Multiboxer - Numpad Fail

That moment you're testing and you realise you've bound the test buttons to the numpad....

Yeah, so I'm working on the multiboxer in bed, the amount of work I've got done on it since Boxing Day has been really great for me, I feel like I've gotten it onto the right footing and things are moving in the right direction.

I plan on getting the parameter passing sorted then working almost exclusively on tooling to help write the scripts.

At the moment I do the mouse offsets with a google sheets page, so high on that list is something to help calculate the client relative offset values for me.

Then there's got to be some visual designer for the scripts and the parameters.

If you're not sure what I'm talking about, I'm writing (well re-writing) a multiboxing software application for any old MMO, you can find I've played this a lot on a vanilla World of Warcraft instance, but also on other games.

See my older pages:

http://megalomaniacbore.blogspot.com/2017/07/c-multiboxing-world-of-warcraft.html

But there's a lot of them if you search "Multiboxing" on this very blog.

Happy New Year

Yes, it's a happy new year from me!

In case you have been missing them, I've been posting regularly about a C++ project I'm working on, the multiboxer for World of Warcraft (and eventually other games).

You can catch up on all the original posts and tests, as well as the new in my play list here: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okuqAMVEDyM&list=PL5XLYa90LcKTt8u__dwzGMxUxWavRuN0r

2019 refused to go out without a final surprise for the wife and I... we were blissfully watching a film (John Wick 3 in case you're interested) and I got up to make us each a drink, only to realise I'd stepped into a hallway full of a centimeter of cold water.

The toilet cistern had gone berserk and started to flood through its top, so it was clean water, but toilet water non-the-less.  We mopped up, I've ripped up the floor in that toilet totally as it was ruined.  We've left the heating on (so the house is boiling) and we're hopeful it'll dry out.

The wooden floors through, I'm hoping not to have to take them up... hey ho.

It's been a hell of a year, new job, new house, lots of things going on, travelling to the US with work a lot (none of which I can talk to you guys about here).

So, you will have to forgive me being so busy.... 2020 here we come.

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!

World of Warcraft - Multiboxer

Update on the multiboxing software, I've had a week of feedback from my two testers, I definitely need to get a hold of a pair (or more) of high level Warlocks, as I've heard a few issues with the warlock pets... hunter pets are reported to be acceptable and following...

I don't like what Blizzard have done to hunters, I think they're now a broken class... No melee weapons and johnny come lately players calling those of us saying anything noobs... Argh.

The code itself has had a pair of re-factoring passes, the first pass added a set of key sequences to a single input, so you can make the client respond to a single key with "/follow <playername>"... This is useful, as I can use the shifting keys to switch up to a set of standard keys if need be.

One thing I've done with this is made each client have a "mount & follow" response set up, they mount from their action bar, then type /follow to the name of the previous party member (as configured with the XML files) so instead of following in a messy gaggle, when I mount and leave an area I leave in a line-a-stern formation.

I still need more support tho folks... See the prior posts if you want to donate, or volunteer to help.

Multiboxing - Healers - World of Warcraft

No, I've not been idle, the Multiboxer has had a lot of work on the local multi-client version.  Its had auto log on ability, and selective delivery (so you can stop certain clients getting the key clicks by filter) plus there's also a new master over ride, so you can hold a key to send all following keys the same to all clients...

This last item is great, because it lets you react better in PVP situations, you can hold the button if jumped, and TAB - to pick the target - and voila, nail them with everything, no need for worrying about the mappings... This is particularly good when all your running clients are the same, e.g. all Warlocks, or all mages.

Of course you can run the whole program with no filters at all, so its all 1-to-1 mappings, this lets you run the multiboxer very easiler in 5 man PVP groups, for battlegrounds!

 

One other thing I've put a bit of time into over the last few days is leveling up a free to play (Starter) wow account with a healer for the other group you've seen running.  The plan being to go take on some higher level elites somewhere - since we're still free accounts we can't party to go down an instance - so elites is our only option to show off...

 

In other MMO news, Allods online has quit being supported & operated by gPotato, it has been passed back to the Russian developers... You can migrate your account from gPotato back to them...

Now, Allods was one of those games I was short listing to add to the free to play list, however, I've been trying to download the client for a few days and been failing, it is dismally slow.

Back to Work & Multiboxing Plans

It's a back to work kind of day, and oh boy have I got a lot on at work, but enough of that... Something is bugging me, and it's this damn sponge rubbish keyboard.

After using my lovely Cherry Mechanical keyboard at home all week, and actually getting code done (see the multiboxer project on prior posts) it is a real shock to the fingers to come back to this horrid rubber dome equipped monster.

It's a bod standard Dell keyboard, the keys are horrible, they don't depress nicely, when they bottom out they just stop dead and they wobble nearly all the time, the whole experience is only saved by the fact that my office desk here is brilliant and I've had the desk over 10 years, so I'm very used to it.  But the keyboard, argh.

Now, I'm in an open office space so mechanical keyboards would not go down well at all, though I'm about to go work for an adjunct company of ours, where I hear well they have mechanical keyboards, we'll see.

How's the multiboxer?... Well, I'm going to be working tonight on a filter, this is different key mappings shifted into and out of on a key press... So you could for example have a set of keys you ONLY want to sent to game client 1 and 3 (the healers) you press the toggle... "Shift" perhaps... and it shifts into that set of mappings.... the healers do their thing, let go of shift and you're back sending to clients 2 and 4 the ranged DPS...

I may spend my lunch break reading up on other multiboxers, I've seen one other multiboxer which embeds the game clients into its windows, so you can size and resize them within a single GUI... I think that's very intrusive on the client, and the game might detect it's parent is not the desktop window but some other user created window and call that a hack/exploit.  So I'm sticking with just letting the game clients open, then using "SetWindowPos" to put them into a known x, y, width & height.

Addendum... Does a first day back at work get any worse, when all your development machines start saying this to you....

Damn you, Damn you all to Hell!

Multiboxing in World of Warcraft

I am writing a multiboxer, if you are interested, read the posts from all this week.

Donate using the PayPal links for exclusive early access, and discounts on the final software!

The project has tonight reaches a new level of performance and stability, literally rolling my four level 1 mages around with the paladin they've been stable in movement in and out of Stormwind and through Goldshire, they've taken on (and won) at level 1 level 9 mobs (the highest available) and have even started to make levels - even without being in a group - I can let the mages pull and they seem to take it in turns being the one to either hit first or get the first key stroke.

If I had full accounts I could of course just group them and everyone would share the rained down XP, and believe me it does rain down on you... playing solo you get about 120XP a mob when you start, so share that between 5 and you're getting only about 20-30XP... BUT... You kill 5-6x more mobs!

So what has this all got to do with multiboxing in general?  Well, multboxing in WoW is nothing new to me, I did it originally with a C# written key sender, but it was very primitive in comparison with this sender, and it was during the good old Vanilla days, so there were fewer group combinations you could use it for.

Now, I first became aware of multiboxing in 2004 when Southshore/Tarenmill world PVP was the only PVP, and this was on Thunderhorn EU server, which is a PVE server... Some knuckle head actually attacked southshore... and in Ironforge the commons between the bank and AH suddenly became a wash of people screaming to head North and defend the borders.  So it was about 65 various level (and PVP disabled) Alliance rattled into Southshore to see what was going on.  What met us was a level 60 undead warlock with four identically geared level 60 undead mages, and they moved in one fluid motion and owned any lone alliance who went PVP enabled to take them on.

They moved together, right with one another, they were the first Multibox I ever saw, and they started the first ever World PVP I saw, as more and more alliances then whole allliance level 60 groups came up and went PVP active and the war flowed.  The multiboxer disappeared soon, but I'd seen him and saw the power.

WSG was the first major location I saw PVP multiboxing take off, but vanilla PVP queues were hugely long on Thunderhorn, and the realm was PVE.  And I had a good guild around me working tier 0/1 gear, so just enjoyed the game.

Later when the guild had gone, when the groups became shit and when Burning Crusade gave us new instances, then my mind cast back to Multiboxing, and I wanted to do it to cover all the PVE content I'd no longer get to play because BC had totally devalued it.  I never ever got to play Nax properly... So I set about writing a key sending program in C# to run my own small group of level 70's through the content, I figured I could... Sure enough I could use my hunter, and a second account with a priest to run most of the content.

But I lost interest in the game and as wrath came along I just PVP'd more and more so lapsed the account and multiboxer.

It was only this year I realised I'd missed out on a big band wagon, I realised people were selling their Multiboxing set up, and that new rigs (PC's) could run multiple copies of the WoW client, so I could run group raids on my own single machine?... And then multiple groups of clients over the LAN!... WOW for WoW!

This project was then born, it soon was up to the old level, but its now oh so much more.  So much smoother, and with so much potential.  I've looked at, but not bought other multiboxers out there, because... Well I don't trust them, a multiboxer suite basically monitors your key strokes and transmits them around, what's to stop that strange multiboxer from transmitting my username and password as I type it in?.. NOTHING... Plus I'm a software engineer, why buy when I can write.

Features complete:

• Launch multiple local clients
• Use/save window positions for clients
• Automatic login to accounts
• Launch different games (WOW & RoM so far)
• Configure source (input) keys to map to different receiving (output) key
• Network (WAN & LAN) transmit of key strokes on a 1-to-1 pattern (1-to-many to come)
• IPv4 & IPv6 suppport
• Monitor mode to help configure the system

Development Items:

• Transmit strings of commands/keys on a single key press
• Manual select of target window preference (so you can set a specific client you opened to pull for instance - "CTRL+1" the next pull shot (action bar #1) will go to client 1 so that client gets the aggro)
• ALT transmit - stops mapping keys and just sends the raw key strokes
• Mouse click on screen location, you click on main client or one subclient and all the other clients do the same - allows you to talk to a quest giver and then accept the quest, or on your main get a quest and "share" it with your group and they can all accept it from your single mouse click
• Select a certain character after logon - based on profile settings, e.g. Client 1 opens 3rd character down, Client 2 opens 1st... etc.  But this is an optional item, I think its too close to a bot feature, so the player may have to just select each too
• DPS client switch - You can set in the profile which clients are DPS clients and so you use one set of key mappings for them
• Healing Client Switch - You can set in the profile which clients are healers and so you use a different set of key mappings for them
• Dynamic switch between key mapping sets as you use toggling keys - e.g. Hold CTRL - to switch between them

 Game Macro's

In Wow the key to getting the multiboxer to work is to use the macro command to call a single key on the receiving end, but that one key do multiple things, step up the Macro.

A feature built into the game, the two main macro's I'm using at the moment are:

/target <main toon name>

/follow

/target <main tool name>

/assist

With these to simple macros my gang can follow me, and then target my target, this is fine for nukers.... If one of my followers were a healer, I could make them /target <main toon> /heal...

And for a round robing "top up" I could have a macro to target each player in the group in turn and cast a top up heal... The Wow forums explain Macro's better than I can, but you get the idea I hope.

Planned Beta Release

The closed alpha is well advanced, the closed beta is therefore slated (very roughly) for the 21st March 2014.  If you want to get into the Beta now's the time to send a donation!

Send your donation, with a valid e-mail address and I'll be able to send you details of how to sign up.

MMORPG Multiboxer (Multiple WoW Clients) #4

Welcome to my dev diary number 4, for the Multiboxer project, I've had a lot of people viewing the posts, far more than the videos (there's like 190 of you viewing the posts, but only like 6 views on the videos; which tells me my tagging either sucks or the videos are so crap you're not watching them).

Well, today's video is interesting in that you will see the code base (its files) and you'll see me using it from Visual Studio, and showing you some of the ease-of use features I'm adding in.  The fact I'm adding ease of use items, and showcasing them is really just a demonstration that I'm thinking about how I, and hopefully you would want to use this software, it really is going to be driven by your guys... So donate now to spur me on!

The demonstration today will focus on the window positions settings, how they're automatically saved for you and how they're used when you start up.  We're handling 4 clients at the same time, but if we opened more the known positions for these 4 would be used and then the rest would default, all being handled seamlessly for you, as you'll see in the video.

You will also see some of the included features of the software, how we switch into "monitor mode" easily to map key codes for the "Key Mappings" configuration, which you'll also see for the first time!

You can donate directly to this project and help fund development today, any donators will receive goodies!

MMORPG Multiboxer (World of Warcraft, Runes of Magic, LOTRO) #3

A fresh development update, the launching of the more complex (than WoW) clients is now working and input is going to multiple local clients in Runes of Magic, here's my level 1 mages backing up a new level 1 Knight.  I'd never played Knight in Runes before, so this is going to be interesting, I plan to have one knight, two mages for DPS and then two priests of healing.  To nuke through the content.

The challenge will be when I come to run multiple clients, Runes of Magic seems to take about 1GB (at least while loading) per client.  Lowering the settings on the slave clients is working well however.

I am of course still looking for Donations to help pay to continue this project more actively, I'm specifically looking for WoW sponsors now as I think I need to cough up for 5 accounts, and that's going to go down with the wife like a tonne of bricks.

I will however take a saunter over to LOTRO, just as soon as I've cloned the install to my many virtual machines to multi-head testing and then cloned it to my laptop for network testing.

I'm also adding ipv6 support to the networking!

 

You can donate directly to this project and help fund development today, any donators will receive goodies, I'm not sure what you'll get yet, but it will be software related!  Or perhaps in game items to help you in your favourite games (e.g. Diamonds in Runes of Magic).

All donators receive a discount on the final product.

Any donator posting £10 or more will receive access to the software to help with the closed Beta test.

Any donator posting £100 or more can join what I'm terming the "premium" club, and have exclusive access to the development process - bug tracking, Alpha & Beta access.

Any donator posting £200 or more can come and have dinner with me and discuss direct requirements they might have for the software, or just shoot the shit about gaming and blogging in general (You have to travel to approximately the UK M1 Junction 25).

Todays video is some more, freshly taken, video of WoW.  The reason we have video of WoW and not the Rom Session above is that Rom takes so much ram it crawled - the development VM is only 32bit, so only has access to 3.5gb of ram... Wow runs much better, seems to be much more optimised.  And of course you can run WoW in DirectX9 mode to save yet more resources.

MMORPG Multiboxer (World of Warcraft, Runes of Magic, LOTRO)

Development Update, Runes of Magic launching with its multi-process, multi-window, shenanigans has been fixed into the multiboxer, so it can seamlessly open and send input to many local Runes of Magic Clients.

Here's a boring video of the software opening two Clients, the only human input is I do click "play" as the launchers open...

Still Looking for donations, so see yesterdays post!

MMORPG Multiboxer (World of Warcraft, Runes of Magic, LOTRO)

I am proud to announce the first useful piece of software I'm creating, it is a whole suite of tools to help you multibox.  This is the practice of using a single keyboard and transmitting the keys, or even mapping different keys (e.g. you press numpad 0 and on the target game it presses W) to multiple game clients.

The end result is you can play alone, controlling multiple characters, run dungeons alone, level up through hard content and essentially explore the world in the myriad of MMORPG's out there without the need for a guild or clan.

I'm creating this project off the back of my recent struggle with gaming, I have no-one to play with, and can't commit to a regular gaming schedule.  Therefore I want to create my own PVE capable groups in the myriad of games you've seen be picking up and poking about recently.

The rubs is, I need your help in creating this software!

The project is advancing along its closed Alpha phase, I plan a Closed Beta, then an Open Beta before releasing v1.0.  I will also be releasing network specifications for the message transmission protocol being used, so you can hook your own applications into mine and build bigger and bigger multiboxers (e.g. you could use my XML network transmitter with some code you wrote to echo the keys being received and forward them on over the internet).

However, I have no money, certainly not enough to pay for all the testing accounts I require, nor the web hosting to let you download this fine software!  So I'm asking, please donate below.

You can donate directly to this project and help fund development today, any donators will receive goodies, I'm not sure what you'll get yet, but it will be software related!  Or perhaps in game items to help you in your favourite games (e.g. Diamonds in Runes of Magic).

All donators receive a discount on the final product.

Any donator posting £10 or more will receive access to the software to help with the closed Beta test.

Any donator posting £100 or more can join what I'm terming the "premium" club, and have exclusive access to the development process - bug tracking, Alpha & Beta access.

Any donator posting £200 or more can come and have dinner with me and discuss direct requirements they might have for the software, or just shoot the shit about gaming and blogging in general (You have to travel to approximately the UK M1 Junction 25).

Many other multiboxers exist, however, I believe for the target selling price of £15 (which will be discounted for donators) you will not find as fully featured a piece of software:

• Local Multiple clients (run 5 characters on your one machine)
• LAN Control multiple clients on multiple machines (run a whole 40 man raid, your healers on one PC, your tanks in another, your DPS on yet others).
• Support multiple games, including the initial Alpha and Beta target titles:
• World of Warcraft
• Runes of Magic
• Lord of the Rings Online
• Conan Online

• Open XML configuration settings for easy and scalable configuration (remap 6 keys today, remap 60 tomorrow).
• Support for Wine users (yes I will be bringing the boxer to Linux platform Wine users as part of the Beta).

 My intial target for more detailed development is £250.  With this I will be able to purchase more WoW accounts and group them together (features not available in the "Starter Edition" free to play).

Super Donator/Partner - If you wish to partner me in this development, I would be interested in hearing from any C++ or C# developers, but please beware I will not be showing you the source, nor making the project open source.  This may require exchange of contracts and significant input from yourself.


Runes of Magic Test Launch