Why do some regions intermittently fail to display?

I have a layout with the main region in the upper left of the screen, with 8 smaller regions around it.

None of the regions overlap or even touch. All are borderless, but they are positioned to leave a gap of a few pixels where the desktop shows through around all the edges, providing a visual border of sorts.

This is used with character sets containing 8 characters, each character assigned to one of the smaller regions 2 to 9. Region 1 is both the active region and the reset region. Region 1 has no character assigned to it, and there is no roaming slot.

Swapping is enabled, and it works fine. Mostly. But there is an oddity, and I would appreciate any suggestions about what I might look at to make it better.

Sometimes one or more characters do not display. They are running, I see them in the task bar. They respond to keys, such as to join a group. But the corresponding home regions are missing, I just see the desktop in the spaces where they should be displayed. If I select a missing character it pops into the active region, and if I then change to another character, the character will generally show up in its home region where it is supposed to be.

I mostly see this at startup. Just after launching all the sessions, I often see all the home regions displayed, but there is nothing in the active region. I select my usual leader and use broadcasting to go through the login process.

The leader stays active and the other home regions are visible until the character select screen comes up. Then one of the other characters pops into the active region, the leader who was broadcasting for the login is left in his home region, and some of the other home regions are not displayed.

To complete the login, I select the leader to make it active again, press enter to start all the characters loading, then ESC a few times to get rid of popups. Then turn off broadcasting and begin play.

All the characters are in game, but some are not visible except in the taskbar. I can get them all back by selecting them individually one after another.

I'm pretty sure I have seen missing regions at other times as well. Not sure what triggers it.

Any suggestions?

[lax]

A copy of the Window Layout would be infinitely more helpful than your description, which could be inaccurate (most of the time when someone describes a problem, their configuration is described as pristine and it just doesn't work, meanwhile if the issue is actually misconfiguration there is no way to know from the description). http://isboxer.com/wiki/Configuration_Sharing. Also you didn't mention what the Swap drop-down is set to; if that's set to something that doesn't start with "Always" then your startup issue may be pretty much expected and you may just have to activate a game window at that point...

Just after launching all the sessions, I often see all the home regions displayed, but there is nothing in the active region

During startup, each region is supposed to go into its home region. When the last window is opened, it should tell Slot 1 to activate. You can get the behavior where nothing goes to the active region by stopping it from launching the final window, or potentially (maybe depending on the Swap setting) by activating some non-game window (e.g. browser) during the startup process


When does this happen other than startup?

A copy of the Window Layout would be infinitely more helpful than your description, which could be inaccurate (most of the time when someone describes a problem, their configuration is described as pristine and it just doesn't work, meanwhile if the issue is actually misconfiguration there is no way to know from the description). http://isboxer.com/wiki/Configuration_Sharing. Also you didn't mention what the Swap drop-down is set to; if that's set to something that doesn't start with "Always" then your startup issue may be pretty much expected and you may just have to activate a game window at that point...

Just after launching all the sessions, I often see all the home regions displayed, but there is nothing in the active region

During startup, each region is supposed to go into its home region. When the last window is opened, it should tell Slot 1 to activate. You can get the behavior where nothing goes to the active region by stopping it from launching the final window, or potentially (maybe depending on the Swap setting) by activating some non-game window (e.g. browser) during the startup process

Again thanks for your prompt response Lax.

Here is the relevant configuration:
http://privatepaste.com/ab971fa789

"Nothing in the active region at startup" is probably a predictable and acceptable result of the fact that I am launching individual characters (potentially from different character sets) rather than explicitly launching a character set. There is nothing to tell the system that the last window has been opened. So it never tells Slot 1 to activate, and I have to select it manually. That's fine, though now that you explained it I will look into whether there is a command I can use to tell InnerSpace to activate a slot/session explicitly at the end of my launch sequence.

The part that bothers me is the disappearance of some home regions, and the change of focus to another character, when the login process reaches character select.

As I said the problem is recoverable. But it puzzles me why it happens in the first place.

When does this happen other than startup?

I'm not sure. It may be only when I switch to another alt in one of the sessions. I camp to character select, tell InnerSpace to launch the new character, then load that character. I'll have to look at it more carefully.

[bob]

A couple of things to consider.

A window layout is assigned to a Character Set. If you never launch a Character Set (launching individual characters from a set or two is not the same thing), how is Innerspace to know what the window layout should be?

When you launch an individual character, from a different character set, how do you know it isn't in the same region as an existing launched character (assuming of course that the Characters are in different sets which use the same window layout)?


Simply. If you want a specific window layout, you need to launch a Character Set that the layout is associated with (and now Lax will tell me I'm wrong ; it's happened before.)

[lax]

A window layout is assigned to a Character Set. If you never launch a Character Set (launching individual characters from a set or two is not the same thing), how is Innerspace to know what the window layout should be?

For launching any given Character it will use the layout assigned to the Character Set it's being launched from

When you launch an individual character, from a different character set, how do you know it isn't in the same region as an existing launched character (assuming of course that the Characters are in different sets which use the same window layout)?

This is indeed possible

A window layout is assigned to a Character Set. If you never launch a Character Set (launching individual characters from a set or two is not the same thing), how is Innerspace to know what the window layout should be?

For launching any given Character it will use the layout assigned to the Character Set it's being launched from

When you launch an individual character, from a different character set, how do you know it isn't in the same region as an existing launched character (assuming of course that the Characters are in different sets which use the same window layout)?

This is indeed possible

I know it isn't in a conflicting region because every character is assigned to a slot that it shares only with other characters on the same account. That is the point of what I am doing: to allow me to launch any combination of characters that the game will allow without encountering conflicts.

I do use the same window layout for all my character sets. Each slot in that window layout is associated with a game account.

Each of my IsBoxer character sets has one character from each account, all arranged in the same order by account.

There are multiple character sets to accommodate multiple alts on each account. For accounts that have fewer than the maximum number of alts, I repeat a character from a previous set as a "filler" to keep the slot-account assignments the same. So all character sets have the same number of characters, one per account, and the one window layout has home regions for every account.

Yes one could define character sets with conflicting slots. But I specifically defined them to avoid conflicts.

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Essentially what I am doing is tying each character to a particular assigned slot. No matter how many or how few characters I want to run at a given time, each character will always load to the same slot and thus the same region, the one reserved for the corresponding account.

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The character sets as defined to IsBoxer are not actually launched. None of my current machines could load all 8 accounts at once and still be playable... they are not that powerful. So the IsBoxer character sets serve only to provide the appropriate slot assignments for the characters, not to define teams of characters to be played together.

I define the "teams" by launching a series of individual characters on each machine.

I did this initially with .bat files, but now I have switched to AutoHotKey scripts.

AutoHotKey makes it easy to recreate something like the IsBoxer "launch a character set" function:

For all characters in a team :
- launch a slot
- wait for the corresponding window to be created
loop til all characters are loaded
Activate the is1 window

I can also establish a remote link to another computer, and load some characters there. I haven't yet looked at how to verify the remote launches... for now I just tell them to launch and have to actually look at the remote screen to verify that it worked.

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I still have the problem with some regions becoming invisible when the game reaches character select during the login process. With is1 active I broadcast a couple tabs and enter keys and the password, tab a couple more times, press enter...
... and suddenly one of the other windows has the focus, is1 back in its home region, and others have become invisible.

I can fix it quickly by re-running the launch script. But so far I have no clue about why it happens.

[lax]

I still have the problem with some regions becoming invisible when the game reaches character select during the login process.

Well now we're getting somewhere.

EverQuest is kinda lame in this respect. The login system up to Character Selection uses a different graphics instance than when it reaches Character Selection, and the game resets everything at this point, including an attempt to maximize the game window. When the game is resetting everything at this point, that is why this issue happens to you then. I'm not sure why they would "become invisible" exactly, but this is why stupid bugs happen at that point in the process.

Is that the only other time this happens?

The problem of some regions disappearing happens consistently only when the character-select screens appear during login. I see it at other times, even when not switching characters, but those cases are infrequent and so far I have not managed to figure out what triggers them. The event is not all that noticeable... the characters continue to respond fine, attacking when told to and all that. It is just that one or more of the small windows around the edges are no longer visible and since I often have gaps in the layout anyway I just don't see it for a while.

It is probably not related, but I also encounter times when clicking on a (visible) home region will not bring it into focus, and I am forced to use the task bar. Usually the clicks work as expected, but occasionally they don't. Any suggestions for why that might happen?