VERY bad thing.

Have you made any efforts to be vetted by Blizzard? I know they are VERY heistant to say anything is ok and fall back to the mantra of 1 keypress 1 action per account. With all of your fancy hocus pocus and macro creation going on it seems like it might be hard for the user to know for sure if that rule is really being adhered to. I am also concerened with Warden. I don't know how it works but, if it sees a process writing to WoW directories it might be less then pleased.

Blizzard won't vette anything - seriously people need to give up on that concept. Someone is going to pull the "Well they said KeyClone is fine by name..." and I'm going to point out that was over a year ago and no other product has ever been mentioned by name again, AND blizzard hasn't thumbs upped a single added feature to KeyClone or reconfirmed it's status.

We have a general set of rules to live by, we do that or we get banned. Works better in Blizzards favor if they can ban for ANYTHING.

[zanthor]

wtf, double post one pure source?

[Aarelan]

We don't charge for the mod, we provide it for free. It's open source. (not encrypted in any way). It doesn't ask for payment in game. (that satisfies the terms of blizzards latest statement on mods). Blizzard don't, and can't, tell us how to publish it, but I'd be happy to put it up on the site anyway. There are some useful bits that others my want to use, and we have no issue with that. Anyone should feel free to distribute it as they see fit.

There is some private data (actually not that private, I've already provided information on it's format in an earlier post), and it's written to the gamecommander.lua file in the wtf folder which is easy to read. As a general rule, even if it where possible, I wouldn't advise changing configuration mid fight!

As said before, Blizzard don't endorse anyone. They do issue rules, and we stick to them. If at any point, Blizzard where to raise any issue with what we are doing, we would, of course, immediately change it.

Phil

[Aarelan]

Do you support multiple monitors for your "Maximizer/Picture in Picture" feature?

Can I run two monitors, on one computer with something like this set up:
Have the active region on monitor 1, and the other toons of my team on monitor 2. Then when I hit my switch key, have the now active stuff on monitor 1, and the previously active stuff switch that that position on monitor 2?

Thats pretty much how my setup is.

GCP handles multiple layouts.

You set up the windows (position and size) for all your characters. You then save this (optionally giving it a name). Each layout can have a zoom position associated with it. You do this by moving your main window to where you want the zoom position to be, and saving this zoom position. This can be done several times, to produce a layout for each circumstance.

Once you've done this, a layout can be activated instantly. GCP is clever enough to only move windows which have changed when you change layouts.

This method needs more work to set up, but is much more flexible. If I lose my main, I switch to my "plan B" layout, which actually minimizes window 1 (he's dead!), brings my hunter (window 2) to occupy the left screen, moves my healer (window 4) to occupy must of my 2nd screen (if my tank dies, I think my healer has become more important), and puts my DPS (wiindow 3 and 5) as 2 very small windows at the bottom. (I can pretty much control them without seeing anything anyway). In the same command, I can change my DPS target to track my hunter.

My "Oh Dear The Tank Died" macro is complicated but goes something like this:

Set Group, 3
Translate Group,`,+`,^`,%`,^+`,%+`,%^`,%^+`
<<All>>
Hit %GroupX%

Msg Select No Of Healers
Get Heals, No
Msg
GroupSet Darelan,DPS
if %Heals% >= 1
GroupSet Darelan,Heals
endif

UseLayout %$LeaderChan%
set LdrToon,%$LeaderChan%

Translate LdrToon,`,+`,^`,%`,^+`,%+`,%^`,%^+`
<<All>>
Hit %ToonX%
endif

The first block sends a special key to tell the GCP addon that we're changing the target for the dps group.
The 2nd group moves my healer from the dps goup.
The 3nd block selects a particular screen layout and select which toon will be tracked by the DPS target group.
The 4th block sends a special key to tell the GCP addon which toon to track for the group.

The group tracking thing means that the DPS group will now target anything that the selected leader targets.

The effect of this is I press one key and press a number to set my healers count. My screen is then re-arranged, I have a new leader, and my DPS targeting is now controlled by my new leader.

Phil

[aboron]

however it's a difficult thing to simulate,

Could you not just make entries in the host file, or firewall the process?

According to the manufacturer, it doesn't react kindly to that sort of thing, but it would be an interesting test. Maybe as we're waiting for the servers to appear...

Phil

If you use another machine as a firewall you could write a rule to drop traffic to the auth host(s) without polluting the local hosts file or blocking anything else.

[Aarelan]

however it's a difficult thing to simulate,

Could you not just make entries in the host file, or firewall the process?

According to the manufacturer, it doesn't react kindly to that sort of thing, but it would be an interesting test. Maybe as we're waiting for the servers to appear...

Phil

If you use another machine as a firewall you could write a rule to drop traffic to the auth host(s) without polluting the local hosts file or blocking anything else.

I should have thought of that - especially as we have that configuration anyway.

Thanks

[Tesseract]

No way I'm going to use hotkeynet, first thing the site did was open a page advertising gold selling and Russian brides!! Now I'm scared I've got some kind of malware my A/V's can't get rid of on my comp. AARRGGHH! :cursing:

(Leaving this up so the next few posts make sense, but it is no longer true; the link on the HKN site went to an address that had a new owner, and Freddie didn't know it had changed. Freddie took it down immediately)

[zanthor]

No way I'm going to use hotkeynet, first thing the site did was open a page advertising gold selling and Russian brides!! Now I'm scared I've got some kind of malware my A/V's can't get rid of on my comp. AARRGGHH! :cursing:

Considering that their site has no advertisements on my IE browser I'd say you probably need to look into that virus option.

[Otlecs]

No way I'm going to use hotkeynet, first thing the site did was open a page advertising gold selling and Russian brides!! Now I'm scared I've got some kind of malware my A/V's can't get rid of on my comp. AARRGGHH! :cursing:

Considering that their site has no advertisements on my IE browser I'd say you probably need to look into that virus option.

Seconded!

http://hotkeynet.com/ is completely ad-free.