WinEQ 2

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Overview

WinEQ 2 is a powerful but easy to use utility designed to increase the playability, as well as falicitate multitasking and ability to run multiple sessions of EverQuest and other supported games.

Windowing

WinEQ 2 forces your game to play in a window, rather than full screen mode. That means faster switching to other applications, such as an internet browser or chat program, or even another game. That doesn't mean it will only take up a portion of your screen, however. WinEQ 2 Pro provides a window preset that causes the window to appear full screen (among other configurable presets)! All the benefits of playing in a window, with the beauty of playing full screen!

In older games, the ability to place the game in windowed mode was considered taboo because it could allow the player to cheat much more easily. In reality, if the player wanted to cheat they would do it anyway (for example, another computer to be used for peeking at a game's network traffic and grabbing otherwise hidden information). Therefore, many older games do not support windowing.

Today, game developers generally realize that people need access to other resources while playing their game (Google, fan sites, instant messengers, email, etc), and potentially playing multiple accounts on their online gaming system (which in turn requires more subscriptions to their service), and that cheaters are far too tricky to let windowing stop them.

Although we do not condone cheating to gain an unfair advantage in a game, we do condone windowing and think it should be an integral part of all social games such as MMOs. Most new MMOs already have the game itself in a window, but as you may well know, WinEQ does not just put the game in a window -- it is capable of much more than that.

Hotkeys

WinEQ 2 provides configurable hotkeys for various tasks, including switching sessions, mouse release/re-capture (for games that need it), and even more for subscribers for such things as toggling a memory indicator, window borders, window presets, even picture-in-picture! All at the touch of a button -- or a few buttons if you prefer.

Simple Preferences System

WinEQ 2 provides an easy way of configuring for each game. Settings are broken into games, and categories for each game. Profiles are used to allow different settings for each game, even multiple copies of each game. For example, one EverQuest profile may be set to be on the primary display with sound on, and another may be on the secondary display with sound off (additionally for EverQuest, each profile keeps its own EQ "last logged in" information so it doesn't need to be re-typed each time for multiple accounts, and allows custom eqclient.ini files to be used per profile to have different EQ settings per profile, replacing the benefits of using multiple folders).

Picture-in-Picture (Subscribers Only)

WinEQ 2 provides single-window Picture-in-Picture. Imagine trying to play two characters at the same time, with only one monitor. You can either play in two small windows, or only have one character in view at a time, leaving one potentially vulnerable. With WinEQ, the last game window to be in focus can automatically place itself in a smaller window on top of your current one. This means that for the cost of a small portion of your main window's visibility, you gain a great amount of visibility for your other character, albeit small. The size and placement of the picture window is also configurable.

Video Capture (Subscribers Only)

WinEQ 2 provides an easy-to-use video capture system, which automatically encodes the video to WMV format (requires Windows Media Player 9 or later). This system is not designed to replace other, possibly more powerful video capture utilities for video capture buffs, but instead to introduce video capture capabilities to a wider audience. Our system can be configured to trade off quality for speed (making videos places extra load on your system, causing the game to have slower framerates) as well as length and space. Where other utilities may require unusually large hard drives with plenty of room to spare, ours can be configured to be a viable solution for average users, and does not require knowledge of video editing tools to convert to a format for sharing with others.

Here is an example video which we recorded in World of Warcraft at an in-game resolution of 640x480, with a 60% rate of capture (e.g. 1 of every 3 frames is skipped), and a resulting video of 640x480 at 60% image quality. The clip is 57 seconds long and is about 10 fps (the game was running at about 20 fps; the rate of capture setting allows the video to be about 60% the framerate of the game). The video was taken with the compression option on, which slightly decreases overall framerate but allows longer videos by using up less temporary space. This particular video did not include sound, but the option is of course available and does not significantly increase the size of the video. Note that the video is only about 2MB in size, making it easy to share!

Click to see video

Features

Dark Age of Camelot

Everquest

Everquest 2

WinEQ 2 Lite Feature Set

Note: Requires EverQuest II to be set to Windowed Mode

  • User friendly preferences system puts all available WinEQ options for each game in one convenient and nicely organized window
  • 30 fully customizable profiles let you keep preferred settings for each session separately
  • Special context menu for the game window lets you adjust settings on the fly
  • Hotkeys for switching sessions, including "Global" hotkeys that can quickly switch to a specific session from any window on your system, help you play multiple characters more efficiently
WinEQ 2 Pro Additional Feature Set

Note: Due to a bug in EverQuest II with resolutions smaller than 800x600, some features are currently less useful than normal (Tiling and Picture-in-Picture are affected for example)

  • Optional framerate indicator allows you to tweak your graphics settings for best performance
  • Framerate limiter allows your system to function much more effectively, and makes "multi-boxing" painless
  • Auto-tiling feature allows you to automatically tile EverQuest II (and other supported games) windows to 4 screen quadrants
  • Picture-in-Picture support allows any WinEQ session window to become a picture window on another WinEQ session window, regardless of whether it is the same game
  • Unbreakable Dual Monitor support
  • Versatile window characteristic options: Border, resizing (scaling), full screen emulation, always on top, tiled mode
  • 10 fully customizable window presets allow quick window characteristic changes
  • Optional Memory Indicator shows the amount of Video/Texture RAM and System RAM remain, so you know the performance to expect from the game
  • Video Capture support allows you to take videos of your game, encoded in WMV format (Subscribers can use this link to read the current incarnation of the video capture guide)


Warcraft III

WinEQ 2 Pro Feature Set

Note: Warcraft III support is not available to non-subscribers

  • User friendly preferences system puts all available WinEQ options for each game in one convenient and nicely organized window
  • 10 fully customizable profiles let you keep preferred settings for each session separately
  • Special context menu for the game window lets you adjust settings on the fly
  • Hotkeys for switching sessions, including "Global" hotkeys that can quickly switch to a specific session from any window on your system, help you play multiple characters more efficiently
  • Optional framerate indicator allows you to tweak your graphics settings for best performance
  • Framerate limiter allows your system to function much more effectively, and makes "multi-boxing" painless
  • Auto-tiling feature allows you to automatically tile Warcraft III (and other supported games) windows to 4 screen quadrants
  • Picture-in-Picture support allows any WinEQ session window to become a picture window on another WinEQ session window, regardless of whether it is the same game
  • Unbreakable Dual Monitor support
  • Versatile window characteristic options: Border, resizing (scaling), full screen emulation, always on top, tiled mode
  • 10 fully customizable window presets allow quick window characteristic changes
  • Optional Memory Indicator shows the amount of Video/Texture RAM and System RAM remain, so you know the performance to expect from the game
  • 17 custom resolutions added to the in-game resolution list, including half screen height and half screen width
  • Video Capture support allows you to take videos of your game, encoded in WMV format (Subscribers can use this link to read the current incarnation of the video capture guide)


World of Warcraft

WinEQ 2 Lite Feature Set

Note: Requires World of Warcraft to be set to Windowed Mode

  • User friendly preferences system puts all available WinEQ options for each game in one convenient and nicely organized window
  • 30 fully customizable profiles let you keep preferred settings for each session separately
  • Special context menu for the game window lets you adjust settings on the fly
  • Hotkeys for switching sessions, including "Global" hotkeys that can quickly switch to a specific session from any window on your system, help you play multiple characters more efficiently
WinEQ 2 Pro Additional Feature Set
  • Optional framerate indicator allows you to tweak your graphics settings for best performance (World of Warcraft also has one built in; you can hit CTRL+R to turn it on by default)
  • Framerate limiter allows your system to function much more effectively, and makes "multi-boxing" painless
  • Auto-tiling feature allows you to automatically tile World of Warcraft (and other supported games) windows to 4 screen quadrants
  • Picture-in-Picture support allows any WinEQ session window to become a picture window on another WinEQ session window, regardless of whether it is the same game
  • Unbreakable Dual Monitor support
  • Versatile window characteristic options: Border, resizing (scaling), full screen emulation, always on top, tiled mode
  • 10 fully customizable window presets allow quick window characteristic changes
  • Optional Memory Indicator shows the amount of Video/Texture RAM and System RAM remain, so you know the performance to expect from the game
  • Video Capture support allows you to take videos of your game, encoded in WMV format (Subscribers can use this link to read the current incarnation of the video capture guide)

System Requirements

  • WinEQ 2 requires Windows 2000 or later. Windows XP Service Pack 2 is recommended.

Tips

Everquest
  • EverQuest uses about 300MB of system RAM minimum per session. Typically, EverQuest players like to play with higher settings, much closer to 400-500MB per session. If you plan to play multiple characters on the same system, keep this in mind!
  • EverQuest uses about 32MB of video RAM minimum per session. Some settings, including resolution and color depth, can bump this up to 45MB on typical systems. If you plan to play multiple characters on the same system, keep this in mind as well!
  • Your video card isn't the only source of video RAM! Spare system RAM can be used to pick up the slack through a BIOS feature called AGP Aperture, or AGP Window. However, there MUST be enough physical video RAM remaining to add another 3D display in order to load another session. The rest goes to loading textures.
Everquest 2
  • EverQuest II uses a lot of system RAM due to memory leaks. So much, in fact, that users with less than 1.5GB of RAM often have problems playing after a period of time, and must close and re-start the game

Installation

Download

Click here to Download WinEQ 2

You must be registered on the Lavish Software forums to use this software (you will need to enter your username and password in a Lavish Software login box)!

Basic Usage

Configuration

See Also