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Question - What does IS Boxer really do
- Thread starter RobRenfro
- Start date
no and imo, if you don't already have habits of using it, it is a waste of time and money using it (at least for eq).
I no longer use it on my main pc and i'm much happier for it
i *do* wish that eq had borderless windowed mode, but that's it --- i -> personally <- don't have any usage for tiling or any of that kind of thing in the current day of multiboxing with framelimiter and the performance it brings
I no longer use it on my main pc and i'm much happier for it
i *do* wish that eq had borderless windowed mode, but that's it --- i -> personally <- don't have any usage for tiling or any of that kind of thing in the current day of multiboxing with framelimiter and the performance it brings
I was an avid ISBoxer user for years and thought I couldn't live without it. In the last couple months, I have started only launching windows through AutoLogin and taking more time to setup hotkeys with buttonmaster and using boxhud more and more and have found there is nothing I miss about ISBoxer. Anecdotally, it feels like EQ runs better without it and that may have to do with framelimiter being just better than what ISBoxer does but it does feel better without it.
I don't see myself switching back anytime soon. The options we have make the game plenty runable with only your driver toon and it doesn't hurt that I can redirect the money spent on ISBoxer to support some of the Lua/plugin creators here I use frequently here.
I don't see myself switching back anytime soon. The options we have make the game plenty runable with only your driver toon and it doesn't hurt that I can redirect the money spent on ISBoxer to support some of the Lua/plugin creators here I use frequently here.
I was using ISB over MQ due to the suspensions and while it is nice for key broadcasting and window layout, I would get random crashes where the client would just disappear or the dreaded d3d crash.
Just going to play 1 char at a time if I decide to play live and then use MQ on my EMU server so not going to renew ISB when it comes up again.
Just going to play 1 char at a time if I decide to play live and then use MQ on my EMU server so not going to renew ISB when it comes up again.
I used to depend on it heavily @RobRenfro - I learned it before ever trying MQ so it was my "safety net" as I was comfortable with it.
big things I depended on it for:
1) seeing other toons - it was easy to have a button that cycled through the group one toon at a time swapping them to main, plus I could always see the non main in a "smaller" picture in picture type window or on second monitor
2) key mapping - ie if I press ALT+1 it will send a mapped keystroke to the other accounts, but it doesn't have to be ALT+1 on the other key binds.
3) key broadcasting (this is similar to MQs Mimic button, but MQ is a bit more intelligent about how it does it whereas ISB is broadcasting exactly the input it receives to all accounts / instances.
You can also check our discord chat and others here from me, I've talked about it a few times on the forums with other users trying to ease my concerns to drop ISB as it was consuming a ton of cycles on my PC and I wasn't able to load more than 6 concurrent accounts.
Moving away from it was my best move yet - I've quickly found the items here on RG to fill any gaps I was worried about; ie BoxHud to "see" what all toons doing or configured as (are they targeting the right person, what spell are they casting, is their combat assist set to Pause or Active, is their BurnAllNamed on or off, etc; ButtonMaster to make a standard button set for all toons for specific activities (ie doesn't matter who I hit pause from, they all do the same thing when I hit that BTN Master button).
My 2cents - if you're not doing it already, and you're leveraging MQ - DON'T add ISB. No shade to anyone who uses and loves ISB, I was that guy - just found ways to get the same old PC to run 24plus accounts and other things I wanted from it by reducing FPS and resource consumption. Maybe I could have gotten ISB to do something similar, but it was far less complex for me to just drop it and get comfortable with some of the Lua options here on RG. Plus it has cost, always nice to eliminate that when unnecessary
big things I depended on it for:
1) seeing other toons - it was easy to have a button that cycled through the group one toon at a time swapping them to main, plus I could always see the non main in a "smaller" picture in picture type window or on second monitor
2) key mapping - ie if I press ALT+1 it will send a mapped keystroke to the other accounts, but it doesn't have to be ALT+1 on the other key binds.
3) key broadcasting (this is similar to MQs Mimic button, but MQ is a bit more intelligent about how it does it whereas ISB is broadcasting exactly the input it receives to all accounts / instances.
You can also check our discord chat and others here from me, I've talked about it a few times on the forums with other users trying to ease my concerns to drop ISB as it was consuming a ton of cycles on my PC and I wasn't able to load more than 6 concurrent accounts.
Moving away from it was my best move yet - I've quickly found the items here on RG to fill any gaps I was worried about; ie BoxHud to "see" what all toons doing or configured as (are they targeting the right person, what spell are they casting, is their combat assist set to Pause or Active, is their BurnAllNamed on or off, etc; ButtonMaster to make a standard button set for all toons for specific activities (ie doesn't matter who I hit pause from, they all do the same thing when I hit that BTN Master button).
My 2cents - if you're not doing it already, and you're leveraging MQ - DON'T add ISB. No shade to anyone who uses and loves ISB, I was that guy - just found ways to get the same old PC to run 24plus accounts and other things I wanted from it by reducing FPS and resource consumption. Maybe I could have gotten ISB to do something similar, but it was far less complex for me to just drop it and get comfortable with some of the Lua options here on RG. Plus it has cost, always nice to eliminate that when unnecessary
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Lord Sivion
Ultimate seasoned veteran member
If you care about seeing all of your characters at once, then yes use it. Otherwise there are better methods of boxing available.
It used to be useful to handle EQ in windowed mode, along with CPU, memory management, autologin, Hotkey to switch toons. None of these are relevant anymore as MQ or EQ handle all of this functionality now. Some people like tiled windows for their toons or borderless windows. It does let you send keypress to all clients which some people use on TLP's that don't support MQ.
Again, no real benefit as MQ supports autologin, hotkeys to switch to specific toons or use boxhud. Frame limiter handles background session memory issues. EQ supports windowed mode although not borderless. EQ handles CPU core management natively now. EQBCS and Dannet allow you to broadcast commands. so, unless you like tiled windows there is no benefit
Again, no real benefit as MQ supports autologin, hotkeys to switch to specific toons or use boxhud. Frame limiter handles background session memory issues. EQ supports windowed mode although not borderless. EQ handles CPU core management natively now. EQBCS and Dannet allow you to broadcast commands. so, unless you like tiled windows there is no benefit
I'm still 100% sold on ISBoxer. I play multiple teams (18 characters total) split across 7 different computers. I have characters that I never run on a PC with MQ running. Yes, it took some configuration, but I can run nearly any team from any PC while allowing the secondary non-MQ teams to run from any other PC. (Learning ISBoxer well could qualify as a college-level course, it's complicated!)
I use ISBoxer's computer-to-computer keystroke broadcasting to allow a minimum level of non-MQ character automation such as /follow and /assist the driver.
Also, during the last years worth of DBG issues making graphics work reliably I almost never had a problem with ISB's emulated full-screen mode. (I'm still hating on Microsoft arbitrarily changing the pixel height of the Windows 11 taskbar after all these years!)
YES, I realize that MQ could do almost all these things, but MQ can get my old Gold accounts banned and so far, (knock on wood), they aren't banning ISBoxer users.
I use ISBoxer's computer-to-computer keystroke broadcasting to allow a minimum level of non-MQ character automation such as /follow and /assist the driver.
Also, during the last years worth of DBG issues making graphics work reliably I almost never had a problem with ISB's emulated full-screen mode. (I'm still hating on Microsoft arbitrarily changing the pixel height of the Windows 11 taskbar after all these years!)
YES, I realize that MQ could do almost all these things, but MQ can get my old Gold accounts banned and so far, (knock on wood), they aren't banning ISBoxer users.
I recently set up ISBoxer for the 7 day trial to see how I liked it for running a 6 box setup on one PC. I specifically wanted to compare it to the MQ auto login feature for ease of switching windows via hot keys. There was no competition. ISBoxer was slow to switch between characters and would sometimes hang for several seconds or seemingly indefinitely until swapping to another window and back.
Using keybinds in MQ auto login is a way smoother experience. Swapping between characters is instant every time without fail. It is honestly more reliable than my old method of using the built in windows shortcuts of Windows + 1, 2, 3 etc. to swap windows based on their position on the task bar.
Needless to say I did not continue using ISBoxer beyond the free trial and I uninstalled it shortly after.
Using keybinds in MQ auto login is a way smoother experience. Swapping between characters is instant every time without fail. It is honestly more reliable than my old method of using the built in windows shortcuts of Windows + 1, 2, 3 etc. to swap windows based on their position on the task bar.
Needless to say I did not continue using ISBoxer beyond the free trial and I uninstalled it shortly after.
I'm sorry you had this experience. Mine is just the opposite. ISB switches instantly for me no matter the keystroke combo or Windows Alt+Tab or just clicking the task bar icons.
Yea I had issues with window swapping in ISboxer as well, but adjusting the framelimiter setting to 5+ on the background fixed that issues.
Schuckenstein
Well-known member
Even after I got it working with emu and MQ the cost is higher CPU usage. I'm currently at 3% per account with 18 accounts so the dream of 54 accounts just isn't going to happen with isboxer. I think I was getting under 1% without isboxer. Until TVCChiver recommended the 5+ thing I had given up on it and spent 4 hours yesterday making a different eq directory for each class and then changing the icon to something like "W" for warrior, "P" for paladins so I could identify the windows and honestly I think I'm going to go back to that lol.
