Comparative analysis? HKN vs. GCP vs. ISB?

[Otlecs]

Lax, I read "somewhere" that IS calls home at startup. What happens if IS / ISBoxer can't talk to it's registration server for some reason?

Will it continue to work for some time, or will it immediately stop working?

[Slats]

I find Keyclone incredible easy to setup and has alot of awesome features. However the PiP swapping is very laggy and isn't something you want to do in PvP - the swap itself has to occur then another second for the resize to full.

Keyclones PiP can also sometimes freak out and not put windows in the right place - this can also get you killed in PvP and PvE.

One of the great things about KC though is the commands, if one of my clients crashes I can quickly reload it and then login to that client and get back to my AV with little issues.

I was using Innerspace for awhile before I quit multiboxing for 6-8 months and while it was a bitch to setup - once it was setup it was damn awesome. It looks like its advanced a great deal since then. I'll probably renew my subscription and look into building a setup for it again.

As for HNK and GCP I havn't tried them at all.

[PhantomRogue]

All I have to say is that from time started, to time im up and running with 5 boxes (1 Druid rushing 4 shaman), using Innerspace...

Was about 5 minutes.

Granted, my setup isn't that sophisticated, but its still from 0 to 5 boxer in less than 5 minutes. Switching and Questing is very easy with some additional setup.

I have to say that with the Quick Setup Guide in ISBoxer... its pretty dang easy to get up and running. I would recommend it to anyone that is considering boxing.

[Lax]

Lax, I read "somewhere" that IS calls home at startup. What happens if IS / ISBoxer can't talk to it's registration server for some reason?

Will it continue to work for some time, or will it immediately stop working?

Inner Space "calls home" when you launch the Inner Space program, and when you launch a game through it. If it can't connect, launching will not be successful. That's pretty much it, you don't get randomly disconnected while playing or anything like that (unless your connection to the game drops) -- the connection to my server is just for a second while launching. The primary license server currently has a 294.5 day uptime.

[Ualaa]

[QUOTE=Fuzzyboy;231569]It's a nice feature, but is it significantly different from the functionality you get from simple directory junctions?



From what I've read, once the junction points or symlinks are set up, there's functionally little or no difference in actual play.
However, there is physically only one directory on your system, so it takes up marginally little less space on the drive.
The main benefit would be patch day - just patch the one wow without breaking links, patching, re-establishing links, copying wow.exe files and then going.

[Lax]

It's a nice feature, but is it significantly different from the functionality you get from simple directory junctions?

I wouldn't say that junctions are "simple", and it is different in that it is dynamic and doesn't require additional folders. If you wanted a different configuration per Character and you have dozens of characters, you would have to make dozens of folders to use the junctions method. With virtual files, there's just another file in the original folder.

That does sound good, but one thing that worries my though. What is the performance difference between a full-size window resized to for instance 800*600 and one where the window is configured to run at 800*600 in WoW? Also, my main windows is 1920 * 1200, so if I set up my user interface to look decent in that resolution, scaling it down to 800*600 (or something similarly small) will make it too small to actually see what is on the screen

They run at the full resolution, so if you're running 1920x1200 main window and you have 4 800*600 smaller windows with Swap enabled, they're all going to run at 1920x1200. It's impossible to get the desired Swap speed without it. The effects can be mitigated by running at performance settings in game, and pointing the camera angle downward on your "other" characters (which subsequently also makes casting targeted AoE spells, among other things, much more convenient as well). I find that I don't need to see anything in my other windows most of the time anyway.

As for the user friendlyness, I bought a trial subscription yesterday and I find it pretty confusing. There are no standard buttons in the program - it looks nothing like standard windows/mac windows, which makes it a lot less intuitive. The setup is confusing and while the wizard will get you running fast, in order to utilize 100% of the programs potential, you have to spend just as much time learning to use it as I did in my time with HKN. In comparison, HKN is kind of hard to setup if you're not into programming - but once it's learned it's actually easier to use that most other programmes which require you to browse about for functionality in windows menus with poor or no documentation.

Yeah, I'm not going to claim that the ISBoxer configuration interface is pretty, but it is pretty damn functional. I agree that it could have a better appearance, and the next generation software (in development) will be much better in this aspect.

The configuration is only as confusing as you want to make it -- for someone with complex ideas it will take more work. I can only imagine that your issues stem from liking your configuration a very specific way, and trying to immediately duplicate it in ISBoxer has a learning curve (which is one reason why a couple dozen people hang out in the ISBoxer chat room to share their ideas and help newcomers). Not everyone is the same, in fact most people have no idea how they want it set up, and are quite happy that the Quick Setup Wizard can get them up and running in a couple minutes, and then they can make tweaks later when they think of something else they want it to do.

[daviddoran]

O. M. G. W. T. F. B. B. Q. Fursphere software boxing? I think i just crapped my pants.....

I'm going to set up ISBoxer this weekend. I might switch back to one PC so I can use the window swapping, for PvP and questing, I bet it's invaluable.

I wish i started out on isboxer, seems like a way easier way to get started (watching the "get setup in 40 seconds" really sold me.

[Ualaa]

I started with Keyclone, and am currently using Keyclone.
I'm very tempted with ISBoxer features.

Honestly, Keyclone does everything I need.
However, I'd like superior mouse broastcasting, faster PiP swaps, automatic FTL, and the virtual files.

Not sure if I'll switch or not, but if I was starting from scratch it would be with ISBoxer.
GameCommander looks good too, but ISBoxer seems to have the most features I really like.

[Fuzzyboy]

I played with Innerspace/IS Boxer for the first time last night. Time to get basic broadcasting working for a single team? About 5 minutes.

Time to get 5 PCs sync'd together to "emulate" hardware boxing? About 20 minutes my first time. A chunk of that time was looking it up on the wiki.. everything I needed to know was there.

Its very easy once you understand how it works.

Yeah, like I said - getting the basic stuff isn't tricky, it's the advanced stuff from HKN I wasn't really able to convert in a pretty manner. I have nothing against learning curves though, I was simply trying to get an overview of the misc. boxing tools - seems HKN is still the application for me :-)

[Svpernova09]

I don't see myself going away from hardware boxing. Doesn't mean I don't want to explore all my options. (I'll probably end up with a hybrid setup though.. IS Boxer still has a few things I want to explore more)

/takes screenshot
/runs away