HOWTo - Set up Maximizer (Updated PiP)

[mildigity]

hi im just starting boxing and the maximizer works at frist when the news window comes up and when i click play it goies back to full screen how do i fix this?

[DLoweinc]

you shouldn't be pointing to launcher.exe, you should to wow.exe that should fix it i think?

[darkzor]

ok so i started dual boxing 2 days ago and it was fine til i wanted to 3 box so i followed every step in this guide but did a setup for 3 boxing but now when i open it up with keyclone instead of goin to the maximiser option i set it region0 up top and regon1-region2 down the bottom it just pops up in window form, i dont get it O.o it was working before when i dual boxed and now my step 6 box is clogged with all these different things i tried to make it work again :,( now i dont know how to get it all working again, please help!!

[keyclone]

hmmm... check the region name of each command. compare those names with the region names in your layout.
make sure they match EXACTLY, case and all.

and of course, make sure 'enable maximizer' is still checked

if you're still having issues, drop me a PM and i'll see what i can do.

Rob

[Mercurio]

Edit: Deleted double post

[Mercurio]

I have two major questions (somewhat related):

1) The first is about the resolution setting in the maximizer screen that is just to the right of the "enable maximizer" checkbox. This seems to default to 800x600, has a number of selectable resolutions in the dropdown (including a "1 to 1" entry), and I believe it also can be typed over to specify any XxY resolution. The question is... what does it do? My assumption has been nothing because it seems to me that I'm setting resolutions for the regions to whatever I want them to be when I define my regions in the top portion of the maximizer settings screen.

2) My bigger question is what I should be setting my resolutions to on my 30" monitor while playing 5 clients. Having tried out basic schemes of where the main and slave regions are located on the screen, I've decided I like to have the four slaves in a column on the left side of the screen and the rest of the monitor used for the main window. My monitor runs at a default resolution 2560x1600. So I've been using the following settings:
Region x, y w, h
slave1 0 , 0 512, 400
slave 2 0, 400 512, 400
slave 3 0, 800 512, 400
slave 4 0, 1200 512, 400
main 512, 0 2048, 1600

This allows me to use the entire 2560x1600 resolution of my monitor and things look quite nice. I've kept the resollution drop-down at it's default 800x600 and basically ignored it. I guess the ratios of the slave and main windows aren't exactly the same in this configuration, nor are they the same as the 800x600 setting in the drop down, but it does make the most of my monitor.

Running this way since WotLK I've noticed that swapping windows is pretty slow and I can only swap about 5 times before the video card (a 8800 GTX) starts producing artifacts on the screen and my FPS goes to 3, which requries a reboot to fix. So I don't use the swapping feature much. But even if I don't window swap there will come a time 3-4 hours after playing that I'll get the artifacts and 3 FPS thing anyway and have to reboot. Not sure if this is related to how I set up maximizer.

However, messing around today I thought the drop down might actually do something, so I figured since it has a ratio of 4:3, maybe all my windows ought to have that same ratio. So I came up with a new scheme that makes the slave regions, main region, and drop down setting all have the same ratio of 4:3. Here it is:

Region x, y w, h
slave1 0 , 0 512, 384
slave 2 0, 384 512, 384
slave 3 0, 768 512, 384
slave 4 0, 1152 512, 384
main 512, 0 2048, 1536

This fills the width of my monitor, but only takes up 1536 of the 1600 pixels on the vertical portion of my monitor. It looks a bit odd, but isn't that big a deal.

The question is.... is there something "better" about the 2nd setting where all the scales match? Does this matter or should I just go back to the first settings I've been running for 8 months or so pretty happily? What advantage does matching the scales of the slaves and main give me? What advantage does matching the region scales to the drop down setting scales give me?

OK, enough of this - just wanted to make it perfectly clear what I was asking. Thanks in advance for sharing your wisdom on the matter.

[keyclone]

@Mercurio
the in-game resolutuion (just below the PiP field and to the right of 'enable maximizer') tells the wow originally associated with the region, what resolution to render in. wow then goes about rendering as if it will display to those dimensions.

if you want to insure the aspect ratio of your regions is correct, thereby making the minimap a circle and not a football or egg, then you want to keep the dimensions of the region (on the top right) to be some scaled ratio of the in-game resolution.

also, when you swap around, if the dimensions you swap to are not the same, wow could (i have no knowledge of their actual code) re-render the surfaces as the wow gets repositions/resized. so, the best idea would be to keep the large region (which you are swapping to) the same ratio as the smaller regions. this way, its just like a simple resize for wow and (hopefully) no re-render should be required.

there are numerous example layouts on the main site (link )

[Mercurio]

Keyclone,

Thanks for the quick feedback. I took a look at all your example layouts. It looks like my first configuration was just fine - all I needed to do was change the in-game resolution from 800x600 (a 1:1.33 ratio) to 1024x800 (a 1:1.28 ratio that matches my region's ratios). I did this and things look slightly cleaner - I guess I've been looking at things slightly skewed from normal for the past 8 months.

Playing around for 15 minutes or so, performance doesn't seem to be affected. One of my worries was that the higher the in-game resolution was set, the harder the video card would have to work, but it looks like settings of 800x600, 400x300, or even 4x3 would produce exactly the same result.

So the bottom line on in-game resoultion is that it is simply a way to match the region ratios and has nothing to do with the actual number of pixels displayed (let me know if that's not right).

Thanks again!

[keyclone]

recently, for performance, i have started using a different approach to the in-game resolution.

let's say the big region is 1280x1024 and the little regions are 320x256. originally, i would recommend setting the in-game res to 1280x1024... but this would result in ALL regions rendering at that res, which can be fairly intensive. (ie: for 5 regions, that would be roughly 1280x1024x5 pixels or 6.6m pixels per frame)

instead, i decided to try cutting the in-game resolution by 50%... so instead of 1280x1024... i would set it to 640x512. i figured this would reduce the number of pixels to render drastically (down to 1.6m pixels in the example.. a 75% reduction in rendering requirements) while allowing for a simple 200% zoom on wows part when rendering the main region (a 200% zoom is almost trivial compared to scene rendering)

i hope that makes sense. give it a shot and see what you think.

[skullchewer]

i like your tut iv gone though is and have it set up but as soon as i log on with the to acc im running but my prob is it still cant get the Picture in Picture to swap iv redid al my key bindings and still no go