Multi-Computer runs of IS - Bugs

JamieW · Post by **JamieW** » Sat Feb 07, 2009 11:50 am

I've got IS setup on 2 computers running side-by-side. The goal here is to run 4 Rune-Keepers in LOTRO on one, and a Champion as the main on the other system. I've found that any more than 4 sessions of LOTRO on one computer can quickly bog it down. So I've been working through this, and have come across some limitations/bugs that I figured I could report here.

I've migrated my 4-box setup from 1 computer onto the backup computer, and did a fresh install on the new computer. I have repeated up and functional between the two systems (I have the remote uplink connected), and I have windowsnapper also running. I use a G15 keyboard on the main system, and have commands bound to the G-keys on that system to send commands over to the other sessions.

Relay groups over the network: My first thought was to have all of the RKs join a group of their own (I called it "army"). And so any commands I wanted to relay from the 1st system over to the 2nd system, I could just do a "relay army Press xx". However, this does not appear to work. When I do a "relay army Press 1" into the console of one of the second system windows, it works (I see the effect on those 4 sessions). But if I put it into the console of the session on the main system, it does not. I've also tried to include the other system name as you must do for session names (ie., second.army) to no avail.

Relay of "all other" appears to repeat the command multiple times: I have the following script setup on my main system:

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bind head_set1 G13 relay "all other" "press F2;press CTRL+="

When I press my G13 key on that system, however, I see each and every session on the other system do the action 4x. I'm assuming that the 4 comes from the number of sessions active on that system.

I'm not sure if the groups across systems is intended to be functional or not, so I might be trying to do something that IS doesn't support (although I'd very much like it to support it). Ideally it'd be nice to have a setup so that I can join the "army" group on 1 or more characters on one machine and on 1 or more characters on the other machine, and relay to that "army" group and have them all pickup the command.

NumPad/NumLock not working with LOTRO: I know that I made a note of this on the dual-boxing forums, but I figured I'd make a note here as well. I still cannot get the numlock to toggle when LOTRO is active in IS properly. The light always stays on, and the "Num 1" - "Num 0" keys aren't registering properly in game. Inner Space seems to recognize them and I'm able to script off of their presses, but I can't get LOTRO to pick up anything but the non-numeric functions of those keys.

Post by **Lax** » Mon Feb 09, 2009 7:18 pm

About relay groups, this is something I have tackled in the current Development build of Inner Space. You can switch to the development build by checking "Download development (test) patches" in the IS Patcher window, and restarting IS (yes, you must restart IS). Then, you will need to join the relay groups on all uplinks, and I added "all uplinks" to the possible relay targets, so you can connect them, and have your sessions do, for example:

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relay "all uplinks" relaygroup -join army

When I press my G13 key on that system, however, I see each and every session on the other system do the action 4x. I'm assuming that the 4 comes from the number of sessions active on that system.

I can't imagine why it would happen 4 times, to be honest. I will have to test that, but it should indeed only happen once

NumPad/NumLock not working with LOTRO: I know that I made a note of this on the dual-boxing forums, but I figured I'd make a note here as well. I still cannot get the numlock to toggle when LOTRO is active in IS properly. The light always stays on, and the "Num 1" - "Num 0" keys aren't registering properly in game. Inner Space seems to recognize them and I'm able to script off of their presses, but I can't get LOTRO to pick up anything but the non-numeric functions of those keys.

Yeah, I do still need to test that one

The num lock light always stays on? .... that's weird. IS shouldn't interfere at all with the state of keyboard lights.

I should have some time to work on this stuff soon -- sorry for the delay

Vikingking · Post by **Vikingking** » Tue Feb 10, 2009 1:57 am

Lax wrote:
When I press my G13 key on that system, however, I see each and every session on the other system do the action 4x. I'm assuming that the 4 comes from the number of sessions active on that system.
I can't imagine why it would happen 4 times, to be honest. I will have to test that, but it should indeed only happen once

You see it 4 times in every console because relay automatically redirects the output of your targets to the session that sends the relay command. You can avoid this spam by using the -noredirect switch whenever you use uplink:relay.

Post by **Lax** » Tue Feb 10, 2009 9:48 am

The Press command has no output when successful, so if thats the issue he mis-stated it. He did say he sees each of them perform the action 4 times, not that he sees the output in the console...

Vikingking · Post by **Vikingking** » Tue Feb 10, 2009 10:22 am

Oh yeah, sorry I misread what he was saying.

JamieW · Post by **JamieW** » Tue Feb 10, 2009 9:57 pm

I've had it marked to get beta builds, but I made sure to run IS, close it out, and then run it again (and saw the new notes listed).

I went to only having 1 session on each system to test this out.

On my main system, I connect to the remote uplink.

On the remote system I join the relaygroup army with the game session:

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uplink relaygroup -join army

I can do:

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relay "all other" press "CTRL+1"

on the main system console, and see my character on the remote system activate that skill.

I try:

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relay army press "CTRL+1"

on the main system console, and see nothing.

To make sure that I'm getting syntax right, I did two things. First I did the above text on the remote session's console, and saw him perform the skill. I then did

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uplink relaygroup -join champ

on the main system's session. And then I did the same command above, replacing the "army" for "champ" and I saw my character perform the skill there.

I tried to do a bit more with the relaygroups, but

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uplink relaygroup -list

returned nothing.

I'm not sure I'm doing things right, so I've included copious amounts of code snippets above.

Am I supposed to be able to relay to other groups from a different session? That is to say, I'm running on a session in the "champ" relaygroup, but want to send commands to all of the sessions in the "army" group. Is that the intention with the relaygroups?

Also, as far as the G15 problem goes. I thought it might be that without the Logitech key manager, that the Num-lock functionality was degraded, so I booted up fresh, and then closed out that key manager. But Numlock still seemed to work.

I'm ready to test any further updates

I've worked around it for now, to some extent, by just sending everything to the remote sessions individually, but it cuts down on my flexibility and what I'd really like to be able to do.

Post by **Lax** » Wed Feb 18, 2009 10:58 pm

Ok now that I've done some testing and you missed me in IRC..

1. relaygroup -list may not be working at the moment.
2. yes, that is the intention of relay groups. check out the [[IS:ISBoxer|ISBoxer Toolkit]] -- relay groups are configured as "Action Target Groups" and the walkthrough video might help you understand the groups a little more
3. "all other" will include remote sessions as you've discovered
4. relay groups are currently PC-specific (I will be changing this in a near-future biuld), meaning that you would also need to join the group on the other uplinks. As explained in my previous post, to do so you need to relay the command to join to all uplinks via

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relay "all uplinks" relaygroup -join army

5. num keys in LOTRO may not be working properly at the moment, I'm going to do some LOTRO testing over the next few days to fix this
6. I did test multiple computers to double check that there is not a problem with each session being told to press the key 4 times. How are you doing the connecting exactly? If you have 2 PCs, only one of them should be connecting to the other (it should actually block it the other direction but I have to ask). For more than 2, one PC should be connecting to the others.

That's about it. Really have to recommend trying ISBoxer Toolkit, it may simplify and/or fix this for you

JamieW · Post by **JamieW** » Thu Feb 19, 2009 7:35 am

Lax:

I tried out the ISBoxer Toolkit before, but since I'd already cobbled together a setup, I hadn't really gone all the way through the setup. I'll get the newest copy and try to see if that helps alleviate the problems.

I tried putting in

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relay "all uplinks" relaygroup -join army

into the main system's game session console. I still could not get commands relayed to sessions on the other system via

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relay army press 1

I only do the connection one way, but I noticed something this morning while running through some of these tests. I tried to do the remoteuplink connection in my startup script. It looks like it's running multiple times (I think I have it in the code in a couple of places as I had been losing connection between the 2 systems every so often... which is not an IS problem). What it looks like to me is that it is allowing multiple remote connections to the same system. I think THAT is why I'm getting multiple keypresses on the 2nd system. So it is most likely something that I'm doing. Hopefully with the ISBoxer generated scripts I can avoid this issue as well. I'm not sure if it is intended to allow multiple connections from one system to another, though, so that might be something that you can limit on your end by making sure each connection is unique.

Post by **Lax** » Thu Feb 19, 2009 9:02 am

By design it should block additional connections to the same PC already. I will indeed have to check on that.

From your description, I think you're joining the group on all uplinks from the wrong session? You need to do it in each of the sessions on the other system, then in the main system's game session console do "relay army press 1".

JamieW · Post by **JamieW** » Thu Feb 19, 2009 6:29 pm

It looks like the fixes you put in today did the trick on my previous setup for the army group relay, and it seems to be preventing multiple connections between the 2 computers!

I started playing around with ISBoxer a bit, and will have some more time tomorrow and Saturday to try and make the migration over since there seems to be some newer options that are implemented there that aren't available (that I can see) in normal IS (specifically the prevention of moving the window the the center of the screen that LOTRO does, for instance).

Thanks again, Lax!

Post by **Lax** » Thu Feb 19, 2009 6:56 pm

Technically that one is done with the following command:

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windowcharacteristics -lock

I am doing heavy testing today with multiple PCs, as I'm working on wrapping up the multiple PC feature set in ISBoxer. The only thing that wont be implemented in the new release will be re-connecting the uplinks (will probably take care of that in a near-future ISBoxer build). But yes, I expected you to be happy with the new changes today supporting the uplink networking

JamieW · Post by **JamieW** » Fri Feb 20, 2009 5:22 pm

I've had an issue a couple of times where the main system's crashed, or the network's gone down, and I have to manually disconnect from the second PC to get the network connection to take again... even though the main seems to think that I've connected up just fine.

With the changes to disallow duplicate connections, it might be better to disconnect the old connection and allow a new connection if it's attempted, rather than just to disallow the new connection, which is what I think might be happening. I could be wrong, and I could just need to write a script to clean up connections for myself if I have issues like above.