Can ISBoxer be made to work with custom software?

Hey all,

I've had a blast this year using ISBoxer to level up some 5-mans in World of WarCraft.

I'm now looking at the possibility of doing some research with the University of Pennsylvania regarding control of multi-robot systems, and wondering if there's any way to get ISBoxer working with custom software (either a custom videogame that I would write or a control system for multiple robots with mounted cameras).

Is anything like this possible?

Gwion Bach

[lax]

Inner Space is designed to work with any Direct3D9 software, so if you want to build a Direct3D renderer then it might work as-is. Direct3D11 support should be coming soon as well.

Feel free to send me an email (lax@lavishsoft.com) with any questions, I'm interested

Inner Space is designed to work with any Direct3D9 software, so if you want to build a Direct3D renderer then it might work as-is. Direct3D11 support should be coming soon as well.

Feel free to send me an email (lax@lavishsoft.com) with any questions, I'm interested

Hmmmm .... Interesting.

I'm not sure I get how it would interact with the whole system ... knowing what the app is, knowing how to launch it and resize the apps' windows for multiple instances, passing the key commands to the appropriate app instances, and so on. Direct3D is just a rendering API, so it really can't handle any of those things.

I don't suppose there's a document anywhere that would describe how to get ISBoxer to work with a particular app? Like, say I had a 3D game like Call of Duty -- would I actually be able to multibox that with ISBoxer? My understanding was that the ISBoxer team actually had to do a certain amount of customization work to get it to work with any given app.

[lax]

No, by design I don't have to do any amount of customization to get it to work with a particular product. Yes, a Direct3D9-based game like CoD would work fine. Most D3D9 games should. If a D3D9 game doesn't work with Inner Space it's pretty much either a bug in my implementation, or the game is designed to prevent it from working (e.g. blocked by GameGuard, or perhaps detected by punkbuster, vac2 etc)

The way it works is Inner Space launches the game (your game, anyone's game), and places itself between the application and the operating system. If the application uses Direct3D9, Inner Space will know what window to operate on, and will automatically handle (and emulate) any input to/from that window. You should be able to take any random Direct3D9 sample application and multibox it

No, by design I don't have to do any amount of customization to get it to work with a particular product. Yes, a Direct3D9-based game like CoD would work fine. Most D3D9 games should. If a D3D9 game doesn't work with Inner Space it's pretty much either a bug in my implementation, or the game is designed to prevent it from working (e.g. blocked by GameGuard, or perhaps detected by punkbuster, vac2 etc)

The way it works is Inner Space launches the game (your game, anyone's game), and places itself between the application and the operating system. If the application uses Direct3D9, Inner Space will know what window to operate on, and will automatically handle (and emulate) any input to/from that window. You should be able to take any random Direct3D9 sample application and multibox it

Very interesting!!!

I may very well try just that.

So I take it you're the author of ISBoxer? Well played, sir; I salute you

Hmmmm ... OK.

I decided to give this a go, so I downloaded the free version of the Unity 3D engine as well as the "3rd Person Shooter" sample app.

I then built this 3rd Person Shooter app as a standalone .exe.

What I'm finding is that if I run the .exe by itself, it does fine ...

... while if I use "Add Game" to add the game to Inner Space and then run the "Default Profile," the 3rd Person Shooter demo app appears to start up normally at first, and I get the dialog box giving me various options to start up the app, and then as soon as the Unity logo splash fades out and it should begin rendering the game, I get a dialog box "Fatal error in gc" / "Collecting from unknown thread." [OK]

Any idea what could cause this?

Again, this crash occurs ONLY if I run it via InnerSpace.

[lax]

I'm downloading it now to take a look, sounds like it must be finding a bug in Inner Space

I'm downloading it now to take a look, sounds like it must be finding a bug in Inner Space

OK, great! Thanks, Lax. I really appreciate your diligence! Would definitely prefer to use ISBoxer for this project since I am familiar with the software and I'm convinced it can do what I'm talking with the Penn GRASP robotics lab about doing with it.

[lax]

Fortunately, I had a good hunch as to where to start with this issue, and I turned out to be right. Inner Space build 5323 is now available as a dev build, which fixes this particular issue. To switch to it, right click IS and select Patcher, check "Download development (test) patches" then close and restart Inner Space.

Unfortunately, the mouselook in the 3rd Person Shooter doesn't currently work in Inner Space, so I will need to take a look at that. It might be the same bug Darkfall is (was?) having with mouselook in IS.

[lax]

I won't likely have time to take care of the rest of this until next week, but other than mouselook it seems ok for now with build 5323