ATMA for the Extreme Pack rats

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timevalue

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ATMA for the Extreme Pack rats

To All:
I admit it; I am a seriously disordered pack rat. So much so that it leaves me asking: How can I safely leave my Diablo II game and put stuff in my ATMA stash while I am still playing the session?
I have heard from one ATMA guide that it can lead to problems and weird stuff happening, but I seem to be able to easily press the Windows logo key on my keyboard (sort of like ALT+f4 which takes the player back to Windows, but closes Diablo). This logo key can access ATMA while my game is still running. The only problem is that I was accidentally starting to make dupes (and I am an HONEST player only interested in self-found items, yet I'm just an incurable pack rat that needs to access ATMA during game sessions because it's just too weird to have to "save and exit" and watch monsters respawn that I have already killed a mere 5 minutes ago). Is this possible?
Sorry I had to start a new thread on a technical question about ATMA, but I figure there must be some experts here on this one....Thanks for your help!
~timevalue
 
What you actually do is not leaving the game and thus muling while continuing the session. You pause your game (to prevent saving during your muling), switch to atma, open your character there and mule things off, close (and save) the character and go back to the game. To prevent dupes, you then first dump all the stuff you muled off on the ground somewhere, preferably in town but not next to your stash in order not to confuse yourself. Then you continue playing where you left off.
This means you can only mule off though. Still, if you find lots of large items you want to keep, it can certainly be worth it. Note however that some people frown upon this hotmuling.
 
If you mule stuff off while the game is still running, it is called "hotmuling". The biggest use of this is when a Gheeds Fortune grand charm is found, and you already have one, but would like to keep the new one too.

It is extremely easy to create dupes this way, and you must make sure to drop any and all ingame which you muled off this way.

Remember, if you want to trade, you should state that you do hotmule, as some members of this forum do not agree that it should be done at all. (I suspect the duping risk is just too high)
 
Iron Crown & Sir Lister,
Yes, I don't have any problems with hotmuling since I believe they are legitimately found items, but I am disgusted by dupes and I certainly agree duping is totally dishonest. The reason I would "hotmule" is because of being able to store away all sorts of possible fun little weapons for my Iron Golem as a Necromancer. I also play 8-player games which leave a boatload of item drops that my regular stash cannot begin to handle in a reasonably long session. (I noticed that ATMA has a cool feature that shows exactly what you're using for your Iron Golem. I wish D2-EXP the game itself had something like this....)
~timevalue
 
Hotmuling is possible, but not that easy.
I'm not sure if it's "allowed" here (as in allowed for trading/MP).

The problem with hotmuling is that you might not see the same character ingame as in ATMA. D2 only saves at certain points and ATMA can only see this last saved character.
You can mule off each item you can see in ATMA, but you need to drop that same item in-game as well otherwise you are duping.

Personally I use Save and Exit at certain good points, almost always connected to Way points.

If a character inventory is starting to get full, I start looking for a WP. Once found I drop out, do the muling and start a new game.
Usually that means I see very little to no double monsters. (that will not work this easy if you like to do full clears though)

Randall
 
Randall,
My experience was somewhat different. With the Windows logo key I was somehow able to see exactly what my character was holding when I left the game (without saving it) and when I opened ATMA, it asked me a question in a dialog box (I've forgotten now what it was) and when I answered "Yes" I was accidentally starting to make a duped weapon somehow....perhaps I shouldn't take duping topic any further, anyway...People can get the wrong idea of what my intentions are...
Indeed, when I play 8-player full-clears I end up having an enormous warehouse of items I'd rather not sell right away to the vendors before the save and exit at the next waypoint....
~timevalue
 
The game saves your character at more points as S&E. Roughly every 5 minutes I would say.

What you see is in ATMA is this last auto-save.
It is close to the char you see in-game, but for example you will not see an item you just picked up.

Be careful when hotmuling, specially in MP games.
For example, if you decide to hotmule an item and to not dupe, you drop the item in-game.
Somebody else might pick it up again and keep it. You basically duped an item there.

I think it's up to you. Just make it clear with those you MP with what you do.


It's just something I personally would not use on this scale (I only use hotmuling for a gheeds)

Randall

PS.
Duping is very easy, even without any third party tool. (just copy the character file to a second install of D2)
 
I would say the only accetable time to hotmule is whith a Gheeds. any other time, I would look for a wp as Randall said. if i am full and nowehere near a new wp - descion time - S&E or dump something
 
Something that I've done sometimes is set up any MP game with myself. I host the game with another character (not the questing character) that has access to the appropriate difficulty. Then, I S&E with the main questing character whenever I want to go to ATMA and then just rejoin the game. If you use Mac OS X 10.3 or later, or Win XP or later, you can use fast user switching to run multiple instances to set up a TCP/IP game on one computer.
 
Cattleya,
If I start a MP game with myself does it put some sort of "taint" on the items in any way like 1.11b vanilla being tainted by RRM/RWM? Is there something I should explain to traders about this?
This thread is giving me a lot to think about; I may want to do a small amount of trading in the future. If lots of people don't like hotmuling then I'll either look into multiplay options or just take Randall & Bhoy's approach and probably end up making lots of difficult item-related decisions pretty often...
~timevalue
 
:scratch: After some more thought....I would think super-heroes out to save the entire world of Sanctuary should be entitled to unlimited storage space completely on-demand whenever they want it. (Humble shopkeepers and vendors that stay out of trouble in town have more storage space than I do, it seems.)
Having said this, I will start with a new character and try to force myself not to hotmule anything. It won't be easy for me to do, but I suppose it's the best way to trade with the SP community if I need to do so.
~timevalue
 
Mursilis said:
Well in all honestly, how many Sparkling Mails do you really need? Once you get 4-5 of each of the normal/exceptional items you won't be picking them up anymore and this will no longer be an issue.
Click to expand...

It's not just the uniques that are a problem if you like playing through to "logical" stopping points. (Places where you don't have to kill stuff you killed in the last session.) Just the normal clutter of gems, runes, potions and such can add up.

@timevalue: The MP option doesn't taint you in any way. I suppose the super purists would say that they would no longer be "true" SP characters, but you lose that distinction if you trade between characters anyhow. :wink3:



 
ATMA has a built in dupe detection feature.

If you have any doubts, you can use it to identify the dupes you may have erroneously "hot-muled". Never heard that term before so that's one on me.
 
Cattleya,
Thanks for all your help on this topic so far. I have to admit your statement that:
"If you use Mac OS X 10.3 or later, or Win XP or later, you can use fast user switching to run multiple instances to set up a TCP/IP game on one computer."
....really piques my interest!
It must be my lucky day because I have an (almost) brand new computer I bought right before Windows Vista came out.
When I tried your suggestion about joining my own TCP/IP game with a "placeholder" host for my main character, I couldn't join the game with my main character. Was it because I had to save and exit with the host character too (thus shutting down the game)?
I also tried to open D2-EXP twice to do this "fast user switching" but that wasn't allowed either.
I give up....what is the secret to your self-using MP magic?:brainiac:
(Any answers you give here might be an excellent resource to put in a stickied thread about MP and ATMA SP)

Old-dude: You are right about ATMA's dupe detection feature, but I went ahead and started a new character fresh from scratch, so it won't be an issue with me anymore....And, yes, I've learned more in the last 48 hours in here than I have about things in the previous two weeks combined!
~timevalue
 
I've only done it on a mac, so I'm not much help on the Windows setup. I'm sure someone else can help though. Basically, though, you need to set up your D2 so you can access it from two different user accounts. You log into one account to host the game, and the switch to the other account and join the game. There may be some network configuration involved in Windows, but may only be if you aren't connected to the internet at all on that computer. (The trick you have to worry about on macs is getting the permissions set up right so you don't end up with read only characters on one account.)
 
I also found the Flavie dupe detector quite useful and more handy than the ATMA one. So unintentionally created dupes shouldn't be a problem at all if in a SP game.
As far as I am concerned, I don't see any real difference between hotmuling Gheed's only or hotmuling in general - hotmuling will be hotmuling. If one regularly checks their stashes for dupes, than this shouldn't be a problem at all IMHO.

One more thing: If you should decide on hotmuling, you might want to try diablo in windowed mode, which makes accessing ATMA much easier. You can do that by simply adding "-w" (without the quotation marks) in the command line.

EDIT: Come to think about it - I advise on running D2 windowed in any case, esp. if running Pindle. Saves you quite some time :grin:
 
The trick in Windows is, I believe, to rename your original Diablo2 installation folder and then re-install the game. You then run two D2's from the two different folders. I haven't tried this yet.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong!
 
No need for the fast user switching in winXp if you use a modified d2gfx.dll that cancels diablo 2's normal check for a previously running process. It simply allows you to run two or more instances of diablo 2 at once. Now I'm not entirally sure about the actual legality of this, if that's an issue then I apologize for bringing it up but it is very useful.
This allows you to set up a TCP/IP MP game with yourself and bring any number of mules into your own game whom you can have sitting around in town while you're out questing or magic finding. There is no risk of duping anything either. All you do is drop the stuff you want to mule away in town then alt+tab to another instance of d2 with your prefered mule logged in.
Even more effective if you launch the mule clients with the -w startup command for windowed, makes them easier to cycle through once you've dropped all the mulables onto the ground, if you have several mule clients running.

This does of course require a computer able to cope with running two or more instances of Diablo 2 but any somewhat modern computer shouldn't have any troubles.

the file in question can be found here:
[highlight] Link Removed -Cat [/highlight]
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Well...so far it looks like LozHinge's suggestion is best (for me as a Windows XP'er) to avoid being a hotmuler, but re-naming the D2 folder and re-installing with the RRM/RWM will take me a little while to try out...
Maybe I should just explain on the trader forum that I hotmule a lot of stuff, but I make sure I never make any dupes, instead (sounds like a much less cumbersome task, but it would shut me off from potential trading partners down the road).
~timevalue

EDIT -I typed this out before seeing Procratius' post...I'll have to consider that, also.....sounds a lot more convenient (if it's legal).
 
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