Follow Problem when using 2 Computers

[Xalan]

Hey all

I am stuck with a problem which I cannot work out so I need some help.

I am using ISBoxer 41.14.912.1 and Jamba 4.1.1

What does not work is that the toons on my remote computer do not follow the toons on my local computer.

I run with a 5-man group with 1 toon as master at any time and the 4 other toons on follow, across 2 computers.
My local (desktop) computer is where I startup the local team of 3 toons and where I play from.
My remote (notebook) computer has a remote team of 2 toons usually running on follow.

What does work is that the toons on my local computer do follow the toons on my remote computer all OK.
Also the toons within each computer follow the other toons on the same computer all OK.

The problem occurs on my local computer when I swap screens by pressing F9 or F10, or when I press ALT-F to force all other toons to follow my current toon in focus.
The toons on my remote computer seem to not respond to the FTL settings on the keys broadcast to the remote computer from the local computer.

This has been working ok for several years across 2 computers.
I could always swap to any toon on any computer to become the master/leader and press ALT-F and all the other toons would follow ok.

I put ISBoxer into debug mode (CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-G) and selected the debug trace window and selected some key options to trace.
Then when I F9/F10 swap screens on any computer I can see 162+160+F12 (LShift+LCtrl+F12) being broadcast to all the other screens debug windows ok.
When I press ALT-F on any one screen on any computer then I see the correct FTL mod-key combination being generated for the character on that screen to all the other screens debug windows ok.
For example, on one character when I press ALT-F then I would see 160+162+F11 (LShift+LCtrl+F11) being broadcast to all the other screens debug windows.
Each character generates its own FTL mod attributes plus F11 key correctly to all the other screens on both computers ok.

In my team configurations I have something like:

Team-Local
Slots
1 Toon1
2 Toon2
3 Toon3
Also Launch
Team-Remote

Team-Remote
Slots
1 Toon4
2 Toon5
Computer
RemoteComputerName

So it seems that Team-Local on the local computer can follow toons on the remote compuer beacuse it knows the FTL mod attributes to expect.
However Team-Remote does not seem to know what to do with the FTL mod attributes for toons on Team-Local, so Team-Remote toons do not follow any toons from Team-Local.

In the Quick Setup 38, FTLFollow macro I used the Preview tab to see what code it would generate for a specific team.
For Team-Local, it generates a /follow with all 5 toons names and FTL mod attribues.
For Team-Remote, it generates a /follow with only the 2 toons names and FTL mod attributes for that remote team only - so it does not handle the FTL combos broadcast from the Team-Local toons.
This problem appears in the generated LUA code for the FTLFollow macro for each character also.

If I press ALT-F on any screen on Team-Local then I get a red error message "You have no target. You have no target." displayed in the top middle of the other screens on Team-Remote's screen.

I tried changing the FTLFollow macro so that it did a /target {FTL} and a /follow so that it had an explicit target selected to follow.
However that did not work because the remote computer does not know how to interpret the FTL mod attributes for the toons on the local computer.

If I enter the F11 FTL mod combinations in directly through the keyboard on Team-Local computer then I can force any Team-Local toon to follow any other toon in both teams ok.
However if I enter the F11 FTL mod combos through the keyboard on Team-Remote computer then only the Team-Remote toons can be made to follow.
On the Team-Remote computer, entering the F11 FTL mod combos for the toons on the Team-Local computer gives the error message "You have no target. You have no target." and no follow occurs.

I checked all the key bindings on all 5 toons. I bound and unbound all the F11 FTL key combos to remove any possible FTL key binding being used by some other wow mod.

Jamba seems to be working OK.
If I open up the Jamba configuration and display the Core:Team tab on each toon then I can see that the jamba master changes immediately on all the other toons to be the toon which now has the focus ok.
All the other toons become jamba minions immediately on both computers ok also.
I use Jamba auto-follow after combat. I have some melee toons so I do not want to use jamba strobing to follow the master while in combat.

So my guess is that Team-Local knows the FTL mod combinations for all 5 toons because it is configured to launch Team-Remote, because it knows what toons are on the remote team.
However the Team-Remote configuration does not know what team it is being launched by. The "Also Launch" dependant team relationship is one-to-many, allowing for many dependant teams on many computers to be launched by one parent team. However I think that from the point of view of each dependant team, the back-relationship to the launching team should be one-to-one, not one-to-many, so that the dependant team can guarantee knowing what toons exist in the launching team and all the other dependant teams. For static code generation from the profile XML to the LUA code, the dependant team characters should include the launching team characters and all other dependant teams characters with their FTL codes in the generated macros for FTLFollow etc.

The behaviour of the ALT-F, F9 and F10 keys in ISBoxer does not work on my local computer to force my remote toons to follow any more.

So I have tried just about eveything to fix this but I have run out of ideas now.

Some help would be greatly appreciated, thx

[bob]

Nice detailed explanation. If you could provide your profile so we can rule out any items that might be an issue, that would be great.

[Xalan]

Hey Bob,

Thanks for having a look at this follow problem across multiple computers.

The profile file is rather large at 870K so I uploaded to a free GitHub Gist facility which does not seem to have any limits to the size of the text file that you can upload.

Here is a link to my ISBoxerPublicProfile.xml file https://gist.github.com/Xatan/0faa3a8c3f17b80e5d2a

I hope that you can access this profile file OK.
I removed any references to my email address, wow account names and changed my computer names so that they are not identifiable.

The problem I am having is when I run TeamWoD-Local, which also launches TeamWod-Remote on another computer COMP3, so I have two teams running together across 2 computers. When I press ALT-F to follow or F9 or F10 to swap screens on any character in TeamWoD-Local then the toons in TeamWoD-Remote do not follow. The last time I can remember that this worked was approx 2 weeks ago. I have updated Jamba and ISBoxer in that time but not changed my ISBoxer configuration at all for those teams recently.

Please note my earlier post that I think that the generated LUA code needs to include all the FTL mod values and character names for all the toons from the parent team and all the other dependant teams launched. I think that the parent team and all the dependant teams should be in a unique relationship so you can derive all the toons which will be running in the overall team and generate the static LUA follow macros coding appropriately for all toons for all teams correctly.

If there is a simple fix that can be made to my profile xml file that would be great.

Generally, how would it work when if were many dependant teams running on mutiple computers and there were not enough FTL combinations available for the F11 key for example?

Some temporary work-arounds for this follow problem which would probably help me get by for a while would be:
- change so that Team-Remote launches Team-Local instead so that at least the follow by all toons will work when I am using the characters in Team-Local (it would not work in Team-Remote trying to get Team-Local to follow, but that is a bit more usable in most situations)
- add all the toons in Team-Local also into slots in Team-Remote, with the appropriate FTL settings as used in Team-Local, so that the generated coding will know what FTL combos and character names to expect for all the toons (but not actually login to WoW using those toon copies on the remote computer)

Thanks for any help to fix this bug.

[lax]

Please note my earlier post that I think that the generated LUA code needs to include all the FTL mod values and character names for all the toons from the parent team and all the other dependant teams launched. I think that the parent team and all the dependant teams should be in a unique relationship so you can derive all the toons which will be running in the overall team and generate the static LUA follow macros coding appropriately for all toons for all teams correctly.

This is correct. There is no way for ISBoxer to derive which toons should be in the team if a child team is associated with different sets of parents. This is an issue solved by design in ISBoxer 2 -- instead of having an Export to Inner Space with all of your teams generated, ISB2 does the Launching bit and builds in the "Export" specifically for that team (so therefore it knows in advance which are correct, there is no longer any question about it). So you will have some extra work at the moment as far as additional Character Sets for different PCs to ensure they have unique relationships (exactly right), but ISB2 should correct that.

Generally, how would it work when if were many dependant teams running on mutiple computers and there were not enough FTL combinations available for the F11 key for example?

If you start running a team of 26+ toons together, there are not enough modifier combinations to cover all characters. At this point you either drop FTL, or only expect them to follow or assist one of the first 26 toons. ISBoxer allows you to specify individual key combinations for targeting, assisting, or following any given Character when not in the FTL mode. One of MiRai's recent videos covered this -- I believe it will be in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev3NRvBSiQM

The problem I am having is when I run TeamWoD-Local, which also launches TeamWod-Remote on another computer COMP3, so I have two teams running together across 2 computers. When I press ALT-F to follow or F9 or F10 to swap screens on any character in TeamWoD-Local then the toons in TeamWoD-Remote do not follow. The last time I can remember that this worked was approx 2 weeks ago. I have updated Jamba and ISBoxer in that time but not changed my ISBoxer configuration at all for those teams recently.

TeamWoD-Remote has specifically been broken by the additional relationship to TeamWoD-Events. The exact scenario outlined above with multiple parents is at play. Remove TeamWoD-Remote from the Also Launch of TeamWoD-Events, do a new Export to Inner Space, and your multi-PC follow/assist should work again

[Xalan]

Hey Lax,

Many thanks for the fast and very helpful response!

Yes the bug you found in my duplicating the relationship to the same remote team from two different parent teams was indeed the cause of the problem.
When I removed the duplicate Also Launch relationship to my remote team in my TeamWoD-Events parent team, then the other parent team TeamWoD-Local started working perfectly again

I had copied TeamWoD-Events from TeamWoD-Local and made some changes, intending to remove that Also-Launch relationship, forgot to do so, and thought that I had. A real gotcha.
The moral of the story is to have unique Teams for use on remote computers and never refer to them more than once in an Also Launch relationship across all the teams.
It is hard to desk-check your own coding when you are biased to think that the problem cannot be you, so it is great having an expert pair of eyes go over the coding, thanks!

That is good news that ISB2 will generate the coding for only the parent team and its remote dependant teams at launch-time.
I found a video on YouTube showing an ISB2 preview and it certainly launches many times faster. Looking forward to its release.
Does that mean remote dependant teams can be re-used by multiple parent teams in ISB2, assuming that only one parent team and all its dependant teams are being launched at one time?

Using mod key (Ctrl/Alt/Shift) attribute combinations, which only have 26 possible combinations, for FTL communications seems like a constraint.
I know that the mod key attributes are fundamental to wow macro conditionals, that there is no dynamic macro parameter substitution in wow and that wow macros cannot be changed dynamically in combat, are all big constraints.
However could the InnnerSpace communications send commands as action-names with dynamic parameters (such as the player name to follow), then pass those action commands to the ISBoxer addon which could then use dynamic LUA API calls, such as FollowUnit("player name") with the player name substituted dynamically, instead of FTL keystroke combinations?
There would then be no limit to the number of team members that could be leader and also have no limit to the number of other team members that can follow, for example.
It would also help to avoid having FTL key combinations clashing with key combinations used by the game and other addons.

I have a very large number of WoW Macros defined in ISBoxer and each of them is mapped to a unique mod-key combination which cannot be used by the wow game and any other addons.
For example, macro "Death Knights Blood Sequence" is mapped to CTRL-K which must not be used anywhere else in the game.
This uses a lot of unique key combinations for all my many wow macros.
So same question, could macro commands be sent as action names (equal to the macro name), no runtime parameters would be needed, to eliminate the need to have mappings of macros to key strokes?
This would help avoid the clash of key combinations used elsewhere in the game and thereby avoid a lot of debugging and support issues.
Would ISB2 be a good opportunity to remove many of the dependencies on unique key combinations?

Thanks for you help again. I had a great weekend with my teams working again!