DAoC dual-boxing

[Wilbur]

The only way I can think of to make this work, is to find the memory location where it detects if its the "active" window and modify if. Reverse engineering, Yay.

[elninost0rm]

So basically I would need 3 computers or no dice? :-( That makes me a sad panda. Oh well, I guess driving with the body sorc and fire wiz in tow is adequate, but with an RR11 cleric with alllll kinds of toys to bring along (including stuns, shears, heals, etc.) through broadcasting it'd be so much better, but oh well. I guess if I get a cheap ass PC over the summer I might think about it.

[Wilbur]

No, you can use Innerspace to do it.

$34 a year.

[Freddie]

I originally wrote HotkeyNet for DAOC, and it can send keystrokes to DAOC in the background without any trouble. You can leave the second client in the background almost indefinitely if you want, only bringing it forward when you need to click something with the mouse.

By the way, DAOC treats keystrokes for slash commands differently than keystrokes for hotbars and qbinds. The game accepts slash commands much more easily in the background than the other two. But you can feed all three types of input to DAOC while it's in the background with HotkeyNet.

Here's an example of a HotkeyNet definition that triggers hotbar "3" when DAOC is in the background:

<hotkey F3>
    <sendpc local>
        <sendwinM "DAOC 2">
            <background_setfocus> 
            3<wait 200> 
            <background_killfocus>

P.S. HotkeyNet uses ordinary Windows calls. It doesn't hack DAOC or any other game in any way.

[Nisch]

Very cool. I wish I would have seen this before I spent a grand on hardware to run 4 boxes......lol

j/k...I just may have to add more accounts. 8)

[Freddie]

Hehe. I've never tried hardware, but I wonder what it does that is better than my software. I'm curious what the advantage is, if anything.

The software allows a person to program any key on any keyboard so it sends any desired mixture of commands to one toon, some toons, or all toons, regardless of which PCs they are on.

For example, if I press the numpad-plus key on my 3rd PC, two of my healers cast group heal at the same time. (One of them happens to be on that PC, the other happens to be in the background on another PC.)

Another example. If I press a certain key on my pally's PC, all the other toons assist him.

[Freddie]

As a result of this thread, over the last few days, I made some improvements to HotkeyNet's ability to send commands to a background window of DAOC. Previously the program could send commands to a toon in a background window, but you had to stop typing at that keyboard while commands were being sent in the background.

The new command pretty much throws that restriction out the window. Now you can manually control the toon in the foreground window while the toon in the background is simultaneously under hotkey control. It doesn't work perfectly -- occasionally a keystroke slips through by mistake to the background toon -- but it seems to be good enough for game play.

The new command is called SendWinMF. You can read about it here:

SendWinMF reference info

And download here:

Download HotkeyNet 48 here

I'd lke to add that this improvement is due to Elninost0rm, who began this thread. Elninost0rm suggested the change to me privately, helped me test it, and made several suggestions for improvements in other areas of the program that have now been implemented. Many thanks!

[Attyla]

Looks very interesting.

Can't wait to give it a go!

[Freddie]

Terrific, I'm looking forward to hearing what you think after you try it.

[elninost0rm]

Hi everyone,

Well, needless I think to say, Freddie is an awesome guy. He went above and beyond to answer all of my questions and even provided nearly instant feedback on bugs and personal issues with his program, HotKeyNet. I pretty much worked with him for an entire day testing certain things and I still have to continue doing it (sorry Freddie, swamped at college but I'll get around to testing mouseclick more!) I highly recommend this program to anyone that wants to play DAoC but not even that, considering any other game (for the most part) would seem to work also. Thanks again Freddie for all your help and awesome software! =)

-Matt