Mac Multiboxing (a summary 2)

[shivetya]

More silly Mac questions.


Can I force minimize the sessions? I assume I can do it from the menu bar on top of the screen because there is no icon on the WOW window, its grayed out, to minimize.


Think 2g is enough ram on a iMac for 3 sessions? what about 5?

I figure I will go this route (waiting on RJs keyclone for mac).

Sessions 1-4 set to minimum everything... 640x480 - no sound - etc. Session #5 (controlling session) windowed 800x600 - maybe more, not sure with sound.

I will start with 2 sessions and work my way to 5 using trials. I assume trials can still join fellowships, haven't tried in ages. I have 3 accounts, 2 active currently. So adding on isn't too difficult.

the iMac is a 2.16 2gb 7600gt (256mb) variety...

[Valorin]

I really haven't experimented with my iMac too much because it's my son's machine, but I think you should be able to run 5 for pve easily. I'm not sure if its gonna be beafy enough for pvp. But my limping G5 runs 3 well and 4 well enough to play. I have managed to "hide" the windows using the menu on the dock but I can't seem to minimize the wows. Personally, I like putting my windows back a little so I can see if they quit following, but it'll hurt your fps a little to have all that video going on. Of course, you don't care what the followers' fps is. I had all mine on 800x600 but mostly so they would fit on my screen. Everything turned down except for sight distance and I have to have sound.

P.S. I'm still planning on updating the summary again soon. Adding some new software options and relating on my new 4 box setup. I think a how-to for synergy would be nice if you have a cross-platform setup like mine.

[shivetya]

Well I guess i need to put some effort in working with synergy as a I have a laptop (XP c2d) next to my iMac....

[Valorin]

Edits, Xkeys, Mac Keyclone?, How-to's.

[HPAVC]

You could duplicate all the installs, but you would be quite well served by making a symbolic link from the master install to the slave's. Now the large read only bulk of the install is minimized (and will cache hard drive controller in memory versus having to cache multiple copies, much less the diskspace). And upgrading patches will be easier. Also doing the same for the addons would be smart as well.

ln -fs ~/WoW_Master/Data ~/WoW_Slave/Data
ln -fs ~/WoW_Master/Interface ~/WoW_Slave/Interface

You could do pretty much all the directories and files except config.wtf, macros*.txt, ./cache, ./errors, ./wtf, and ./logs I would think.

[rjenkins8142]

CloneKeys for Mac has been released.

See my announcement here: http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums2/viewtopic.php?t=1335

This should make multi-boxing on Macs a hell of a lot easier.

[shivetya]

You could duplicate all the installs, but you would be quite well served by making a symbolic link from the master install to the slave's. Now the large read only bulk of the install is minimized (and will cache hard drive controller in memory versus having to cache multiple copies, much less the diskspace). And upgrading patches will be easier. Also doing the same for the addons would be smart as well.

ln -fs ~/WoW_Master/Data ~/WoW_Slave/Data
ln -fs ~/WoW_Master/Interface ~/WoW_Slave/Interface

You could do pretty much all the directories and files except config.wtf, macros*.txt, ./cache, ./errors, ./wtf, and ./logs I would think.

I will see if I can do this successfully.

I assume I will still need to duplicate the actual executable of WOW into this slave's directory?

Sorry if I am being dense...

basically duplicate the wow directory and only the subs for /cache /errors /wtf /logs ... and symbolic link the data and interface?

[shivetya]

You could duplicate all the installs, but you would be quite well served by making a symbolic link from the master install to the slave's. Now the large read only bulk of the install is minimized (and will cache hard drive controller in memory versus having to cache multiple copies, much less the diskspace). And upgrading patches will be easier. Also doing the same for the addons would be smart as well.

ln -fs ~/WoW_Master/Data ~/WoW_Slave/Data
ln -fs ~/WoW_Master/Interface ~/WoW_Slave/Interface

You could do pretty much all the directories and files except config.wtf, macros*.txt, ./cache, ./errors, ./wtf, and ./logs I would think.

Well I cannot create a link to save my life..

I can do cd /Applications/WOW but if I try the ln -fs ~/World of Warcraft/Data ~/WOW/Data is tells me no such directory or file (for the /WOW/Data



/Users/Monolith/wow/Data: No such file or directory

[rjenkins8142]

In Unix ~ is your Home directory. So in your case, just change the ~ to /Applications since that's where you installed WoW. Looks like the original poster has WoW installed in his home directory instead of in /Applications.

ln -fs /Applications/World\ of\ Warcraft/Data /Applications/WOW1/Data
ln -fs /Applications/World\ of\ Warcraft/Interface /Applications/WOW1/Interface

substitute the /Applications/WOW1 with the real directory of your copy(ies).

-----------------

But if you're doing that, you may as well just copy World\ of\ Warcraft.app to WoW1.app, WoW2.app, WoW3.app, WoW4.app, etc...

Here's what I initially did:

In Finder, I went to /Applications/World of Warcraft, and selected the main World of Warcraft program and selected Duplicate. I did that 5 times. Then renamed the copies to WoW1, WoW2, WoW3, WoW4, WoW5. You have to redo this step after every patch. But that's pretty easy and that's all you have to do.

Then I opened up a terminal window and did cd /Applications/World\ of\ Warcraft. In the Finder window, I opened up WoW1. I sized and positioned that window where I wanted it, then exited. Then in the terminal window, I did: cp ~/Library/Preferences/com.blizzard.World\ of\ Warcraft.prefs wow1.prefs. Then I did the same for WoW2, WoW3, WoW4, WoW5, saving each preference file to wowX.prefs (where X is the # of the WoW you just positioned.) Then I created a new shell script in my home directory called WOW-ALL.sh that does the following:

[code:1]
cd /Applications/World\ of\ Warcraft
cp wow1.prefs ~/Library/Preferences/com.blizzard.World\ of\ Warcraft.prefs
open WoW1.app
sleep 5

cp wow2.prefs ~/Library/Preferences/com.blizzard.World\ of\ Warcraft.prefs
open WoW2.app
sleep 5

cp wow3.prefs ~/Library/Preferences/com.blizzard.World\ of\ Warcraft.prefs
open WoW3.app
sleep 5

cp wow4.prefs ~/Library/Preferences/com.blizzard.World\ of\ Warcraft.prefs
open WoW4.app
sleep 5

cp wow5.prefs ~/Library/Preferences/com.blizzard.World\ of\ Warcraft.prefs
open WoW5.app
[/code:1]

Then to start up all my WoW windows, I just run that WOW-ALL.sh shell script. (Open up a terminal window and type: bash ~/WOW-ALL.sh)

This will open up all 5 windows at once and position them where you positioned them right before you did the copy from Preferences steps above.

You could even do the above preferences copy trick in combination with separate WoW directories and the "ln -fs" trick that hpavc posted. Which is pretty much how I'm running now.

[Crunchie]

After spending more than 6 hours on this last night I am stuck.

I have played with both ikey2 and butler.

Ikey for some reason(or maybe it is the system) constantly rewrites my applescripts. If I tell it to activate wow1 and wow2 once the script is saved it gets rewritten and only one instance of wow is there.

With butler it works fine but it does not recognize xkeys.

So I am stuck. I would like to use butler because it doesn t rewrite the applescripts but at the moment it seems only ikey works with xkeys. I have no clue whatsoever why the scripts are being rewritten when called in ikey2.

Any clues?

Lock the script?Locate the script file in the finder,
Get info on the script from within the finder, And select "Locked" IIRC.