Post Mon Jan 25, 2016 11:02 am

Your Introduction to ISBoxer 2

Alright many of you have been waiting for this. The private Beta forum has a kind of log of development with early Alpha screenshots along the way, but at this point all of those are outdated, don't cohesively present what is great about ISBoxer 2, and most of you can't see them anyway. :)

So here's your first real taste of ISBoxer 2.

This is ISBoxer 2:
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As is plain to see, ISBoxer 2 is very different from ISBoxer 1. Let's start with the skin and basics of the UI. ISBoxer 1 was designed using the older "WinForms" system, which feels very technical, no-frills, and ... squared. ISBoxer 2, on the other hand, is designed with WPF, and shows some personality right away. WPF makes it easier to design a beautiful and functional user interface, and that contrast from ISBoxer 1 will be quite apparent to those who have used both.

When you first start ISBoxer 2, you're greeted with what appears to be a launcher, similar to what you might expect for a game. Coincidentally, ISBoxer 2 now *is* the launcher you will use. With ISBoxer 1, you launched the ISBoxer Toolkit, did your configuration for any number of teams, "Exported" settings to Inner Space, and then usually used Inner Space to launch your team. That process is not particularly obvious, and there's plenty of times where one might forget to Export to Inner Space. With ISBoxer 2, the Export phase is combined right into the Launch button; you just pick your team from the drop-down box, and click Launch. With the old process, ISBoxer 1 is generating configuration for many teams at a time, and so there are times when ISBoxer cannot determine which settings should actually apply to what you're trying to do at the time -- for example, if you have the same Character in two different Character Sets with two different styles of Window Layout, ISBoxer 1 may be unable to set the game to the correct resolution because it won't know which you'll be using. That is no longer an issue for ISBoxer 2, because it focuses on a single team at a time!

Let's go over the parts of the main window and move on to making your first team. At the top of the window we have a row of icons/controls: standard minimize, maximize and close buttons, along with a Settings icon, a Save icon, and a slider control. The Settings icon will take you to ISBoxer 2's Global Settings window, which as you might guess allows you to configure things that are not tied to a particular Team, such as file paths, Computer details, etc. The Save icon will save both the Global Settings and your Profile (which there is only one, currently, but it will likely work similar to ISB1 where you can load others). The Slider is used to scale the ISBoxer 2 windows to your personal preference; this will certainly come in handy for those with 1440p or 4K displays!

Directly below that is a browser area. The contents of the browser window will become more exciting later on, but for now provides helpful links. In the bottom left corner is a Console output; this is where ISBoxer 2 will provide status information and notes about what it is trying to do for troubleshooting purposes. The Swap button at the bottom right corner of the Console output area will switch the Console output with the browser, so you can more easily read whichever of the two you need at the time (typically the browser).

To the right of the Console output we have the Team controls, with a team selection drop-down box, buttons for New (Team Wizard!), Edit (Team Editor!) and Delete, and a Launch button. The Launch button has a separate arrow on it, which will pop up a box to let you choose Computers and Characters, for individually launching them and/or dynamically forming a team.

Below that you've got Save changes on exit, hopefully the meaning of which is obvious enough, and then a grip at the bottom right corner for resizing the window.

The New button opens up the New Team Wizard.
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On the first page of the wizard, you pick the game. ... ... moving on.

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Here we go. Step 2, Select your Characters. If your Profile already has some Characters configured, or if ISBoxer 2 can detect some Characters from the game you're playing (some games keep a list of them, on disk, that we are allowed to read from) they will be available in a box that appears on this page. If not, no extra box will be shown. Some defaults will be selected for you on this page already, including the Computer, Game, as well as the Launch Profile if possible. In this case I have added 3 Characters called d3 1, d3 2 and d3 3. Note that the Display Name box says d3 4, this is from an auto-fill feature where you can put a number at the end of the name (e.g. d3 1), click Add to Team, and ISBoxer 2 will add it and set up the following number. So if you're setting up a team with a bunch of toons and do not need the actual names filled in, you can just put in something like "toon 1" and click Add to Team many times to fill out the team; here I entered d3 1, and clicked Add to Team 3 times.

As you add Characters to the team, you can make adjustments in the table at the bottom (called a data grid) if needed. Selecting an entry in the Grid will change the context of the boxes above to edit the selected Character; to go back to adding new ones instead of editing what was just added, use the "De-Select Character" button (which is grayed out in the example image, because I've not clicked in the data grid).

Several fields are labelled in gray. ISBoxer 2 will not use those settings for all games, but can use them for some games to make life easier or to help you create in-game Macros (there is no other purpose for the Actual Character Name field). I've not filled in Account E-mail in this case, but I could enter my battle.net account e-mail for each D3 account to be used and ISBoxer 2 could fill that in for the battle.net launcher or game client -- you can just as well use battle.net's or the game's saved account information features.

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Now that you've selected Characters for a Team, you should be able to come up with some kind of name for this specific set of characters. It doesn't really matter how creative you are, it's just for you. (phew!)

... and now the fun begins:
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Modules! We'll talk in depth about those later. When you arrive at this page, a Preset has been selected for you, which should select basically what you probably should have for the game you're setting up. Because I'm setting up Diablo 3, "Action RPG - Standard" is selected which includes just about all of the modules except Party and Standard MMO Combat. Each Module has a brief description to help you understand what is going on. Diablo 3 doesn't need the Party module because it provides per-character Target, Follow and Assist -- none of which exist in Diablo 3! Standard MMO Combat is also basically useless by default for this game; for the most part Broadcasting Mode is used. The rest of the Modules are left enabled. Note that any Module enabled here will be configured on individual pages as we advance through the rest of the wizard, unless "Configure during this wizard" is un-checked; this option is off by default for the Video FX Module for example because VFX are much easier to configure while the Team is running! We'll go with the default selections.

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Here is the current configuration page for the Core Module. It has exactly one option at the moment, just a key for "Main Hotkey Toggle". This is equivalent to ISBoxer 1's Key Maps Toggle, and therefore uses the same default Hotkey. The Hotkey box works as an auto-detect box, so you can just click on that Shift+Alt+M, press Ctrl+Alt+Q or Shift+F9 or whatever you would rather it be, and the Hotkey is replaced. To have finer control or to select an alternative input device button, click the "..." button to pop up the good old drop-down box and check boxes.

Many Modules will be similarly simple to configure.

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Here are two different appearances for the Broadcasting Mode Module. On the left, we have a version with "Show more options" un-checked, and checked on the right. This check box gives us a way to provide advanced/expert level controls without unnecessarily cluttering up the interface for everyone else.

The Broadcasting defaults for D3 are shown. Shift+Alt+R toggles broadcasting mode, just as with ISBoxer 1, and Broadcasting Mode starts ON (note that would be OFF by default for WoW and other MMORPGs). The Hold-to-Control Hotkeys are also configured by default for D3 (but are disabled by default for WoW and other MMORPGs). There's no right answer on this page, just configure to your liking.

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Here's something that was harder to find in ISBoxer 1. Slot Activate Hotkeys are keys per window, to activate/focus any particular one. Rotate forward and backward keys can be used in place of Alt+Tab, to quickly switch between game windows. ISBoxer 1 had Slot Activate Hotkeys hidden in each Slot of a Character Set, and Next/Previous windows were an unconfigured extra Mapped Key hidden in the Always On Key Map. Here, you cannot miss that they are available!

... and now to ensure that you are properly terrified:
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This beast... is for setting up your Window Layout. (Note that this Module also has the more options check box, but in this case I am not going to bother you with the added options.)

It is actually similar to ISBoxer 1's Window Layout style page, with a lot of improvements. For starters, there's a Computer drop-down box at the top there, but I'm going to glaze right over that for the moment. Right below that is a Style drop-down box. The Style drop-down is similar to ISBoxer 1 in that the same basic styles are available, but different in that ISBoxer 2 does not generate a heap of examples for each style. Instead, you just pick the style base (Corner, Edge, Tiled, Full Screen Stacked, User-defined) and then use the properties box to the right to make adjustments. And then it works pretty much like you would expect. By contrast, ISBoxer 1 reset the list of examples in the drop-down box each time you adjusted properties to the right, leading to unnecessary confusion when the style you had chosen was de-selected and possibly even disappeared. Again contrasting with ISBoxer 1, it is possible to manually design a complete Window Layout during the wizard; click and drag is available if the Style is set to User-defined. Additionally, the available properties to the right change depending on the selected Style; Full Screen Stacked for example has no use for the "Small window size" option used by the Edge style.

I have left this page 100% default with the generated Edge layout.

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This is the CPU Strategy Module. The default is probably fine for most people. In this case I see a minor bug, where for Diablo 3 the foreground and background FPS numbers should both be identical by default for best Mouse Broadcasting. No matter, the number 30 can be filled in to adjacent cells using a feature of the data grid. With a cell selected, a little square pops up at the bottom right corner of the cell (visible in the image above, at the bottom right corner of the text edit box with 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8); drag that square to copy the value to other nearby cells.
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Boom.

At the bottom this Module shows a sort of graph that shows how your game instances will be distributed across your CPUs. In this case, they are nice and evenly distributed, and that should provide a nice smooth experience across all game instances.

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The GUI Module currently has only one option, much like the Core Module. Ctrl+Shift+Alt+G is the same Hotkey ISBoxer 1 used for this same purpose.


And finally ...
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... we're done with the wizard. This page has nothing new on it, actually it is just a placeholder at the moment because the wizard MUST have a page at the end that comes after the Modules. This page will get a makeover, right now it just looks a little ugly and isn't particularly useful.

After clicking Finish, we're done with the wizard. This team can be launched immediately with the Launch button!


To make changes to anything configured in the wizard, click the Edit button to bring up the Team Editor. Then click the Modules tab on the left, and select a Module to re-configure.
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As you can see, exactly the same options from the wizard, are still available after completing the wizard! With ISBoxer 1, the wizard has the easy controls which it uses to generate complicated settings, and making otherwise simple changes like setting "Broadcasting Mode starts OFF" instead of ON requires either running the wizard again, or manually correcting complicated settings in several areas to make sure everything still links up. With ISBoxer 2, there is no hunting for obscure options, because it should be exactly how you last saw it!

One more thing to show you from the Team Editor for now:
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Hotkeys, in one place! These are the same Hotkeys that were configured during the wizard, and that still appear in the configuration for those Modules, but now you don't have to hunt them down. Note that some Hotkeys are generated on the fly, and those Hotkeys won't end up listed on this page (because they don't exist at the time... they're generated on the fly ... later ...).



Now, since I showed that for Diablo 3 we didn't get to see the Party Module or Standard MMO Combat Module.
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Here's the Party Module, for WoW. The Party Mode drop-down selects the style of Follow/Assist/Target keys ISBoxer 2 should use for the game. Slot-order Party List is for most MMOs, where ISBoxer 2 can just assume that the windows are, in order of Slots, F2 F3 F4 F5 F6 and so on (F1 for targeting Self). Game Character ID-order is for SWTOR, where the game sorts the Party List by some internal ID number. In-game Macro-based will work for all other cases, and allows you to specify buttons for individual characters to press to target each other. For WoW, those buttons are filled in for you by the WoW Addon Module.

For WoW, no setup is needed to use the Party Module, but it may be helpful to configure the keys (in-game key binding, and ISB2 Hotkey) for Interact with Target!

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The Standard MMO Combat Module implements the Assist + Broadcast 1 through = keys. Any simple broadcasted key needed can be configured with this Module!

More complicated keys (like ones that send different keys to different windows) will be configured by other Modules; it is possible to design the behavior of your own Hotkey in a Team-specific Module, which is automatically prepared for you. Part of the beauty of the system is that Modules can be shared with others, downloaded and installed quickly and easily. Setting up something someone else has should be just that easy, as opposed to ISBoxer 1's IKEA-like model where we provide materials and a set of instructions and you do the dirty work yourself.



Soon I'll get you all a fresh introduction to User-created Modules and how to use them to set up some cool shit. :)