Angsty Teenager
Broski North
Black Legion.
232
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Posted - 2013.12.31 02:40:00 -
[1] - Quote
Heh, anybody complaining in this thread should try to pick up isboxer (you can get a week long free trial for it) and see if they can actually use it effectively.
Let me tell you, outside of scenarios where you have like 10 of the same ship, it's pretty much useless for eve for a number of reasons, which I'll list below:
1. Even though you can sync your cursor, the cursor's position is highly dependent on the fps of your clients. Isboxer has an option to set background clients to run at whatever fps you want them to, but if you're not running them at closer to the fps of you main client, your mouse can be slightly desynced, and considering how small eve's menus and dropdrowns are, this can cause huge problems if you're trying to do anything from sync'd fitting, sync'd refitting, targeting etc...
2. Most of the hotkey options aren't really that useful for eve because of the heavy degree of mouse usage that the game requires. For example, there is no way (at least that I know of) for a client to unlock a target without a mouse click. This means that you can't use hotkeys to control all aspects of the clients easily, and you have to use the mouse. This has other issues (see point 1)
3. The videofx feature that lets you mix and match parts of the video of various clients is nice, but ultimately useless since you can just use multiple monitors anyway and it really offers nothing except cluttering up your screen.
4. If you are trying to do anything with ships that are not all exactly the same, most of the options isboxer offers are really not that useful since sync'ing evreything is pointless and you may as well alt-tab to do stuff anyway since you have to click on stuff with the mouse. This isn't like WoW where you can use isoboxer and have 5 guys following you around and use macros to auto-target various stuff while only looking at one client.
Now, the ONLY reason imo to use isboxer in this game is for two reasons (and these are the two reasons I use it for). One is to allow for sync'd firing, i.e. if you're using tornados you can all fire at the same time. The other is that it allows you to set hotkeys for your windows so you can just hit these hotkeys and go to them. When you're using 6+ accounts on a regular basis all doing different things, this is very useful. Prior to using isboxer, I would just memorize how many times i had to press tab in the alt-tab menu to get to the client I wanted. Very annoying. I'm sure this can be done with another program apart from isboxer, but the isboxer software is well made and is straightforward to use. The addition functionalities are interesting and I've played with them, but I can tell you that they offer no really outrageous advantage like some people seem to think.
Ultimately what it comes down is that if you couldn't multibox without isboxer, you won't be able to do it with isboxer, especially using different ships in different roles. Multiboxing requires a huge amount of situation awareness.
I'll give you an example of what I tried to do at one point with isboxer, and eventually gave up on because it required too much concentration and would bug out constantly.
I wanted to run triple escalations in a C5 wormhole using 2 moros, 1 archon, and 2 webbing lokis. I set up my screen such that it showned no full clients, it was just a black screen with a bunch of video feeds from the various clients (that are interact-able with the mouse), I had all the overviews showing and all of the huds, but no areas of space. I had it set up so that i had hotkeys for both of my dreads to fire and such, and I managed to set up a system that allowed me to lock targets without clicking. So I would warp everything in and siege and **** and start shooting, but the way I handled targeting was too complex and required the dread and loki clients to constantly have focus on the overview. This meant that if I ever clicked on any of the screens, I'd lose focus and evreything would get unsynced and it would mean that my dreads would be shooting unwebbed targets and all sorts of crap like this. It was very difficult becuase I needed my lokis to web both the primary and secondary and constantly be swapping webs and TP's, and at the same time I had to constantly be refitting the dread that was being shot by the sleepers. It was extremely stressful, and to top it off, the isboxer video feeds would introduce a little bit of mouse lag so evreything was slow and a little less responsive.
I initially thought it just would take some getting used to, but eventually I gave up because something inadvertantly went wrong every time and I'd have to swap back to just alt-tabbing through the clients to fix it (it's worth noting that I only have one screen).
Isboxer setups become very complex in eve if you want to do anything that approaches being easier than manually controlling each client and this complexity just makes the system fail so often that it's not worth it.
Anybody who says that isboxer is unfair should just try it and then realize that it's a very nice piece of software that simply streamlines the multiboxing process (which is really something the eve dev's should be doing anyway since EVREYBODY who knows how to play and has played for more than a year has more than one client). It doesn't offer any unfair advantage. |