Just found this app called Groupy, which can be found here: https://www.stardock.com/products/groupy/ It's a utility that allows you to organize windows with tabs (any window, not just EQ). (skip to the pic for the tl;dr...) Since I've been working on building up a 36-box army (from my old 12), I've been looking into how I would organize the windows. Generally I would manually place my windows in a "cascade" layout, with my main in the upper right, next window slightly down and to the left, and so on, until they were all laid out in like a stair step pattern. That way, I could see the name in the upper left of every toon with MQ2 running. But doing it this way, even with a 4k monitor, I start running out of room with around 24 clients open. Last night, I attempted to run 30 clients for the first time, and while the machine can handle all that and more just fine, it's the screen real estate that I was concerned with. I have no desire to pay a monthly fee for WinEQ, so that was off the table right away. I literally just googled "windows grouping windows" and up came Groupy, which is $5 for a lifetime license (at least currently, apparently it's "on sale," but who knows if it's one of those "always on sale" deals to help ease your decision to buy). But it does have a 30-day trial, so I started the trial tonight to give it a go, and it works a treat! Screenshot of all 36 toons neatly taking up an area of about 2300x1700 (I play with a large client and on a 4k monitor, those of you who run a smaller client wouldn't even need that much room): This is more or less how I laid out the windows before, but now with each window being a full group rather than an individual client (and I put my main in the lower left instead of the upper right, since I'll spend more time there, it'll leave all tabs uncovered and I can jump to any toon with a click if I want to. Still learning e3 so I still do some window jumping when I need to) Also, with this layout, since the group status window is in the same position on every client, it doesn't matter which client is active from each tab group, I can see the health bars for every group at a glance this way. I'll probably spread them out horizontally more so I can see the full health bars. This is a bit overly compact now. Anyway, I'm probably going to buy this app at some point while it's still on sale. I haven't done much except run around PoK with all 36 toons, but it doesn't seem to have impacted performance, since all it's doing is adding an extra tab interface to the top of the window. Just wanted to share what I found, and I hope others find this useful too!
Hotkeynet is a good alternative to wineq. Im computer retarded and was able to set it up pretty easily.
Looks pretty cool. Wish I would have seen this before I built my custom EQSwitch utility. Does this have a hot key option? Or does alt-tab work the same?
This is a neat looking program. If your preference for switching windows is indeed via mouse, this seems like a must-have. Personally I use a little C++ program a fellow PEQer wrote (forget his name or I'd credit) that takes a search string and finds the window with that name and puts it to the forefront. Slap that on a hotkey with hotkeynet and g2g.
Alt+tab appears to work just the same as if you had a mess of windows like I had before (chaos). This is really just something that compliments how I tend to do things (with mouse clicks), though the main desire was to be able to condense the footprint of the client windows into something that was easier to manage without having to hide any windows or bury them behind other windows. Yeah, as I said above, mouse clicks are my thing. Probably not that efficient, but I guess playing a lot of WarCraft 2 and StarCraft back in the day made me this way lol. I would love to see how that program works for jumping between windows quicker than mouse-clicking.
Wanted to report back after ~30 days: I'll probably buy this when the trial expires (tomorrow I think) The one complaint I have with it that I can't seem to figure out is that once in a while (fairly uncommon), when I join two windows, it will maximize all the windows in the group, but remain in the same place, rather than moving to the upper left and filling the entire screen. Basically it makes the window massive and leaks off the side and bottom of the screen. I can double-click the window bar of the active window, and force that one to return to normal, but all the other windows in the group will be "stuck" at this size until I manually dig into the game options and change the window resolution back to normal. I use the setting that prevents manual window resizing, and that doesn't seem to prevent this. This only ever happens when joining windows into tabs, though, so it's just an occasional minor nuisance when I'm getting started, and doesn't present itself later when I'm actually out doing stuff.
How do you manage that many clients on 1 pc? You must need tons of RAM? Have you taken steps to minimize ram usage per client? If so, can you share please.
As donnylad said, there is an optimization guide here, however I haven't used it, as my workstation has 48GB of RAM in it, and will run 36 standard clients, at 1920x1200 each, with only 52% utilization (including running a bazillion unnecessary tabs in Firefox, Notepad++ and a handful of other things).
Another alternative is using autohotkey. It is a hotkey scripting program that does lots of things. One thing it can do is bring a window into focus using a title. MQ2 and autologin will rename the title of your EQ instance to your characters name. Autohotkey will search for the title that matches your name and bring it to focus. Below is the code you would use. A little customization is necessary to refer to the correct character, as well as use the right key combination. Below will bind mouse2+4 to this action. Mouse2 being the back button on your mouse, combined with the 4 key on your keyboard. Change these to whatever you want. Link to all autohotkey bindable keys: https://www.autohotkey.com/docs/KeyList.htm Script example: ~XButton2 & 4:: WinActivate, Coreidan return
AutoHotKey is great! If you use it, I recommend adding these lines which will perform an exact, fast match. I made the mistake of naming a couple of toons too similarly and had a problem switching between them due to the default query style TitleMatchMode. Code: SetTitleMatchMode 3 SetTitleMatchMode, Fast
I haven't tried to figure out how to automate the layout setup yet with autohotkey or something, so yes, I have to manually group up each team of six and arrange the windows manually every time, but I like having the layout the way it is, showing the status bars of all 36 toons when I'm running all of them, and giving me quick clicky access to all of them. Happy with how it runs, so I did throw down the $5 for it. Also, an update to my one complaint I had before... I think I sorted the issue I mentioned about the windows changing size on me. When you log out, there's a brief period where the window resizes to max and snaps back to normal. I think I was spamming ESC too fast, and it would save the last window with some latent size issue behind the scenes. Later, when I would start up clients and joined them together, this seemed to cause the issue with maximized windows. Using /botexit to close all the other windows, and then camping out normally on my main, and avoiding spamming ESC from character select, but rather tapping slowly, once at each stage of closing the client, that seemed to prevent this issue completely, so I don't have the issue anymore.
im using 2 monitor, and i think that i will use this setup.. 2 tiled on each monitor (i still work on levelling my 3rd group so i have space )
Have you noticed the mouse pointer gets a little wonky when you use this ? The pointer is off by about half inch from where it's showing on the screen, if i click for full size then windowed seems fixed. But soon as I changed to different window it's off again.
I noticed Humble Bundle added a $15 bundle which includes Groupy. I thought I'd post in case any of y'all were interested. https://www.humblebundle.com/softwa...medium=product_tile&hmb_campaign=tile_index_3 Many are Steam items which may mean you will need to be running Steam for a software utility. I'm not certain of the versions but a post on Reddit said it's likely a 1 year license for updates and permanent for any version released within that time frame. Also looks like Groupy is on sale for $5 on Steam and on the Stardock website.
