No broadcast software ideas for multiboxing

[nodoze]

Love it! Any details on the hardware setup behind both of these? Just a single keyboard & mouse with 4 clients running on a single PC? How are you doing the 4-windows on the monitor? (is that native on the 43" multiclient monitor?)

We literally just finished moving the 43" Dell from our "kid office" to my office and am working on configuring it now so I haven't been able test much yet. Currently the 43" is just VGA at 1080P via my KVM to my VPN-work-laptop, an extra/old PC, and my main gaming/personal PC. I just finished installing WoW on the old/extra PC so I could put my healer there and now I am going to work on getting the dell management software installed on my main PC and see if I can use hot-keys to switch from 1K VGA to 4K DP when on my main PC. After I make sure I have it to where I can switch back and forth with my work laptop (I get calls 24x7 and need to be able to help the users quickly) and understand the monitor utilities/switching I will work on the personal PC stuff and try to replicate the quadrant setup...

Those 2 quadrant examples were not mine but rather 2 other boxers who were using native windows 10 functionality (if I understand correctly) to do the 4 quadrant setup...

To do the 4 quadrant setup that way I think it is just a single monitor with windows 10 accessibility (ease of access) setting for mouse over window functionality (and a registry adjustment for timing and reboot) and then setting some windows management "snapping" features to make the 4 windows stick/size to the 4 quadrants.

I snagged the steps as best I could and put them on the 'noBroadcast' tab of the 'Classic WoW Planning' spreadsheet. Once I get through the steps and test/validate them I will try to clean them up and maybe have a mini-guide or something. I went and just now hi-lighted in cyan/light-blue on the 'noBroadcast' tab the steps I think need to be done to do the quadrant setup in case you want to try them before I can get to them.

[Pineapplepizza]

I have been multiboxing a team of 5, warrior/priest/mage/mage/warlock for about a year in Classic and have cleared every 5-man with it including some raids with my guild, just to fill up the lack of people.

I do use hotkeynet to broadcast only hotkeys, not mouse, I use a lot of ingame macro's and addons (leatirix), most hotkeys having overlapping abilities or macro's on the characters. I play fullscreen on the warrior and don't see the others at all, i assisgned hotkeys to quickly bring each character's screen as the active screen.

The way i play, bloodthirst or a heroic strike would also do a fireball from the mage, and shadowbolt from the warlock, these are bound to the same hotkey ingame. When i started out, this would also cast a heal on the tank, this resulted in me running out of mana too fast and way too many unnecessary heals. So separate hotkeys for the healing were born.

However the better I got, the more i got to lean to 1 action per keystroke when doing the rotation for dps as well. There are so many cases I don't want my characters to cast the things that I bound to the keys doing the overlapping spells. For example, mages are out of mana and need to evocate, while the warlock can still cast shadowbolts. Or the warlock has to lifetap and the mages need to keep shooting. So these all got their own keybinds as well.

So I really wouldn't mind doing the same with all spells from each character on a seperate keybind, it would even add flexibility, i'd need to do just a bit more typing though. So i would send part of my keyboard to WoW1, another few keys will always go to WoW2 etcetera.

I know how to configure this in Hotkeynet, and would not be using any broadcasting at all anymore, however, it appears the entire program is blacklisted.
- Is there any other way to basically split your keyboard over the wow instances?
- Is there any alternative for the following hotkeynet script: (it eliminates the alt-tabbing)
<Hotkey F8>
<SendPC local>
<TargetWin WoW1>
<SetActiveWin>


<Hotkey F9>
<SendPC local>
<TargetWin WoW2>
<SetActiveWin>
etc
I read that windowskey-1 works, but i really need it to be one key dediced to each character.

[nodoze]

I have been multiboxing a team of 5, warrior/priest/mage/mage/warlock for about a year in Classic and have cleared every 5-man with it including some raids with my guild, just to fill up the lack of people.

I do use hotkeynet to broadcast only hotkeys, not mouse, ...

However the better I got, the more i got to lean to 1 action per keystroke when doing the rotation for dps as well. ...

So I really wouldn't mind doing the same with all spells from each character on a seperate keybind, it would even add flexibility, i'd need to do just a bit more typing though. So i would send part of my keyboard to WoW1, another few keys will always go to WoW2 etcetera.

I know how to configure this in Hotkeynet, and would not be using any broadcasting at all anymore, however, it appears the entire program is blacklisted.
- Is there any other way to basically split your keyboard over the wow instances?
...

The only ways I can think of are as follows:

5 numberkeypads (without the wooden dowels) with each one connecting via USB to a single WoW client in a dedicated PC or VM (but these would give you a limited number of keybinds):

https://i.gyazo.com/79ec17ce563426d0...55ea1547d3.png

If you needed more keybinds than can fit on the 10keypads you could do something like 5 of these (each mapped to a PC/VM):

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B074SGZ6Z4
https://smile.amazon.com/Koolertron-.../dp/B076LRJ528

(you could velcro multiple of these or the 10keypads to a single lapboard)

If you wanted to try to do it all from one keyboard you will likely have to use some software based routing like depicted here using something like a Launchpad or an Elgato:

Diagram of a Launchpad approach (with rtpMIDI and Bomes Midi Translator) and VMs:

https://i.gyazo.com/ab172a7a596229d8...02fe12a6a5.png

Lastly you could maybe build a hardware based single-frankenstein-keyboard via Arduinos that outputs specific keys to specific destinations.

[jak3676]

I think there's 2 different approaches people are working on for no-broadcast multiboxing that both seem promising (I'm excluding hardware broadcasting and broadcasting with VM setups from this discussion). Both of these no-broadcast approaches are essentially finding ways to rapidly switch windows such that you can provide input to only that window, then switching to the next window providing input there, etc.

1) Mouse-Switching: Opening multiple clients then configuring your system's focus to change with just a mouse-over, such that the user can rapidly mouse over multiple windows and provide input to each one in rapid succession.

A) Windows without boarders
- This Microsoft utility works to share your mouse and keyboard across multiple PCs (its a "software KVM" utility). But instead of having to switch your keyboard, video and mouse with a button on your KVM switch, you can just mouse between the different screens and whichever system has focus is automatically switched to whichever screen has the mouse cursor. Note that the software is internally limited to only 4 systems, so to 5-box (or greater) you still need separate keyboard, mouse and monitor for the 5th system. This utility does seem particularly good where you have multiple video feeds multiplexed onto a single monitor (there's a few 43" monitors that have this multi-client multiplexing built in, otherwise and external video multiplexer is required.

B) Synergy/Synergy Core/Input Director/Barrier
- I need to find the links and do some comparison against windows without boarders. I think the functionality that people want that windows without boarders doesn't is the ability to scale to 5 or more PC's

C) Windows Accessibility - "Activate a window by hovering over it with the mouse"
- Fundamentally different than the above approaches, this can all be contained on a single PC (no additional hardware required). Instead of switching monitors based on mouse position, this approach is to switch windows within a single PC based on mouse position. I expect that this is where the different multiboxing software utilities could also be re-engineered to help

2) Keyboard-Switching: Opening multiple clients and using keyboard input to rapidly switch which window has focus.

These are all somewhat clunky options on their own, but if combined with a programmable keyboard, they can be quite fast (as fast as you can hit a key) and convenient (can program the focus shifts into a "rotation" along with your in-game dps rotation)

A) "ALT-TAB" is generally the 1st option people think of here, but its probably the least preferred option as you still have to select which window you want to gain focus, so that involves additional key presses. Still you can improve the speed of alt-tabbing through windows by disabling windows 10 preview feature https://www.windowscentral.com/how-b...nce-windows-10 and for folks using multiple desktops, you can limit alt-tab to only your current desktop https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/...dows-10-a.html

B) Windows + 1, Windows + 2, etc - allows the user to directly switch to specific windows, but does require you to have these windows open an positioned in a specific manner on your taskbar. But there's confirmation required like there is on alt-tab. For people who want to hard program specific actions regardless of where you are in your screen focus "rotation", this may the best option (e.g. you could program a keyboard button to switch focus to your healer's wow client, then heal your tank)

c) "ALT-ESC" switches to the next window that's already open on your taskbar

Where I really see some added utility needed is to combine 1C, 2B and/or 2C into a multiboxing friendly software package, similar to how ISBoxer and Keyclone used to allow you to set up window control. I could see some added utility in allowing windows mouseover and/or keyboard focus control to be configurable (easy to turn on and off, re-assign to other keys and potentially only allow keys or mouseover focus to switch to WoW windows, while ignoring other windows)

[pak]

Don't we just need software that will switch to a specific screen, hit a button, then switch back? I feel like thats already possible with ISboxer. Wether we get away with it or not is the question.

[boxblizzard]

Don't we just need software that will switch to a specific screen, hit a button, then switch back? I feel like thats already possible with ISboxer. Wether we get away with it or not is the question.

everything is sketchy because blizzard give the generic response “ no software “ that rules out everything, we may work round it but we need harder evidence what is ok and what is not ok.

using modified is boxer may not be allowed as it will flag and probably have to get unbanned every 5 minutes as the argument is, no broadcasting being used.

very risky atm

[jak3676]

That question has already been answered - you cannot get away with it. Blizz is actively looking for ISBoxer. LAX agrees (the maker of ISBoxer) and has told all users not use ISBoxer for WoW anymore.

But yes, that was a core component of ISBoxer as well as Keyclone - so it shouldn't be difficult to strip out just the window control features into a stand-alone application. This added utility isn't actually required - you can do without it and just manage your windows yourself with nothing other than built-in windows settings. I just want to make that more user friendly.

[jak3676]

I should have been more clear - I don't think a user modification to ISBoxer or Keyclone will be sufficient. It will take the ISBoxer and Keyclone developers to develop an entirely new product. I just mean that they already have the code developed to do that, so it should be a simple fork - no need to greenfield a whole new project.

[Tin]

What I understand is that LAX is working on a windows manage only version - with some of the same thing we had with ISboxer
easy team setup, layout and load

[boxblizzard]

What I understand is that LAX is working on a windows manage only version - with some of the same thing we had with ISboxer
easy team setup, layout and load

the problem with this is, it’s looked upon as “software” to manage toons. This is what has sparked off the arguments.

I think it’s great Lax is developing a new product but I fear once this is released and technically not against the new rules this may still come a problem with the wow community again!

if people snatch the new product and again farm and be attention seekers, we can kiss boxing good bye