Video Feed and Cursor Feed Tutorial

[Alge]

Hi folks,

Note: This is a technical guide. For discussion of how or why you would want to use this, see some of the comments below the guide.

I played around with video feeds and cursor feeds quite a bit in the ISBoxer 38 beta and they've changed the way I setup my windows, so time for a guide. Here is a screenshot to give you an idea of where we are headed:




In the above there are 4 full screen video feeds(along the bottom), 4 smaller video feeds (just above them, showing my bags/repair on my slaves) and a cursor feed (of my mages' action bars).

A video feed is a static window into another character slot. A cursor feed is just a dynamic video feed that follows the mouse cursor. All feeds have two components: a source and an output.

Firstly, if you wish to use either video feeds or cursor feeds and have the feed region not appear at a lower resolution than your main window you may have to change your window layout so that all of the regions in your layout are the same size. To do this, delete your window layout from your character set. Using video feeds like I do in this guide means you don't need to use a window layout.

This results in all 5 game windows being the same size and being stacked behind each other. I swap between mine with hotkeys. See below for a technique to use for those of you who change windows by clicking.

See post 2 for how to setup up the feeds.

[Alge]

We are going to use a set of mapped keys to create and manipulate our feeds. I'd suggest creating a new Key Map to hold these. I called mine "video Feeds".

First we'll create the full screen feeds along the bottom. Make a New Mapped Key. Add a New Video Feeds Action. Set it up as below. The copy that action a further 4 times, changing the "Feed name" and "Position". The feeds is1, is2, is3, etc are created automatically by ISBoxer and are full screen feed sources for the corresponding slot. You should get something like this:



You could use a hotkey directly to activate that mapped key. I activate it automatically every time I swap windows with my window-swapping hotkeys.

Each slot in my character set does a mapped key when I switch to that character, as shown here:


So in my Follow/JambaMaster Mapped Key I just add another action (Do Mapped Key Action) to do my CreateScreenFeeds Key Map.



There are other ways to set this up.

What if you are used to clicking on windows to swap to them? We'll place a click bar underneath our feeds so that when we (seemingly) click on them we swap windows. Create a new click bar like the one below. You'll need to modify the cell dimensions to match your feed dimensions. Make sure to add the appropriate character sets. I use a transparent image for my buttons.



Now save and export to Inner Space. Fire up your character set through Inner Space and open the ISBoxer Control Panel (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+G by default). Position the click bar under your video feeds (you may need to adjust dimensions in ISBoxer and re-export to get it just right). Make sure to sync and save in the control panel before closing it.

Now back in ISBoxer, do both a left click and a right click on each button in your click bar so that you can add mapped keys to those actions. We now need to create some more mapped keys in our Video Feeds keymap. For me, left-clicking opens a cursor feed and right-clicking switches to the appropriate slot.

[Alge]

The mapped keys to swap to a particular slot are easiest, so we'll create those first. Add a New Mapped Key to your Video Feeds keymap. Call it SwitchSlot1. Set it up as shown below. The action is a Window Action: New Window Focus Action.



Then copy the key map, changing the name and slot number until you have 5 mapped keys (or one per slot). Now you can go back to the click bar (in ISBoxer) add add the just-created mapped keys to the buttons. You can see what that should look like in the last image of the previous post.

To add the last of the functionality shown in the aforementioned image, we need to set up some mapped keys for creating cursor feeds. I call mine SlotxCursorFeed. They have one step with two actions. The first action is a Repeater Action: New Repeater State Action. Set it up as shown:



The second action controls which slot is supplying the source for that cursor feed. It is a Repeater Action: New Repeater Target Action. Set it like this:



Then just go through creating the other mapped keys for the other slots, ensuring you change the repeater target in the second action. Then go back to your click bar again and assign those newly-created mapped keys to the appropriate buttons. Refer to the last image in the previous post for what the result should look like.

Before you go testing that in-game it is a good idea to make a way to turn the cursor feeds off. Make a new mapped key in your Video Feeds key map. I call mine CursorFeedOff. This one will need a hotkey. I use Ctrl+Mouse3. Pick something within easy reach. It has one action a Repeater State Action, set up thusly:



Notice how you can only modify some properties of the repeater state by only checking the properties you wish to modify.

OK, if all that is set up correctly, save, export and test it out in-game.

[Alge]

What if you need to get at part of your screen/UI under the feeds? We create a mapped key to toggle them off and back on again. This mapped key is called VideoFeedsToggle. It will also need a hotkey. I use Ctrl+Numpad+. It will have two steps, in the first step we hide all the feeds and also the click bar. In the second step, we re-create the feeds and turn the click bar back on.

In step 1, create a New Video Feeds Action, set up as below:



Then copy that action for each slot, changing the "Feed name". The last action in the first step is to turn the click bar off. That needs a Click Bar Actions: New Click Bar State Action, like so:



When re-enabling in the second step we already have a mapped key to turn the feeds back on and we can just use a Do Mapped Key Action:



and finally turn the click bar back on



Go test that in-game before going any further.

[Alge]

And finally, here is how to set up your own feed sources and get them to display.

I use these to display the bag space and repair status of my slaves on my main. I use a LibDataBroker display addon (Docking Station) with a panel which just contains my bag space and repair status. It is 150x20 pixels. This helps me to know how large my feed sources and outputs must be.

OK, once again we create a new mapped key in our Video Feeds keymap. I call mine CreateBagFeeds. First we will create the feed sources. Add a New Video Feeds Action, set up so.



Note that the target is a character slot (the one we want to create the source for). A unique feed name is required for each source. Copy that action 4 more times, changing both the target and the feed name. Your position and size should be the same for each slot if you have your UI set up identically for each character (always a good idea).

The output feeds are similar:



Note that the target is now Window: Current and you must reference the just-created feed names. Also the position of the output feed will need to be different for each slot or they will just overlap.

Now make sure to go back and add this mapped key (CreateBagFeeds) as a Do Mapped Key Action to your mapped key that is activated whenever a window gets swapped.

That's it for now. I hope you found this tutorial helpful. Please let me know of any errors or omissions or any feedback you may have. Many thanks to Lax for this great new functionality in ISBoxer 38.

Alge

[Multibocks]

Can you explain the advantage of this vs my regular 5 windows at bottom of monitor setup? It looks similar...

[Alge]

Can you explain the advantage of this vs my regular 5 windows at bottom of monitor setup? It looks similar...

Yeah, it is similar, but better. The advantage is I can have not only the small slave windows along the bottom but other video feeds and cursor feeds at the correct resolution. To do that you need all the game windows the same size, which means you can't have them small along the bottom, unless you emulate that with more video feeds.

[Multibocks]

So different resolutions buy cursor responds as though they are the same? Maybe a video of this would help....

[JackBurton]

Can you please start your guide with a discription of why we would want this feature? What it does. You want to change your readers minds.

Some great uses i know for the Video Feed Features

1. Minimap Sharing
Great for sharing important slave minimaps that track mining, herbs and other things

2. Global Cooldowns
Have five hotboxes next to each other showing showing the global cooldowns of each character. hopefuly this is all in real time.

3. Real Time Updates
Show the targets of each toon in real time. No one to two second waits for the data to go back and forth to the servers and to the clients

4. Click based actions.
See the ground where the slaves mouse is for click based AoE. Use the cursor acurately to activate ground spawns. Remotely mine a node or pick up herbs.

5. Conserve Screen Real Estate
For those of us that dont have 3 or more screen to display our toons on having only the important pieces of information on our center screen is great. Think Titan, Broker, or FuBar.

6. Farming
Track # of certain items you've gathered from looting. Drop items like cloth or Volatiles on Jamba Item bars and video feed them to your primary screen. it will show the quantity of those items across all your toons.

anyways this is what comes to mind right away. a great video of what this does here.

[Alge]

Can you please start your guide with a discription of why we would want this feature? What it does. You want to change your readers minds.

I'm not really a salesman. I'll leave that to those more that way inclined.

Having said that, you provide a great list of use cases for video feeds and cursor feeds. MiRai's video is what first got me excited about using these features, so thanks for providing a link to it.