I have been thinking of what I am missing as far as addon's for Multi-Boxing. I have something in mind but not sure if its allowed. The big problem Boxers have, that do not 5-Box, is Group Healing. You see the party is ordered in reverse order by Character Creation Date. What this means is what you see on your Masters Screen does not correspond to what you see on your Slave Healers. The five character slots are defined as "Player", "Party1", "Party2", "Party3", "Party4". Player will always be the Master, If the Master is the Group Leader, then on the slave he/she will be "Party1". Party One is always the Group leader, with the exception of when you are the actual leader.
More Information.
This can be really hard to picture so lets go with an example. I will use three boxer Toons, the Tank, the DPS and the Healer. Other Members will be random. If the Tank was created on Day 7, the healer on Day 9 and the DPS on Day 3, Here is what it would look like for the Tank:
| Player | Tank |
| Party1 | Healer |
| Party2 | DPS |
To the Healer it will look like:
| Player | Healer |
| Party1 | Tank |
| Party2 | DPS |
Now here is where it gets confusing. Lets Add PugDPS and PugCC. PugDPS was created on Day 1 and PugCC was created on Day 4. Now we see:
| View: | Tank | Healer |
| Player | Tank | Healer |
| Party1 | Healer | Tank |
| Party2 | PugCC | PugCC |
| Party3 | DPS | DPS |
| Party4 | PugDPS | PugDPS |
Now this seems OK, right? Well lets change the group Make-up. Leats replace our PugDPS and PugCC with GuildDPS and GuildCC. GuildDPS was created on day 8 and GuildCC on day 10.
| View: | Tank | Healer |
| Player | Tank | Healer |
| Party1 | GuildCC | Tank |
| Party2 | Healer | GuildCC |
| Party3 | GuildDPS | GuildDPS |
| Party4 | DPS | DPS |
Can you see the problem, basically what you need to be able to do is consistently know that if you want to heal player1 from the Masters view-point, you have to redo your Macro's every time the group changes.
The Solution?
There is a mod called Multiboxer that communicates things like who is following who and the XP of the slaves, among other things. Now wouldn't it be good if you could pass variables across from the main to the slave that can be used in Macro's?
What do you Mean?
Lets say that the Mod on your Master stores the party members as P1, P2, P3, P4 and P5. It then passes this information to the Slave. You can now use Macro's like:
/cast [target=P1] Heal
We are no longer reliant on the order of the party, it doesn't even matter about the order the Slave Healer see's the party, it can all be handled using these variables.
So What's the Problem?
The problem is I don't know if you can do this as a Mod. If anyone knows if this is even possible, please leave a comment. This would be a dream come true for a lot of Multi-Boxers.
Razorbax
5 comments:
I'm pretty sure this can be done because all the setup can be done out-of-combat.
Healbot uses a similar method with marcos. You can assign a button to a macro with a 'target=hbtarget' string, and Healbot automatically subs the target name before assigning the macro to the heal button.
I ran into this problem recently when trying to rebind and consolodate my priest's macros.
I ended up just using the Party1-5 + self macros, then arrange them on the toolbar in order as I see them on my main. If new person is in the group, I just reshuffle the macros and do some test heals to make it fit.
I'll just say that this is possible and completely within the rules. Your addons are allowed to communicate through the addon channel and macros are able to be altered through script without any button pressing or moving or any of that nonsense. You would just need to make sure the new macro is going into the correct hotkey slot so you use the ability you actually want. I can give more information on this if you email me but no promises I'll code anything. :P druid_kagrra at rocketmail dot com
Razor,
I have an idea on how to code this. Basically if you configured a list of names you want to assign, then defined functions that took a variable as a parameter and cycled through party1..party4 until GetUnitName("unitID") returned the one it was looking for then used that as a target.
Actually this sounds fun and I'm gonna give it a shot to see what I can come up with
There are a couple of useful things that could help with this. You can use Lib-Trust and Lib-RPC from the dualboxing forums to write macro's remotely. Also Jafula is adding this in 2 versions of his Addon (see blogroll-Misc).
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