So i started an interesting discussion about aoc multiboxing

[xartin]

So i started playing age of conan again a few weeks ago. it's definitely an entirely different game than what was released at launch. certainly matured and looks to have a lot of potential as well as offering offline time based character advancement similar to eve online's skill training.

Come check it out. I'd love to play with any of the regulars and I got into an excellent well established guild on the wiccana pve server that's lead by a big community supporter.

Here's our age of conan guild leader's youtube channel for you to review some of the game videos he's made

http://www.youtube.com/user/EquinoxWarriors

it's also worth mentioning it's a free to play game now so your startup cost is exactly nothing

It also appears I may have discovered another game worthy of more effort to document tips and advice for multiboxing. I have a small dialog established so far with the lead game director Craig Morrison so there's a possibility for making suggestions or requesting multibox friendly improvements.

I could really use your input to assist with documenting creating macros or scripts as they're known in aoc as well as some familiar gamer's to own it with with!

http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=89600

Open invitation to my aoc guild for any multiboxing fans if you'd like to try out the game

[Tim]

That is an awesome looking Youtube channel, pretty badass.

Interesting about AOC and multiboxing. Any idea how many people multibox in that game? Also, can you run the game exe directly to multibox, skipping launchers and all that?

[xartin]

i'm not sure how many but apparently people do.

there's a 3rd party utility called aoc quick start "AoCQS" that can make a minor modification similiar to using a custom ui that allows you to launch the game with the dx9 or dx10 executables so it will work. you can find AoCQS on curse or google it.

By default if you try to launch the game with the executable the game automatically starts the game's launcher.

multiboxing aoc at the moment has a big potential.

The game has an expansion launching that's themed in tandem with major motion picture that's due out tomorrow or the new conan the barbarian movie.

Because the game publisher never fixed the original game design with horribly lacking LFG utilities finding level appropriate groups in AoC can be somewhat difficult. They are planning a LFG system revamp in the coming year but there's still a lot of really attractive options for multiboxers.

The base game population is definitely there since the recent free to play change and i've seen people playing everywhere 24 hours a day in game.

available ideal classes for multiboxing would be determined by your account type. free to play or premium since free to play accounts are limited to certain classes.

There's a class in aoc somewhat similar to a death knight called a dark templar that makes a really potent tank class with exceptional dps however a guardian is the overall predominant tank

Priest of Mitra or a PoM is the overall predominant main healer class but there are a couple other classes that can heal as well.

I think the guardian and PoM are available to free to play which is what makes multiboxing AoC so attractive.

one of the major issues people have with multiboxing is the overall cost of subscription accounts. You can multibox LotRO but your level capped at level 20 with f2p.

AoC lets you level to max level but your class availability and content access is somewhat restricted however what you do get access to is enough to keep someone playing for several months without paying a dime.

I did subscribe for a year but it only cost around $95.00 for an entire year which is a LOT cheaper than blizzard.

[xartin]

So i figured i'd test to see if i could get aoc working with pwnboxer. Note i used the AgeOfConanDX10.exe executable in this test.



The game will load but you must have one game folder per client you wish to run but that's not a problem for me as I always run multiple game client folders while multiboxing. As you can see there window border remover does work which is a bonus.

launching the game from the executable does work from pwnboxer if you use AoC Quick Start to disable the exe file launching the patcher but pwnboxer doesn't attach to the game client. I can only assume this is because the game takes quite a long time to load the login screen which isn't at all unusual.

To get pwnboxer to attach to the game client's I has to use the advanced option to attach after the game is run manually which did work just fine. it does unfortunately appear that the game will not scale to within the dimensions of pwnboxer's movable game boxes as you can see in the screenshot. it works fine on dual screens at the game's full preconfigured resolution but for reasons i'm unaware of scaling to the movable game boxes doesn't work.

I also found the source code for AoC quick start which is LGPL 3.0 licenced so you could review the source to see how aoc quick start modifies aoc's config files to disable the patcher automatically running on startup.

Age of Conan QS.NET - mainline - AoC AddOns - CurseForge

[Chamassa]

Allright, so i have some bad news here :P

The problem with AoC and multiboxing is 2 sided
1. The quick starter is not just changing some settings, its actually hooking the software differently. Its basicly hacking software for AoC :P
While using the quick starter, i was unable to get stuff running properly at all. It distorted the placement and stuff
2. While NOT using the quick start software, i was able to get everything working properly, except 1 thing.. The software seems constantly keeps redrawing in the set resolution, as if it tries to set the window back to the original size (pwnboxer wont let it do that though, but it ends up only showing a portion of the game). The problem with this, is that this means it is impossible to run this with pwnboxer in resized windows.

When u dont use the quicklauncher and attach the processes after u started the games in windowed and let both run on a different monitor, it will work. If you want the resizing and placement on 1 window, your not gonna be able to get it.

Age of conan hates us, cant help it :P

[xartin]

Just wanted to clairify that aoc quick start itself was not used in any way in my test as a game launcher. the name of the utility is really derived from how AoCQS changes the game's preference xml files to allow the game to just "start faster"

One of the common nuances of AoC when used with the patcher is it will very frequently request consistency checks on the game's resource files before the game is launched which can take a very long time on slower computers. You can optionally bypass the consistency check from the patcher but some people find that behavior to be an unwanted nuisance.

AoCQS also has an option to change the xml preference to not play the game's intro movies such as funcom and nvidia's logo movies when the game is launched. Those two changes were the only changes I used in my test. After making those changes with aocqs you can entirely exit the utility and it does not run in the background so i'm curious how it's "hooking the software differently".

If there are any processes from aoc quick start running they're likely just ghost processes. I checked my task manager and did find two aoc quick start processes running but killed them, started aoc from the game's exe and it launched just the same afterwards skipping the patcher and intro movies. The processes created by aocqs did restart with the game but killing the aocqs process did not kill the running game client.

It's possible there is some conflict between pwnboxer and aocqs but the source code for aocqs is available to assist with determining which config files would need to be edited to allow launching the game from the exe files to skip the patcher and intro movies.

Hacking software may be a little subjective as all the utiltiy does is change true/false variables in the game client's xml files that reflect preferences not available from the in game or launcher options.

You could just as easily edit those variables yourself with a text editor if you know which preference file to modify but I'm not that intimately familiar with the game client so using AoCQS was the most preferable and user friendly option.

Having pwnboxer make these changes if aoc ever was to work with window resizing would be no different. it's just easier for cornfed humanoids than trying to edit xml files and who can argue that making pwnboxer more game agnostic would be a good thing. Warcraft won't be around forever if the current subscription loss trend continues

The developer of aocqs is very open about how the utility is used and what changes are made by the utility. AoC europe forums hosts the official discussion thread for AoCQS as well so this is certainly not any form of officially barred utility by funcom

http://forums-eu.ageofconan.com/show....php?p=1207941

            <setting name="SkipVideo" serializeAs="String">
                <value>False</value>
            </setting>

As kevin and I both discovered you can use pwnboxer with AoC but only in fullscreen mode with multiple displays which is really the larger issue. getting that far may however require making some minor modifications to the game client if you were ever wanting pwnboxer to start the game from the executable files.

[Chamassa]

Considering it also changing the CPU affinity of AoC, it is actually doing something, that process. the term hacking might've been a little loosely used there :P From what i can figure out, it basically works like pwnboxer a little (very little hehe) in that it starts the application and changes some conditions around for the game.
Like this quick start would change the CPU affinity compared to default, run fullscreen windowed that kinda stuff.
Pwnboxer does these kinda things aswell. It changes ur game size, removes borders, its all adjustments of how the game is run.

Here in lies the issue.. if u get 2 programs to try and do the same kinda things, stuff gets messy. For non-programmers this may sound a bit vague, but if u ever programmed, you probably get the issue here :P

anyway. the only real issue i found was that because of the changes the quick launcher applies, game positioning got a bit dodgy. This is probably something you could avoid with careful setting up etc.
the real issue is however that the game client is simply not willing to be resized whatsoever. this is something AoC will have to change to be an option for multiboxing > 2 chars without having an unusual kind of monitor setup
Honestly, i don't know how the development team is over there. I just know that the resizing thing is probably part of some anti-hacks stuff, and they probably wont change something like this (even tho the game its goals have changed considering they are F2P now :P)