Hello, I am a returning player after a LOT of years away ( just after OoW) and I was wondering if there are better ways to multibox than what I remember. That is simply changing windows for each toon you wanted to play. Any help would be appreciated, Thanks.
Without buying some of the software out there to bring up multiple windows at once, or simply having two windows side by side that you can click on, alt+tab is your best bet.
I three box on a 25" monitor by running 3 instances of EQ side by side in windowed mode. I make the puller's window about half the screen width, and the other two 1/4 of the width. If you lay out your hotbars and windows accordingly, it works very smoothly.
My 4.5 year old PC starts to lag when I run 2 clients. I've taken to make a second EQ install (by just copying the EQ fodler to an "EQ-lite" and in that version's options I disable just about everything graphically... it seems to help a bit. The machine has only 4 GB of RAM and Win7 chews 1 GB of that, EQ chews 1 GB each. I use a laptop to run further instances. =p
Short of using 2 (or more) separate computers. I have found WinEQ to work well on my "boxing" machine. I run 2 instances of EQ on it and can easily tab back and forth. If your video card can support 2 monitors, you can try having both screens up at once. However, in my experience, you will get considerable lag on the inactive window.
I don't multibox well at all currently, as it's been years since I properly did it, but I use WinEQ too. Tabbing was too annoying still so I made autoit scripts that tab through them using my mouse (had to cause I have a normal mouse).
Odd. I have a PC that's even older than that (built it in October of 2008) and several parts have actually been downgraded (like the mobo, from Striker Extreme to some ASUS that Newegg had for next to nothing). 4 gigs of RAM, Vista (so, an inferior OS), but with a higher end video card (9800 GTX) and I can run 4 clients without much slowdown. Performance degrades significantly after 2 hours of continuous play but before that, it's fine. And this is using only WinEQ2 (premium, if that matters at all). My advice for folks wanting to box without software to assist is to turn everything down/off, run at the lowest resolution you can stand, then see how many clients you can get to work decently before your computer contracts epilepsy (seizures whenever you try to switch windows). Once you get that figured out, you can experiment with fewer clients and higher settings/resolutions.
Mis-calculated math? ;p 4.5 years is pre-October 2008. Mine was June 2008, made it with Vista, upgraded to 7. I'm much better with minimal models.
I tried [Unmentioned 3rd Party Software] but found it overkill for my type of boxing 2-3 accounts. I just tried 24 boxing and my evil army is ready to destroy all of Norra....ahem, get along peacefully with everyone. 24 boxes with 24 mercs and 24 pets. System: Core i7 3.4GHz 16GB RAM 2xGeforce 680's. 4 monitors in a 2x2 configuration. Windows 8.
I've literally knocked out all of my front teeth from facepalming so hard after reading a few certain posts in this thread.
If not using a program, you'll want to adjust the ini file to utilize multiple cores. You can look up how but you can set it up so that it runs each instance of the game on a seperate core. Personally I box with [Unmentioned 3rd Party Software]. You can change settings in that as well. Right now I have it set for each instance of the game to use all cores (chaotic but it works best on my machine compared to other options). I'm using a 4 year old PC I built myself for gaming and while I have some settings turned down, it still runs pretty smoothly. A couple things I really like about [Unmentioned 3rd Party Software] is the quick transition between screens, and the hotkeys. If I hit 7 on one screen it hits it on all screens. So on my warrior the 7 key is just a blank social hotkey labeled "blast". On my wizard and 2 mages, the 7 key is a macro: /pause 5, /assist <my character's name> /pause 5, /cast 1 /cast 1 I put in the cast twice with a small pause in case I got a fizzle. But with this I don't have to switch screens. I just stay on my warrior and with that one button the casters do their thing. It doesn't leave a lot of room for personal hotkeys for my warrior but it's so convenient... 2 hotkeys for bard melodies, 1 for making my casters and cleric sit/stand, 1 for complete heal on warrior, 1 for pet attack, 1 for pet back, 1 for follow me, 1 for follow each other (so I can pull without them getting agro), 1 for damage shield (though with a 17 minute duration I don't really need it). It doesn't leave room to hotkey clicky effects, and basically the only skills of my warriors I have hotkeyed are taunt and bash. combat skills I adjusted the key command so I can still use those of course. I only have the other screens as my focused screens maybe 1% of the time. Emergency healing or evac, buffing, switching to selos song of travel, burnout, portals, saying level XX for hotzone quests, etc. The other 99% of the time my warrior is the focus. I know there are other programs out there that run recorded keystroke/mouse movements/clicks based on keywords found in running chat logs. Using hotkeys that send tells to your characters and this program (not sure what it's called - just heard of it), you can run full screen in whatever instance you want and the others can just run in the background. I'm not sure if it's against the EULA though. [Unmentioned 3rd Party Software] is fine but I'm not sure on the other I mentioned.
i didn't change anything about the ini files. ( using a dual core athlon 6400 ),it run very well so i didn't had to check for any other setting. i am using the setting for better auto-follow tho. i am 3 boxing pretty effectively ( very used to box since a while ) and i don't use any programs , no [Unmentioned 3rd Party Software] or wineq . i play full screen in windowed mode and click the eq icon on the toolbar ,maybe not as fast as [Unmentioned 3rd Party Software] but it's pretty fast once used to it. ( using a caster set up tho who is much easier to play as a box ),
I 3-boxed for years like pk76, clicking the EQ icon to change instance, and it worked fine. These days I use [Unmentioned 3rd Party Software] and have it set up similar to Bryan. I ran an SK-based team and now a caster-based team this way, and I find it much less window-swapping. Personally I would recommend [Unmentioned 3rd Party Software] and I feel the sub cost is very good. I've had pizza delivery that cost the same as a year's subscription.
