Simple Multiboxing with AHK

[Darkekat]

Hi, I've been trying for a couple of days to multibox and have not had much luck. Theres a couple of forum posts on here to help and ive tried reading through, using the scripts people far better than me have already made but i've had no luck. Could someone help me to make a simple AHK script that just tells all clients to assist the leads target and fire? Im happy doing everything else manually, just getting everyone to target and fire on a few key presses would be enough for me.

[Kyp [LDEV]]

I hope other players can help you. While we don't frown on the usage of multi-box utilities, we also know that it can be a complicated thing network-wise and few on the team outside of the programmers have any real view on how that sorta thing works.

[Codemonkeyx]

Hey @Darkekat, give this a shot and let me know if it works for you:

 

https://github.com/ciphersimian/enb-ahk/blob/master/multifire.ahk

 

This may not seem like a "simple AHK script" but it's handling a few things automatically like dynamically adjusting for your display resolution and saving and restoring the cursor position after moving around to different windows, etc.

 

To use it just start up all your Earth & Beyond clients, then run the mutlifire.ahk script. You should get a message box that says "Initialized! Press Alt+f to multi-fire!", then just make sure you're in the "leader" window the first time you use it and press Alt+f.  If will then determine all the window handles for the running Earth & Beyond clients (assuming they all have the default window title of "Earth & Beyond"), save the one that was active when you pressed Alt+f as the leader, and the rest as "other".  It will then cycle through the "other" windows and take the leaders target, then once everyone has the same target it will cycle through again and press "f" on each to fire.

 

Let me know if you run into any issues or have any further questions!

 

Good luck out there and stay safe!

Edited March 17, 2024 by Codemonkeyx
grammar

[Darkekat]

That works perfectly, thank you so much!

[TempestNWK]

Any chance of a sample file? that has the correct monitor settings

 

bit of head scratching how to exactly edit the login.ahk (and in the correct format)

 

Thanks for your time!

 

 

 

 

[Codemonkeyx]

Hi @TempestNWK,

 

Just to be clear this thread is about multifire.ahk and login.ahk is a bit different, and the two aren't directly compatible because login.ahk renames the windows from their default of "Earth & Beyond" and gives them all different names, while multifire.ahk hard-codes that in addition to assuming all the windows have the same name, so combining them requires more work.

 

That said, the configuration for login.ahk is pretty simple.

 

First of all, if you only have one monitor and all you want to do is tile 1-6 windows like most people do, then all you need to do is comment out the call to "NeedsConfiguration()" (by placing a semicolon in front of it) and the default should do what you want.  I would try that and see what it looks like before you configure anything else.

 

Beyond that, if you do have multiple monitors you just need to change the values:

 

; Client 1
...
; top left corner
X1 := "default"
Y1 := "default"

MONITOR1 := "default"


; Client 2
...
X2 := "default"
Y2 := "default"
MONITOR2 := "default"

 

So let's say you have two monitors that are 1920x1080 and you wanted to run 1 client on each in the upper left corner of each screen, in order to do that you would use a configuration like:

 

; Client 1
...
; top left corner
X1 := 0
Y1 := 0

MONITOR1 := 1


; Client 2
...
X2 := 1921
Y2 := 0
MONITOR2 := 2

 

A caveat to this is that I don't have multiple monitors (I'm a one big monitor kinda guy) and AHK doesn't have great multi-monitor support in the first place, so this is all untested and pretty rudimentary based on reading the documentation.

Edited March 29, 2024 by Codemonkeyx

[TempestNWK]

Thanks again for your time, @Codemonkeyx

 

My interest was in the login.ahk solely, and in particular the auto-sizing & placement of the screens, i had been using an older v1 AHK script (on the forum here somewhere)  and it has always been somewhat of a pain the get going on a new windows install.

 

Was thinking i had to manually input the settings the unmodified login.ahk spits out upon launch, heh ... lesson learned.

 

AAAAND i'll be seeing you in guild someday perhaps 😁

 

[Oregonaut]

@Codemonkeyx: I greatly appreciate your helping with this, as I've been able to make the multifire.ahk work...until last week.

 

I'm not sure why (obviously) but the script is now bringing up random windows from my taskbar and system tray.

 

I have one window (the first window I open) set at 2560x1440, and five others at 800x600.

 

I have tried manually opening each client to make sure that there's no other scripts involved, have redownloaded and reinstalled E&B, the .ahk, and even run a repair on my Windows just in case a recent update went wonky.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Codemonkeyx]

37 minutes ago, Oregonaut said:

the script is now bringing up random windows from my taskbar and system tray

 

That's a weird one!  I'm not sure where to begin with that to be honest.

 

The first thing I would make sure of is that the very first time you press Alt+F after starting the script that the 2560x1440 window is firmly in focus and the active window, and don't click outside of it right away afterward.  Make sure it has both your mouse focus (by clicking in the window) and keyboard focus such that hitting enter brings up the chat box, etc.

 

The very first time you hit Alt+F it does a sort of calibration where it will assign the active window as the leader, and all other windows with the title "Earth & Beyond" as the others.  So obviously if you had other windows labeled "Earth & Beyond" for some reason, that could cause an issue.

 

Beyond that I'm not sure what else I can suggest without more information.  Is there any pattern to the windows it brings up?  You say it's random, but is it the same ones for a given session, or is it different windows every time you hit Alt+F?

 

I guess another possibility is that something in Windows broke AHK; I assume you're on Windows 11?

 

Can you think of any other changes that were made to your computer which might correspond to when this started?

[Oregonaut]

I did some more futzing around this morning, and I think I've figured out the problem.  *Why* it's a problem still doesn't make sense, but I know that the script doesn't work when I have the title bars offscreen.  When they're onscreen, script works fine.  When I reconfigured my setup so that the 2560x1440 window was placed at -10 to hide the title bar, script goes nutty.

[Oregonaut]

Ha ha, disregard that @Codemonkeyx I short stocks.

 

Now it's minimizing the windows and then restoring them, all without even targeting the enemy.  The mystery continues!

 

I am completely within the main window when I hit Alt + F.  I am using Windows 11.  No recent updates to my system.  Tried reinstalling AHK again, same result.

 

ETA: When it's bringing up other screens, the main screen it brings up is the mini-settings panel where you can mute Windows, switch your network connections, switch off bluetooth, stuff like that.

Edited July 12, 2024 by Oregonaut
More information.

[Codemonkeyx]

I'm still not sure what to make of it, but give this a shot.  I added a few things which might increase the reliability:

• Increased the ClickDelay to 500ms
• Made the window title matching exact regex matches
• Added a loop around activating the appropriate window that checks to make sure the window we activated is on top and indeed active

I also added more debug message pop-ups at the beginning to tell you how many windows it found, and then it activates each one in turn and gives you the window handle that it knows the window by. This may give some clue as to the nature of the problem if the number of windows isn't right, or if it obviously has the wrong windows right off the bat.

multifire-oregonaut.ahk

[Shadowfynx]

Bump, really trying to get this to work.

[Codemonkeyx]

1. The last reply before yours was 8 months ago so I'm not sure how relevant it is anymore.
2. There have been updates to the repo where this came from in the intervening time thanks to @Zerodragoon which I incorporated back into the repo.
3. What are you actually seeing when you try it? What isn't working?

Make sure you are using the latest version from https://github.com/ciphersimian/enb-ahk/blob/master/multifire.ahk