Dual-Heading, Window Switching and EVE

Trying out ISBoxer per recommendations from peeps on Dual-Boxing .com. I've gotten everything setup but, I'm getting a serious performance hit by letting the application decide on monitor 'affinity', i.e. which monitor the client should run on. I'm dual-heading with 2 different monitors 1680x1050 (main) and 1280x1024 (slaves) and running just 2 clients until I get the bugs worked out. All EVE clients are setup to use main monitor, game profiles are letting the application decide on which monitor and swapping is enabled in ISBoxer. With this setup, client on the slave monitor takes a while to load and the setup overall is laggy. I've also noticed this performance lag if the EVE client isn't on the correct monitor without using ISBoxer. If I specify monitor 'affinity' for the slaves but keep swapping enabled, all clients load fine but performance degrades as soon as I swap one of the slaves over to the main monitor. If I specify monitor 'affinity' and turn off swapping, performance is great but, I lose mouse-broadcasting or so I've read as I've yet to set this up.

Any ideas on how I can solve this? I do plan on running 4 clients eventually and I'd really like to have mouse-broadcasting working when Incursion finally gets released. Prior to ISBoxer, it's been EVE Launcher for window-management and mousing each client separately. It works but it's tedious and I'm limited to one client per monitor.

[lax]

This article briefly explains the performance hit you're seeing:
http://isboxer.com/index.php/guides/21-using-multiple-video-cards

In short, if you're on Windows XP and move a window from one monitor to the other, it's going to incur a massive performance penalty. Vista and later remove the penalty as long as the monitors are controlled by the same video card. If your two monitors are controlled by different video cards, there is NO way to move them from one monitor to the other without this penalty (whether you drag it yourself, or ISBoxer swaps, etc).

If you want your setup, without swapping, with mouse broadcasting, you can leave Swap and Instant Swap on but change it to one of the non-Always options. For example, you could tell it to switch only when you press Ctrl+Scroll Lock or something, and then if you're in a pinch and for some reason you absolutely need to swap some window even though you're going to take a performance hit to do it, you could. Or, you can disable Swap and Instant Swap but check the "Desired rendering size" box, and set the size to the same size as the #1 region in your Window Layout (probably the size of your main monitor?).

Thanks for the timely reply. This solution should work for me until I can get my gaming system built, which will run Win7. Currently using WinXP. Awesome software BTW. Really good tool you've built here.

Hah, and here I thought I was being so clever. I had a thought of separating the character set by monitor, to get around the monitor-switch performance hit. As in, have one toon run exclusively on the smaller monitor at 1280x1024 res. And have the three other toons run on the larger monitor, also at 1280x1024 res, with region 1 set to this res and designated the active region for these three toons. Unless I missed a setting, IS can't run 2 character sets simul. The behavior I saw was the second character set would over-write the first. The only reason I'm posting this is maybe I was on to something (I'm hoping) but was going about it the wrong way. As always, any thoughts are appreciated.

Almost forgot...I am also assuming that IS needs to launch the game. As in, I can't launch the game outside of IS and then add it in later.

[lax]

Correct and correct. ISBoxer is designed for one Character Set to run on your PC, and can't add it in later.

If you want a workaround for your Window Layout to use per-monitor swapping, there is a way to do it. It's a little involved (not really, an ISBoxer veteran could complete this set of instructions within a couple minutes.. but it's going to look hard if you don't know what you're doing), but this might give you an idea of what you can do with the building blocks in ISBoxer.

Set it all up in one Character Set and one Window Layout -- and skip the "main" region on the second monitor in your Window Layout. So in other words, make sure region #1 is your main screen main region, and then set up all of the smaller regions. After doing that, you can add the second "main" region -- after all of the regions that will actually be used are made, we can add this one at the end that wont be used, to copy down the size and position for one of the next parts.

Set up an Action Target Group (ATG) for each of the monitors, e.g. Monitor1 and Monitor2. To create an ATG, just right click on "Action Target Groups" in the top pane, select New, and name it. Drag characters from the top pane to the bottom left pane to add them to the ATG.

Next, you will need to set up a Mapped Key (you wont need to hit this yourself, don't set a Hotkey), with 1 step, with a Window Style Action in it. This is where we can change the size and position for the other windows to go to when we switch to (or from) them. For the Target, use "Group(all of):Monitor2". For "Style to Change", select Foreground. Then check the Position box, and put in the position (upper left corner) for the second monitor (e.g. from the extra region in the Window Layout). If the size is different from region #1, check Size and put in the new size.

After making this Mapped Key, it will need to be activated each time ISBoxer reloads its configuration. Select your Character Set in the top pane, and click the < under "Perform this Mapped Key when Character Set is loaded or reloaded". Tell it to do the Mapped Key we just made, with Target being "Window:Current" (because we already specified all of the targets).

This will let you swap within monitors, but with the default window swapping you will still only have one monitor or the other with a large window. I'd recommend trying it out at this point before continuing.

There's more tricks you can use to get both to have a main window if you want. First, in the main options page for your Window Layout, change the Swap option to a specific Hotkey (that you wont use). Then create two Mapped Keys, one for each monitor. These Mapped Keys each need two Window State Actions (in the same Step) -- 1. Target=Window:Current to apply Foreground state (style), 2. Target=Group(others in):Monitor1 (or monitor2) to apply the Background state (style). Then in each Slot in your Character Set, use the "When I switch to this character..." option with "Do this Mapped Key", and have it do one of the two Mapped Keys, depending on which monitor that slot is in (if it's on monitor 1, use the one that uses the monitor1 group target, if it's on monitor 2, use the one that uses the monitor2 group target).

So that's about it. 2 Action Target Groups, 3 Mapped Keys with Window Style and Window State Actions, no new hotkeys

I thought there might be a work-around, seeing as how modular IS is. Good food for thought and thanks again for the speedy reply.

Yahoo! After a couple hours of screwin' round, I got it to work. You Da Man, Lax!!!