Hobbedoc at your service

[Hobbelion]

After some false starts and some odd turns, Hobbedoc, a hobbit minstrel, has been created and is at your service. It turns out that you can run as many instances of LOTRO on the same computer as your computer and internet connection can handle. I think my computer can handle two which is great since I can easily load both plugins from the same source and use the same mouse and keyboard for both.

He's done the intro quests and now hanging out at Michel Delving. Probably needs to earn TP to get the riding ability (not going to pay for that). I'll invite him to our Kin and hopefully we can get a Kin house soon so that he can teleport there quickly if it takes a while for him to get a pony.

He has the starter minstrel skills and I'll have to figure out how and when he can get more instruments. I'm trying not to invest too much time into this character, but want him to be fully equipped.

[Briallan]

That's totally awesome! Just out of the gate, the minstrel is really flexible; he can already play: clarinet, cowbell, flute, harp, horn and lute.

So, you really don't need to even bother leveling him up if you would rather work on other characters. At level 10 you get drum, and at level 15 you get theorbo, but we don't usually have a problem covering both those instruments. You could just buy the six instruments you can already play, and be done with it.

As far as transport for Hobbedoc -- you might consider this: set your milestone for the Shire, and then get Krohkur to invite him to the Northern Lights kin for the time being (their kinhouse is where we practice in Bree)-- that way you can teleport between Shire and Bree, which is prolly the max extent of where we will play for the forseeable future.

I didn't quite realize that you could run multiple instances of LOTRO on the same box, so I tested it and it seems to work for me as well.

One issue is screen real estate. I happen to have a dual monitor setup, but even if you don't, you can run LOTRO client windowed, and resize the windows so that both fit on one screen. Works pretty well on wide screen monitors (at least, well enough for band concerts).

Second possible issue is stability of the clients. I tried it just now -- first time both clients just abruptly crashed .. not sure what I did ... but I tried it again, and they've been stable for half an hour of further testing, so not even sure if the first crash was related to the two clients on same box issue.

Anyway, as Hobbs says, it might just be a question of what your particular hardware can handle. According to this thread, running multiple clients on a box should in theory work.

And, being able to have a couple characters per band member would really help. I could even run a couple characters on each of my computers -- that would be four band members from just my little old self!

So, Dend, if you are reading this, I think we might have a way to get that 20 to 40 piece band you were thinking of!

So, hope to get out a post about next concert later tonight -- probably Silth and I will organize this next one, and I'm want to run some ideas past him first.

[Siltharan]

As I mentioned already, I may not be at the meeting on Sunday due to a half marathon earlier that day. :) Plus Bri has my other thoughts on the issue of planning meetings as well as just meeting before the concert.

[Ice Weasel]

Woo-hoo!!

Very cool news, all around.  

If I get some time, I might try the multi-client thing... have to change some settings for the laptop here, I'm sure. I have a couple of other musical characters, one plays near everything... Hmmm..

*wanders off thinking about bandwidth, graphics, RAM...*

[Hobbelion]

That's a good idea Brillian regarding traveling. That should work.

I might try to get Hobbedoc to level 15 so that we have almost all the instruments except the Moor Cowbell. I'll also have him tag along with Hobbelion to do slayer deeds since Hobbelion hasn't really done any in the Shire so it would raise Hobbedoc's level and we both would get TPs and deeds so it's win-win.

[Briallan]

Ok, just to expand a little on the issue of running two clients on the same machine (I've read the post again and checked a few things):

One of the things that this thread says is that you need to have certain values of the [Net] section of the UserPreferences.ini file set correctly, specifically:

        ComputeUniquePort=False
        UserSpecifiedPort=0

I found that, on my machine, ComputeUniquePort was in fact set to True. So, this might explain why my clients crashed the first time I tried this. Also, since I have not previously edited my UserPreferences.ini file, True is likely the default setting for this value when you install the product. So, likely, you will have to change that value to be able to reliably run two instances of LOTRO on a single machine.

Another point that the thread makes is that you should log in and enter the world as one character before you bring up the second client.

The last issue discussed in the thread is that running multiple instances might not work on some older operating systems.

OK, I'm done rehashing what you can read for yourself in the thread -- the main point is that, as Krohkur says, you probably will have to edit UserPreferences.ini as above to run multiple clients at once. UserPrefereneces.ini is located in the My Documents \ Lord of the Rings Online folder on Windows machines.

[Ice Weasel]

Just a quick FYI, as well: 

The "Powers that Be" have declared multi-boxing (running more than one account/character at a time) while doing landscape quests is fine and good.  The practice has been listed in the "approved" category.

[Briallan]

Oh, just one last thing (there was a question about this in-game): running multiple instances of LOTRO only works if each of those instances is a separate account -- so usually people who do this create an additional free account for each extra instance they want to run. If you log on to a particular account a second time, the first instance will automatically log out.