Tuesday 25 July 2017

C++ Multiboxing : World of Warcraft

I'm a huge fan of the early World of Warcraft games, I make no secret of this, and spent far far too long playing the game when it came out.  I enjoyed the game into Burning Crusade and enjoyed PVP during Wrath of the Litchking, but I think somewhere along the way there Blizzard lost their mind.

And way back in 2010, on the then in vogue talk show "Shut Up We're Talking", I predicted where I thought things would go, and that looks pretty much to be where the game has gone, it's been dumbed down, and the MMORPG inflation on damage and stats has become insipid throughout.

As such, I crave a Vanilla experience, and wish Blizzard would allow the free usage of the Vanilla assets (mainly extracted client data) for all the server emulations out there - Nostalrius and Felmyst come to mind.

Until that happens however, I'm stuck exploring the old game myself, alone... Yes, I still have the original client DVD's I purchased in my battlechest and armed with CMangos, I have been building up my old multiboxer from 2014.

The result tonight is my first Boss kill, Scarlet Monestary Graveyard run... Not perfect, the summoning by "Haunting Phantasms" really screwed me up, my mages won't decurse on command, and the priest keeps pulling aggro as her fade is slow... but other than that, we got somewhere, and I really enjoyed myself...

Click to enlarge.

You can see on the detail screen the top left client is the one I'm playing the warrior, I am tanking... Bottom right is the priest, the only healer, and the group is a warlock (top right) and two mages in the smaller windows center bottom.

The command prompt window is the multiboxer, it simply takes key presses of one key, say "numpad 5" and delivers them to the other four clients running as windows key down messages but of another key code.  So, 5... Hence making the fifth item in the action bar cast.

Shift and 1, will select action bar 1... etc etc... I have a myriad of little command helpers.

However, the boxers are totally dumb, they are only being controlled by myself, at my keyboard, alone.  No hacks, no injection, no memory scanning, just me and my eyeball mark 1.

My ultimate aim is to run Scholo - I love Scholomance!

Tuesday 18 July 2017

Speak More Slowly Please

I'm English, this means I speak English, or at least a dialect of it... This mere fact has furnished me with the ability to communicate to a myriad of other people, of different nationalities and inclinations.

However, it completely alienates me from the French.

Well, a certain sub-set of French speakers, whom simply are rude... Now, I'm sorry, but these people exist, and good on them, they want to protect their beloved French language from the likes of me, coming along speaking it with a terrible rich British Midlands accent.

I accept that.

I'm not trying to compose poetry in French, I'm just trying to communicate with someone, so when I say:

"parlez plus lentement sil vous plais, je ne pas parlez Francais bon"

I think I'm asking them to speak more slowly please, as I don't speak French very well.  I don't expect them to stop the conversation completely, roll their eyes and then turn their back on me.  That's rude.

And this wasn't an isolated case, since the mid-90's it's happened a few times.  And every single time it annoys me more.

When a French person speaks to me with strongly accented and semantically incorrect English, I of course listen to them, I'll even take a stab at working out what they were intimating, I'll smile and maintain eye contact, reassure them they are okay to just try... Very much a "we'll get there together" feel to the conversation.

Some French speakers however... Just Rude.

There, I've said it, I'll leave this here....

This post also may give away why there's been a small break in posts for the last half month... No I've not been anywhere, but I have been extremely busy.

Saturday 1 July 2017

4000 Monthly Viewers

Back in May I came to these pages to thank my Russian viewers and I mentioned I had passed the 1000 viewers a month mark...

Well, here we are on the first of July, with the numbers in for June... 4143 viewers.... What the?

Where are all you guys coming from?  The google stats don't tell me :)