FAQ  •  Register  •  Login

Guide: Unlimited Hotkeys Through Virtualized Menus

Moderator: MiRai

<<

firescue17

User avatar

League of Extraordinary Multiboxers

Posts: 584

Joined: Wed Sep 19, 2012 7:37 am

Location: Omaha, NE

Post Sun Jan 27, 2013 6:08 pm

Re: Guide: Unlimited Hotkeys Through Virtualized Menus

Ah, I just got your point Ualaa. You're right, I mispoke in the video about using mouseclicks.

Originally, when I was turning clicks bars on and off I had the dual hotkey/mouse set up. When I switched over to the virtualized click bar, I didn't even bother to set up the mouse clicking as it was a lot of work for something I personally never used.
<<

Alge

User avatar

League of Extraordinary Multiboxers

Posts: 1223

Joined: Wed Jan 26, 2011 2:17 am

Location: Under the milky way tonight

Post Sun Jan 27, 2013 7:46 pm

Re: Guide: Unlimited Hotkeys Through Virtualized Menus

firescue17 wrote:Thank you, Lax.

I don't presume to understand the inner workings of ISB, so I don't know what the feasibility of implementing anything is; however, as I was fleshing this out and experimenting with things, my imagination was telling me what I wanted to do was:

1) Assign a hotkey to a clickbar button directly in the ISBoxer UI panel, similar to the manner would would assign a left / right mouse click or mouseover action.

Instead of creating a whole bunch of infrastructure Mapped Keys for label and hotbutton virtualization, one would create separate clickbars in the ISBoxer UI panel with hard coded hotkeys. Once I had separate clickbars with hardcoded hotkeys, I could do:

2) "New Clickbar Virtualization Action" such that Clickbar "Empty Placeholder" is now "Clickbar "Something Else."

Version 1.0 of this consisted of separate clickbars with "New Clickbar State Actions to turn them on and off, but as I expanded on the theory, added more pages and workflow logic, especially jumping to a non-linear page, it became too complex to track and troubleshoot which of any of the 17 clickbars needed to be turned on or off at any given time.

The ability to associate the labels with the hotkey would reduce the profile overhead by at least half.


This summarizes my ideas pretty well as well. Set up a bunch of Click Bars in their required state, complete with Mapped Keys (with Hotkeys) assigned to Click Bar buttons (similarly to how clicks are now handled), then use Click Bar virtualization to change the currently available menu.

Some extra thoughts:

* it would be great to have visual feedback that a button was pressed. At the moment I am building this into the Mapped Key that gets activated, changing the Click Bar button image on key press and then back to its original image on key release.
* it would be great to have a default image (or even pressed and released image) for a whole Click Bar and a default text style for a whole Click Bar.
* would it be possible to tie the Click Bar Button name to the name of a Mapped Key and then just assign a Key Map to a Click Bar? i.e. this is my Combat Menu Click Bar, it has buttons G1 through G12, it is linked to a Key Map called Combat Menu which has Mapped Keys G1 through G12.

I threw some screenshots of what I have so far up as an imgur album. This is very much still a work in progress. I'll post my ISBoxer configuration when it is a less messy state.
<<

lax

User avatar

Site Admin

Posts: 7301

Joined: Tue Nov 17, 2009 9:32 pm

Post Sun Jan 27, 2013 8:34 pm

Re: Guide: Unlimited Hotkeys Through Virtualized Menus

I'm working on a proof of concept to take this to the next level, I think it will be even simpler. :)
<<

Alge

User avatar

League of Extraordinary Multiboxers

Posts: 1223

Joined: Wed Jan 26, 2011 2:17 am

Location: Under the milky way tonight

Post Sun Jan 27, 2013 9:34 pm

Re: Guide: Unlimited Hotkeys Through Virtualized Menus

simple is good
<<

FuryOfNature

Posts: 60

Joined: Thu Sep 30, 2010 9:26 am

Post Mon Jan 28, 2013 9:30 am

Re: Guide: Unlimited Hotkeys Through Virtualized Menus

lax wrote:I'm working on a proof of concept to take this to the next level, I think it will be even simpler. :)

Buffing you with Triple-Espresso and Chocolate-Covered Coffee Beans now...
<<

Zeksiz

Posts: 1

Joined: Tue Jan 29, 2013 7:29 pm

Post Tue Jan 29, 2013 7:52 pm

Re: Guide: Unlimited Hotkeys Through Virtualized Menus

Thank you for posting this guide. I've only been using ISBoxer for a day, but as soon as I saw this guide I instantly realized just how powerful it can be. Utilizing a limited key set (like the G keys, or a Numpad in my case) one can have access to hundreds of different hotkeys that can do different things for different characters. It really is a brilliant idea. I look forward to seeing what Lax can do to incorporate it and make it even easier.

On that note it took me a while to figure out some of your steps and what they were for. Having not used the program much I didn't fully understand the method and logic behind the parts of the guide until I really thought hard about them. I think there could be a way to explain the thought process a little more between the steps. Mainly it would be answering things like the purpose of the different key maps and how they relate to each other. In the guide you tell us what to do, but not necessarily why. For example, you could explain why you have a "00: General Hotkeys" key map and how it relates to the overarching idea and purpose of the guide. The same with the "Clickbar: Combat" and "Virtual G15: Combat". Why did you need to create these two key maps, and how do they relate to each other and toward the eventual goal of having a visual and virtual menu of hotkeys to tab through?

Those were basically the questions I had to ask myself before the idea really started to make sense. Only after I started putting all the questions and answers together could I then start modifying the guide for my own characters. Also, in the last never-ending step you don't tell us where we have to "assign label text", nor do you tell us where to start creating our own Mapped Keys to eventually be used in our virtual key maps. I'm assuming you left an explanation of the "label text" out because a solid understanding of Click Bars would tell most people where they assign labels, but for a beginner like me it took a while to figure out what you meant and where I needed to change them.

It is an amazing guide, especially for people with a solid understanding of ISBoxer. For a newbie, it's still an amazing guide but a bit confusing at first read for the reasons I mentioned above. Still, thank you for putting it together! I know I'm going to be using it a lot as I set up my new boxed team. :D
<<

bollwerk

Posts: 67

Joined: Sun Oct 03, 2010 1:22 pm

Post Sat Aug 02, 2014 3:49 pm

Re: Guide: Unlimited Hotkeys Through Virtualized Menus

I just spent some time integrating your XML file into my own and I noticed one minor issue.
The labels for the virtual G15 buttons are off by a row.
You mistakenly label the "clear" row 3, but leave out row 7.
I just changed the row 3 buttons to row 7 buttons.

Thanks for doing this!
<<

Renatus

Posts: 46

Joined: Tue Mar 03, 2015 9:24 pm

Post Sat Mar 07, 2015 10:24 pm

Re: Guide: Unlimited Hotkeys Through Virtualized Menus

Is this still the most up to date method and approach for this?
<<

firescue17

User avatar

League of Extraordinary Multiboxers

Posts: 584

Joined: Wed Sep 19, 2012 7:37 am

Location: Omaha, NE

Post Sun Mar 08, 2015 5:29 am

Re: Guide: Unlimited Hotkeys Through Virtualized Menus

Renatus wrote:Is this still the most up to date method and approach for this?

Replace the clickbar actions with menu actions. Aside from that the principle is the same.
<<

inmysights

Posts: 94

Joined: Sun Sep 28, 2014 11:20 am

Post Mon Apr 13, 2015 1:48 pm

Re: Guide: Unlimited Hotkeys Through Virtualized Menus

your download link isn't working, could you post your document for download again, I would love to try and setup my G15 like this!

Thank you
PreviousNext

Return to Menus

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 7 guests